Kareem Zaki - Small Ideas Attract Competition - [Invest Like the Best, EP.392]

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/08d3da0dcd7fd874

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Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Invest Like the Best.
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My guest today is Karim Zackie.
Karim is a general partner at Thrive Capital and has been at the firm for a decade.
In an episode last year, Thrive's founder Josh Cushner told me that he thinks Karim is the best healthcare investor in the world.
Cream has co founded three health care businesses worth over one billion dollars.
He also has expertise in financial services, where he's led the firm's investments in companies like Ramp and Robinhood.
It's a timely moment to have this discussion with Drive announcing a new five billion dollar fund in August.
We talk about how Thrive identifies category defining companies, what concentration means to them, and how startups should approach the healthcare industry.
Please enjoy this great discussion with Karim Zaki.
So I have heard this story a couple times from you, not on the record.
From Josh, obviously.
And from others here at Thrive, Miles included.
Maybe you could just give your
Long version.
Feel free to meander a little bit in your answer here.
Your version of Thrive story as a business.
And I'd love for you to bake your own motivation and experience in here.
about as thrive has grown.
the parts of it that you're most proud of and enjoy the most.
Because obviously you've been a key part of building it. So
I guess it's been a two part question, like your story
At Thrive.
as a way of talking about Thrive Story overall and what you're trying to do.
I think what's just so interesting about the Thrive stories, if you looked at us from the outside
And our first fund being a forty million dollar fund.
All the way now to our most recent being five billion dollar and a lot of different size funds.
In between.
You'd look at it from the outside and be like, Wow, things have changed a lot at Thrive.
And there's definitely some things we've gotten better at.
And we've grown up and been smarter.
About certain things.
But if I actually look back to the early days, joining Thrive about a decade ago when
We had a hundred fifty million dollar fund.
I actually say the most surprising thing about the journey is just how consistent the strategy's been.
But
Josh in the early days, even with Princeton, which was our first institutional investor, and we had a forty million dollar fund.
Was talking about Thrive being
A firm that wanted to back these category defining companies.
That we're really shaping not just tech, but every industry.
Now that's a common idea that every industry is gonna change by tech.
Over a decade ago that wasn't a common idea.
And that we were gonna do it across stages.
That we're gonna do it in different ways. And by the way, we're gonna be really close, meaningful partners to companies across those journeys.
And we've obviously sharpened the language around that.
But even if you look back at a forty million dollar fund we were doing growth rounds in Instagram or a hundred fifty million dollar fund, you were doing growth rounds in Spotify and Twitch and Slack and Stripe and GitHub.
And so the core DNA
Of what our strategy was, even from the outside world, you would have looked at us and said, Oh, that's a seed series A fun in New York City, and they're building something around that. And that was the energy that first attracted me to Thrive.
I was working at Blackstone, a large private equity firm at the time when I reconnected with Josh.
Actually the first time I really spent time with Josh, we both went
to school at Harvard. I was a senior
in undergrad and he was actually at the business school at the time.
And it was finals and all the undergrad libraries are so full.
And I was like, where could there be an empty place to study? And I was like, probably the business school library. And so I went around the river and I was right, it was empty except for one person, it was Josh.
And he was starting to think about the idea.
of Thrive and we connected on it. I didn't totally connect the dots at the time.
But him and I started to chat and realized all the mutual friends we had.
And then we reconnected a few years later when I was at
Blackstone.
And
The vision of Thrive was
Coming through.
And again.
It wasn't
crystal clear in the way that a lot of these stories can be even at the earliest moments.
But there was the idea of Oscar and transforming an industry. And I spent a lot of time in healthcare and financial services, so that deeply resonated with me. It was this idea that tech was gonna transform every industry, and there was this big sweeping force, this tidal wave that was gonna come through. And so to see that energy and passion.
from someone who was young at the time, I think twenty seven or twenty eight, he started thrive when he was twenty six.
And as a twenty five year old, coming from a great institution like Blackstone, but feeling that
We were with these big companies, but maybe not the world changing companies. And so I got sucked into the Oscar orbit, got more excited about Thrive.
And then
joined ten years ago.
And
We've been able to do things in a different way.
And I think we've been able to be very
pure in our mission to back these category defining companies.
with long term tailwinds.
And while I say that strategy, I know
A lot of investors might listen and be like, Of course we want a back category defining companies that are amazing with great founders.
But if you're fine investing in good and great companies, it's not an insult. It's just
If you're fine just investing meaningfully in a company'cause it might be a two and a half X or it might be a three X.
It actually dilutes your thinking and your aperture to be able to identify these really great iconic companies that are about to change
A face of the industry.
Or you might just be spending time on something else.
Actually a silly anecdote to just
Came to mind.
But
My wife Raquel and I, we have three kids.
Our oldest son, Raff's five years old, and
I saw
Awesome orange bird fly past our window and I was like Oh Raf, let's go look at it outside.
And so we couldn't place it right away and I'm looking for a minute or two.
And as five year old boys do, they get distracted and he started chasing some bugs and then a butterfly.
And then I saw the bird again, I was like, Oh, Raf And I look back and he's not there. He had run around the corner to chase a lizard
And he missed it.
And obviously lizards are cool and that was
Fun that he got to chase that.
But he obviously missed a bird that we don't get to
often seen. That was pretty rare.
And sometimes I think it's like that with investing.
Where you could spend all your time looking at good deals
Interesting things.
But because you're spending all your time there, you might miss that rare thing that really shapes the industry.
And financially actually defines a lot of the returns of what play out.
Even to put quantitative numbers to that, we'd actually run this internal analysis
here at Thrive and if we looked at when Thrive was founded.
And we ran it up to about five years ago so that the cohort of companies could mature.
There was a hundred twenty thousand companies that were founded in that period.
And then of those companies.
I think three thousand or so are now worth five hundred million dollars.
Two thousand are worth more than a billion.
But when we looked at that list, we'd probably count a hundred to maybe two hundred as real category defining companies.
And so all those three thousand companies, all those two thousand companies, those are probably good or great companies.
Smart investors think that they're gonna make
Return on it.
But just mathematically, if you spend equal time trying to chase those opportunities
than as those one hundred or two hundred companies.
You'd spend ninety five percent of your time
On those deals.
I think that
Very
deliberate decision from the early days of Thrive when I joined through today has been one of the things that has really carried us through and has allowed us to do what we want.
And I think over time as we've gotten the words
We've set up a structure at Thrive.
that I think allows us to execute on that strategy.
Strategy without structure, I think.
doesn't allow you to actually push forward on that mission. I'm gonna ask about that last thing before returning to category defining, because I'm worried that we're gonna go off on a half hour sidewander. I hope we do.
When you say the firm has changed and mature to better be able to handle
And we were talking about this before recording that
in the last X period of time, it feels like there's this new
alignment and maturity of the business.
And the ability to go after this in the most fulsome way.
Maybe just describe what that
literally means what did you do to change it so that you're better equipped to handle
These kinds of companies and supporting them now?
Absolutely. And I think this had been a deliberate decision.
As we've grown.
Small fund, we were small team.
And everyone's heroing it and figuring it out.
As we went and we kinda react to what's happening.
And then as our fund size grew, I think we had to make some really intentional decisions to maintain that
period of mission that we were committed to pursuing.
A lot of things make Thrive special, but if I had to really summarize it, I think it falls in four pillars.
The first is that
We're committed to being generalist.
We're committed to being life cycle investors.
Concentrate in our investments.
And builders that last point to the mentality that flow through.
All of Thrive.
On the generalist point.
This is really the idea.
That we're not gonna constrain ourselves to certain sectors or spaces.
Even though sometimes there's a pull to do that because it's neat to put these things in boxes. And it really stems from the fact
That we don't think technology
moves uniformly through every industry.
At the same speed at the same time.
If you look at social networks
From two thousand five to I don't know, two thousand twelve.
Some of the largest companies are created in that period.
And then since then I don't know if there's been a single large social network created. And so that would have been a flourishing time.
Raise your hand, start a social network fund. I'm sure someone did.
And then you would have had a decade plus where you had no investments to make.
FinTech where I spend a lot of time in.
There's in a really flourishing period to probably two thousand ten and two thousand fifteen where all these iconic consumer fintech companies got started like New Bank and a firm and Robinhood and Square and Venmo.
And
Honestly, it's been a little quieter on the consumer fintech side. And so you see these ebbs and flows of markets. And so again, if we're committed to backing category defining companies,
Pre-allocating a lot of our dollars to certain sectors or certain spaces.
Before we know what the real winds of change are gonna be because
No company's big enough to create its wave or create a market.
Great companies ride these big enduring tailwinds that can go for a long period of time. Somehow Stripe is rid in the e commerce wave.
That's a thirty year tailwind that's gonna continue to go and we could probably see that going for another

