Thrive's Joshua Kushner chides Silicon Valley VCs over AI euphoria

In Thrive Capital’s first-ever investor letter, leaked to Bloomberg, founder Joshua Kushner took aim at his Silicon Valley venture-capital rivals over their enthusiasm for AI. “It is difficult to overstate the magnitude of the opportunity,” Kushner wrote. “It would also be a grave error in our minds to let excitement weaken our investment discipline. … Within Silicon Valley in particular, the industry can become fixated on hyperincremental technological turns rather than where the technology ultimately leads.”

Kushner contrasted his New York-based firm’s approach with the “outlier” philosophy espoused by Silicon Valley investors like Marc Andreessen, in which a VC makes many bets, expecting most to fail so a handful of huge wins cover the losses. Thrive instead concentrates capital in a small number of companies — Bloomberg estimates about 90% of each fund goes to its top 15 investments — a strategy Kushner says lets the firm work opportunistically across stage, sector, and geography while staying deeply concentrated in a small number of people and ideas.

Thrive’s clearest bet is OpenAI, where it is a major investor; in December 2025, the relationship flipped when OpenAI took an ownership stake in Thrive Holdings, the firm’s spinout that buys companies and rebuilds them with OpenAI’s help. Thrive’s $516 million 2022 early-stage fund, which made early bets on OpenAI, Anduril, and SpaceX, was worth more than $3.7 billion as of the end of June, according to Bloomberg. Kushner disclosed that Thrive now manages $60 billion in assets, with a 41% gross internal rate of return across its funds and a 33% net IRR, and has returned more than $1 billion in liquidity to investors over the past year alone.

Kushner’s approach and Andreessen’s both clearly generate returns — Andreessen Horowitz reportedly returned $25 billion to investors between 2009 and 2025. But concentrating capital the way Thrive does may not be realistic for smaller, newer funds without Thrive’s scale and connections.

Why it matters

Kushner’s critique doubles as a pitch: while much of Silicon Valley chases the next mega-hit, Thrive is betting that going deep on fewer companies — anchored by its unusual OpenAI relationship — is the more durable way to capture AI’s upside.