Jared Kushner: BrainCo, Affinity Partners, and the Geopolitics of AI

Hi, listeners. Welcome back to No Priors. I'm Sarah Guo, 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 company they're launching, BrainCo, and his career in government, business, and investing. Welcome, Jared. Thanks so much for doing this with us.

It's good to be with you guys.

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

1. Affinity Solves Complex Problems

When I'd 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?" As I was studying all the different firms out there, I realized the world didn't need another 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 and what value we could provide. What we saw was that we had the ability to be complex problem-solvers. That's what I did in government, and that's what we were good at. We thought we could do that in partnership with a lot of other firms.

The aspiration with Affinity is to be the most value-add and outcome-determinative partner to the best entrepreneurs and the best companies in the world. We focused on finding the best companies, thinking through their biggest challenges and opportunities, and figuring out how we can partner with them—putting skin in the game by investing with them versus being a consultant—and then helping them achieve their aspirations.

We have a very unique, large network and are very trusted by the people we deal with, so they open up to us about their challenges and opportunities. Then we're able to scope and look for different solutions, validate them through investment, and add value to the companies we're investing in by helping them find new customers and new opportunities.

In what ways do you think companies are not as globally ambitious as they should be? If they knew what you knew or had the network you did, how might that change things?

2. The Global Investing Lens

I think for most people to be very successful at something, they usually are very focused on an industry or on a geography. To be exceptional, you have to be fairly obsessive about whichever field you're trying to be exceptional in.

What happens is that they usually have a lot of perspective in their field or geography, but they don't have the time, knowledge, or network to see how people like them are doing similar things throughout the world. By having a real global perspective, I was able to see that, in most places, if you're successful, you have a fairly positive and local-centric view of yourself.

But when you can look at a global view, you can say, "Wow, these guys in India, or these guys in the Middle East, or these guys in Europe—they're doing the same business but in a different way." By giving those suggestions and 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.

My sense is Yuri Milner kind of did that when he showed up for Facebook and made a famous investment there. He'd been involved with a Russian social network—or he started a Russian social network—and so he realized that Facebook could monetize in all these ways that it wasn't doing. That's how he did his valuation.

I think at the time everybody thought his valuation was crazy. How could you invest in Facebook at $5 billion, or whatever it was? Of course, now it's a trillion-dollar-ish company. I think it's really notable when people bring these cross-border things over.

I think you've mentioned in the past that you all are involved in businesses in Israel, Europe, and Latin America. Could you give some specific examples of the things that you've done through Affinity and how that has pulled together from a global perspective?

I agree very much with what you're saying about being a generalist. Sometimes you can miss things, but sometimes you can also see things that other people don't see. The cool thing about investing is you don't have to be right about everything. You have to be very focused on finding the things that you think you have a differentiated perspective on, where you can have high conviction, and then you place your bets on those high-conviction bets that you want to take.

By being global, we've done a lot in the technology space. We've done a lot here in the U.S. in technology, AI, and the data layer, as well as some of the models and different applications that we've worked on. You've helped us source and introduce us to some incredible companies in that space.

We've also made investments throughout the world. We've done some in insurance. We've had 4 insurance investments, which we like. Those fit into more of our bucket of conventional businesses that have some form of differentiation, great leadership, and can be long-term compounders.

Another one of those businesses was buying into the food sector in Brazil. We bought a lot of the Burger Kings there, and then we just bought the Starbucks and the Subway out of bankruptcy. We did that in partnership with Mubadala, which has been great so far, and I think that will be a great long-term investment.

We look for different types of companies, and now, obviously, with AI, we're thinking, "How can we apply AI to these businesses?" That's helping us understand the limitations and capabilities of AI and how that will impact the future of both conventional businesses and technology businesses.

You talked about how your time in government changed how you think about how you can help these businesses and who to do business with.

Mm-hmm.

Has it changed your underwriting at all—how you evaluate companies?

I'm not going to say we're going to be right all the time, but I think where we have some form of specialization is that we're able to understand the macro trends of a country and whether we think the governance and leadership in place are pushing the country in a direction that's compatible with private-sector investment.

My general framework from what I came away with in government is that government has limitations, and that government, at its best, can set the right policy. If you have great leaders who can do that, you still need the private sector to come and be your partner in order to bring expertise and technical expertise. You need them to bring project-management capability, capital, and local-navigation skill.

If you have 3 out of those 4 things, it's a recipe for disaster. The private sector isn't always organized in a way that governments need it to be in order to effectuate their ambitions. But if you can put that cocktail together in a good way, there's amazing potential for what can be achieved.

One example is that we're doing a big investment in Albania now. That's a market that, when I started looking at it 3 years ago, a lot of my friends were saying I was crazy.

But what I saw there was a country that had a ton of potential. You looked at where it was located in Europe, and the place was incredible. It also had very good leadership for a while. They have a prime minister, Edi Rama, who's actually, I think, technically a socialist. But he's socialist in that he's for the people, while also being pro-private-sector and pro-business, and he's created an environment with rules and regulations that's encouraging capital investment in the country.

He's also an artist by training, so he actually has amazing taste and really wants to make his country dynamic in that regard. What we saw there were the right elements: a government and the raw material for a country to be successful.

What we're bringing is capital, expertise, great designers, and great brands. I think we'll be able to help each other do incredible things in that scenario.

I have a friend who was there this summer, and he called me afterward and said, "Jared, when you told me you were going to Albania, I said, 'How is somebody as worldly as you investing in some place that's so outside of the world like Albania?'" He called me afterward to say, "Can I buy a house there? I want to invest with you, and I'm going to be doing several projects there because I think it's going to be an unbelievable place."

Understanding governance and the structure allowed us to see it for what it was, not for what it reputationally was perceived to be. Again, we obviously did a lot of diligence and spent a lot of time trying to validate those things, and so far our experience has been very, very positive there.

It's interesting to think that there are entire countries that are underpriced or mispriced right now.