And so this idea of being generalist, again, not that the firm is maybe generalist, but the individuals are, so that we're flexible and nimble and move across opportunities.
I think it's been a
intentional decision that we've maintained through that's allowed us to pursue this mission.
I think the second thing being life cycle investors.
Which more commonly known would probably be multi stage.
I think it's the idea that
We're not here to invest
In series A companies or series C companies.
We're here to invest in great companies, period.
And if we're gonna be a great thought to founders
who are building a company.
Then we need to be able to shame the whole life cycle of a business.
And so again, this isn't
We have a growth team and we have an early team. We also co found and build companies. We don't have a separate team for that.
It's really every investor is really trained to really think about what's a life cycle look like for a great company.
And that's really important even at the early stages because the DNA of the company is really set in those founding moments.
Where you set the team, you set the vision, you set the prioritization.
And
I think it's something that founders are expecting more and more of because
Even from day one, they're planning for a decade long
Business arc.
Because they've seen what Amazon's done, and they've seen what Facebook's done, and they've seen what
stripes done, and they want to build the next one. And so to have an investor who's able to see that with them, not one whose vision ends at a series A or ends at a series B, and then you've got to go
pass that along, but that can be in the trenches and scale what the founder as the founder needs to scale.
It's something that
I think we've built.
And then the point on concentration.
Which I think is pretty counter to
how people classically think of venture, which is make a hundred bets.
Hope that three of them work and
Forgive all your sins.
We've just taken a different approach. And again, someone can probably convince me mathematically that the other one is better.
But I just think we wanna be high conviction when we meaningfully invest.
And we think concentration drives conviction, which is better decision making.
But also I think it
Sets us up to support companies.
In a more intimate and deep way.
I mentioned we went back category defining companies, the second part of that is being the most meaningful partner.
If we have a thousand portfolio companies, it's just impossible to do that.
When we have
A narrow set.
And if you look at most of our funds, the vast majority of our capital is concentrated in fifteen names, so
We're talking about
Dozens of companies that were really leaning in to support we're able to be there in it with them.
I also think there's an important emotional component that's hard to separate.
Because for the founder
Building a company, this is everything for them.
They put all the chips on the table to go build this.
To have an investor who's like, this is one of a bunch of bets. If it works, amazing. If it doesn't, I'll be fine.
I think being concentrated binds us a little bit closer to the founder to really be in it in the highs and the lows with them.
And I think we just enjoy that. It feels much more aligned.
It feels like we're really part of what they're building.
And that's just not speak financially, we're committed to you.
In a way that
But we've burned the bridges.
For lack of a better word. And I think the last thing on the builders
Mentality.
Whrives a lot of aspects.
It's really around this idea that
Yes, we literally build companies, so we co-found things, and that gives the DNA, I think, to be better thought partners. I've personally been a part of starting
four companies here at Thrive and that's really helped me mature and be a better thought partner of the companies I work with.
But then we also think about building thrive.
Which I think historically
maybe hasn't been a mentality and venture.
I think a lot of times romanticized that it's only a handful of partners in a room.
And that's just how it's done.
And I think that can work for some
people, but I think we've learned a lot from our founders in seeing some of the best companies operate.
And thinking why don't we apply that to Thrive?
And so I think that's allowed us to improve every dimension of what we do. It's allowed us to expand our capabilities to support founders in new ways.
To really be in the trenches with them and support'em across
all the important functions of business building.
And
I think it's allowed us to constantly challenge what we're doing.
So I must reject
This idea that things are static.
Here.
And the mission's gonna stay constant.
I feel confident that we've thought of a structure that I think hopefully keeps us
Loyal to that mission and the journey.
for the next decade to come as it's done for the last one.
But the how of we're gonna do that, I think evolves over time.
And
That's a big part of constantly challenging here, constantly need to improve. One of our values is
There's no such thing as perfection, just a pursuit of it. I think that's a mentality that comes through in lots of the ways that we've approach building thrive.
One of the things that
has surprised me
about learning the history of the business.
is the nature of portfolio construction, even in the very small funds, and that you were doing these growth rounds.
Still, we have to talk about the fact that you just raised a huge fund.
I think five billion or so total.
Which is big.
That's a lot of capital to deploy.
Obviously then people can
Google and find some of the interesting companies like OpenAI and others where you've been a huge talk about most meaningful partner, like a huge partner to these businesses that certainly so far seem to be defining categories.
Again, we'll come back to that.
Maybe just talk about
How the feeling is different to you.
'Cause you've been here a long time with Josh doing the same thing.
But having a five million dollar checkbook versus a hundred and fifty million dollar checkbook.
Must feel radically different.
So what changes? I know you're going after the same kinds of companies.
But the scale is just so different. So
What is the difference in feeling to you and what it unlocks?
I know my answer's gonna sound silly,'cause when you frame you started with forty million, now you have five billion, it's gotta feel different.
A big part.

have felt underpowered relative to our vision to really support companies through this journey.
Some examples we've been investors in Stripe for over a decade.
We were able to support and lead around right after COVID, a seven billion dollar round. We invested nearly two billion between us and our LPs to support that company in a crucial moment that we've been on that.
investors for over decade and we're excited to
Continue to do that.
ramp a company we've been invested in since the series B.
Similarly after Covid, we were able to lead around and support the business. You mentioned Open AI, we've supported that company through
multiple rounds and been partners of the company.
Through multiple rounds.
And so I think
As we look at it.
The strategy's been the same. We've just not been able to support in the fullest sense that we've wanted to, and really concentrating these categories defining names. I think if anything
Maybe the feeling that's a little bit different.
Is it just hit viscerally?
How few great companies there are.
And so
When you start investing
You know that everyone knows the power law. Everyone can recite the power law.
But you're out there and
You see good opportunities or maybe it's a good deal, I think
one of the worst traps in venture is a good deal.'Cause you look at it and you think you can put it on paper and it's gonna play out the way you hoped.
But then you step out that business building is really hard.
And sometimes these small ideas, while they seem really tractable, small ideas
Have lots of competition.
And
The opportunity to go after big things and the companies are able to get that scale.
They're not that many. So maybe they'll say ten to twenty.
In any given.
You start to feel that a little bit viscerally, and so I think we'll probably have more confidence when we see that.
Than we did when we first started at Thrive.
And so maybe that's given us
more confidence to lean in the big ways that we've had to support across multiple funds. And so as we're talking out
That's probably the biggest sense of feeling is
You never want to
believe in your abilities too much. You want to constantly be challenging and questioning that.
But I think rightly, through some experience, I think we have a little bit more confidence when we see it and we want to lean in in bigger ways with those founders.
What does it feel like?
Or what do you know about a company that
you've invested in let's say three times or something.
gonna raise money again. And there's lots of great investors out there that a great company especially probably can pick from.
What do you feel are the sorts of things that you tend to know about companies?
that a brand new investor simply couldn't.
I guess this is my way of asking the value of the life cycle approach.
'Cause private markets are this great thing where you're allowed to have proprietary private information.
Very different than public markets.
Give us a peek into what that's like and what sorts of things
You learn as a longtime investor that a new one just couldn't know.
I think the big thing is it brings the pitch deck to life.
Everything looks great in a PowerPoint.
Everything looks great in a slide.
And
The reality is
The great iconic companies usually have two things.
One is that their core engine can go for a long time.
And when you're looking at a pitch deck, you're looking at a company
At its prettiest moment.
Everything's been dressed up, everyone's been prepped, the pitch has been rehearsed a hundred times.
And I think there's a rawness in being a partner to the company.
That we're able to see what's happening.
And when you look at the core engine
When we're inside a company
And I don't mean this in an insulting way.
But when things aren't going perfectly, but the metrics look amazing.
That to us is a great signal because there's such a pull in the market that you didn't have to be perfect.
You didn't have to be optimized.
Sometimes we can call it margin for forgiveness.
We call this busted baboming. Yeah, there we go. Busted but booming. I love that. But that just means that the market
is there in a way that the company doesn't have to be perfect.
And it's not the founders aren't great. It's just the market's willing to pull ahead of them getting to their roadmap, getting to their plans, getting to launch that.
And when we see that, we know there's a lot of room to run.
And it's hard to have that feeling and texture.
without being close to the company. So that's something that
We index too.
The second thing is
Usually multiple acts.
Seeing how the team's executed.
how they're moving towards those, their ability to launch new products, scale new products.
That's something where we get a little bit more
Texture being close by going back to some of the examples we're talking about with Stripe and Ramp. We're close and we understand what they're launching. We know what's happening. We know what the initial customer pull is. We've seen ramp execute and launch product after product. We know their roadmap. We know their ability to be able to push this to their customers. We see how customers respond.
And those are all things that when we see
gives us a lot more confidence in a way that's really hard to tell from a pitch decker
A first time meeting with a founder.
other thing about being lifecycle investors and also just being the individuals
Even when we don't invest.
being able to have seen a founder from the seed series A, series B, and then maybe we'll invest
In the series C
We get a chance to invest behind a line and not a moment of time.'Cause you're able to connect the dots.
See how they've evolved, see how they've grown, see how they delivered on what they were going to do.
And so
When we talk about wanting to invest through the life cycle of companies
We really anchor to be as early as possible.
I mean we co found companies, so we meet lots of founders even before they have a pitch deck or an idea because we might build something together. We've done it over a dozen time here.
A prize.
But as we see when that journey gives us much more confidence to lean in in a concentrated way because
To that point.
We don't view investing as like an option call.
Or a lottery ticket, as sometimes early stage investing could be. We're gonna be emotionally invested in this. We're gonna invest meaningfully from a capital standpoint and lean in.
And so being able to see people multiple times I think really helps
confirm that that this is a founder that we want to be in lockstep with for hopefully the next decade.
I want to talk a lot about
this line that separates the top hundred or two companies, the category definers from whatever that next group
Those are maybe there's some great or very good companies in that next category.
But it seems like being able to be on one side or the other of that line is f the game that you're playing.
So maybe
break down for us in as many ways as you can what category defining actually means. Because yeah, of course I want to be in those ones. But
The pursuit of that.
that you've honed over a long time is pretty singular here.
So just define that for us in a whole bunch of ways.
I don't think you can talk about
These great investments without talking about founders.
They're the heroes of the story.
The ones that create and push boundaries and push
farther than our imagination. And so
Really comes with one, does the founder have a big vision?
To start.

When
A founder comes in and

just rewires the way you used to think about the world. It really hits you. It feels fresh. It feels different.
Because
You see lots of pitches that look similar.
That play out, I think a couple of years ago, famously. We saw so many SaaS companies being pitched just across the board, every vertical
That's not an insult to the category, but I think there was a moment of time where that just felt so easy that we just saw so much of it.
And so the first is a founder who's willing to zoom out.
rewire your way of how you're gonna think about the world.
But also can get into the details and connect the dots.

