No Priors Ep. 131 | With Jared Kushner

(music plays) Hi, listeners. Welcome back to No Priors. I'm Sara Goa, and Elad and I are here today with Jared Kushner at the Miami headquarters of his investing firm, Affinity Partners. We're here to talk about Affinity, the new co they're launching, BrainCo, and his career in government, business, and investing. Welcome, Jared. Jared, thanks so much for doing this with us.

Oh, it's good to be with you guys.

So, you have a couple interesting new and new-ish projects. Let's start with Affinity. Um, you were an investor before, and you started a firm after your time, um, as a public servant. What did you do differently?

When I left government, I was thinking, "What could I do to apply the different learnings that I'd had to my next version of a business career?" And as I was studying all the different firms out there, I realized the world didn't need another, you know, couple billion dollar private equity firm. But I tried to focus as I would speak to my friends who were investors on what they needed, what value we could provide, and what we saw was that we had the ability to be, uh, complex problem-solvers. Uh, that's what I did in government, that's what we were good at, and we thought we could do that in partnership with a lot of other firms. So, the aspiration with Affinity is to be the most, uh, value-add and outcome determinative partner to, um, you know, the best entrepreneurs and the best companies in the world. And so we focused on finding the best companies, thinking through what are their, uh, biggest challenges, what are their biggest opportunities, and thinking through how we can, uh, partner with them, putting skin in the game by investing with them versus a consultant, and being in a position where we can then help them achieve, uh, their aspirations. And, uh, a lot of... You know, we have a very unique, uh, large network and, uh, are very trusted by the people we, we deal with. And so they open up to us about their challenges and opportunities, and then we're able to, you know, scope and look for different, uh, solutions, and then we validate them through investment, and then we're able to add value to the companies we're investing in by helping them find, uh, new customers and new opportunities.

In what ways do you think companies are not as globally ambitious as they should be, like if they knew what you knew, or had the network you did?

I think for most people to be very successful at something, they usually are very focused on an industry or on a geography. And to be exceptional, you have to be a fairly, uh, obsessive about whichever of the fields you are trying to be exceptional in. And so what happens is, is they usually have a lot of perspective in their field or in their geography, but they don't have the time or the knowledge or the network in order to see how people like them are doing similar things throughout the world. And so, by having a real global perspective, I was able to see that in most places, if you're successful, you've a fairly, um, positive and, uh, and local-centric view of yourself. But when you can look at a global, global view, I would say, wow, these guys in, in India, or these guys in, in, uh, in the Middle East, or these guys in Europe, they're doing, uh, the same business but in a different way. And so by, you know, giving those suggestions, sometimes connecting them together, you can help people who are very good at something accelerate or modify their business in order to do something hopefully better than they would have done without your perspective.