Yeah. Well, if you think about it, there are tens of thousands of companies, if not more, and you could buy or sell them every day on the market. Those, by and large, are fairly efficient. I mean, there are obviously inefficiencies in public markets as well, but it’s pretty efficient.

There are roughly 200-plus countries, and they’re all very inefficient. So there are always opportunities to optimize, and that’s why they need the private sector. If you can understand the countries that you think have upside in them, the number one thing I’ve looked at is: What are the big macro trends? I wouldn’t call it our number one criterion. It’s just a criterion, right? If you don’t have the right tailwinds behind you, you shouldn’t be investing. It’s much easier to be with tailwinds than headwinds.

I liken it to surfing. If you’re a mediocre surfer and you surf terrible waves, it’s going to be bad. If you surf a great wave, you’ll look okay, right? The goal is obviously to find amazing waves and also to be an amazing surfer. But if you’re a great surfer, you have to make sure you’re going to the places where you have the potential for a great wave. So those are the macro trends we look at.

Obviously, we have our criteria beneath that for what we look at in order to make something qualify as an investment that we would look to partake in.

If you look at countries that look like they’re going to really participate in the future, there are the preexisting stalwarts. There’s the US, Israel, and, in some ways, China, et cetera. Then there’s, at least in Silicon Valley, some perception that some areas are increasingly engaging with being pro-tech or pro-progress. An example would be Singapore or the UAE.

What do you view as the most underpriced or underappreciated countries in the world, either from a technology perspective or, more broadly, from a general investment, progress, or forward-looking perspective?

Singapore is blue-chip. When I was in government, anytime I was given a new problem, I had the desk where all the really bad problems went, when people were like, “We don’t know what to do with this. Let’s give it to Jared.”

My first question was always, “Okay, what do they do in Singapore?” Because in government, what I learned is that even though every problem seemed crazy, nothing was actually new under the sun. I started reading a lot of history and studying other countries because every problem I was dealing with, somebody had dealt with it either at some time, in some form, or in some place. I wanted to pull whatever learnings I could from that in order to inform the approach I was going to take.

In some ways, my lack of experience was actually a benefit because I approached every problem by saying, “How could I learn from the people who have done well and the people who have failed in order to effectuate that?” Singapore has just been a very steady example of a country that’s done a lot of the right policies in the right ways for a long time.

When I left government, one of my strong instincts was that the Middle East—whether it was Saudi Arabia, Qatar, or the UAE—were places that were very much on the rise. I really had to go back and question myself because I wanted to make sure I didn’t have a recency bias from having spent so much time there and having built such strong relationships there.

A lot of the time, when I was helping them think through how to solve intractable political problems like ISIS and Iran funding proxies in different areas, a lot of the efforts were around: How do we build strong economic ties with America? How do we build strong economic ties with Israel, potentially? And what are the win-win scenarios that economic cooperation can bring to lift societies?

I saw a lot of ambition in those places. They’re probably more middle-market countries, but they have big tools available to them from an economic perspective. When you put a country’s toolkit together with industry and capital, there’s a lot that they can do to really accelerate innovation. Obviously, they all have different forms of leadership, but they’re all committed, in different ways, to big advancements. That’s part of the world I’m very excited about.

Then Latin America—I think there’s a lot of opportunity there. After COVID, there’s a lot more hesitancy from US corporations to be dependent on Asia for their supply chain, so I think Mexico has been and will continue to be a big beneficiary of that.

Obviously, under President Trump, he’s trying to work out some issues, particularly with the cartels and illegal immigration, and then to make sure we have a fair and balanced relationship. But the reality is that if we set that relationship right, Mexico should be a massive beneficiary from a rising US.

So far, the policies that have been set forth—lowering taxes and lowering regulation—and the fact that it appears interest rates will probably come down next year, if we can get some of these global conflicts resolved, I think Mexico will be a big beneficiary, along with the rest of Latin America, of a rising America.

Speaking of being focused on the biggest macro trends, I’m biased here in thinking that AI is probably the biggest macro technology wave we’re going to see in our lifetimes. You and Elad and Eric and Luis started a company together around this. What can you tell us about Brain Co. and how it came about?

Sure. AI definitely, as far as I’m concerned, is the biggest technology shift that I’ve seen in my lifetime. As an investor, when something’s changing, we felt it was very important to take a step back and say, “Okay, you can’t just assume that tomorrow is going to be like yesterday.”

How do you get a deep understanding of what this change is going to be, and how can it either affect every investment you’ve either made or will make in both a positive way—where it could add extra margin, extra growth, or extra value—or in a negative way, where it creates vulnerabilities for a business that you maybe didn’t anticipate before the inevitability of AI became so pronounced?

It really forced us to take a moment and stop. We looked at our portfolio. We started dealing even deeper with our partners to understand what their ambitions were and what their needs were. What we saw was that there were very few places where you could actually apply AI in a thoughtful way that didn’t feel like either they were ineffective, rip-offs, or more happy-talk solutions.

We were looking for real, tangible solutions for our portfolio and for our partners. Obviously, Elad is somebody who is incredibly well respected in the US investing community, but particularly in AI, with the way he’s been so far ahead of a lot of these companies, seeing and investing in them and seeing the trends, understanding them, and seeding some of the best entrepreneurs in America.

We were having a conversation, and I shared with Elad some of the frustration that we felt at not finding great solution providers for our portfolio. My partner Luis had been in the Middle East the week earlier, dealing with some of our partners and going through their AI aspirations and roadmaps, and they were having a very similar frustration.

We were sharing the learnings with Elad, and Elad, in the way he does, said, “Well, let’s start a company to do it.” We said, “That sounds great.” So we really got to work. We pulled in our friend Eric Wu as well, and the four of us set out to try and build something and define what it could be.

The goal was really: How do you create almost a frontier AI implementation company where you can work with top clients in the most impactful institutions and companies in the world, help them identify what the best use cases can be, where they can apply AI either to make their companies more efficient or where they can use AI to create more productivity and growth out of their revenue-generating opportunities?