And
A big vision without a plan it's just a fantasy.
And so famous example SpaceX.
We want to go to Mars. Amazing.
Well, you're starting to see all how all those steps have been planned out over two decades of first being able to launch into orbit and now we have
Starlink and all the things that they're building on top of that.
We have another company in our portfolio formation bio.
They're a full stack pharma company. We invested with them in the early days, but even then when they were just a patient recruitment company.
They laid out these steps to be a site manager, to be a CRO.

bring in therapeutic assets that they're gonna run by themselves. Okay, we're gonna commercialize it. And so six hundred million dollars later, they're building along that journey, but the seeds were there day one and there were the clear steps
To go do that.
I also think it needs founders too.
I don't know what the exact word is, but they almost have an unreasonableness, like a mutation in them that makes them uncompromising around some
dimension that you wouldn't necessarily expect, but makes the company
Really special.
For Stripe and Patrick and John Carlson. I mean it's just a push to simplicity. How do you take something so complex and arcane as payments, make it as simple as possible?
for developers. Ramp we've been talking about, but the velocity
And just the speed to kind of push we're gonna be uncompromising about responding to customer needs.
I saw them post recently they
They responded from a customer request.
The new product feature in five hours. I mean that's just where there's being relentless and uncompromising.
About doing that.
I mean that even scales outside of tech founders.
Costco
Just
Unreasonable giving value back to the customer.
I love
That they make fun of of CO there for
Refusing to change the price of the hot dog and the soda.
'Cause I think it's just so emblematic of what they're delivering to the customer, and we're gonna be uncompromising about that.
Even though we know we're probably losing money on this hot dog and soda.
For a dollar fifty or whatever it is today.
I love that. And so
We see that in a lot of our companies. Actually a fun anecdote about Robinhood
When we invested they were only an equity platform, we had this meeting to talk about all the other things that they were gonna launch. And one of the things we had on the page was
Well, there's all these robo advisors that seem to be getting traction. You should just bundle that in.
To the product.
And the reaction was interesting'cause they were like
No, if we're gonna do something, it's gotta shock the consumer.
And that was just so core to their DNA, these really frictionless, amazing value products.
When they first launched, obviously they shocked the consumer, zero dollar trading. No one could believe it. Everyone's like, How are they gonna make money?
And obviously they had a plan and they delivered on that.
And it persists to the company today.
Where they launch a credit card.
And it's three percent.
Cash back.
And no one can believe it.
And
Those are some of the unreasonableness that these founders bring.
I think you can have it across one or two dimensions if you
Have too many mutations, you become an alien and no one knows how to work with you.
But we usually that really shine through.
And then to the separate point on market.
I think there's a couple things that really show up.
As we look at categories.
Back to this point that no company is big enough to create its own wave, we really need to see change happening in a market.
And ideally it's not a ripple, it's gonna be a tidal wave.
Especially when it's a new market that we haven't seen before.
It's hard to tell for sure.
But we're really looking for obviously one
scale of vision. Some things just hit you as big, some feel small.
But then you're also looking for the velocity of the market.
in those early moments to tell you how long it's gonna run. A couple years ago when we're looking at AI, obviously
The market was small, but you just saw the pull, and obviously it wasn't hard to imagine how
All of work wasn't gonna change this way.
And so we're not gonna get the forecast of twenty thirty right. But you just look at the pull of the market and you can kinda imagine it.

The famous example of Uber where everyone undersized the market.'Cause again, these new markets are hard to
Predict.
But if you looked at Uber, it was growing insanely fast. So this idea that it was gonna be capped by whatever it was, a billion dollar taxi market.
made no sense. Something growing that fast isn't gonna be so constrained.
And then if you zoomed out a bit, if you looked at tangential markets, well transportation's a massive market.
And so we look at it if is there speed in the market and is there obvious tangential areas of spend that could be represented
And what's happening?
And then some categories I think are a little easier to define and think about.
Which are these old categories that can be turned over.
Financial services. Well, we can look at the banking sector, we can look at the brokerage sector, we can look at the credit card sector and get a thought about that.
Or the healthcare market where
Obviously we can look at where all the spend's going.
I just think what's really important
when we look at these old defined markets, even though it's more appealing because we can neatly put it in a box or put in an investment memo, how big it is.
Is this emphasis on where's the change in the market?
Our partner Miles has a good long site, startups need to be change seeking. And I think where it really comes from is
Startups have so many disadvantages. They have
Less capital, they've fewer resources, they're fewer people.
They have less time, honestly, to go after these markets. And so they need it to be changing. So that the incumbents, especially in these more calcified large markets,
have less to be able to compete them on. They need change. And so we really pay to what is the change catalyst.
That's gonna drive it in a given market.
Because if you look at Amazon and how they beat Barnes and Noble
If in a different narrative in an alternative universe, Amazon just built bookstores.
I think they would have lost to Barnes and Noble.
Despite how smart those people are, because Barnes Noble's been doing that for a long time, the people are really good at that, and they have a lot of resources pointed at that.
I think Netflix would have lost to Blockbuster if they just decided they were gonna build a bunch of stores and rent DVDs and videos.
Because Blockbuster was very good at that. They had it really honed in. So
That's something that we really look for again.
What's the change that's happening in especially if it's these well established markets that have incumbents?
Can you bring us in a room?
And tell us what it's like for a very small
nine person investment team.
to deliberate about companies around this specific question of
Is this yes or no the potential to be a category definer?
What is the nature of those conversations? When do they happen?
Who's in them?
How are they structured?
It's quite interesting to me that I'm sure there's a cost to this. You can't see everything in the world with nine people, but again, you're looking for the one or two hundred. So
You know, maybe it's while it matched.
But I really would love to understand
what it's like to be in that room for those discussions and the sorts of things that
you keep finding yourself talking about.
I think it's an interesting blend of r right and left brain thinking.
Which I call out'cause I think people think about investors and say, Oh, left brain
Quantitative.
But I think you'd be surprised at the creativity and the elements that shine through.
I think internally we kinda refer to it as a blend of east coast and west coast thinking. Thrives based in New York City.
That's really important to the roots. I think it led to a lot of independent thinking.
But we have a deep admiration and passion for creativity, these big projects, these magical
Products that can transform an industry, which I think the West Coast in Silicon Valley have famously invested behind and created some of the greatest innovations.
That we see today.
And so if you were in the room with us, I think you'd be surprised at how much
We lean in to the creativity.
The magic that's being built.
Trying to imagine the world five or ten years from now.
Not just the next one or two years, even we're looking at seed in series A companies.
A lot of times the conversation will be like, Okay, I see where the next two years are gonna go.
But ten years from now.
How's this company gonna look?
How's the S one gonna read?
How are the big incumbents gonna respond?
How could this be one product and become a platform over time?
Which.
I think it's just to imagine to believe if the founder's in the room with us, we're starting to dream with them in the pitch and see, do we have alignment around where this is gonna go?
Can we see the future together?
Do we see the steps that can get us on that journey and are we inspired by that?
And
When
I think we look at that room and the more animated it is, the more creative it is.
I think the better investment decision we're gonna make
I know I keep repeating it, but the small ideas attract a lot of competition. There's something fresh about the big ideas
that when they come into a room
That I think get people excited.
And I think so qualitatively we lean heavily there. And then we're obviously investors, so then we think quantitatively, okay, this narrative plays out the way that we see.
Are we gonna be rewarded for this investment in a way that makes sense for the risk that we're gonna take, for the effort that we're gonna put in?
To this journey.
I the second thing that's interesting is
I think you'd be surprised by the directness.
in the investment conversation that we have in the room.
I've only been a part of one other investment firm, but I've talked to lots of people at other investment firms, and you get the sense that
Investment committee is more political.
Then it actually is truth seeking.
Because trying to make this pitch.
You're really trying to get permission
to go make an investment.
And I look at that and say, What a wasted opportunity.
To not really leverage the brain power of your partners, the people presumably that you think most highly of in the world in the space that you're operating with, oh and understand you so well.

Full on or varnish view about what you're doing.
And to be vulnerable in the room.
To have unfiltered feedback.
Through that.
And so a lot of times it's not that we're asking for permission, we're inviting participation.
In our journey
To go
Make the best.
Decision.
And I think we're able to set that up because precisely we do have a small team.
One, we have deep relationships with each other.
So
We know that
Any ideas aren't personal.
We're really all just trying to achieve the same goal together.
And we can engage the substance on the page without the person feeling personally attacked.
In that.
I think the second thing is
This idea of not asking for permission.
Well, because we're small and we have a lot of trust with each other.
I'm going into that room knowing I can do the deal if I want to do the deal.
Because
That's how much trust we have. There's not that many of us.
But
I'm excited to get the feedback of my partners.
to help me make the right decision. And they're willing to push me that way.
I just went through that this morning on a deal and just the process and the vulnerability help. I even walked into the room sharing a little bit of
Hey, this is where I'm thinking, and this is where I'm honestly very conflicted.
Which
The more I understand is pretty rare.
I think the last thing that's kinda interesting.
F Thrive is obviously.
We're an investment firm.
But there's so many contributions for people who aren't investors that thrive, and I think it really adds a richness to the conversation.
And it's funny because a lot of investment firms are mostly just investors.
But if we looked at a startup and it was a product company and all there were was engineers.
You probably would not say that's not gonna be the best executing company. And of course it's a product company, you gotta go build that.
But
The finance team and the sales team and the communications team all those elements really come together.

