Thrive’s Joshua Kushner chides Silicon Valley VCs over AI euphoria
Thrive’s Joshua Kushner chides Silicon Valley VCs over AI euphoria
Thrive 创始人 Joshua Kushner 批评硅谷风投对 AI 的狂热
In Thrive Capital’s first-ever investor letter, founder Joshua Kushner has some unexpected things to say about his venture capital rivals on the West Coast. 在 Thrive Capital 史上首封致投资者信中，创始人 Joshua Kushner 对其西海岸的风投同行们发表了一些出人意料的看法。
“It is difficult to overstate the magnitude of the opportunity,” Kushner wrote about AI in the letter, leaked to Bloomberg. “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.” “很难夸大这一机遇的规模，”Kushner 在这封泄露给彭博社的信中谈及 AI 时写道。“但在我们看来，让兴奋情绪削弱投资纪律将是一个严重的错误。……特别是在硅谷，整个行业往往会沉迷于微小的技术迭代，而不是关注技术最终的走向。”
While his secretive New York-based firm, just like those in Silicon Valley, is betting heavily on AI, Thrive is doing so differently, he argues. There’s no so-called spray-and-pray investing. Thrive tends to go big on the companies it backs. Bloomberg estimates about 90% of its capital is poured into the top 15 investments in each fund. That makes Thrive, he contends, a company of independent thinkers. 他认为，虽然他那家位于纽约、行事低调的公司和硅谷同行一样，都在重注 AI，但 Thrive 的做法截然不同。这里没有所谓的“广撒网式”投资。Thrive 倾向于对所支持的公司进行大额投入。据彭博社估计，其每只基金约 90% 的资本都集中在排名前 15 的投资项目中。他主张，这使得 Thrive 成为一家由独立思考者组成的公司。
“We are independent because markets move between fear and enthusiasm, and neither is a substitute for judgment.” His comments are in direct contrast to one of the basic premises of Silicon Valley venture capital: that it is a business of “outliers” as espoused by Marc Andreessen. “我们保持独立，因为市场总是在恐惧与狂热之间摇摆，而这两者都无法替代判断力。”他的这些评论与硅谷风投的基本前提之一形成了鲜明对比：即 Marc Andreessen 所推崇的“离群值”（outliers）商业模式。
In the “outlier” view, a VC firm makes a lot of bets, prepared to lose money on many — even most — of them. The few big hits will be so lucrative that they will cover the losers and much, much more. That philosophy leaves VCs forever looking for the next OpenAI or another mega hit. It can also lead to, as we saw during the post-pandemic lean years, cutting ongoing support for startups not deemed to be on track to be the biggest winners. 在“离群值”观点下，风投公司会进行大量押注，并准备好在许多（甚至大多数）项目上亏钱。少数几个大获成功的项目将带来丰厚回报，足以覆盖亏损并实现超额收益。这种哲学让风投们永远在寻找下一个 OpenAI 或其他超级爆款。正如我们在疫情后那几年所见，这也可能导致风投切断对那些被认为无法成为最大赢家的初创公司的持续支持。
In contrast, Kushner writes, “We believed an investment firm could be opportunistic across stage, sector, and geography, while remaining deeply concentrated in a small number of people and ideas.” The idea is to “build Thrive to concentrate our time, capital, and energy on the people and ideas we believe in most.” 相比之下，Kushner 写道：“我们相信，一家投资公司可以在不同阶段、行业和地域上保持灵活，同时将精力高度集中在少数人选和理念上。”其核心理念是“打造 Thrive，将我们的时间、资本和精力集中在我们最信任的人和想法上。”
He also dismisses Silicon Valley’s idea that VCs are in the business of disrupting incumbents. “Unlike many of our peers, our conviction was not only that these industries would be disrupted from the outside in but also that many would be transformed from the inside out,” he wrote about AI’s impact. 他还驳斥了硅谷关于风投旨在颠覆现有巨头的观点。在谈到 AI 的影响时，他写道：“与许多同行不同，我们的信念不仅在于这些行业将从外部被颠覆，还在于许多行业将从内部实现转型。”
Thrive has largely stuck to this thesis. Its deepening relationship with OpenAI is its biggest example. The VC firm is a major investor in the AI lab. But in December 2025, the roles switched when OpenAI took an ownership stake in Thrive Holdings, the VC firm’s spinout. Thrive Holdings buys companies and then works with OpenAI to give them an AI makeover. Part of the deal involved OpenAI dedicating employees to work with Thrive’s companies. Thrive Holdings has bought more than 70 businesses and has a team of 35 engineers. Thrive 在很大程度上坚持了这一论点。其与 OpenAI 不断加深的关系就是最好的例证。这家风投公司是该 AI 实验室的主要投资者。但在 2025 年 12 月，角色发生了互换：OpenAI 入股了 Thrive 的衍生公司 Thrive Holdings。Thrive Holdings 收购公司，然后与 OpenAI 合作，对其进行 AI 改造。协议的一部分包括 OpenAI 指派员工与 Thrive 旗下的公司合作。Thrive Holdings 已收购了 70 多家企业，并拥有一支 35 人的工程师团队。
