Summary

Affinity Partners is built around the proposition that networks, governance judgment, and hands-on problem-solving can uncover returns that capital alone cannot. Kushner says the firm puts “skin in the game,” then helps scope solutions and find customers and opportunities. His government-to-investing framework says government can set policy, while the private sector must bring technical expertise, project-management capability, capital, and local-navigation skill; having only three of those four is a “recipe for disaster.” The largest inefficiency may be sovereign: companies trade constantly, while roughly “200-plus countries” can remain reputationally mispriced.
Kushner’s macro map favors tailwinds in the Gulf and Latin America, with Albania as his clearest contrarian specimen. He calls Singapore “blue chip,” sees Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE pairing capital with ambitious leadership, and argues Mexico should benefit from US supply-chain diversification if bilateral disputes are resolved. His underwriting rule is to find an amazing wave and also be an amazing surfer.
BrainCo is the founders’ attempt to productize AI deployment for the world’s largest institutions rather than sell one-off implementation work. Started in January 2024 by Kushner, Elad Gil, Eric Wu, and Luis, it combines common infrastructure with applications that can be reused across customers and verticals. The founding insight: Silicon Valley is exceptional at solving problems but “not always the best at identifying which problems to solve.”
Construction permitting is BrainCo’s strongest proof point: a 40-plus-step process taking three or four months should, Kushner says, take three minutes with AI. The initial ambition was over 90% efficiency on one step; Kushner says he thinks the system is now at 35 steps with over 90% accuracy on all 35, while the implementation exposed over 10 human-designed steps that could simply be removed. The claimed payoff spans lower consultant costs, faster construction and tax receipts, and less opaque discretion that can enable corruption.
The binding constraint on enterprise AI is organizational adoption as much as model capability. BrainCo wants complex problems, usable data, and leadership able to overcome internal resistance; as Kushner puts it, “Change is like heaven. Everyone wants to go there, but nobody wants to die.” The company has grown beyond 40 people, but Kushner says time, talent, project selection, and maintaining quality—not customer demand—limit growth.
US AI competitiveness depends, in Kushner’s account, on energy permitting and innovation, with Gulf partnerships adding capital and deployment environments. He cites roughly 1,300 gigawatts of existing US energy capacity against about 2,000 gigawatts awaiting FERC permits, arguing that private capital is available if government clears bottlenecks and avoids premature AI regulation. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar offer not just capital but companies, governments, and data—“tremendous sandbox” capacity for building tools with US AI firms.
Kushner’s diplomatic lesson is that shared forward interests can beat inherited sequencing assumptions. His team challenged the view that Arab-Israeli progress required first solving the Palestinian issue, eventually reaching UAE, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco agreements after succeeding on “plan C” only by going “through the alphabet like three times.” He now frames the return of hostages and a humanitarian resolution in Gaza as critical steps toward Saudi-Israeli normalization and says broader progress could follow soon afterward.
The episode’s sharpest realized-investment claim is Affinity’s Phoenix Holdings position. Kushner says the Israeli financial institution manages about $160 billion; Affinity became its largest shareholder through two 4.9% purchases, entering around $37 per share before the northern war and watching the stock approach $120. He says the staged purchases enabled better leverage and claims “almost a nine times” return in just over a year—and says Gulf investors are consequently examining Israel while Phoenix explores Saudi and UAE opportunities.

Deep dive

1. Affinity sells judgment and access, not undifferentiated capital

Leaving government, Kushner concluded that “the world didn’t need another…couple billion-dollar private equity firm.” Affinity would instead become an “outcome-determinative partner”: identify a company’s hardest problems, validate the thesis by investing alongside it, and use trusted relationships to find customers, opportunities, and solutions unavailable through conventional consulting.
His public-private execution framework requires four ingredients: technical expertise, project-management capability, capital, and local-navigation skill. Government can establish policy, but private enterprise must operationalize it; assembling only three ingredients is, in his words, “a recipe for disaster.”
Guo’s global-ambition question elicited a useful diagnosis: exceptional operators become obsessive about one industry or geography, leaving them unable to compare how equivalent businesses work elsewhere. Affinity’s role is to connect those local specialists with different operating models from India, the Middle East, Europe, or Latin America.
Gil invoked Yuri Milner’s Facebook investment—once considered extraordinary around a $5 billion valuation, versus a later “trillion-dollar-ish” company—as the cross-border pattern. Kushner’s answer: generalists miss plenty, but investing requires being right only where differentiated perspective and conviction justify a concentrated bet.