create a symphony and play music together in a way that's special.
And I think one of the things we've really benefited from by having an impact team and having world class operators across finance and talent and data and communications and research.
is that we have contributions in a much richer color of these companies for the deal I was talking about this morning.
News who leads our
A lot of our portfolio impact and leads a lot of the product managers and engineers here spent over thirty hours with the founder working through different things over the course of
months being invited to help him think through different
Dimensions.
been able to get insights from people who've operated in certain dimensions.
And those opinions I think add a richness to the conversation.
I think the best representation of that is also Nithan, who's our executive chairman.
He was the dean of HBS for over a decade.
He's a confidant mentor, thought partner to so many of the leading CEOs.
and brings in such a richness of case studies to all our conversations that really enhances it.
Some of my favorite moments is we're having an intense debate.
In the room.
And you'll just see a smile go across Nithin's face because
Clearly he's
understand some case or some market or seen it a hundred times and work really
struggling with it because we think it's the first time this has happened in the world.
And
Just as insight that he can drop in that situation to make it even tangible when we were looking at
Ramp.
At the time you had companies like Ramp and Brex and Divi and five or ten other players.
Lots of corporate cards in the market.
And we were excited about Ramp not just because they're a corporate card, but because their vision to automate finance
And all the elements and the products are gonna launch over time, and the North Star felt different than every other company that was maybe focused on easy access to credit or awards.
And so we're debating how's this market gonna play out?
There gonna be ten people in this market forever.
How's it gonna go? And Nithan just goes.
It's gonna be three companies.
And one of them's gonna get acquired. This is just the nature of consolidation in markets.
And lo and behold, a couple years later
And there were three companies, Brex, Ramp, and Divi, and Divi got acquired by Bill.com.
Having that insight in the room I think really added a texture to the conversation and so I think the other things
I think you'd be surprised by nature of the conversation, the contributions from people who aren't just investors that adds the richness
To the decision making in the debate.
Can we zoom in on
The changing nature
Of
I guess the categories or the types of companies that seem to be attracting the most
Extreme talent.
Or people with the biggest ideas for how the world should change because it just feels like things have graduated from software.
And that was for so long the vast majority of time and attention
That was spent by
investors of your type was in software businesses.
And software did beat the world.
I don't know about you, but I've had this experience recently where we build software for ourselves.
And this thing is three people building it and it's so good and so perfectly wrapped around what we need.
And it's hard to imagine that in five years or ten years, everyone's not just building their own with all these tools that are becoming available through AI, et cetera.
And now there seem to be way more super capital intensive massive scope of ambition.
Projects.
whole new fields. We'll talk about healthcare.
But the nature of the categories that matter seems to have changed quite a bit.
Can you just riff on what your view on that change is and how you see it or how you feel it?
Yeah.
I think you articulate really well.
People just want to work on real problems.
They wanna work on
Things that if it works.
We're gonna have an impact in the world.
Are gonna feel meaningful.
And I think maybe we lost sight of that over the last couple of years'cause it was just too easy to build a company.
So everyone kinda wanna launch something.
Every employee at a corporation had a corporate card that they could just buy some piece of software and
I want a calendar app that's blue instead of red, so that's why I'm gonna pick this one.
And
That just I think
deluded us or confused us from what actually
would be meaningful in the world. And so we looked at revenue traction and said, that's a great company.
And when you step back, great companies solve big problems.
And
I think that people are being grounded back into that.
And we're coming out of
the lead up to Covid and the rise up of all these tech companies and the ease of capital that went around.
And now people I think are reflecting, be like, what do I wanna work on? What's meaningful? What do I wanna talk about with my families? What am I gonna feel proud about?
In ten years.
And I think the great thing about that is
Usually also those align with great financial outcomes because you end up
banding together a really talented team.
Again, these big problems sometimes seem scary, but I actually think it's probably easier to go build
Because you end up attracting way better talent.
Yeah.
I'm glad that the market's catching up now that capital is actually going to these great ideas instead of being crowded out by SaaS.
Also, when you're working on these things, there's less competition and so to the extent you're able to succeed in what you want to do.
You're in a position.
to go capture that value, whether because you're the only person
You know SpaceX famously, the they don't really have
competition as today I don't know some
People are inspired now is what they've seen with SpaceX, but they were building for two decades. No one was really paying attention to them. What it seemed like they're doing is crazy. And now they've built almost an insurmountable lead in our view to go
do that. And I think more companies are starting to think like that. Like an Android
Like an open AI.
Companies that have a long term vision, they're going after these crazy problems, which the first couple of years
People are like, No way you could sell
Defense to the government.
Or no way you can
Achieve AGI. That just seems crazy and a fantasy and
In twenty fifty, not twenty thirty.
And then these companies kind of quietly build, as OpenAI has done for since being founded in twenty fifteen, and then they have these light bulbs, and then everyone's playing catch up.
And so that's exciting to us. And it's something that
We love to lean in. We love that more founders are doing. It's been part of our DNA from the beginning, I think being based in New York.
We were backing some of these
more service capital intensive businesses
Whether it was Josh starting Oscar
Or us
starting a P B M and right way to go after
the big three P BMs that control eighty percent of the market and have two hundred billion of enterprise value.
Or backing a lot of the fintech companies that
You had to have a balance sheet, or you're regulated like a Robin Hood or a firm or a new bank.
And so those things were scary to people and
We kinda leaned into it.
And we've seen how that's played out and I'm just excited that more and more of the market's going there.
And we're realizing that
A hard thing, a capital thing might actually not be a bug, but a feature of a great opportunity.

