Long Journey Ventures closes $181M fund three, bets on 'magically weird' pre-consensus investments

those stuff bags of cash it's great it is a very very cool company he was he was kind of alluding to Planet Labs we got Lee Jacobs and cyan here go chain what's up congratulations guys thank you thank you already putting those LP dollars to work with some nice jewelry yeah yeah this oh this little thing that was that was fun one here at a long journey so yeah sometimes I put this on you know fantastic uh can you give us the overview where' long journey start how'd you get here what are you announcing today yeah uh long journey started in 2020 when cyan and I uh you know we've been really good friends from our days at angelist uh and she had decided that you know she wanted to go back into her Roots at early stage uh and we decided to start a fund together and that was in 2020 and that was like five years ago yeah I basically asked him to meet me at a coffee shop and I said what do you think about me joining you and we team up together and he said I've been manifesting this basically like yes and that was it like there was no further discussion really it was was it totally I kind of knew I kind of knew it was going to happen um we had just had this really powerful uh you know way of working together and when she said let's work together I was like yeah I've been waiting for you to ask for that let's do it that was about five years ago uh and today uh we announced our newest fund which is 181.

fm at least in crypto you know you yeah totally yeah there you go the numerology is big in Tech these days everyone loves numerology yeah totally but I prefer I prefer a more creative one than just the 42069 the 42069 is a little played out at this point I like that you're um you know high is a uh is means life in you know you probably heard Lam or misfah or something you're given 18 or 36 which is like to life and we really think of it as um our role is to is respectful of the dollars we've gotten from our LPS but also to give the gifts entrepreneurs so they can give more and more gifts uh and ultimately we're we're we're pro-life I mean that's not exactly what I mean to say but it's like we love life here of course you know long journey yeah t is this sorry I didn't if I didn't catch it uh is this fun three fun four the third institutional fund but it's technically the the uh fourth fun I tried to it's a confusing for a reason you know just to throw people off keep their toes has uh has a strategy changed at any point you know I'm obviously we have very close relationship with with Justin Mars We've joked about this on on the show who's a adventure partner uh uh at long journey for those that don't know and uh I always joke about it anytime I see an exciting company Justin Mars is always like uh yeah I got in at a two and a half cap and I'm like what do you mean like so I mean like you guys have been very intentional around valuation you actually have a extremely I feel like Risk on approach where you know some of some of the um and not to say it's not calculated but you know you're willing to give a $100,000 at some point to somebody who just literally just has like a crazy idea how H you know talk about kind of your strategy has it evolved or is it just been coming back you know always back to early stage root start with our thesis which is Chase the magically weird and when we went and looked back at all of our companies that the the highest returns they had one thing in common which was that nobody believed in them at the time and so Justin you know is remarkable at finding people and companies at their Inception point where sometimes like like he created inflection grants uh for example and he's always doing interesting things on the edge like doing things Edge City when when he started King fire in 2015 he was like yeah I he was like there's a thing called bone broth and I was like uh what's bone broth he was like yeah you take the bones you like squeeze them you put them in a box and you can sell them for $8 at Whole Foods and I was like okay tell me more that was pretty absurd at the time now as you know it's it's a thing yeah bone broth is everywhere and everything and everybody talks about it so what we like to do is invest in things before it becomes a buzzword and it becomes consensus and so when everybody is chasing for example the application layer of AI right now we're thinking about what is next and so we're already planning ahead for the future that comes after what everyone's investing in in right now and we've done that consistently and I think that's where all of the alpha is and you know it really works for us and it's where we like to play do you think it's do you think it's getting harder you know people have talked recently about how the the you know YC batches Everything feels very on Trend right you've got defense Tech space uh AI agent infrastructure it feels like you know 15 years ago there were still Secrets right whereas now information gets out super quick now the benefit if you're an investor is like if you're ahead on a trend you can invest in something and then two months later it's getting a 4ex you know markup and you look really good but do you find that you you know do you see that the internet is is making it even harder to stay ahead of and find what's weird or is it just about you know sort of thinking differently and um no I think that so I always think that uh I love y combinator so I don't ever want to say anything negative about but you know I think that they serve a great purpose when you go i' I've found a couple of companies in my career at y combinator uh butur security for example you're basically searching for a needle and a hay stack and and you're also you know you're dealing with some pretty stiff competition when you go in that room it's like the who's who of venture capital and Angel Investing and so you know I don't really want to play in that Arena you know I want to dream about the future and figure out what's coming so that when that entrepreneur starts to go out and pitch people initially a lot of people will be like well that doesn't fit into our thesis you know investing in nanotechnology