How Does Thrive Do It?

“Thrive Capital does not do marketing.”

There is no phrase to quote or format they own - unlike with a16z where you can name the media, Sequoia the essays, or Index the playbooks.

With Thrive, nothing.

No blog, no podcast, no newsletter, with the occasional tweet. When Colossus profiled them last year, most of the partners "looked surprised to be talking to a reporter."

Yet, Thrive comes up in my conversations with VC firms every week. The recruiting survey I referenced in the firms that don't do marketing had them as the most desired firm in venture - twice the score of Sequoia - and just when you thought you’d get a break from them. They bought the Lakers.

Last week's piece covered the loudest way to market a fund - short form video, daily posting, maximum effort for attention. But Thrive has more attention than anyone, and seemingly spends zero effort to get it.

The industry has mostly settled on a comfortable explanation. Thrive is just good, and the brand is what being good looks like, there is no marketing.

Except… Thrive does have a head of brand and comms, (the first?) Head of Design in venture AND even a company naming operation.

And just 4 months ago, the firm that never publishes, hired a storyteller.

So the real questions… what are Thrive doing? And is there anything here to copy beyond a boat load of capital?

Caveat… Josh Kushner’s starting conditions (Family wealth, relationships, including Jared’s help with fundraising and founders) give Thrive meaningful, hard-to-copy advantages. There's no way to know how much of Thrive's success those advantages explain. But leaving them out would turn this into a rather convenient story about hard work and good taste.

Thrive publishes with capital, not content

In The Market for Words we tracked "conviction" becoming venture's phrase du jour - 250% increase on fund homepages in the last decade.

Interestingly - Thrive, one of the first to reject spray and pray investing for concentration - barely uses the word. Their own vocabulary is "concentration" or "commitment."

Conviction is what everyone else calls what Thrive does - the industry coined a word to describe their behaviour, then started applying it to themselves.

Mostly, this is because their behaviour is extreme enough to need a word. $1.8B into Stripe at a 50% discount, the only term sheet for OpenAI at $29B, a Wiz deal closed by flying Paris - Cyprus - into Tel Aviv during missile attacks.

See what extreme does… it generates its own coverage. Nobody writes an article about a firm participating in a round at market price, but people want to writes the story of the firm flying into a war zone.

This is something I reference a lot in these blogs - Doing Things is the ultimate marketing, because the press release writes itself and someone else publishes it.

Because of this too, when Thrive's announcement says "We do not hedge," it is not pontificating. The words have receipts.

Your capital allocation is your loudest publication. Founders and LPs read what you do long before they read what you write - and if the 2 disagree, they believe the money. Many firms write "conviction" while "exposure” portfolios. Find the honest connection between your work and your message.

Founders do Thrive's marketing

You might have seen the Sam Altman quote doing the rounds: Josh Kushner, "absolute MVP investor”

and more of these roll in, Patrick Collison: Josh "committed $1 billion before the round had even started coming together." Jony Ive: "Josh has wonderful taste." Hassabis: "Josh pushed us to raise sooner and was right"

This comes back to the old adage that referral marketing works because over 90% of consumers trust recommendations from friends and family more than traditional ads.

Josh described the strategy himself in 2023: "whenever we're competing, we want to have those that we've worked with in the past speak about who we are."

So… why is this not working the same way for every firm? Because versions of it exist everywhere - venture already runs on founder references. But most of this testimony stays private.

Thrive's escapes into public, for (1) The service is extreme enough to be a story - nobody retells "they were helpful," (2) the witnesses have distribution - when your references are Sam Altman et al. it is easier for these to spread.

Which gives every other firm its so-what… you already have witnesses, so:

• Do you lack service remarkable enough to retell?

• OR a surface where the retelling can happen in public?

The first is a bar to raise. The second is literally buildable - it is half of what the short-form census crowd is doing when they put their founders on camera….

So if founders carry the message, where does the firm show up?

Almost nowhere. In 15 years: fund announcements, investor letters, 2 podcast episodes and 1 profile. The biggest firms publish more in a month than Thrive has ever.

But that is the trade. Volume buys relevance but costs significance. 1 appearance a decade makes every appearance an event.

Josh’s model isn’t another investor, instead its Frank Ocean, hasn’t created an album in ~10 years - “[We only create] when there’s something worth creating… then do it with ‘deep intentionality’.”

The periods of silence add to the lore of Thrive… As Mike Volpi put it, there’s something powerful about brands that make you feel like you’re in on a secret - his comparison was Hermès.