Interesting challenge. Let's say there's a hundred just to make a round number.
category defining companies out there in private markets right now.
If you went and asked a bunch of smart investors, what are the hundred?
There'd be a decent amount of overlap for sure. At some point these no one would say SpaceX is not a category defining company or Stripe or all these names that you've mentioned, honestly. And obviously at some point they weren't and then they became one. And of course you want to be in there earlier, but you continue to invest as they continue to dominate.
So what is it that creates the return opportunity in your opinion? Is it
Access
because access is scarce to these companies. They only raise so much money from so many investors.
Is it better understanding and knowledge? Do markets
Under price.
Category definingness.
Where does the alpha remain before it tips into
Teta.
For that.
Group of one hundred.
I think it's two things.
One is what you called out. I think the market underappreciates the scale of where these opportunities can go.
I think if we went back a decade ago
And I asked you if there was gonna be a trillion dollar company.
You'd say no way.
And then if I asked you five years ago if there should be a three trillion dollar company, you would laugh and say, No way. And I think we have three of them now.
And so I think we're underestimating the impact and the transformation and the returns to scale of a lot of these companies. You know, talk about stripe, we're looking at the round
We led after Covid.
Stripe's been working at it for over a decade. It's this really established company. It's a category leader.
You go look at their market share.
And I think it was like two to three percent globally.
And if I tell you that are more things gonna be bought online versus less things, you'd say absolutely.
Even then e commerce, thirty year trend, where twenty percent penetrated.
And so
You just look at that is is that two percent or three percent market share for Stripe?
Gonna go to five percent. Gonna go to go to eight percent.
But I think we struggle at some of these high absolute numbers.
To visualize that and how it's gonna play out.
I think the second thing
That I think is underappreciated in the market. I think it's an advantage to us is
both being early stage and life cycle investors.
is the opportunity for a lot of these tech companies
To take a product and build a platform.
And I think being in the weeds with this companies, understanding all those details.
I think is a different muscle in mind than historically traditional finance investors.
Who know how to read a P L.
Who know how to value the cash flows of a future company.
But maybe underappreciate the strategic placement of a company.
And all the things that are gonna come from that.
Over time.
And so we've seen those journeys with some of the first wave of these companies. Obviously Amazon's become much bigger than it ever was.
Meta and Facebook has evolved in multiple dimensions. Google's evolved in multiple dimensions. More recent companies like a service now are at last scene. You just see the compounding of
Layering on products.
And even though we've seen that narrative a few times
I still think people really underappreciate that.
And I think it's part of our early stage lens that we're able to sit with the founder.
We're able to see the vision.
We're able to think about the product surface area where they sit.
the data gravity that they might have, the workflow and the engagement they might have.
And what does that create?
Over of time. I think it was a big part of our insight into GitHub.
Where it was clear they were dominant in the developer community.
But
We just thought it was a really strategic place to play. One, because developers were gonna grow. Everyone's forecasting, I don't know, five percent growth for developers. Well, we just knew that everything was gonna be built in a digital way. So that just didn't
Resonate or sit.
Qualitatively with us.
But on top of that, you just sat in a place where code was being created and collaborated on.
What are all the downstream things that are gonna be created from that?
And I think you fast forward
Obviously there's a
acquired by Microsoft and it became an important strategic asset in terms of launching things in the cloud and all the downstream things that would come from owning the developer relationship.
There's a question here about
How shocking it is.
It's a very small handful of companies.
Let's take open AI and SpaceX as two examples.
Which are enormous in terms of their market caps.
They're quite large in terms of their revenue and crazy in terms of their growth rates.
But somehow they feel kind of early.
I know SpaceX better than Open AI.
But the people that I know who are some of the best investors I know that are big SpaceX investors, they all say the same thing, which is this thing is chronically undervalued.
And
It's really interesting. I don't think there was another point in time when you had these
Whatever, two hundred billion dollar companies.
Which felt like
Almost immature.
And how to think about underwriting
Those ones especially
I don't know what to call them.
as a category feels like an important challenge to solve.
How do you underwrite
SpaceX or open AI in a differentiated way.
And does it require you think something about markets in general that that's different to do so?
I think there's two things there. I think we look at these companies and I think our gut reaction is two hundred billion dollar valuation, a fifty billion dollar valuation, a hundred billion dollar valuation.
Oh man, that's so big. How could it get bigger?
From here
But I think we're just anchored to the past.
And the reality is just we're underestimating
the ability for technology to transform every industry. And so we just look at that and say, yes, these feel like high absolute numbers.
But if you look under the hood
You'd say, Wow, we're still really early in some of these
Trends.
I think a space X on the same thing, it's almost hard to quantify
Where these things are gonna go.
And so we even look at the core and say
Yes, they've accomplished a lot, but they've opened up a new frontier.
That really has no headwinds.
But they've launched Starlink.
And I think they're gonna reshape what telecommunications looks like.
And
Again, we'll look at that because it's just so impressive and then try to put a cap on SpaceX.
But I would be shocked.
If that's the last product that they launch. We're gonna see more and more.
And because of the scale of the platform they built.
The ability to launch so many things into space.
And start to open up in our imagination in ways that we don't know.
We're gonna see more and more built on that. And I think similarly with open AI.
I think it's easy to put a ceiling on opening air because it's so impressive.
But come on, it's been two years.
Since I've launched a product.
To say that there's a ceiling on the company
Like just try to cap what we're looking at now.
Doesn't really resonate.
It's like
Being in ninety seven in the internet and thinking what you know what it's gonna look like.
We're just seeing the pull
so aggressively in the market, a company that's innovating.
The idea that their innovation is just gonna stop.
Because we're so impressed about where it is today, I think is some people's natural reaction, but that wouldn't make any sense.
Or that
We've seen the balloon in AI and we got the hype, and of course things aren't gonna always
Translate
On a perfect line and there's gonna be
over hype cycles.
But to say we've thought of most of the use cases in AI is just ridiculous as well.
And so
It's a very selective group of companies that will be investing in at these really high valuations.
But to your point.
It feels early.
It feels like we're investing these innovative companies. It still have a long way to go. And that's what gets us excited to invest in these companies
Even at these valuations.
What are examples of
You don't have to name them, but
things behind the names of Fool's Gold where you
thought something for sure was going to define a category.
maybe even ideally later in its journey.
And then it ultimately did not.
Is there any common
Pattern across
Those or is it different in each circumstance that you can imagine?
That's a good question.
I think the big thing is honestly quality of the market.
And so what I mean by that
Is
If you think it's fools gold, it's probably growing really quickly. I mean that's the first tell is this thing exciting? So we see businesses that are growing really quickly.
And so I think the second question is what's the durability of this tailwind and what's the quality of the end market?
And
That seems obvious to say, but I think for a while
We got
away from thinking about that because so many of the tech businesses are being created were just automatically great companies.
And
Some of these companies too.
Didn't look great.
And then they got to big scale and then there was a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
Like a Google. You just scale it and then wow, search has money and
Facebook.
Or it's like we're just gonna scale the network, we're gonna grow, grow, grow and then
Money's gonna pop out of the other side. And that's what happened.
And then also we're backing a lot of SaaS companies where just
Inherently the business model was advantaged. And so we just you didn't really think about
How do all the things line up?
And so I think when you look at some companies, especially ones that are
technology enabled services companies playing in traditional sectors.
What is the quality of the end market and how that gonna play out? Because you can't escape the genetics
of the business at the end of the day and the genetics of the market.
Makes for high and low quality markets. What would be the
characters. So I mean, obviously you have the classic five forces in all these different dimensions.
I think to speak at a
High level, I think one
You obviously need to believe in the defensibility and the modes of what exist.
Obviously that creates the margin that you can go capture.
I think a second thing is the stickiness and the loyalty of the customers and part of that's product, part of that's market.
But
Are you the most important thing that these customers work with? Are you
list five or seven on a priority list.
Which I think gives you the right of first refusal to build a lot of things over time.
And
I think fundamentally just again the unit economics of how these things flow through, which I think we got away from because capital's cheap.
We look at the headline growth numbers, but if you really parsed it back.
These businesses famously were spending a dollar to get ninety cents, and no amount of growth was gonna cover
What was gonna happen there.
And so I think when you step back
You look at it and be like, Am I solving a real problem? Does that have modes to it that allows me to capture margin?
And we're looking at the growth stage, does the data support the qualitative narrative? And if you look at it and the economics are upside down.
Or the customer retention isn't great.
Or
They're not attaching and cross selling to new products.
Something in your narrative about how this is a dominant company and exciting market isn't holding up.
And that's a big part of where a quantitative check comes in the back end. It's like lay the narrative out. We're so narrative driven because the world is changed by narratives.
But
Does the data then support what comes through there?
is a big part of us assessing the quality of the market.
Can you explain healthcare?
To us. Okay.
Easy task. I'm gonna leave it that broad. Yeah. Well we can start in lots of places. I mean I think the first thing is that
The problems I think are obvious in healthcare. You don't have to look so far to find problems. Everyone's usually had a bad experience. And it's an individual problem.
And it's a government problem.
I mean our government itself
It's probably going bankrupt with healthcare.
I think we spend over twenty five percent of the federal budget on healthcare, and that continues to grow faster than inflation. Our employers are now spending more
on healthcare that they're spending on R and D.
On average.
And so as you look at that cycle and we're entering, it's the number one reason for consumer bankruptcy. So consumers are really struggling by it.
By some accounts, consumers are spending probably thirty percent of their overall income.
On healthcare.
Because when you look at what their employer's contributing, which is
wages that would have gone to them, but now it's going to health benefits. When you look at their taxes and where their tax dollars go.
And then at the end of the day
The quality and the experience.
Barring some unique cancer treatments which
America's better than the rest of the world at
It's not better than the best of the world. Even though we're spending
So much more.
And so the problems are numerous, and we could spend this whole podcast talking about the problems. Where does it kind of stem from? I think it's kind of two dimensions. The first is the market's not competitive.
And everything is so siloed.
On the competition piece.
Healthcare's local and in every market there's like two or three insurers.
There's one to three health systems.
We talked about PBMs earlier. There's three PBMs that capture eighty percent
Of the total market.
Even on the tech side.
You have one or two.
IT service providers that power all these health systems. And so when you don't have competition
You don't have an urgency to change.
And so things just move so slowly. So we have all these problems, they're so obvious, but there's not an urgency to change because there's not competition and there's not a mechanism for the right behaviors to be rewarded and the wrong behaviors to be punished.
And then on the silo piece, I think it slows it down a lot more.
Because it gets harder to drive change where
You're in a health system. And they might be on
I don't know.
different systems and different departments and
A payer has a lot of different systems, and a big part is the industry's grown through MA. And so you have all these acquisitions and it just builds on itself.
And it just calcifies. So you have lack of competition and you have all these silos.
Makes it really hard.
To make progress.
And then I think the other thing
Which is
I just don't think we've been approaching the problem the right way.
To change it.
When I think about
how we've approached it as
tech startups or Silicon Valley,'cause I think
When you look at that problem you say, How should we do it? it might look a little bit different than we would go
Disrupt some other industries.
Because if you look at classic wisdom
The first is
Build a small MVP and launch that in market.
And I think the only way in this moment of time to move the needle on health care.
is to go after big problems and build big products.
Because there's so many small silos.
That if you're just another piece in the process.
You're not gonna really change anything.
the whole experience is still gonna be slow and clunky for the consumer.
I think
As we look at how we've approached that.
When Josh was starting Oscar, there were two routes. We could have built software to sell to
health insurance companies or we could have built a health insurance company.
I think the reality is we wouldn't have moved the needle for the consumer if we just ended up being a small part of it. Oscar's like thirty startups in one.
To go do what it's going to do. And so I think
If we started with a small approach, which is the classical windsom, it would have never worked.
Same with the PBM.
It's intimidating to go build a new pharmacy benefits manager.
I'm sure most people don't even know what that is, but that's the way that you go access your drugs.
And it's a big considered decision for an employer to pick a new PPM because if it doesn't work,
then your employees are gonna show up on January first and they can't get their medicine. In a lot of cases it can be life saving and life threatening if that doesn't work.
There's so much to go build if you're gonna rewire and move someone from their existing PBM.
To a new PBM.
We've done it backing companies that are building full stack pharma companies, we've done full stack home care, we've done people rewiring the mental
healthcare system and it's because they're broad that I think gives them a chance.
I think the second thing is you gotta meet the system where it is.
Well I think again
Classics.
Venture would be like
Forget the system, build it new, build it from first principles.
Let's go challenge the norms.
Well,
US health care is four and a half trillion dollars.
If it was its own economy with the fourth largest economy in the world, the size of Germany
Something that big
is not gonna move and change that quickly, definitely not in the timeline that a startup needs. And so I think you gotta go meet the system where it is today, go build within the system, go understand the system, and then help it evolve over time.
Back to some of the co founding points. We co found a company called Cadence with Chris.
And it's really focused on transforming chronic diseases for elderly patients. And we monitor patients in the home daily. We have blood pressure cuffs, we have glucose monitors on these patients.
And we're helping them stay healthier, engage.
And have care every day versus the two days they might show up to a hospital.
Well they're
are some really innovative business models we could go after to go do that. But we started we're gonna go fee for service, we're gonna go partner with these health systems. So we're gonna go work with them because all the patients are already there. We're gonna go work with their physicians because they already have the relationship
And we're going to be a part of that. We're not going to build outside the system. We're going to build in the system. We're going to get paid like the system. And I think over time we can evolve it and get paid in new ways and innovative ways.
But we gotta get the scale on the system and help it evolve over time, which I think runs counter to a lot of people's initial reactions and makes wanna build outside the system.
I think the other thing that looks a little bit different is
Again, a lot of advice is well build products for yourself, build products for your friends.
And I just don't know if that's gonna have the impact in healthcare.
If we do that, we're gonna have a lot of great products that are good for fancy tech companies or big New York
Firms
And that's just not gonna move the needle.
on healthcare.
We gotta build for Ohio where I grew up. We gotta build for
The rest of America.
And
That's the only chance it go impact a hundred million people, which if we want to move the needle on healthcare.
The system that's bankrupting us, it's growing faster than inflation consistently, that's a poor consumer experience.
You gotta think of the order of magnitude of a hundred million people and you're not gonna get their building for New York and San Francisco.
A cool anecdote on this, we're early investors in a company called
Headway and we were looking at the series A of the company.
And it was small at the time, but