right now right you know like no one's thinking about nanotech but maybe nanotech is one of the next things and so that's where we want to actually figure out you know where are we going to be in six to eight years and that's we want to get ahead of it and do the picks and shovels of whatever that is so we did that with cruso we did that with together AI we're doing it with um we have a stealth company that you know in the chip space and so we're doing things that will power AI but staying away from kind of the this Cambrian explosion of people investing in things at high valuations because we're not going to get a price Advantage if we enter now uh we should have seen it in advance y yeah Sayan can you tell me about the diamond age oh my gosh yes it's my favorite book um it's by Neil Stevenson and I remember the first time I read this book um if you if you pick it up and you try to read it the very first 10 pages are so there's this character that's so annoying that I couldn't get past the first 10 pages and then my husband was like hey he dies and I'm like when goes like by like page 11 if you can just get it through you can get through this I think his name is Bud he's a horrible character with like a skull gun attracts to his head yes but once you get past that you know Neil Stevenson one of the reasons why he's one of my favorite authors is he's a historian first and foremost and so he predicts the future by going deep into the past and understanding historically what the trends have been and you can determine how the future will play out based off of that and so one of the things that he predicted among many things like in snow crash the book that he wrote he predicted meta he predict predicted uh VR he predicted second life and um there was a company called there.

com and virtual reality period and then in the diamond age he predicts an AI future where there's a little girl who gets a book and it's indistinguishable from an iPad and this book basically teaches her to adulthood and so you can imagine a future where you know scarcity we live in a world of abundance so the other thing in in in Diamond age is everything is manufactured and 3D printed and on a on a on a level where everything is perfect so if everything's perfect the thing that becomes valuable is human Innovation and human thought and human Artistry so while everybody's worrying about how we're going to mass-produce Art and music will be you know and and code and all these things are going to be created by AI The Artisan is always going to be able to create that desk that you're at you know um a piece of art a piece of music that's original from the human mind is always going to stand out as being different and so I think that human Innovation and human Ingenuity and things made with human hands are just going to become incredibly valuable so I based a lot of my investment decisions over the past I probably over 10 years based off of Neil Stevenson's work yeah and and so I'm just a I'm huge fan of his and I'm going to be on a panel with him coming up excited about it yeah I mean you think about uh uh Palmer with oculus VR coming from Snow Crash uh Dean's favorite book for a long time was seven EES another Neil Stevenson book uh can you tell me about the actual Diamond Market I believe you invested in a company that makes diamonds so interesting to go from sci-fi to actual investing thesis yeah so I invested in Diamond Foundry early and the thesis behind that was um when everybody thought that they were just going to make fancy diamonds that we wear for wedding rings I thought what is the secret here the secret is that we're actually going to need compute and Diamond Wafers are going to be a thing and also industrial diamonds which are actually the more expensive diamonds and they're not pretty we're going to need that for cutting for manufacturing and for you know all sorts of applications saw blades or made out of diamonds and when I went around to other investors and I told them about this future going back to Magic weird they're like you're crazy like this is just going to end up being a three karat diamond and this Market is they kept comparing it to deers and caring you know comparing it to you know the the Diamond market and I said no that's not you're not seeing the bigger picture here and that was in completely informed by the diamond age because in order to have this you know post scarcity future of abundance diamonds were a critical part of that and I don't know if you remember in the book but there are things that are made of diamonds in there you you know there are buildings made of diamonds they're just like all of the technology was enabled because of that unlock that we needed this this material that was virtually indestructible how how important do you feel science fiction is to the Future right it seems like and and is there more that the technology industry should be doing to invest in you know we have we we've had uh people like Jason Carman on the show who make documentaries about tech today he wants to eventually make sci-fi but do we need to be funding a lot more science fiction media is that one of the ways we running out of sci-fi it feels like we've invented most of the things that you know I grew up with except for you know flying cars but there's already flying car startups right yeah so my biggest gripe with Hollywood and with media in general is it's cheaper to create a dystopia than a Utopia so when we move into AI generation we'll be able to create Utopias cheaply and that actually will allow us to tell stories about a scientific future um that actually is possible where you know before in order to render all those things and to get things that didn't exist was incredibly expensive so the filmmaker just went to the dystopia it's much easier to create a wasteland to create like robots destroyed everything than to create robots made the future better for us and so I do think here's what's really interesting I gave a talk recently and I asked everybody in the audience who here has read Diamond age only one person and he was 20 years old raised his hand that is alarming to me that people people are not reading more science fiction and not