Kushner says its accounting platform uses agents to produce tax returns 30% faster with 98% accuracy, and its IT services firm has agents independently solving half of its help desk tickets. Kushner 表示，其会计平台利用 AI 智能体（agents）将报税效率提高了 30%，准确率达到 98%；其 IT 服务公司则通过智能体独立解决了半数的客服工单。
Still, Thrive’s strategy is working in part because it nabbed stakes in some of the industry’s best-performing startups ever. Its $516 million 2022 early-stage fund, for instance, made early bets on OpenAI, Anduril, and SpaceX, and is now worth more than $3.7 billion as of the end of June, Bloomberg reports. Thrive has, over its 15 years, increased its stakes in all of them (and also had a sizeable stake in Cursor, which just closed its sale to SpaceX). It has also backed Wiz, Ramp, and Stripe, to name a few other big names. 尽管如此，Thrive 的策略之所以奏效，部分原因在于它抢占了一些行业史上表现最好的初创公司的股份。据彭博社报道，其 2022 年规模为 5.16 亿美元的早期基金，早期押注了 OpenAI、Anduril 和 SpaceX，截至 6 月底，该基金价值已超过 37 亿美元。在过去的 15 年里，Thrive 增加了对所有这些公司的持股（此外还持有 Cursor 的大量股份，该公司刚刚完成了向 SpaceX 的出售）。它还投资了 Wiz、Ramp 和 Stripe 等其他知名企业。
Plus, it has led seed investments in new labs like Essential AI, founded by former Google Brain researcher Ashish Vaswani, the lead writer of the famed “Transformers” paper that spawned today’s AI industry. 此外，它还领投了像 Essential AI 这样的新实验室的种子轮融资，该公司由前 Google Brain 研究员 Ashish Vaswani 创立，他是催生当今 AI 行业的著名论文《Transformers》的主要作者。
All told, Thrive has $60 billion of assets under management, Kushner revealed in the letter. He reports impressive profits: a gross internal rate of return (IRR) across all funds of 41% and a net IRR of 33%. Thrive has returned more than $1 billion of liquidity to its investors in the last 12 months alone, he said. “There may be an opportunity for billions of dollars in additional liquidity in the coming quarters,” he promises. Kushner 在信中透露，Thrive 目前管理的资产总额为 600 亿美元。他报告了令人印象深刻的利润：所有基金的总内部收益率（IRR）为 41%，净内部收益率为 33%。他表示，仅在过去 12 个月里，Thrive 就已向投资者返还了超过 10 亿美元的流动资金。“在接下来的几个季度里，可能还会有数十亿美元的额外流动性机会，”他承诺道。
He doesn’t specify which companies are headed for their exits, but obviously the SpaceX IPO was a start, and OpenAI is working toward its own public debut. 他没有具体说明哪些公司即将退出，但显然 SpaceX 的 IPO 是一个开始，而 OpenAI 也在为上市做准备。
It should be pointed out that both Kushner’s and Andreessen’s approaches obviously work in terms of making money. Andreessen Horowitz returned $25 billion to its investors between 2009 and 2025, according to the last leaked returns, reported by Eric Newcomer. Thrive’s philosophy of concentrating capital may not even be possible for most smaller, scrappy emerging seed funds, whose founders weren’t born into the kind of access that the son of a billionaire New York real-estate family has. 需要指出的是，Kushner 和 Andreessen 的方法在赚钱方面显然都是有效的。据 Eric Newcomer 报道的最新泄露收益数据显示，Andreessen Horowitz 在 2009 年至 2025 年间向投资者返还了 250 亿美元。Thrive 这种集中资本的哲学，对于大多数规模较小、处于起步阶段的种子基金来说可能根本无法实现，因为这些基金的创始人并没有像这位纽约亿万富翁房地产家族之子那样拥有与生俱来的资源。
That said, Kushner’s general premise of how overheated Silicon Valley’s AI investing has become isn’t wrong either. As he puts it: “Not every fast-growing business is exceptional. And not every exceptional company is a great investment at every price. Our responsibility is to maintain those distinctions.” 话虽如此，Kushner 关于硅谷 AI 投资已变得多么过热的总体前提也并非错误。正如他所言：“并非每一家快速增长的企业都是卓越的。也并非每一家卓越的公司在任何价格下都是好的投资。我们的责任是保持这些区分。”