first early data and they were only in New York City, we looked at it and the most represented employer in their data set
was the MTA, the transportation authority.
And why? Because it was the biggest employer.
in New York.
And so we looked at that and said, wow, this is a problem for everyone. It's not just for f fancy engineers or high paying
White collar jobs.
This is for
all of New York City's residents. And so that gives confidence that it was going to scale to the rest of America. That was going to scare across all the states. And now the company is in most of the states and growing really quickly because they built a model that worked within the system that scaled
to every American and has a real shot to get to a hundred million users. When we co founded Cedar
Really focused on the
broken experience for consumers understanding their bills and their payments and healthcare. And proud to say we're serving over twenty million Americans today. So I think we're gonna get to that hundred million goal as we go after that.
And I think the last thing
Which maybe fits with the Thrive DNA, but
Also it's counter to maybe some
Venture thinking is I just don't think venture math works in healthcare.
This idea that seventy percent of your companies can fail.
And the thirty percent will pay for it. Again, mathematically it might work, but I think why it struggles in healthcare is if you're gonna go partner with a health system and you're gonna go partner with an insurance company.
It's hard for them to integrate and work for you.
And so if seventy percent of the startups they work with are gonna be gone in two to three years
You just can't get any momentum of innovation. And so I think something we've really pride ourselves on in Thrive is like we're concentrated, we're committed.
And when we're showing up to go partner
with a lot of these systems.
we're committed to these companies are gonna be there and it's a higher bar for us to show up because if seventy percent of the companies we represent fail, well there's gonna be no momentum in innovation.
Because they have the industrial resources to work with us.
And so we gotta show up with a lot more commitment, a lot more build.
And so if you actually look at all the healthcare companies we backed, it's big capital checks, it's big ideas, it's robust around that'cause that's
One, the only way was you can move the needle.
But we need to partner with the system and we gotta
Show up with a commitment that this isn't just a lottery ticket or an option call for us.
What part of the system if you had a magic wand
that would unlock more potential or innovation across healthcare.
What would you change with your magic wand? What part of the system would you alter?
Interesting.
Going back to the
competition and silos and if I had to pick one, I'd pick competition.
How do it increase competition?
And I think the biggest thing we can do is
Honestly, get the employer out of healthcare.
And the fact that the employer picture healthcare plan is a vestige of after World War Two.
Where there was a freeze on wages and so people were thinking about other ways to pay people and create benefits. And so we said, Oh, pay for your health plan.
And now it's morse into this entire system. I knew that. That's kind of interesting. And so it's morphs into this entire system now.
And now you have these employers who are responsible for healthcare.
And rightly they don't know what they're doing.
They're like, I don't know what I'm picking, I don't know what I'm doing and then
You have a middleman as the employer who's picking benefits for your employees.
And then you also have to pick these bundled benefits.
Because if I'm buying something for five hundred employees, it's gotta work for them. So it makes it hard for new things to show up.
And as a startup you can't literally do everything day one and so you try to
Figure out your niche and do that.
Person really well.
Well
Employer can't bundle that. And so how do we move there?
Honestly there's a rule now that's been put into place
Personally, I want to see flourish and grow, which is this idea of
Employers now can give
Payments.
to their employees to go purchase health insurance and it's tax advantaged in the same way.
And so I think that's interesting because
It allows people to go
Pick individual
Plans.
And hopefully that creates new competition and allows new startups to grow in that market, new ways for people to sell even directly to the employee. So I don't have to go sell the employer. I could sell to you and be like, Well, you have your ten thousand healthcare bucks.
Why don't you buy it?
these services that I'm gonna build to you and I'm gonna deliver to you directly. And so we start to take the middleman out of it and allow people to compete on an individual level.
Because right now you have to go through the broker, that then goes to the employer who then makes the decision, and now you have this network and then you gotta go figure out the doctor.
And at the end of the day, the consumer is so outside of it and the consumer's also so shielded from the cost of it all.
They don't really understand.
Yes, we talk about high deductible plans on the rise, which I think is giving more consumer choice.
But even then it might be a two thousand dollar deductible on a fifteen thousand dollar plan.
What if I gave the consumer fifteen thousand dollars?
Now they know the cost of everything.
Now they know the cost of going to one hospital versus the other. And so I think they're just starting to lay the groundwork.
with some of those and so the more to push in that direction, and I think the analogue that
Gives me a little bit of hope is
We had pension funds and they went to four one Ks, so
Employers used to be responsible for your retirement. That was pension funds. I was guaranteeing you retirement.
And that became really unwieldy and hard to manage. And then they said, Well, I'm just gonna go from defined benefit to defined contribution. Now I'm just gonna give you money. You gotta invest in responsible for your retirement.
And so I think if we can move to a world like that on the healthcare side, I think would be one of the biggest unlocks and would
create a bunch of competition, which I think will create new innovation, new companies to be built against it.
Are there any trends back to your idea of the tidal waves that are starting to form or have form that are gonna be
The antecedents of great opportunity.
Are there any of those that you are
materially less excited about
than you think in general.
investors of your type might be.
I'm an optimist at heart, so I don't spend too much time thinking about what I don't like.
More attracted to what is exciting, what's inspiring.
What gives us energy versus critiquing maybe other people's
Thinking, so
I just think if it was anything it would just come back to his core point of
Revenue doesn't mean you're solving a problem.
And I think it's easy with the investor lens.
To just look at what's growing.
But if we really step back and be like
If this company's successful, how does the world change?
How does this person's life get materially better?
If you were explaining this to
Your wife or your kids who aren't in tech?
With their eyes
Class over and there'd be like
Okay, sure.
Or would they be fired up as well?
That's actually one of the tests I use. I talked to my wife
Raquel a lot about the things we're working on and
The more she's animated or excited about
the things we're looking at the more it resonates with
me that were onto something special.
Are there any other heuristics like that that you find yourself
using when evaluating the scope or potential impact of something? Yeah, I think one of the advantages again about being a generalist firm.
is I spend a lot of time in fields like healthcare or financial services or some of these traditional industries.
And
I think people will look at that and be like
Oh, that's such a disadvantage that maybe your other partners don't understand your spaces so well, they're so regulated.
They're so nuanced.
But I find that if I'm pitching something and it's not
Resonating with a generalist crowd.
It probably means I'm thinking too small.
And I've convinced myself that a small idea is a big idea just because I live in that market and I breathe it all the time. But if I can't elevate to someone who doesn't live in healthcare, doesn't live in fine sources, they're like, wow, that's a big idea. That's exciting.
And I find myself having to go two or three layers deeper to defend why it's a big deal and you don't understand this is gonna happen in the market.
When I'm talking that way, it's usually a click for me that no, the best ideas are gonna be big and simple. They're gonna captivate an audience who hasn't spent their whole life studying these markets.
On the largest of all tidal wave side, you're a
life cycle multi time and very large investor in open AI.
So you have an inside view.
into
what to expect into the ways these things are being used.
They had a big launch today that was very cool to see the strawberry model that everyone's been talking about.
And I love the way they announced all the different demos and genomics and in economists with Tyler Cowan and everything, such a cool way to do it. Definitely a show not tell type of company. Yeah, show not tell.
Just talk about what you're seeing as a central investor in the engine that's fueling this space.
And what you expect is gonna start to change.
about companies and products as a result of this new technology.
It's
Incredibly hard not to be fired up.
Well what's gonna happen to AI.
I just can't imagine a world where not everything how work is done and across all dimensions.
doesn't ultimately get transformed.
I think in the short to medium term, I think it's inevitable that we're disappointed. And I think the big reason
It's'cause the world's not ready for AI.
How could it be? It didn't know AI was coming.
A I was actually reading.
In a book.
called capitalism in America.
And
It just goes to the history of innovation in America and all these different cycles and it's amazing to go look back at electricity.
And even after electricity was launched, which is one of the biggest innovations, horizontal innovations that's happened.
In the last two centuries
Twenty years in.
I think it was like less than five or ten percent of manufacturing.
was powered by electricity.
And why was that? It's because
All the manufacturing plants were designed for steam engine and steam power, which means you had one big drive shaft.
That powered the entire factory, that meant every machine had to run at the same time. There was no individual workstations.
And to embrace electricity
You had to remodel the manufacturing plant.
You had to create all these individual work stations. It created a flexibility that we didn't have with steam power.
But it just took time.
For that to evolve and eventually, obviously that
Replaced everything.
I think similar thing with AI.
Where
It's gonna be obvious that it's gonna change every category, but we have to rework how
Work is done.
It's one of the reasons actually we're inspired to partner hand in hand with some traditional businesses. And so a little bit different than we've done in the past, but again, we like to defy tradition, like the thing from first principles. We're actually partnered with two founders, Jake and Frank, to go acquire a lot of accounting firms and rework a lot of the workflows that happen today because we don't think it's purely technology. It's gonna be operational.
Sconna be incentives, it's gonna be processes that are actually gonna drive
The change.
And we're partnered with another group that's unannounced that's doing something similar in a couple exciting industries and they're investing in a platform to do it across
Multiple spaces.
And you have to marry the technology with the operationals and the process to really drive that forward.
And so I think for that reason
We've taken on a slightly different
approach they are much more aligned with ownership.
But also
I think the big breakout cases that we'll see in the short term aren't gonna be the obvious ones. It's gonna be the new categories.
that don't have that friction of transformation that we'll see break out. Vince, our partner, thinks the first hundred billion dollar AI company
Is gonna be a consumer company. For that reason.
One, it's gonna stay on the consumer space, so hopefully there's surface area for something that's new and innovative.
But
I think it's just gonna be a bit more of an unrestricted behavior that hopefully we're gonna create or new markets that are gonna build, they're gonna be the fastest adopted because not the friction of the old ways.
But I'm optimistic that everything's gonna change over time.
Where do you think the
most opportunity is for a new entrepreneur that's twenty three, twenty four, twenty five.
to start thinking about deploying these things in a way that can create
A business with some defensibility because it seems like a lot of these things
I guess this happens in every era of technology where you sort of use the new thing to do a better job solving existing use cases.
But it does seem very non defensible in the sense that you and I can build them.
Probably not a good business idea.
So how would you coach a young
Founder that is just
ambitious and interested in deploying these things, but also wants to create something of enduring value.
It's a great question. And it's probably the trillion dollar question if we're thinking about all the value that's gonna be. Yeah, exactly. Well five trillion by the time that these companies play out over time. We don't want to put a cap on it.
I think it goes back to the
First advice.
about all businesses and all category defining companies.
We just say solve a problem that matters.
And hopefully do it in a way that you're adding value.
Again, I think when we see this new technology, especially when
You see it before the rest of the world.
There are going to be these arbitrage moments that we're talking about. Where I can take this and give it to someone else because they haven't heard of OpenAI, or they haven't played with ChatGPT yet, or they don't know that OpenAI has an API.
They go use.
And those are
I think fleeting arbitrage moments and to your point, if we think about the arc of time.
might not be defensible. And so I think people would step back and be like, Okay, what can I build that's meaningful?
What can I build that's transformative?
Okay, Bill that can solve a problem.
It might not be the first idea you have. Back to small ideas have lots of competition. If the first idea probably lots of people have it. If it feels super easy, lots of people are gonna go after it.
And then I think it's gonna take creativity.
How do we reimagine the world again that wasn't built for AI?
If we're starting to build these things from the ground up with AI, what would that look like?
And I think the other element
Is that
It should take some time to go built.
I know, I think a founder wants to get out there and go do it, but again, if you can get it out there in a month
Is that the actually the most exciting thing to go after?
Step back.
Be like what I want to work on for a decade.
What do I have the best shot of recruiting the best talent to go execute on?
What would I be proud about tell my kids that I built?
And created.
If you can answer
Satisfactory to all those questions. You're probably on to something that's interesting.
One of the things that
has to have changed across the last ten years is just your surface area.
And the way that you found your way to the next promising
founder and company ten years ago versus today, I'm sure is different.
How has that evolved and what is it like today? On average, if you're meeting X number of new people every month or whatever.
How
On average, are you finding your way to that person?
I'd say a lot of things have stayed the same and some things have evolved. And what I mean by that is we want to meet these founders as early as possible. Again, we're co-founding and building companies with them. So a lot of founders are coming to us.
Even before they have pitch check ready. Because we might go build that together.
The second thing is I think there's no substitution, especially in the early stages, to go meet founders.
And it's so hard to tell from a pitch stack. It's so hard to tell
obviously outside in on traction'cause it might not be there.
And so there's no substitute for being in the room. And we do this, we audit our calendars.
And usually every quarter, probably eighty percent of our meetings are early stage. So it's reflective. So you might look at the capital deployed and say, Oh, there's a lot of capital at the later stages. Well
We have to spend all the time in the early stage'cause we don't know
What's going to be there? You have to engage a lot of founders to really find these exciting opportunities early as possible.
I think what allows us to
make decisions at the early stage, even though it's maybe a smaller part of our time, is this narrow funnel?
that we have this narrow lens of these category defining companies, these hundred or two hundred companies, these ten or twenty companies founded every year.
Allows us to say no to a lot of things.
and really pursue the things that we think are breakouts. Because if I'm looking at a company that might be at scale, it might be a five or ten billion dollar company, well there's very few companies where we could sit here and be like, wow, this is writing a big decade trend. They're still on the exponential growth curve. There's multiple products that we can launch even from here.
And so that really narrows it and we're able to really focus on those companies which
Higher probability that
We'll see the right things. And also that I think we're
More attuned to identify
The right opportunities.
I think where we've evolved a little bit is there's lots of data out there.
of identifying these companies and we have teammates here, we have
whole data and analytics team.
That's really analysing
Where founders are, what are the new companies, what are the things that are getting traction in the market, what are consumers downloading?
Which
I think we used to augment and help us understand the trends and what's happening in the market, what's happening broadly.
And I think it's one of the things that as as we've thought of Thrive, not just as an investment firm, but as a company.
where we started to invest and bring people on who've really augmented our thinking around that.
And be like, how do we improve every element of it? How do I get best in class people across every dimension? And that's been a big part, I think, of really
Adding so much context to help us find the right pockets, but also understand what's happening in the world. Yeah. So that's C. We've talked a lot about.
Pick.
What about wind?
I think a couple things.
If we think about the early days of Thrive.
Man, it was a grind.
It was hard.
And the only way
That we were gonna win.
was either we had to get to that founder early.
If we showed up in a process
With Sequoia and Kleiner and Benchmark and they're meeting it for a first time, zero chance.
So we gotta get to them early. We gotta build a relationship. We gotta show value.
ahead of that.
Again.
If it's just my reputation.
who's been investing for two years and someone who's been doing it for thirty years and has all these wins on their walls.
Gonna lose that deal.
And so that's really pushed a lot of us to be like
Let's add value to founders even before we're gonna partner with them. We gotta get early. We have to align with them. We have to do the work to understand their market and be really deep around that.
Which by the way I think translates to be great thought partners.
to any founder out there, if an investor doesn't take the time to really understand your business in the diligence process,
I can guarantee they're not gonna do it after they make the investment. They have the highest motivation to understand your business before they make an investment. And so I'd look at that diligence process be like, How well do they understand my market? How well do they understand dimensions? How well do they understand my product roadmap?
I think the third thing is we work as a team.
And it came from necessity at the beginning, again.
Me having a couple of years' experience, Josh only having a year or two more than that, Miles on our team was
twenty two at the time. Everyone was young and figuring it out.
Well, the only way we could win against someone with twenty years' experience was to collectively bring our experiences together. And so I think that's
been something that we've maintained even as Thrive has gotten more experience. I think it's been grounded in our DNA.
And I think it resonates with founders.
I think the other thing is
The way we structured ourselves has been unique and founders feel that.
So at the early stage side, when you're a founder and you're building
The fact that I'm sitting here not just talking about next year and how you're gonna raise series A, but I'm talking about ten years from now.
And what we're gonna go build.
How we build the foundation, what's the most ambitious version of what we're doing?
resonates with that early stage founder who wants to build something big and grand. And it's not the conversation they're having with everyone who's maybe focused on the next year or two.
The same thing is when you go talk to a growth stage founder.
And I'm not sitting there just talking about your P and L and your L T V to CAC.
And your payback.
I'm sitting there talking about okay how do
Customers use your product.
Where's the product gonna evolve from here?
How's it gonna grow? What's the second and third act gonna look like? I'm engaging with them.
Like it's an early stage company think about the product lines.
And I think that's exciting for founders because
Found change who they are just'cause they're a series D company.
They didn't start their company because they love the P L.
They started the company because they wanted to solve a problem. They're
animated, they're passionate.
To
deliver for their customers. And so and I think they have investors who show up and still have that DNA and aren't fully financial in the way that sometimes can flip at the later stages.
I think it really resonates and founders feel that
And then I think they respect the concentration and conviction.'Cause they're all in on their company.
And so to show up and they know that we're not making that many investments.
That it's a real sign for us to say yes.
Then it means that we're not here for just this year or just for the good times, but we're here for the whole journey.
And
That
It's a sign of our passion and commitment.
I think they want to be picked in that way.
What's the crazi thing you've ever done to win a deal?
Forget when a deal, just get a meeting in the early days. It was