The silence also gives Thrive the breathing room to take its time over what it does say. It’s not dissimilar to the Sequoia of old, when the firm spoke rarely so that people paid attention when it did, although Sequoia now publishes far more frequently.

Would a firm that doesn't do marketing have merch?

It would seem like a massive contradiction for Thrive - no blog, no podcast, allergic to attention - to run a merch operation.

But they do… and it’s purpose from the words of the man who runs it: "What's going to make us stand out?"

Frank Guzzone, hired in early 2024 as the first Head of Design at a venture firm. Kareem Zaki, a lead partner, was asked for his best non-consensus hire. No hesitation:

"Frank. There's no reason a venture firm should have a head of design, but it's one of the best things they've ever done with this firm." (source)

So why employ a full-time Head of Design?

Because Thrive has decided what its brand is - not content - but the experience of dealing with them… and experience lives in surfaces. Every surface a founder or LP touches either agrees with "we are precise and deliberate" or contradicts their brand.

So that is what Frank does. The function runs design support into the portfolio, and even into the investing process itself - but the part that matters for this piece is the third job: Thrive's own surfaces. The investor materials, events, are touch points, but so is the flags, custom gifts for founders and the merch (stitched by local embroiderers to luxury-house standards).

So "quiet" for Thrive, is less the absence of marketing - but is a decision about where the marketing lives. They moved it out of the feed and into objects,.

The so-what is that you are already shipping these surfaces… Decks, events, merch and so on...

Each one is saying something about your firm right now, designed or not. You might not hire a Head of Design. But deliberateness is free - and the gap between firms here is enormous, and much of this is just effort to treats these surfaces as marketing.

Why have Thrive hired a storyteller?

In 2023, after 13 years of near-silence, Josh sat down with Patrick O'Shaughnessy and explained why, quoting a mentor:

"If you don't tell your story, someone else will tell it for you."

It is fair to say the stepping-out worked. Since 2023 - the Colossus profile, the second episode, the fund announcement with 2.5M views, the most-desired-firm surveys…. Helped enormously by the OpenAI arc, of course - but the reputation has compounded fastest in the more Thrive started speaking.

So they are going to do more of it, right? That is why they hired the storyteller?

Kinda…..

4 months ago, Nathan Baugh - writer of World Builders, a 100k-subscriber storytelling newsletter - joined to lead content.

• In June came the first blog post, Long Humans.

• In September, the first story, The Pioneers - a Colossus-grade profile of an accounting firm, now being printed as a physical booklet.

Technically… this isn’t Thrive Capital, but Thrive Holdings - the permanent-capital business buying and transforming service companies.

I think this is because these businesses (accounting firms, IT services businesses) have much less contact with investment firms than startups.

There is no Sam Altman to testify for an accounting firm in Ohio, no war-zone flight to generate its coverage, or a Substack profile writer on the way.

Holdings operates exactly where the witnesses run out - so it is manufacturing what Capital gets organically. "Our partners are the heroes" is Josh's Medici positioning ("we're not DaVinci, we're Medici") - this is Holdings editorialising companies whose stories cannot tell themselves or won’t get PR.

Most importantly too… Josh had already named the gap this fills.

For all the reputation, he admitted in that same 2023 conversation: "some people don't really know what we do."

Reputation and understanding are different assets. Thrive has maximum reputation - and it is now investing in understanding, starting where their reputation doesn’t reach.

So what?

You probably can’t copy the concentrated billions, the famous witnesses, head of design, or a brother with a president for a father in law.

But every Thrive mechanism has a version…

1. Let the money talk first. Thrive's positioning works because the deals and the behaviour prove it. Read every claim on your website and ask whether the portfolio backs it up, does your behaviour back it up too?

2. Find your witnesses. Your founders already say good things about you. Give the best of them somewhere public to say it, and if this feels forced, revert to (1).

3. Treat EVERYTHING as brand. Your deck template, your term sheet email, your announcement page, your merch - founders and LPs are reading all of it already. Decide what it says instead of letting it say something by accident.

… and finally… Use content where you are recognised but not understood.

Thrive has maximum recognition and still had the problem - Josh admited "some people don't really know what we do." Thrive Holdings made it acute (new model, new audience, no PR)

So they are using content to close the gap.

Audit your own version - founders know your name? But do they know what working with you involves, what you believe, who you are for? The plugging of those gaps is the purpose of “content”.

Laurie, Refinery Media

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