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New York City, NY
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We are all builders
We work with our founders to build their companies, we build companies ourselves, and we are building our firm.
The builder mindset is part of our DNA, and it goes back to the earliest days of Thrive.
When Nitin Nohria, then dean at Harvard Business School, met Josh for the first time Josh said he was dropping out of HBS to start two companies, Thrive and Oscar Health. Nitin’s response was, “If you’re crazy enough to start two companies at the same time you might as well stay and finish HBS too.”
The idea for Oscar was born out of personal, frustrating experiences that Josh and his co-founder Mario had with the existing healthcare insurance model. The US healthcare system is the world’s largest and most expensive, yet health outcomes are worse than in other advanced economies.The Affordable Care Act (ACA) was just passed, paving the way for an opportunity to transform the industry.
Yet they knew that building in the healthcare insurance space would be an uphill battle - we don’t often see true transformation in industries with such entrenched, powerful incumbents. In addition, the political climate at the time was extremely volatile, and it wasn’t clear whether the ACA had a future. With the amount of confusing regulation in the industry, there were few tools that a new company was even allowed to use in their operations, meaning the Oscar team would have to build an operating system from scratch in order to run an insurance company, end to end.
At many points in its journey it would have been easy to give up on Oscar, but the value of being a builder alongside being an investor was clear. It is easy to romanticize the difficult parts of starting a company, but that’s impossible to do when you’re spending your nights and weekends working on it. That perspective is still with us today.
Oscar Health launched in late 2012, to provide a smoother and more affordable healthcare experience to consumers in the US. It was one of 33 companies formed in the market created by the ACA. As of writing, in 2024, Oscar is one of only two such companies that remain, now serving nearly two million members across 20 states.
At Thrive we've started over a dozen companies now, and many members of our team have been a part of incubations at Thrive. We understand the pain that founders go through – the high highs and the low lows. We experience it ourselves viscerally every day. We are builders too.
Thrive One
We incubate companies at Thrive and we are also building Thrive itself as our ambitions and opportunities grow.
Prior to 2023, all of the information about our portfolio companies was scattered across Dropbox, Google Sheets, Airtable, apps, email, and other stuffy corporate channels. Finding a deal memo was an exercise in wasting time - an obvious problem, but not one that we had the wherewithal to fix. It also kept getting worse as our portfolio grew.
We say we aim to be the most meaningful partner to our companies, but that’s challenging to do when you can’t find the information you need to be fully up to speed on their businesses.
Anuj joined Thrive during this period to form the Data team, building systems of scale to uplevel everyone’s game across the firm and give Thrive its own structural advantage. Anuj, Duncan, Logan, and Frank spotted an opportunity to create a platform for everyone at Thrive to make better decisions and provide more insights to our founders.
They came up with ways to gather information across the firm that seamlessly fit into our existing ways of working. To manage the change, Data set up “roadshows,” regular demos, and user feedback sessions with all teams across Thrive to demonstrate how Thrive One could help us be the best partner possible to our portfolio.
Change isn’t always easy and building something new for a 10 year-old firm is hard. But the team had conviction that the more we could operate as one team, the more valuable a partner we could be to our founders. Thrive One was an enormous investment in our ability to be there for them, and the work to uplevel its impact continues on today.
°F
New York City, NY
Select a value
We are all builders
We work with our founders to build their companies, we build companies ourselves, and we are building our firm.
The builder mindset is part of our DNA, and it goes back to the earliest days of Thrive.
When Nitin Nohria, then dean at Harvard Business School, met Josh for the first time Josh said he was dropping out of HBS to start two companies, Thrive and Oscar Health. Nitin’s response was, “If you’re crazy enough to start two companies at the same time you might as well stay and finish HBS too.”
The idea for Oscar was born out of personal, frustrating experiences that Josh and his co-founder Mario had with the existing healthcare insurance model. The US healthcare system is the world’s largest and most expensive, yet health outcomes are worse than in other advanced economies.The Affordable Care Act (ACA) was just passed, paving the way for an opportunity to transform the industry.
Yet they knew that building in the healthcare insurance space would be an uphill battle - we don’t often see true transformation in industries with such entrenched, powerful incumbents. In addition, the political climate at the time was extremely volatile, and it wasn’t clear whether the ACA had a future. With the amount of confusing regulation in the industry, there were few tools that a new company was even allowed to use in their operations, meaning the Oscar team would have to build an operating system from scratch in order to run an insurance company, end to end.
At many points in its journey it would have been easy to give up on Oscar, but the value of being a builder alongside being an investor was clear. It is easy to romanticize the difficult parts of starting a company, but that’s impossible to do when you’re spending your nights and weekends working on it. That perspective is still with us today.
Oscar Health launched in late 2012, to provide a smoother and more affordable healthcare experience to consumers in the US. It was one of 33 companies formed in the market created by the ACA. As of writing, in 2024, Oscar is one of only two such companies that remain, now serving nearly two million members across 20 states.
At Thrive we've started over a dozen companies now, and many members of our team have been a part of incubations at Thrive. We understand the pain that founders go through – the high highs and the low lows. We experience it ourselves viscerally every day. We are builders too.
Thrive One
We incubate companies at Thrive and we are also building Thrive itself as our ambitions and opportunities grow.
Prior to 2023, all of the information about our portfolio companies was scattered across Dropbox, Google Sheets, Airtable, apps, email, and other stuffy corporate channels. Finding a deal memo was an exercise in wasting time - an obvious problem, but not one that we had the wherewithal to fix. It also kept getting worse as our portfolio grew.
We say we aim to be the most meaningful partner to our companies, but that’s challenging to do when you can’t find the information you need to be fully up to speed on their businesses.
Anuj joined Thrive during this period to form the Data team, building systems of scale to uplevel everyone’s game across the firm and give Thrive its own structural advantage. Anuj, Duncan, Logan, and Frank spotted an opportunity to create a platform for everyone at Thrive to make better decisions and provide more insights to our founders.
They came up with ways to gather information across the firm that seamlessly fit into our existing ways of working. To manage the change, Data set up “roadshows,” regular demos, and user feedback sessions with all teams across Thrive to demonstrate how Thrive One could help us be the best partner possible to our portfolio.
Change isn’t always easy and building something new for a 10 year-old firm is hard. But the team had conviction that the more we could operate as one team, the more valuable a partner we could be to our founders. Thrive One was an enormous investment in our ability to be there for them, and the work to uplevel its impact continues on today.