2. Whole countries can remain mispriced longer than companies

Kushner contrasts tens of thousands of frequently traded companies with roughly 200-plus countries whose reputations and governance are much less efficiently priced. Governance is not his sole criterion, but capital should avoid headwinds: “The goal is to obviously find amazing waves and also to be an amazing surfer.”
Albania is his specimen. Friends initially thought the investment irrational, but Kushner saw European geography, undeveloped potential, and Prime Minister Edi Rama—technically a socialist, he says, yet pro-business and artistically trained—creating regulations hospitable to capital. Affinity is contributing financing, designers, brands, and expertise.
The reputational gap became tangible when a skeptical friend visited Albania, then called asking to buy a house, invest alongside Kushner, and pursue several projects. The lesson Kushner draws is not that diligence becomes unnecessary, but that governance analysis can reveal what a country is rather than “what it reputationally was perceived to be.”
Singapore remains his “blue chip” policy reference: in government, his first question on a difficult problem was often, “What do they do in Singapore?” He also favors the Gulf’s leadership-and-capital toolkit and sees Mexico and wider Latin America benefiting from post-COVID supply-chain diversification—provided US-Mexico disputes are settled and a rising US economy supplies the tailwind.

3. BrainCo bridges elite AI talent to institution-scale problems

Kushner calls AI the largest technological shift of his lifetime and says it forced Affinity to stop assuming “tomorrow is gonna be like yesterday.” Every investment had to be reconsidered for potential margin expansion, growth, and new value—as well as vulnerabilities that were invisible before AI’s trajectory became pronounced.
Affinity and its Middle Eastern partners found few providers offering tangible results rather than “ineffective” tools, “rip-offs,” or “happy talk solutions.” When Kushner brought that frustration to Gil, Gil’s response was: “Well, let’s start a company to do it.”
BrainCo began in January 2024 with Kushner, Gil, Eric Wu, and Luis; Gil described later founding moments when Dan and Mercia joined and Clemens became CEO. The proposed bridge connects large institutions possessing valuable operational “sandboxes” with engineers who otherwise lack access to the right problems.
Gil stresses that this is not simply implementation consulting. A shared infrastructure layer serves every customer, with incremental applications built on top and resold across divisions and verticals; the architecture lets one institution benefit repeatedly while BrainCo accumulates reusable product rather than starting over each time.

4. Permitting demonstrates AI redesigning the workflow itself

BrainCo’s initial use cases span healthcare patient experience and throughput, hospitality reservation clusters, and faster insurance-claims management. Demand has spread through Affinity’s portfolio and partners as early customers show other divisions what the platform can do.
The construction-permitting project started with digitized government records and a process exceeding 40 steps. Applicants paid consultants and waited three or four months; Kushner’s target state is blunt: “With AI, it should take three minutes.” Initially, success meant over 90% efficiency on just one step.
Building the system revealed that more than 10 steps could be eliminated because the human-designed workflow itself was inefficient. A separate obstacle—converting spatial plans into a format models could read and score—became solvable after an underlying model update, illustrating why implementations must evolve with frontier capabilities.
Kushner says BrainCo is now, he thinks, at 35 steps, with over 90% accuracy on all 35 steps. Beyond lower government and applicant costs, he expects fewer busy-work consultants, faster development and tax collection, and less graft: opaque human judgment should shrink where consistent automated review can replace it.

5. Organizational buy-in is the binding enterprise constraint

Gil describes an unusual go-to-market motion: rather than spend seven years climbing from SMBs to mid-market and enterprise, BrainCo “jump[ed] seven years ahead” to globally important institutions. Those customers responded with “prove it to us,” so the team initially performed substantial work at risk before earning broader mandates.
BrainCo has grown beyond 40 people, but Kushner says its constraints are hiring, time, choosing the right projects, and avoiding dilution of technical quality. Successful customers are already expanding scopes across multiple companies and divisions, making existing accounts potentially much larger than their initial engagements.
The customer screen has three parts: a complex problem with meaningful AI leverage, suitable data, and a command structure capable of forcing experimentation through resistance. Gil agrees that people, processes, and organizational redesign can matter more than technology; initial skeptics can become the largest champions once AI demonstrably improves their jobs.

6. Energy and Gulf partnerships shape the AI power map

Kushner says he contacted TSMC during the first Trump administration and encouraged US fabrication in Arizona, which he hopes becomes the foundation for a larger deployment. His current policy framework has two pillars: expand energy by clearing permitting bottlenecks, then maximize innovation without regulating capabilities before policymakers understand them.
One abandoned battery investment produced his most optimistic chart: approximately 1,300 gigawatts of US energy capacity versus roughly 2,000 gigawatts awaiting FERC permits. To Kushner, that queue demonstrates abundant private-sector willingness; permitting relief, rather than capital formation, is the immediate bottleneck, though capacity cannot appear by “a switch you can flick.”
He argues Europe’s regulatory approach helps explain its limited AI activity and favors attracting top talent to the US, creating a dynamic development environment, and establishing US leadership before addressing demonstrated worst cases. The strategic objective is to introduce the technology globally “under the guise of US values.”
Gulf attention predates the current boom: in 2018, Sheikh Tahnoon insisted Kushner stay after a UAE diplomacy meeting to see his AI work. Kushner now sees differentiated strategies across Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar: Saudi Arabia has a larger domestic market, while the UAE wants to be a major investor; all three also want to implement AI domestically. They provide capital, companies, government, and data environments where US partners can build exportable tools.