Patrick and John from Stripe.
Emailing him being like
Oh we're in town, we'd love to meet.
And then being like, Can you come later today and we're still in New York and finding a way to get out there.
Or
Peter from segment being at a
customer in Indianapolis.
And I was being like, Oh, we're in Indianapolis.
To like go find a way to get in front of them. And so the early days we had to really hustle to get meaning, we had to send people

Just to get them to
meet with us and all the research that we would have done. And so
There was so much in the early days just to get a meeting.
You'd put almost like a month's work in just to get an hour with the founder.
And I hope that still sticks with us. I think one of the things
We really want to maintain it thrive. We can talk about the character of our team and
what we look for and how we build the culture of Thrive. There's like this Maverick mentality, this ability to want to create, the ability to do things differently.
Josh and others at the firm really talk about
The most important thing for us to remember is
All the hard work it took to get to this moment, and now that Thrive is maybe a little bit more mature and established.
How do we still maintain that energy and that focus to go create
It's the craziest thing you've ever done to support a company.
Well lots of things we've done export, I don't know, crazy, but
It's kind of an open secret at this point, but Nabil, who's one of our partners, was the interim CFO at GitHub.
For a long time.
Leading up to the Microsoft acquisition.
We have another person on our team you should have done that for another really fast growing company where
they really need to get a hold of their finances, they're growing so quickly that
They're mismanaging their working capital.
And sort of step in and save that company in that moment and transition. We've had people to step in as interim
chief growth officers to do that. And so I think we'll find here at any given time.
One or two of our leaders here are embedded in companies.
almost committed to it. And I think a lot of times people think of portfolio services and say, well, that's only for the struggling companies that need the portfolio services. We found the opposite. It's the fastest growing companies who need this the most, because the reality is if you're in these fast growing companies, anyone who's been there knows
It's more chaos than order.
Things are all over the place. And it's because you're growing so quickly. So you're outgrowing your systems. You might be outgrowing your people in some dimensions. And so to have a partner here who can drop in in bed and not just give you an hour phone call of advice.
And we're gonna get through this together.
Those are the things that I think.
really strike founders in ways that they never expected. And they said, I know you said you were gonna be here for me.
But I never thought you were gonna be here for me in this kind of way.
What are the most you mentioned the word maverick when I talk with Josh
When we did this a year ago, we talked about will versus skill.
What are the
most essential
attributes to a new person that you'd want to hire.
I think that will and skill really lines up to me. It's like this Maverick mentality.
Tie with high horsepower.
Back to this Maverick point.
You gotta wanna do things in a different way.
If you've always done the default thing in your life.
If you've never really challenged the status quo, if you never really pushed yourself outside your comfort zone.
If you just take things that people say at face value, you never challenge it yourself.
You're probably not a fit at Thrive. It's not an insult to anyone. It's just more about how we want to engineer Thrive and we wanna mirror the mentality of the founders.
Because these founders are Mavericks in their own right. They're trying to change an industry. They're obviously doing something different, otherwise they wouldn't

