Why Josh Kushner, the lead investor in OpenAI, likes to hire people with less than 4 years of investing experience
When it comes to hiring, Thrive Capital founder Josh Kushner leans into green—rather than employ senior employees he’s looking for Gen Zers and millennials to pave the way.
The billionaire founder of venture capital firm Thrive Capital explained his unusual recruitment strategy at the Fortune Global Forum on Tuesday in New York City.
Part of his mentality in hiring more junior workers began with necessity. The son of real estate mogul Charles Kushner began Thrive at just 26 years old with some extra help from the Princeton Endowment Fund, which provided early funding.
At the start investors “pushed us to hire people with more experience,” Kushner told Fortune Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell, adding that there was an “adverse selection dynamic” associated with people they’d hire. Adverse selection refers to unequal scales of sort, wherein one negotiating party has less power or information than the other.
“My line at the time was anyone who has experience that is talented will never want to work with a 26 year old,” Kushner said. So he pivoted accordingly, hiring the “smartest people that we knew who were our ages, our close friends from college, people that they knew from different work experiences.”
Value in hiring Gen Z
Young people today often face an uphill job application process. Reports of entry-level jobs with degrees years or years of experience required have cropped up, indicating how tight the current market can be.
More than half of the current class of seniors report feeling pessimistic about starting their careers, according to student job platform Handshake in a newly released report which surveyed 1,925 members of the class of 2025. Hungry for a gig, these Gen Zers have flooded the job market, making the number of applications per job “significantly higher than in any of the past five years,” adds Handshake.
The latest cohort to enter the workforce is desperately looking for a job, and if hiring managers follow Kushners’ words they might just find that these young adults are key to their company’s journey.
“Instead of trying to hire the experienced person today, we’d rather just find that young, hungry person who’s willing to run through the walls like we were ten years ago,” said Kushner, adding that they’re looking to train this cohort and “help them become the best versions of themselves.”
Successful bets
Kushner perhaps is going against the grain in his desire to hire the new kids on the block. A recent survey of more than 960 employers from Intelligent.com revealed that one in six companies were hesitant to hire a Gen Z worker. Like most generations did before them, Gen Zers have gained a (largely unearned) reputation for being difficult to work with.
But Kushner’s choice to hire bright young minds has paid off: his firm has made early investments in startups worth billions, including OpenAI, which was recently valued at $157 billion.
His company’s ethos was “driven by first principles thinking, humility, an incredible drive to do whatever is necessary to kind of understand different topics, [and] be there for founders,” notes Kushner.