Then what we do is work on scoping what the capabilities are. We can build the technical solutions, implement the technical solutions, and then keep updating those technical solutions as the base models change as well.

So much with AI right now is changing rapidly. If you don’t have a dynamic product and you’re not constantly up to date on what’s possible, it’s very possible you’ll either do something that will be obsolete very quickly. You have to understand both the trends and the capabilities and have the right team available to do that.

What we saw in Silicon Valley is that they’re amazing at solving problems. They’re not always the best at identifying which problems to solve, and we thought that Brain Co. could be a great way to build a bridge between some of the top problems that could be solved in AI and a great team that can provide solutions.

Yeah, and Brain Co. has a common platform underlying it, where there’s a common set of things that are provided to every customer and really is a piece of infrastructure that’s used. Then there are some incremental things that can be built on top to help with specific use cases, which can then be cross-sold into different verticals.

And so the idea is to basically do both the platform side and then a subset of apps that are resold over and over to the world's biggest institutions. The company, I feel, actually had a few almost-founding moments. There were sort of 4 of us helping to get it up and running initially, and then a really key moment was when Dan and Mercia joined and really became part of the founding team. Later, Clemens came on as the CEO of the company. And so there have been multiple key parties really involved in terms of setting this up and driving it and making it what it is so far.

What do you think created the gap, given there's this much business motivation to increase margins or drive growth and even a belief that AI is going to be part of the solution? There are lots of existing vendors out there that will do involved implementation projects with large companies. Why didn't it get built?

It isn't really just an implementation thing. It really is a platform company that—

Okay.

…did a common piece of infrastructure and then built stuff on top of it. So I think that's an important piece of both differentiation, but also the ability for 1 organization to benefit across multiple different aspects of that organization.

And how did you pick a set of use cases, or what informed the platform itself?

But I'll say, Sarah, to your last question, then we'll get to that, what I saw working with Thrive was that some of the best technologists are often building things, but it takes a while for big corporations to want to take risks on emerging technologies. What I saw when I was in government was that I would deal with the top CEOs or leaders in the world, and most of them spend a lot of their time just keeping their job or managing their very complex, large businesses.

A lot of them are hearing about AI and a lot of the things that AI is capable of, but they don't necessarily have the right people around them or access to top technologies in order to implement it into their business. So that was really the problem we were trying to solve: a lot of the people who have the best sandboxes to deploy AI often don't have access to the best talent. That was really where we thought we could create differentiation, and so far we've proven that. But on some of the use cases, do you want to start with some of these cases?

Yeah, I should go for it.

3. Enterprise AI Use Cases

Sure. We have a wide range of use cases that have come either through our portfolio or some of our partnerships to date. Quite frankly, the more our other partners see the capabilities we have, the more they're now starting to use it for their portfolio. We're constrained really by the talent we can hire and the time we have.

In healthcare, we're working on how to improve patient experience and throughput time, and use data to lower cost and also give a better experience. We've been working in the hospitality space to figure out how to work through some of the clusters that come through reservations, to make sure that people are able to do bookings in a much more efficient way. We're doing it in the insurance space, where we have some very, very good use cases to help claims management go much faster and be more efficient in that regard.

And one that I'm actually really quite excited about, having had a background in real estate, is that we're working on something in construction permitting. We found a government that has incredibly digitized records and was willing, after some time and trust, to let our team really go to work there. What we saw was that they had a process that was over 40 steps, and we thought in the beginning, when we were doing it, that if we could get the AI to handle 1 of the steps with over 90% efficiency, that would be a big success.

What we saw was that you take a construction permit, you make this big application, you submit it, and usually you have to pay big consultants. Then it takes 3 or 4 months to get your approval. With AI, it should take 3 minutes. So we really attacked this problem. We didn't necessarily realize at the time that we were doing a little bit more of a research project than we anticipated.

But now we've been able to accomplish 2 things. Number 1, the client is now going to reduce the number of steps that they have in their process to get the permit, right? Because by building all the processes to deploy the AI, they realized that the process that had been designed by humans wasn't necessarily efficient. They could reduce more than 10 steps in the process—

Mm-hmm.

…during that time. The second thing was that, as different updates came through to the models, one of the issues we had was: how do you convert the spatial plans that were being submitted into the right format for the AI to read and score them? That actually changed when an update came into one of the models.

As we've been able to evolve the product, we found that we're now at, I think, over 35 steps, with over 90% accuracy on all 35 steps, which has become really, really satisfying for us. And so I think this will save, obviously, the government and its customers a ton of time and money.

Mm-hmm.

It gets rid of a lot of the consultants who are just charging fees to do busywork. And quite frankly, it's the type of task that can be automated, which I think will create a lot of economic value and also allow the developers to build faster. It means they pay taxes faster.

And from the government's perspective, it also gets rid of graft and corruption, because it's one of these things where you're relying on a lot of human judgment in a very opaque way that, quite frankly, shouldn't be that way if this technology can do what we're seeing it has the ability to do.

That's such a great use case, and it sounds like you're serving businesses, you're serving governments, and also, if it's not the U.S. government, then you're also serving globally.

Yes.

Some of these customers are among the world's largest and most important institutions. One of the things I was struck by in terms of working with this company on BrainCo was that there was a very strong “prove it to us” mentality going into a lot of these customers. The team really had to show up, show technical excellence, show value, and so on, before really converting them into a customer.

Initially, we were doing a lot of things at risk just to be able to prove that, yes, we had the technical chops and capabilities. And it's really some of the world's best engineers from all the top institutions that we know in Silicon Valley helping to implement and facilitate these really important, valuable use cases for them.

So I think that was a really key part of it: these were kind of tough deals because, to your point earlier, normally with a startup you start with SMB, then you go mid-market, and eventually, 7 years later, you have enterprises. This was, “Let's just jump 7 years ahead and go to the world's biggest enterprises.” But then it became a very strong, “Okay, show us you can really do this well.”