life on the line to go build something. They believe in something different than the rest of the world. And so I think it's really important to thrive.
That we mirror the mentality of our founders if we want to be good partners to them.
And I find it surprising sometimes that
You could have these conservative investors showing up to go invest.
In these world changing founders. It's like water and oil. The DNA's
don't necessarily match. And so I think it's just really important.
That we align
On that.
And I think the thing that's gotten trickier over time about that
Is the early days of Thrive.
You almost didn't have to suss it out because it's self selected.
Anyone who's willing to leave their job to join Thrive ten years ago.
Was off the path.
Was a rebel in some ways because it was not an obvious decision. We used to talk with our LPs because we were all so young at the time. They would tell us, Why don't you hire someone with more experience? We're like, we'd hire them if they would join, but none of them want to join. Now we're fortunate that Thrive's evolved a little bit, and I think some experienced people would want to join Thrive.
But we want to maintain that.
Because
I think it's easy sometimes.
As you get more established and some great resumes come through the door.
That you leave the things that made you great in the first place.
To pursue the things that seem safe.
And our founders go through that all the time.
You're a company, the replacements, the rack tag, passionate people are gonna go build it.
And then at some point you're a series D company and all these resumes from Google start showing up.
And it's like
Exciting and flattering, but you gotta make sure that the mentality matches. Doesn't mean that someone from Google doesn't match, but you have to, I think
Fight that. Because you don't want to lose the core of what made your company successful.
In the first place. And the high horsepower thing.
There's no substitute for hard work.
You said will or skill. We believe in both. And so it's like you gotta
Work your tail off.
You gotta be high IQ and you gotta be high EQ.
And really when we talk about high horsepower.
Can you deliver on the things you say you're gonna go do?
Can you go deliver on that? Emblematic of that, I think usually the first bonding experience people show up at Thrive is how long their interview process was.
Because it could take months. It's intense. And it's because we're trying to look across all these dimensions.
And it's easy to compromise as you're growing.
And you're getting large and
We have no shortage of ambition at Thrive and so we're constantly constrained by our ability to get great people to grow.
Here, but I think it's important to really hold the bar because
When you get those people who are multi dimensional.
They can
Create new and exciting things.
And again when we come back to Thrive, it's again the small team.
both on the investment team, but everywhere that's doing all these things. They're building companies, they're investing early, investing late. They invest across categories.
That's not just like a fun thing to talk about. We actually think it creates better outcomes not just'cause of focus, but
being multi dimensional and having the range, the book by David Epstein
I think he might have even had him on a podcast.
He talks through that and these people who are multi dimensional and connect worlds in different ways.
are able to see the exciting things, but I think bring a new dimension to companies.
That wouldn't just happen if you have one dimensional people.
In the range book.
I think he summarizes it well. If you want to be predictably good, specialize.
If you really want to be the elite the cutting edge of th never been seen before, it usually comes from these generalists. It's the Roger Federer who played soccer a bunch before he played tennis. It's the Tom Brady who was better at baseball than he was at football when he was young.
I think it quotes that
Noble laureates are
twenty times more likely than other scientists have serious hobbies in poetry and art in
woodworking, things like that that
Are able to help them connect concepts.
And I think that's something we really look for.
And the Thrive Team. I think the last thing
Especially on the investment team is
We're really focused on being able to develop and build our own talent.
I think you go to every investment firm, you ask them what's the most important thing?
That you do, well it's the people.
Well, if you believe that, you better be good at

That's not true. You're basically outsourcing talent development to other people.
And you're hoping to maybe poach them later down the line.
Well now you just outsource the most important thing you believe makes your
company differentiated.
And so we really focus on hiring people of zero to four years experience.
Who have the raw talents and abilities.
They might have never even imagined they'd be in venture capital.
And be able to shape and mold that in a way that
allows them to grow and do things in a unique way that we think we do.
And we take a lot of pride in the development.
Of that.
And I think a lot of us are in a position to do that because
It's still fresh in our mind what it's like to be new to the industry. We've been doing it for a decade.
But we've gone through that journey. And so we wanna make sure we're continuously investing
In new talent, wanting to build around that.
And I think if you look at any great company, not just an investment firm, that has a unique culture that does things differently.
I think you would find that they hire their talent early and they stay for a long time.'Cause they really mold them and build them in a unique way.
What is your
largest passion outside of investing or your family?
My faith is super important to me. And so that's a big
Commitment and drive everything.
About me.
I also just love learning new things. I love new challenges. I love being
Step on the
Learning curve.
The most recent things on
Trying to learn tennis.
And I never grew up playing it, so I'm comically bad.
A year ago, maybe a little bit better.
Now. But I think that idea of getting better a little bit every day, learning something. I just find that to be a lot of fun.
I'm gonna ask a crazy wacky question, just for fun.
How do your ancestors show up in your life?
I'm Egyptian, my family's Egyptian, we immigrated to this country when I was
Young
And
I think there's so many immigrant stories just imprinted me in a way that I think is really hard to separate from how I approach things.
Especially my family's Christian and
minority in that country and a big part of why we came to the US was to be a little bit unburdened from the restrictions that existed there. My dad was a leading surgeon and doctor and you can do a good job as a Christian but you can't be the best. So he was
denied professorships and other things because of that. And so
A big part of the ambition of coming to the US was to be a little bit unbounded.
In
What can be accomplished.
And he ended up being
One of the first robotic surgeons in
the Midwest and brought that to the US in the early two thousands pioneer into that.
It's a big part that shaped me, this idea of
One.
Not putting a ceiling on yourself.
And finding ways to push the limits and
Really
Find and push yourself to try to be the best in that way and not let obstacles
Get in the way of that.
I think obviously a relentless
Yeah, hard work to kinda go pursue the things that you want to go
Yeah.
And I think like so many other immigrant stories.
Immigrants are
entrepreneurs in their nature. And so I think it's really built this builder DNA.
Within me.
Actually moving around
We had to move around a lot.
Mostly for visa reasons.
I end up going to eight different schools growing up and so
That just really shaped me in terms of new environments don't phase me, change maybe doesn't phase me as much. Actually it's an opportunity to
build and connections and I feel fortunate now'cause I've friends across six different states and seven different elementary schools and things like that.
And so I think that's morphed into what we do now.
Can I ask one follow up?
Please.
Let's say I'm the seventh elementary school.
What had you gotten good at?
To
Enter a new environment like that.
With the experience of the prior six.
I'm have to reflect on it. I think
I don't think sports helped.
In some way. And so meeting new teammates
I just got used to it.
So I just knew that the first month I wasn't gonna have friends.
And then by the third month I will have friends. And I think it pushed me to also be proactive as well, which I think if you're just gonna be reactive.
The default comfort zone for everyone is to hang out with their old friends. And so taught me to be proactive and
Try to find ways to connect with folks.
What Christian idea is the most meaningful to you?
It would have to boil down to the life that Jesus modeled on earth.
The Christian obviously center around Christ, so
Everything flows from Jesus, but
I think one of the things that's been really powerful is the idea that
I believe
I was created by God. There's a purpose for me on my life, and I think that's really shaped
the intensity and the energy by which I approach things, because if I believe that this is where God's put me
This is the opportunity.
He's put me in, then it's on me to make
The most of it.
That's probably the biggest.
Idea.
I think the second thing that's really modeled by Jesus and the whole
Idea of him coming
To connect us back to God.
To be the person who forgives us.
This idea of having grace.
And everything.
There's no way to be perfect. The people you're gonna work with aren't perfect.
There gonna be mistakes along the way.
And so really how to lean with grace.
Through things has really been a part that's
just made the intensity of work much more enjoyable.
in a way where I feel like I don't have to harbor or hold the things or to feel wronged in a way, but just to lean into grace, have that hopefully be a default posture.
And hopefully that makes me uh
more agreeable person to be around, but also it's m made me enjoy the day to day a lot more.
I think you know my traditional closing question for everyone. What is the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for you?
I think to answer it.
Literally obviously my parents just growing up in a loving home, the family they created here
building this foundation of faith that drives everything I do. Also my wife Raquel, who's I can't imagine
a better, more wonderful partner and to have the blessing of a family together and to see her evolve into a mother and
to be able to do that together.
Wow.
But if I was to answer what was something that someone did that maybe felt small to them but ended up
being dramatic for me.
Actually my
eighth grade teacher. She
Went out of her way to reach out to my parents and said, Kareem needs to go to a different school.
And we had just moved to this area, moved a bunch, we didn't even know about the school. She printed out all these papers to explain to them that Cream needs to go to this new school and
That's what fully expressed.
His talents
And so I ended up going to a school, St. Javier in Cincinnati, because of
her guidance and I don't think that would have happened otherwise and
I could over extrapolate some of these moments, but I do think it honestly changed the structure of my life and set me on a different path on the college and all the things that came from there. So
Miss Bonfield, if you're listening to the podcast. Thank you. Amazing.
Um
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