7. First-principles diplomacy broke the inherited sequencing

Kushner says his Middle East assignment began almost accidentally after Donald Trump told The New York Times that Kushner would work on Middle East peace before Kushner had agreed to enter government. Knowing “nothing,” he spent six months to a year asking what others would do and studying failed approaches—skeptical of Washington experts who had failed for decades.
His method was to define a mutually accepted end state, put parties metaphorically on the same side of the table, and iterate relentlessly. The Abraham Accords succeeded on “plan C,” he jokes, only after the team went “through the alphabet like three times”; if failure was likely, “at least let me fail in an original way.”
The challenged orthodoxy held that Arab states could not normalize with Israel before resolving the Palestinian conflict. Kushner instead emphasized forward-looking common interests: security against Iran and economic gains from pairing Israeli technology and AI capabilities with Gulf capital and ambition.
Israel and the UAE normalized after three and a half years, followed by Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco; Kosovo also sought participation, while the team resolved the GCC dispute involving Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, and Bahrain. Kushner says the last deal was on January 6, 2021, and expected a Saudi deal and a wider cascade.

8. Gaza remains the gate to normalization and cross-border capital

Kushner says Saudi normalization was “three to six months” away when Trump left in 2021; in his account, the next administration reversed course and refocused only after China helped negotiate between Saudi Arabia and the Houthis. He says Iran and Hamas both wanted to disrupt an approaching Saudi-Israeli agreement before October 7.
His present assessment is that Hezbollah has been “basically decapitated,” Iran is weaker with its nuclear program set back, and the conflict has imposed enormous costs. Converting military outcomes into politics requires returning Israeli hostages and finding a humanitarian Gaza resolution that protects civilians from the consequences of Hamas’s leadership.
If that condition is met, Kushner expects Saudi-Israeli normalization, deeper commerce, and greater stability under new leadership in Syria and Lebanon. He says President Trump and Steve Witkoff are working hard on a resolution, believes they will be successful, and says “big progress” will follow soon afterward.
The mechanism is commercial familiarity: once Arabs and Israelis discuss an opportunity, Kushner says, “they forget about everything else.” Joint ownership and business execution can make abstract normalization tangible by revealing shared interests and building relationships that official diplomacy alone cannot sustain.

9. Phoenix turns the normalization thesis into a measured return

Affinity deliberately restricted its Israeli investments to “blue-chip partners” because much of its capital comes from Gulf countries. Kushner wanted strong financial outcomes to demonstrate what Middle Eastern investors could gain from Israel, while recognizing that a loss would undermine the broader relationship-building effort.
Phoenix Holdings was the difficult test. Kushner describes it as Israel’s leading financial institution, managing roughly $160 billion; because regulatory approval was required, Affinity bought 4.9% and then another 4.9% later, becoming its largest shareholder despite anticipating a northern war around its initial investment in July of the prior year.
Affinity entered around $37 per share, Kushner says, and the stock approached $120. He says the staged purchases allowed better leverage as the shares rose and claims an “almost a nine times” return in just over a year. The result has Gulf investors reassessing Israel rather than treating political risk as an automatic exclusion.
The capital flow could now reverse direction: Phoenix is examining Saudi and UAE infrastructure investments and whether its retirement-savings model can travel to Gulf markets. For Kushner, business ties can bring people together by building trust, perspective, and knowledge on both sides.

10. Tours of government and chairman roles concentrate consequential work

On his partnership with Ivanka Trump, Kushner’s framework is simply “marry the right person.” He credits her support through business, family, investigations, and 33 hours of government testimony; after Washington she prioritized their children while continuing to help Affinity with early-stage AI investments.
Kushner encourages private-sector “tours of duty” rather than a permanent political class. He says DOGE-linked teams are renegotiating contracts and saving “a billion here, a billion there,” while saying he thinks Antonio Gracias has saved more than $10 billion a year by helping ensure Social Security is paid only to eligible recipients; he also cites Joe Gebbia’s chief-design role as another example.
His selfish case to a 25-year-old engineer is learning: government is “a two-year business school stint” offering exposure to institutions, people, and problems unavailable inside one company. Kushner acknowledges the price—millions in legal fees and four stressful years—but says the mind does not return to its original size.
Back in investing, he prefers a chairman-style role that strips away CEO minutiae and concentrates on critical problems with strong operators. QXO is his example: board work with Brad Jacobs lets him study M&A, technology integration, and organizational change, then transfer those lessons across other portfolio CEOs.

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