One thing I give Elad credit for, among a lot of things, is structuring the business and helping us keep refining what the optimal products were to build and how to go forward with it. But we were able to get some very large institutions to give us a chance initially to try and scope out and see if we could create solutions for them.

But Elon's ability to recruit top talent and what he, Eric, Luis, Dan, Mercia, and the team have been able to do has been really incredible. So now there are over 40 people, growing very rapidly, and we find that there are so many real-life cases where you could apply AI.

Quite frankly, from my perspective, at Affinity, we're usually writing much larger checks in later-stage companies. But what's appealing to me about this was that with this technology transformation, if you have the ability to work with top talent and really be on the cutting edge of seeing how AI is advancing, how it's being applied, and understanding real use cases, I felt like that was a critical perspective to develop for being an investor today in this changing world.

That resonates, especially if you actually think it can change the growth or margin profile of a business.

Well, it is. We're seeing it in real ways in different companies that we're implementing in, and it is.

Then it should also be a weapon for the portfolio—

Mm-hmm.

…at least the expertise.

Yeah.

What do you think the biggest challenge for the company going forward is?

It's very early. I think right now it's just continuing to keep up with the demand for the projects that we have, making sure that we're focused on the right projects and not the wrong projects, and making sure we can continue to attract the right amount of talent so we don't dilute ourselves trying to keep up with the fast pace of demand that we have.

I think the team’s done a great job of keeping a high bar on talent and making sure we continue to work with great customers. So far, some of our early customers have been really expanding the scope of what they’ve been asking the team to do because they’re realizing what a great capability it is.

That’s been very gratifying to see. I think there’s a lot of opportunity to go much bigger with some of our existing customers because they have multiple companies or multiple divisions, and word’s starting to get out as they achieve success that these are the guys who can apply AI in a very thoughtful and cost-beneficial way.

What makes somebody a good customer—the right type of early customer for you?

I would start with: Do they have a complex problem that we think could have a lot of efficiency created by applying AI? Number 2 is, do they have the right data that we can use in order to create the solution?

Number 3 is, do they have the right command-and-control structure in the company where people are willing to buy into it? Because you could have 1 or 2, but if you have a lot of resistance in the ranks or in leadership, and they’re not willing to force people to try, there can be a lot of resistance because people are afraid of change.

Change is like heaven: Everyone wants to go there, but nobody wants to die. What we found is that some of the people who were most resistant initially, once they see what this can do for them and how much better it’s making them at their job, are actually becoming our biggest champions.

That’s been very gratifying to see in some of the customers so far.

The biggest obstacle to AI implementation in enterprises tends to be people, processes, and organizational redesign. It has less to do with the technology sometimes than with rejiggering things so the technology can actually be placed into the workflow or placed into the organization.

But I agree with Jared that there seems to be a lot of interest and a lot of demand from people wanting to work with us. We want to make sure that the platform side of it actually fits in terms of what we’re doing, and the focus has really been: Can we work with the world’s biggest and most important institutions versus every smaller company that’s interested in doing something?

It’s trying to select for the giants who are driving the world forward in different ways.

We started this in January of ’24, and it’s been amazing to see what’s happened since then. Obviously, it took some time to get going and to really finalize the idea, but it’s been amazing to see how much even the underlying technology has changed.

I think our central premise has remained pretty consistent since then.

One of the ways you got involved in AI even earlier was from a policy lens, right?

Right.

What has been most interesting to you on that front, or from the geopolitical perspective of how energy and our relations with Middle Eastern countries play into the future of AI?

4. AI Needs Energy And Talent

From a policy perspective, when I was in the White House the first time under President Trump, this was part of the effort that he said he wanted to focus on. At his direction, actually, I reached out to TSMC and was in touch with them then to push them to try and start doing some production in their fabs in the US.

We pushed them to Arizona, which I think is now the foundation of what hopefully will be a much bigger deployment. That’s obviously a very critical element.

From a policy perspective, the way that President Trump has put out his policy so far, I think David Sax has done a fabulous job. I think their plan is the right plan. We need to do 2 main things.

One is to make sure we have all the tools to compete, which is to really accelerate our ability to build energy in the US. I think it’ll be really bad if we’re constrained on that, and I think they’ve taken a lot of steps to do that.

It’s not like a switch you can flick, so it takes time, but you need to obviously make the permitting process a lot better. In America, our capital and our private sector are so dynamic that the capital formation will occur to help us build all the energy and data centers that we need.

I think the government could help us do that. We need to create the environment.

We need the 7-year cycle for nuclear to get 90% more efficient.

Do you think it’s nuclear, or do you think it’s something else? What do you think, from an energy perspective, are the areas that need to move fastest? I’m guessing it’s a mix of everything, but are there things that stand out the most?

The thing I saw, actually, was in one of the investments I was looking at about 2 years ago. We ended up not doing it. It was a battery company here in the US.

There was 1 graph that my team showed me that actually made me quite optimistic, which was that in the US, we have about 1,300 gigawatts of energy. What they showed me was that there was about 2,000 gigawatts of energy waiting for permits from FERC, which was actually quite optimistic because it shows that the US has a lot of private-sector interest.

We just need the government to get out of the way and allow us to do what we want to do. It’s complex, but I think what we saw under the last 4 years, under the Biden administration, was that it was just kind of a war on business—an overregulated environment.

They said some of the right things, but there was no effort toward trying to relieve that bottleneck. Now I know there’s a very intense effort to relieve that bottleneck and to try to stimulate the growth of energy.

The second part, which also is on the AI roadmap that President Trump put out, was really to figure out how you can stimulate as much innovation as possible. You see the regulations they put in place in Europe, and that’s why there’s really not a whole lot happening in Europe on the AI front right now, which isn’t necessarily bad for America.

But I think the goal is not to overregulate before we know what to regulate. If you’re a regulator or a politician, you see this coming and you want to focus on the worst-case scenarios, then think about how you regulate, because that’s kind of all you do.

