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How Josh Kushner built Thrive Capital and became a billionaire startup investor | Fortune

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His generative AI startup, OpenAI, was close to launching ChatGPT, the chatbot that would captivate and terrify the business world. Scaling ChatGPT’s large language model into true artificial general intelligence—human-like reasoning—was his ultimate goal. That would cost a fortune, perhaps $100 billion over OpenAI’s lifespan as a private company. And once ChatGPT showed what OpenAI could do, he would need to quickly pay up to keep deep-pocketed competitors from poaching his engineers. It was time to call the venture capitalists. The first person Altman dialed, however, wasn’t a larger-than-life Silicon Valley titan like Marc Andreessen or Peter Thiel—even though Altman knew them both. It was Joshua Kushner, founder of a boutique New York-based firm, Thrive Capital. Kushner had been working for more than a decade to get that call. He and Altman, who are both 38, met around 2011, when Kushner was first launching Thrive and Altman was advising companies for startup accelerator Y Combinat

Update, Aug. 30, 2024: This article was originally published on Dec. 2, 2023, shortly after Thrive Capital led a tender offer financing of OpenAI shares that valued the startup at $86 billion. In August 2024, media reports surfaced that Thrive is investing an additional $1 billion into OpenAI, leading a multibillion fundraising deal that could include Apple, Nvidia, and Microsoft as investors, and value the ChatGPT maker at a whopping $100 billion , making it one of the most valuable startups in the world. One year ago, Sam Altman was quietly preparing for a world-jolting event. His generative

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