Jared Weinstein, co-founder of New York-based venture capital firm Thrive Capital and founder of The Overton Project, recalled working in the White House, growing a venture capital firm, and helping to scale organizations in Birmingham, Ala.
Weinstein was the keynote speaker Tuesday (April 21) at Onward FX at Ledger in Bentonville. Steve Nelson, co-founder and former CEO of Carbon, led the conversation with Weinstein.
Startup NWA, an initiative of the Northwest Arkansas Council, and Arkansas Economic Development Commission hosted the event, aimed to help startup founders seeking capital. More than 600 people attended.
Serafina Lalany, executive director of Startup NWA, said attendees included 250 investors from across the country and 400 founders from 40 states representing nearly every sector of the economy.
“One out of every four companies that have walked through our doors have landed a deal,” Lalany said. “They have walked away with a term sheet, and we are going to keep that up today.”
More than 300 meetings between founders and investors were scheduled at Ledger on Tuesday.
Since launching in 2024, Onward FX has facilitated more than 500 founder-funder meetings and helped startups secure millions in venture capital investments nationwide. It expanded statewide last year. The next Onward FX will take place in Little Rock from Sept. 15-16.
Before the Tuesday event, the founders voted on the topics they wanted investors to discuss. The Unscripted event comprised multiple breakout sessions on topics such as venture capital’s impact on the use of artificial intelligence and how Walmart and J.B. Hunt Transport Services work with startups. The Unscripted keynote, Scaling Deep, featured Weinstein in conversation with Nelson.
Thrive Capital has grown from $40 million in assets to more than $50 billion under management and backing 39 unicorns in total. Before Thrive, Weinstein spent seven years in the White House, the last three as personal aide to President George W. Bush. Weinstein founded The Overton Project in 2013 as a social investment platform focused on scaling organizations to Birmingham — specifically Breakthrough Collaborative, Venture for America, and Microsoft’s TEALS computer science program.
“Birmingham is where my heart is, and it’s where I’ve recently returned,” Weinstein said. “I grew up with a great family. We ran an industrial services kind of company, but I had a grandfather who was my hero. He was a World War II veteran. He built a big business, and I think he really instilled in me kind of an ambition to dream beyond Birmingham and also a love that ultimately brought me back.”
His mother encouraged him to look outside of the city for college. He attended Duke University, studying public policy.
“I studied public policy for a really good reason, which is the café in the public policy building had great sandwiches,” he joked.
The major required an internship in public policy, and he sought work on the presidential campaign of Bush, who was then the governor of Texas. Weinstein cold-called the campaign for about 10 months before he got a job stuffing envelopes for the summer. He remained with the campaign after the summer and through the election. He considered dropping out of college to work in Washington, D.C. However, Karl Rove, the president’s political adviser, suggested he remain in college and, after graduation, he would find him a job. He remained in college, interned for Rove in the West Wing in summer 2001, and returned to Duke for his senior year before earning his degree.
In college, he also wrote a report on a social initiative he wanted to start and eventually did. It was to help provide Durham youth with the same access to sports as was available to youth of wealthier suburban families.
“We partnered with some corporations in Durham and said, ‘Let’s build a baseball league and baseball fields and equipment and coaches that are on par with the suburbs,’” Weinstein said. “We spent my junior and senior year focused on that.”
After graduation, he started in the White House scheduling office.
“The scheduling is really the center of the White House because you see all of the president’s requests for his time, and you see what gets added to his schedule and what doesn’t get added to his schedule,” Weinstein said. “I really learned the inner workings of the White House as a 22 year old.”
At 26, he was a personal aide to President Bush.
“It was absolutely the honor of a lifetime,” he said. “My days would start around 4:12 a.m. when my alarm would go off. People said, ‘Why 4:12?’ And I said, “Well, 4:10 was too early. I wanted two more minutes of sleep, and if I waited until 4:15, I wouldn’t get in on time. I would get in by 5 a.m. I would get a copy of the president’s briefing book. I would review everything in his day, and I’d start firing off emails and calls, and try to make changes to ensure that his day went the way that he would want it to.
“He would get in around 6:30, and we’d talk about the day. Then the day would start, and it was chaos and an intelligence briefing, an FBI briefing, a legislative briefing and…the prime minister of Finland comes in. Then you’re going to the Patriots Super Bowl rings… you’ve got a meeting on tax policy… you’re flying to Michigan… you’re going to Arkansas to do an event at Walmart. Just nonstop, and he’s an incredible boss. He’s an incredible mentor. He’s also a great dad and a great husband and a great friend.”
Some of the lessons he learned from his time working for the president included the importance of having the right people with specific knowledge of relevant matters and of creating a culture of decision-making. Weinstein, whose office was 10 feet from the Oval Office, said the Oval Office is intimidating, and the president wanted to ensure his staff “felt comfortable giving him clear-headed advice.” Another takeaway was that the president or founders should make only the toughest decisions. Easy decisions can be made elsewhere, he said.
After President Bush left office in January 2009, Weinstein attended Stanford University to earn a master’s degree in business administration. In California, he was an early adviser to Palantir and received stock in the company. A friend who knew his background working at the White House suggested he meet with the company, which works in government.
“So I started hanging out in Palantir during business school,” he said. “They were just starting to think about going into the commercial sector, which is a huge part of their business now.”
Weinstein helped introduce Palantir to the Bush administration’s White House staff who’d went on to work for and with Fortune 500 companies. He joked that he sold his stock early, as the company has grown to 4,400 employees, $4.5 billion in annual revenue, and a nearly $350 billion market cap.
Before attending Stanford, he met Josh Kushner at a session at Harvard Business School. They remained in touch after Weinstein left for Stanford. While hanging out in New York, Kushner suggested they start a venture capital firm. Thrive Capital has grown from two to over 100 employees and invested in companies such as OpenAI, Spotify and Slack.
Weinstein said venture capitalists like to share the deals that worked, but there were several the firm passed on that became successful, such as Uber, Doordash and Nubank.
He said he enjoyed living in New York and growing Thrive Capital, but that’s not where his heart was, as he’d been away from government work for a while and was looking to give back to the community. He looked to make a bigger impact at home in Birmingham. He started The Overton Project and began recruiting successful organizations to the city to work on initiatives such as early childhood, entrepreneurial support and workforce development.
“It’s been really fun,” he said. “It’s kind of this matching of venture capital mindset with social impact mindset. It’s very hard, as we all know, to build a company. It’s really hard to inflect a city, which makes the work that’s being done here even more impressive. But we’re trying.”