Right now, we can stimulate bringing the best talent to the US in order to have them focus on this problem here, where I think everyone does want to be innovating. Number 2 is creating the most dynamic environments so that we can do the most innovation in AI possible, so that we can be the global leader and usher this technology into the world under the guise of US values.

It’s been a surprise to me how much of an emergent player certain Middle Eastern countries have been within AI, as both an energy and potential energy and capital provider. What’s your take on this?

They’ve been focused on this for a while. I remember I was over in the UAE in 2018. We were working on the Abraham Accords, and I was trying to make progress.

Sheikh Tahnoon, who’s a good friend of mine, said, “I won’t meet you on this topic unless you stay in afterward and see what I’m doing in AI.” I said, “Look, I don’t really have time for this,” but he made me stay afterward, and I was quite impressed. I didn’t think much of it afterward.

I know in Saudi Arabia, MBS has been very focused. In the UAE, his brother, MBZ, is also very focused. In Qatar, the Emir and the prime minister, Sheikh Mohammed, are incredibly focused on AI. They all have different strategies.

Why is that, by the way? Why do they all get interested in it, especially in that area?

I think they all talk to each other a lot, and I think there’s definitely competition, but they all have unique advantages and different ways they could play it.

Saudi Arabia has a much bigger domestic market. I think the UAE obviously wants to be a big investor in it, and I think they want to implement it in their country as well. All 3 want to implement it in their country.

What we’ve been doing is understanding what their different ambitions are, and we’ve been connecting them to a lot of the leading US AI companies, obviously hoping that they do partnerships and invest in and create with US companies over Asian companies, which we think would be much better for the US and where we have great capabilities.

What they also have is a tremendous sandbox, in the sense that they have companies, governments, and data, and they’re able to really be a great partner to a lot of these AI companies in order to create tools, applications, and even companies that you can build off of what they’re capable of doing.

I actually think they’re going to become a very significant—not just investor, but also partner—in creating AI tools and capabilities that can then go from there to the rest of the world.

You have an amazing set of relationships, but I think it comes from an even more impressive stint in diplomacy without prior experience.

Mm-hmm.

Well, let's say that. You described it as an intense PhD in both the region and geopolitics. Tell us about the experience of learning—first of all, maybe the ambition of what you were tasked with doing in the Middle East, and then the learning experience of trying to be effective and eventually the Abraham Accords and such.

5. The Abraham Accords Strategy

Sure. So I got tasked with the Middle East, I think, almost by accident. The way it came about was that I'd worked very hard on my father-in-law's campaign in 2016. He had almost a family campaign because people were told that if you worked for Donald Trump, you would never get a job in politics again.

The campaign was going, and he said, “Try this, work on this, work on this.” The next thing I knew, I was running a lot of the aspects of his campaign. My wife and I were in New Jersey for a weekend after he won, and he said, “Would you like to join us? Please come join me in Washington.”

I think his first night that he ever slept in Washington was in the White House. He wasn't a governor or a mayor. He didn't really have experience there, but my wife worked with him in his company, so he'd run a family business, and I obviously worked with him closely on the campaign. He wanted people with him who he could trust.

We were thinking about it. It would have been a big life change for us. I got a call that weekend from the PR person for my family's real estate company, who said, “I got a call from The New York Times. They said you're going to Washington, and you're going to be working on Middle East peace.”

I said, “Well, that's not true. We haven't made a decision yet.” She called back and said, “Well, their source is Donald Trump.” He was doing an interview with them, and he said, “Of course Jared's coming to Washington, and he's going to work on Middle East peace.”

So that was how I got the job working on the Middle East. The next day, on the front page of The New York Times, there were stories asking, “Who's Jared Kushner? What does he know about the Middle East?” The answer was nothing. Nobody knew me there.

If that's what my father-in-law asked me to do, I went about it trying to figure out what was possible. I spent probably the first 6 months to a year asking questions and asking people some version of, “What would you do if you were us? What do you think are the solutions?”

I've always learned in business that it's sometimes better to study all the things that have failed and understand why they failed. You learn a lot from that versus listening to the professionals and the experts. I found in Washington it was amusing that only in Washington could you fail at something for a decade or 2 and then be considered an expert on what to do about it.

I started working on it. The goal was really to figure out how to get through some of the conflicts and bring people together. At the time, ISIS had a caliphate the size of Ohio. They were beheading journalists and ruling over about 8 million people, so that was a big problem.

Obama had just done the Iran deal and signed the JCPOA, and the Gulf felt very betrayed because they said Obama went behind our back and went to Persia. They were very surprised by that. They told me they were starting to learn Chinese and push their alliance toward China because they thought the US was no longer a reliable partner.

That was basically what we inherited, so perhaps my father-in-law thought it couldn't get any worse, which is why he told me to work on it. What I basically did was go around asking questions, and I thought I built a lot of trust by trying to build collaborative ideas.

What was interesting about my diplomacy was that I really tried to get everyone focused on what the defined end states are. If we could agree on the end state, we weren't sitting across the table from each other. We were actually sitting on the same side of the table, trying to accomplish a shared goal, and then we would keep iterating on how to get there.

I always joke with the Abraham Accords that we were successful on Plan C, but only because we went through the alphabet about 3 times and failed at every letter along the way. Every time we failed, we just never gave up. We were very determined. We knew the goal was virtuous, and we knew it was important.

You had a velocity of improvement that wasn't 10 years of doing the same thing repeatedly and failing. Yeah.

You know what? It was interesting, too. I see this in politics, where people are afraid to take on hard things, right? You guys are in Silicon Valley, where everyone who comes into your office every day is saying, “We are going to take on this impossible task,” and that's celebrated.

If you fail doing it, then you start another company. That's a culture that's celebrated. In politics, everyone's afraid to take on hard things because they know that there's a high probability of failure.

Mm-hmm.

As a result, they don't try. You look at all the articles, if you go back, at how much I was criticized by everyone for trying to take on these hard problems. All the experts were saying I was doing it not in the way that they did, and I said, “Why would I do it the way you did it? You failed. If I'm going to fail at a hard problem, at least let me fail in an original way.”