writing more science fiction and not thinking about the future and what it can become you know I'm really excited about shows and books like free body problem because we do need to start thinking about we did send signals into space they will be received at some point and there will be aliens coming if they exist and so like these are things that are existential threats not only well to all of humanity that will bind us together where we actually start caring about things as humans rather than Nation stes and things like that is when Earth is going to encounter an outside force is going to be one of the most unifying forces for our entire planet and so I think we do need to think about that it is a future that could happen yeah the Utopia dist to me that more people don't read in general yeah we're not helping there I can't wa we're reading post we're reading a 100 posts a day to people uh no I think the the Utopia versus dystopia thing is super important you know we see this on social media if you post uh everything's bad you'll get 100,000 likes but if you go you know no one's ever had more access to food education Healthcare all this stuff it's like you know nobody nobody want to see that we want conflict dystopia means conflict means antagonist about it um we don't talk about the 99% of everything that's going right we fixate on the 1% that's going wrong and it becomes this narrative that the world is going to can I curse the world is going to [ __ ] and uh and and basically unfortunately young people when you ask them if the world is a better or worse place they think it's a worse place yeah because they're on Tik Tok because they're on social media because they're being fed a feed of non-stop violence and death and Tesla cars blowing up and and so your view of the world is dark and gloomy when it's actually you know people are living longer people are more prosperous you know there's so many things going on that's just so great for Humanity but we don't celebrate those things and so I'm really hoping that part of the the next four years of you know when you see people working on deep Tech and there's this new sort of reinvigoration of Technology where people are excited about the future that they start actually highlighting and talking more about the things that are going right than the things are going wrong that makes sense uh sort of a one last sort of random question I'm curious to get hear how you guys think about this uh we seem to be entering a period uh of sort of renewed nationalism globally like Europe waking up you know America's you know fighting trade Wars with our closest allies this comes at a time where you know um Lee I think we met for the first time at this sort of popup city right and there's sort of these renewed experiments around cities nation states Network States uh you know do you do you foresee a a future where people are traveling way more and we're all investing globally or are we going through an era where you know do you do you do you imagine that most of this fund as an example will be deployed here in the US or you guys thinking you know how are you thinking about International yeah let's say answer the the broader frame I think from our perspective we're really open-minded uh you know if you're really going to do invest in the magically weird and um do things that you know the Absurd before it becomes consensus you have to stay open-minded so we've done things all over the world in Europe and in Brazil and stuff like that but in general we've always been really excited about what happens in America uh and I think if I had guess most of the dollars will be deployed that way but I um yeah these little mini cities it's such an interesting future to imagine I do think that there will be we're in a recombination phase and like the Havoc actually the first name of the fund that I started was Havoc VC nval wanted me to keep it that way but um you know maybe one day we'll get back to long journey we'll Rebrand and in a few years and you guys will get the exclusive on back to Havoc you know yeah havoc.

VC was my URL um but I do think that the recom creates the opportunities for new ways of living in new cities and Edge City the stuff that um you know Janine and team there are working on is really powerful where we met Jordy I don't know what you think about countries have the culture that we have in America where it's okay to fail like when I speak broad you know I go abroad and I speak in France or Italy or wherever I have entrepreneurs who come up to me afterwards and they say you know I don't live in a culture where failure is an option and so I think that's one thing that makes us special we also have um laws that are pretty well established around businesses like that we we understand how the framework Works whereas if you invest abroad you have to understand the legal framework of that country which can be problematic sometimes and then I think going back to the diamond Age The Diamond age does cover Network States and it does cover um some really interesting very futuristic Concepts there there's this group of people that they call the Neo victorians and uh they basically have everything that's made by hand but they're the most tech techologically Advanced and the most wealthy uh group of people and they basically band together on a set set of values and so it's possible that we'll start seeing that going forward and we might see investable opportunities in in those um but it's still very Frontier and it's still very on the edge uh that sort of thinking but in general I think probably a majority of our investing is just going to stay in United States makes sense love it well thanks for stopping by congrats on the new fund uh we got to bring the size gong for go thank you for bringing the chain on as well it's a big fund it's great you yeah thank you so much for having us and we'll talk to you soon see you good luck out there see you later very cool it's hard to do hard to do uh for funds in basically well they didn't call it fund four because Chinese in Chinese the number four is for death so that's probably what from the numerology perspective that's probably why they skipped that go straight into