New data, yeah.

And so that was kind of bringing a first-principles approach to diplomacy, and a lot of it had to do with just building relationships and building trust.

Where was the conventional wisdom strongest about the Middle East?

It started by saying that you cannot get the Arabs together with Israel until you solve the Palestinian issue.

Mm.

I had an assessment of that issue which felt like it was a riddle designed not to be solved. I felt like what we could do instead of getting people to look backward was get them to look forward, and that joint interests are very, very critical.

The joint interests at the time were, number 1, security. People were very afraid of Iran, so Iran in some ways drove people together, and I think they continue to drive people together by being a menace to all sides.

Then number 2 was: What are the benefits you can get? We talk about AI and technology. I think that the match of Israel's burgeoning AI and technology scene with the aspirations in the emerging AI scene in the Gulf created a lot of desire to be together. I think those aspirations have driven a lot of the shift that we've seen.

I think a lot of people aren't aware of how many different treaties or peace treaties came out of this. Do you mind just quickly enumerating those? I think it's quite striking.

The first one was Israel-UAE. It took me 3 and a half years to do it, which was really incredible. Obviously, I give President Trump a ton of credit because, number 1, he believed in it the whole time. Even when I was getting criticized and he was getting criticized for having me there, he would always call me and say, “Hey, they're saying this. What do you think?”

I would say, “No, this is why I'm doing it.” He'd say, “Well, that makes sense to me, so keep going.” He really believed in the vision and pushed forward with it, which was critical. You've seen it even now, but that's really who trained me, right?

His whole view was that we should go to the pragmatic forum as to what people are actually fighting about and come up with the best solution, right? A lot of these outcomes are arbitrary because they're negotiated in that regard. You have to find ways for people to move forward and be together.

The UAE and Israel came together for the first one. After that, we were able to get Bahrain to join the Abraham Accords. Then we got Sudan, which unfortunately has gone backward, but they're still technically a signatory to the Abraham Accords. Then we got Morocco to join as well.

We also got a deal with Serbia and Kosovo, where Kosovo wanted to join the Abraham Accords. From August 2009--2020 up until the last deal, which was on January 6, 2021, we got the GCC dispute solved. That was between Qatar and Saudi, the UAE, Egypt, and Bahrain, and that was a really tough one.

We got that one resolved, which I thought would have paved the way for Saudi to then join the Abraham Accords, which would have led to Indonesia and Pakistan and all the others. We still have a long list, and right now President Trump is very focused on the next phase of getting more countries to join the Abraham Accords. Ambassador Steve Witkoff is doing an amazing job leading that effort.

And I think that there's a long list of people who will want to join that once the current issues with Gaza are resolved, which hopefully will be very soon.

So one analysis that I saw claimed that one of the reasons Hamas attacked Israel on October 7 was, in part, due to the fact that Israel and Saudi were getting increasingly close to a peace deal, and it was a way to disrupt that process. In general, Hamas, the Houthis, and Hezbollah are, to some extent, proxies for Iran in terms of funding, arms, and other things. How do you think that all evolves, or what do you think happens for a Middle Eastern peace process going forward? What do you think happens in Gaza? Is there anything you can talk about there?

Yeah. When President Trump left in 2021, a deal with Saudi could have been done in 3 to 6 months, and that was basically what I passed over to the previous administration during the transition. They chose to go 180 degrees from all the different policies that President Trump had simply because they were his policies. But I think that we basically inherited a Middle East that was a disaster and left it pretty stable and with a lot of momentum.

It took them 2 years to then say, “Wait, maybe we should focus on the Saudi thing.” What got them to focus on it was that China ended up getting involved to negotiate a deal between Saudi and the Houthis to stop some of that issue in Yemen. And so when China got involved, the US said, “Oh, we don't want to be outdone.” So then they ran over and finally started focusing on this issue, which—

Mm.

—I think would be a historic issue to really resolve this tension between Israel and Saudi and then get full normalization, which I think is much better for lifting the region. So they were doing that very publicly, and I think that there definitely was a desire on their part to stop it. But what's happened since October 7—

By “their part,” you mean—

Hamas or Iran?

Both. I think it was both Iran and Hamas's desire to stop that normalization, because that normalization means that the division that Iran has used in order to justify their existence is no longer justified, right?

What does Iran use as its cause? They call their army the Quds Force. Quds is Jerusalem. They have the Al-Aqsa Brigade for the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and they use this notion that Israel's trying to destroy the mosque or that they're fighting to liberate Jerusalem, when the reality is that Israel will let any Muslim or Arab who wants to come there come, as long as they want to come peacefully. So they almost need this cause to stay out there in order to justify their existence as a revolutionary government.

When you look at where we are now after October 7, it's been at a huge cost in all regards, but Hezbollah is basically decapitated. Iran is now weaker than they've ever been, with their nuclear program set back a long way. The Houthis in Yemen haven't been having a great month, and Hamas in Gaza is basically destroyed.

And so now they have an opportunity to convert those military victories into political victories. But what you have to do is find a resolution in Gaza. If you're able to find a satisfactory resolution there, Israel obviously would love to get their hostages back. I think that's a critical element.

And then once you do that, you want to find a humanitarian way to make sure the civilian population there is not negatively impacted by the horrific leadership that Hamas has brought on and the conflict that's ensued. Then I think you can get to a place where full normalization happens with Saudi and Israel. I think you really are able to then just get everyone doing business, getting to know each other.

If you look at what's happening now in Syria and Lebanon, both have new leadership. Hezbollah is destroyed. By Hezbollah being destroyed, that meant that Syria is looking to be much more stable. Lebanon is looking to be much more stable. And with the Iranian influence out of there—

Mm-hmm.

—it looks like Israel has a real chance to make stability there as well. I know Ambassador Barak has been working very hard on that under Secretary Rubio and President Trump's direction. So I actually think the board could be amazingly positive, but we need to get the Gaza issue resolved. I know President Trump and Steve Wyckoff are working incredibly hard on that, and I do believe that they will be successful. Then big progress will be made soon thereafter.

Some of the companies that you are invested in now have very surprising business relationships and backers. And I feel like, through brokering some of these relationships between Arabs and Israelis, for example, you're really proving the point that people can build normal relations and effective business relations in ways people wouldn't have believed before. Can you talk a little bit about that?

6. Investing Across Old Divides

That was one of the things that I've actually been most excited about, but also most cautious about in pursuing the investment. A lot of my investors come from the Middle East, from the Gulf countries, but I really wanted to show them the good experiences that they could have investing in Israel. The criteria we've used for that are, number one, to only be with the blue-chip partners. Our 2 investments in Israel have both performed very well, but have also been with top-tier firms.

One of the ones we got the most scrutiny on was our investment in a company called Phoenix Holdings, which is the number-one financial institution in Israel. They're a monster company. They manage about $160 billion. We became their largest shareholder, but we invested in July of last year, which was right before the war in the north with Hezbollah basically started.

I remember at the time we made the decision, we had very intense discussions in our investment committee because they said, “Look, there's about to be a war in the country,” which is what we kind of thought was going to happen. They said, “How do we explain this to the investors if it goes wrong?” And I said, “Well, number one, it's not a bad thing to have them more vested in the economy of Israel now.” But I felt like the pricing that we were able to get at the time was very advantageous given what was possible.

So we invested then at about $37 a share. Today, the stock's almost $120 a share. Because we needed approval from the regulator, we bought 4.9% then and another 4.9% later. So we were able to use better leverage because the shares went up quite a bit, and it's been almost a 9-times return on the investment in just over a year so far, which has been quite strong.

Obviously, my investors from the Middle East are now looking at Israel, and they're saying, “Wait a minute, maybe there's a benefit to having these wars done,” and they're seeing a good example there. That's been very satisfying—to be able to explain to them the benefits of being together and the positive results that can come from being invested together.

The next phase of that is that Phoenix, which is a monster company, is now looking at investments in Saudi Arabia and investments in the UAE, and basically thinking, “How can they start deploying their huge amounts of capital into infrastructure projects in the region next to it?” Again, that's just further going to bring people together. They have a great retirement savings program. How can they take that retirement savings program over to some of the Gulf countries as well?

So it's been very interesting to foster some of these connections together. And then when you get an Arab and an Israeli together and they start talking about a business opportunity, they forget about everything else.

Interesting.

And then they realize that there's a lot of similarities. In the Middle East, for 1,000 years before the 1940s, Jews and Muslims lived basically side by side in the region. And I think through business and through building these relationships, you find ways to bring people back together.

Again, that's one of the positive things. In my business, I try to work with founders I love, on companies I'm excited about, and on missions that I think could be productive. And I find with deals like this, it's just extra rewarding to be able to work with great people and then to help build relationships, perspective, and knowledge for both sides that probably wouldn't have existed otherwise.

It's been a wide-ranging conversation. Can I ask a really micro question up close? You and Ivanka have built this incredible partnership across business and politics, and also raising a family together. I look at this with great interest given I feel I'm part of 2 partnerships: mine at Conviction professionally, and then also me and my husband, Pat. How have you done that? What's the framework for it?

7. Partnership Through Every Phase

So it's funny. A lot of people always try to give advice on marriage, but the one that I always felt was the most important is: marry the right person.

And so I'm very blessed that I married an incredible person. Ivanka has been a great partner to me in all the different phases of our life. We obviously had our New York phase, when we were building our businesses and starting our family. Then we had the Washington phase, which was a lot more about survival every day.

She was supporting me with my efforts, and I was supporting her with hers, but we were constantly under attack and facing investigations. Now you're seeing all this stuff about how these Russia investigations were totally made up. I spent 33 hours on congressional subpoenas, testimony, special counsel, and grand jury testimony. Those were very intense times, and Ivanka was an amazing partner and support to me in my weakest times there.

When we left Washington, the focus for me was to start a new business. We moved down to Florida, and Ivanka said that after so many years of being public and so many years of either building a business or doing her policy work, which helped a lot of people through her different efforts, she wanted to focus on being a mother and really raising our family. She's done an incredible job doing that over the last few years. I think our kids are all thriving, really thanks to her amazing job as a mother.

In my business, she's been a great partner. She's been making investments and helping us a lot on some of our early-stage investments in AI and other areas. She has a very good track record of doing those investments, and Elon has helped her with some connections. They've worked together on some great things.

She's just been an amazing partner, a very special person, and I'm very lucky to have her as my wife.

So you made the transition from the private sector to the public sector. Obviously, you had a really big impact while you were there. Right now, there are a lot of different people I know in Silicon Valley who are moving out to help with different aspects of government in a way that I haven't seen people show up before. These are really exceptional people who have accomplished a lot in their careers in tech, and now they're coming in and helping out in government. What should a private-sector person expect when they get to D.C.?

8. Private Sector Service Pays Off

It's a completely different world, and I think you have to understand that it's a different system design. But if you spend the time to understand the system, there are tremendous amounts of positive things that could be accomplished by doing it.

When I left government, I'd say the primary reason why I wrote my book was because I wanted to encourage people from the private sector to go and serve in government. One of the things I've been so satisfied by seeing in Trump's second term is that, with the work that Elon started with DOGE and with the great work of the PPO group, the people that they're hiring now at the third and fourth levels of government are better than the people who were willing to come work for us at the top levels in the first administration.

President Trump has an amazing Cabinet, an amazing team, and an incredible bench of talent. What we're seeing with DOGE, and how it's still persisted, is that there's a great group of people from the private sector who are there every day renegotiating contracts. I speak to them, and they say, honestly, they've never had such easy negotiations in their life. They're saving a billion here, a billion there.

There's so much low-hanging fruit there. It's just a place where, first, there hasn't been a president who's willing to empower people to go make deals and let them loose to try and change things. I think the more that people from the private sector go in, number 1, they'll learn how the government works. The government is obviously a massive organization that has a big impact on all of our lives in so many different ways.

But I think people are finding that the difference they can make will be quite huge. Joe Gebbia just got announced as the chief design officer for the U.S. I know Antonio Gracias has done amazing work helping figure out how to make sure we're only paying Social Security. I think he saved over $10 billion a year so far from that.

I think all these guys are coming away with the experience where they're feeling enriched by the contributions they've been able to make to a country that's done so much for them, that enables these platforms they want to build. I think it's just a great place, and I think it's a great opportunity for people to go in, especially during this administration, because they'll be allowed to do things and make big change.

I hope that we have more people do it like the Founding Fathers' kind of design, where you leave your farm, you go do your service, and you go back to your farm. Here, maybe it's you leave your office, you do your service, and you go back to your office. I think that it's very important to have private-sector people going into government, doing tours of duty, versus just having a permanent political class, which I don't think is necessarily great for the long-term interests of America.

It used to be an embedded part of the business community to say that there's enormous patriotism and value in going in and doing a term in government, or helping out in different ways along those lines. Often, people are motivated by those altruistic reasons, and then there are almost the selfish reasons to do it.

What do you think are some of the selfish reasons? You're a 25-year-old engineer, and you have a great offer from OpenAI or another major tech company. Why should you go into government instead right now?

I think there's a quote that's attributed to Einstein. He gets a lot of quotes.

Yeah.

I don't know if he said them all or not.

That's good. Yeah.

"Once your mind expands, it never returns to its original size." I think that goes to what we were saying initially about how, when you're in business and you're looking at things with a different lens, sometimes you see different opportunities or different solutions.

I think going into government, number 1, if you go there, you'll definitely make a contribution, and you'll feel good about the fact that things are different in the world because of you. You'll know that whether you get recognition for that or not doesn't matter.

But I think I look at my experience. Again, it was 4 very hard years. It cost me millions of dollars in legal fees, and it was stressful.

It was actually one of the things that shocked me as I got to know you and Ivanka: the degree to which you were vilified in the press, and then you'd meet both of you in person. Before we started working on Brinco together, I actually asked around to different people, just in case: Is there anything there? Because there was so much negativity.

Mm-hmm.

Everybody basically said you were a mensch—a good person who tries to help whenever he can, and so on. Same with Ivanka. As I got to know you, I'm like, "Oh my God, these people are super smart. They're clear thinkers. They're always trying to do the right thing," and yet they got completely vilified. I always thought that was almost a travesty in terms of how those things can happen.

We were very fortunate to have the opportunity to make an impact. The way I would say it to Ivanka at the time is that every opportunity in life has a cost, and if this is the cost of what we have to bear, it's a small cost relative to the opportunity we have to make an impact.

I kind of just accepted that that was the deal. Now, the fact that people recognize the work a lot more is obviously an extra benefit, because I think we can use it to hopefully inspire more people to come in and do the work. It was a very interesting time in our country and a very interesting time to serve.

In some ways, like I was talking with my brother about this, almost because it was so unpopular to be in government at that time, we weren't spending time doing things other than working. We just put our heads down and got the work done. We weren't being invited to—

Very good. Carry on.

—to the party. So our view was, well, let's just spend our time working.

Yeah.

I think that's ultimately what led to a lot of the successes we had: the maniacal focus on the task at hand. We never took for granted how lucky we were to have the opportunity to serve and to make an impact, and we relished it every day.

Every day we woke up, we viewed it and said, "It's sand through an hourglass. At some point it's going to be over, and how can we use every minute to make as much impact as possible?" I would say the benefits we got from it were that we made some incredible friends.

We learned a lot about our country. We learned a lot about the world. We made incredible contacts around the world, and I think we have a much more refined understanding of how the world actually works.

Then it’s been fun for me to apply that to the business world, which has only brought me closer to the relationships I’ve built through that process and allowed me to find ways to create almost the private-sector solution that I wish I’d had when I was in government, in order to hopefully effectuate a lot of the positive missions that I thought were important to pursue from the government side.

So, I guess to finish off the 25-year-old engineer point, there’s obviously the altruistic impact on the world.

Mm-hmm.

I guess there are certain things they can learn along the way. How else do you think about the benefits of going into government right now?

You’ll learn a ton. You’ll meet a lot of interesting people from different backgrounds, and you’ll definitely leave with a different perspective and appreciation for our country, appreciation for what’s possible. I think you’ll learn a lot along the way.

I view it almost like a 2-year business school stint, where you go in and you’re obviously leaving behind a lucrative career, but you’re going to leave hopefully in a better place than where you found it. You’ll feel good about the fact that you’re doing it as well, and you can make a big impact.

So, one of the ways that you’ve described to me the kind of role that you like to play is almost like a chairman-style role in terms of businesses you get involved with, things you help build, and the different dynamics of what you do in general. Could you extrapolate or explain what that means and how you’ve been doing that?

I’ve been CEO before, and I like operating things, but what I’m enjoying about this phase of being an investor in other companies is the ability to really spend your time on just the most critical things.

Anyone who’s been a CEO knows that there are mission-critical things, and then there’s minutia and things you have to do to run a business. A lot of this phase of my life, I’m trying to design how to spend your time with the people you want to be spending your time with, on the best problems, and doing the things that utilize your best skill sets in the best way.

I’ve really been enjoying that with different companies because I get to sit with incredible CEOs, and I get to work with them on their big aspirations and how to work through those problems.

One example is that we made a big investment in QXO with a guy, Brad Jacobs, and seeing the way that he’s pursued his M&A strategy and then his change-transformation strategy. I’m learning a lot being a board member there and watching him and his incredible operating team do change management, take a company that’s operated one way for a while, and then convince them to operate a different way—to integrate technology and integrate a different mindset.

I find that by being in this role with a lot of different CEOs, I’m able to learn from the things that they do well and then take those learnings, bring them across, and help other CEOs achieve at a higher level. Right now, I’m really enjoying that, and that’s been fun to do.