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Minus One · 3 min · May 21, 2025

Investors find more alpha by looking beyond the current AI wave

Cyan Banister · Co-founder & general partner, Long Journey Ventures

Cyan Banister explains why her firm invested in AI infrastructure early and is cautious about crowded applications.

The episode’s best minutes

Full episode
  1. 20:40Science fiction gets mythology right more often than details5 min
  2. 13:27Investors find more alpha by looking beyond the current AI wave3 min
  3. 1:07:19AI may absorb emotional work pushed out of social life3 min
  4. 5 more moments in the full episode
“this whole space has been defined and therefore there's no price advantage as an investor.”
Cyan Banisterat 15:10 · Minus One
15:10

Takeaways

  1. Look six to eight years ahead when a market is crowded.
  2. Infrastructure can be a better early bet than applications.
  3. Seek opportunities that let people work across disciplines.

About this segment

Cyan Banister explains why her firm invested in AI infrastructure early and is cautious about crowded applications. She looks for what comes next, where competition may be lower.

Cyan Banister

Co-founder & general partner, Long Journey Ventures

Backed early bets on Uber, Postmates, SpaceX and Flock Security; previously partnered at Founders Fund.

  • Aditya Agarwal, Host · General partner, South Park Commons

    One of Facebook's first engineers, he helped build its first search engine; later CTO of Dropbox.

From “AGI, Sci-Fi, & Storytelling | Neal Stephenson, Ken Liu, Cyan Banister, & Joscha Bach”, May 21, 2025. Watch the full episode

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

  1. 13:30

    So given the crowd here, Saino, I want to ask you kind of how you think about this, right? Like obviously investors in particular are always both, um, having to sort of be boosters and also be sober, uh, about things at the same time, right? You have to be like the second believer is, as I think you, you, uh, at Long Journey like to put it. And then also you have to evaluate, like, actually, is this something that has the potential to stick and become something in the real world?

  2. 13:59

    Yeah, you know, I think there's obviously a Cambrian explosion right now of activity in this space. And so as an investor, I like to take a seat back, actually, and try to figure out what's coming six to eight years from now. And so one of the things we did at Long Journey when about four years ago is we started thinking about the picks and shovels of this space, like power, compute. What are the things that this revolution is going to need?

  3. 14:27

    And now that we're in the sort of application layer where things are being built on top of it, as an investor, this is not an exciting time for me to invest. I know that sounds weird. And there's going to be certain things that we do do, But as a rule, you know, I want to figure out, you know, going back to the diamond age, you know, nanotechnology, biotechnology, like when we have these agents that actually can make a human superhuman and you can now be a super biologist or a super whatever, you know, and you can be work across disciplines and do things that we never thought possible before.

  4. 15:04

    What is coming next? And so that's what we like to think about. And that's where the alpha is, because when we're competing against everybody else for what is happening right now, basically this whole space has been defined and therefore there's no price advantage as an investor. I mean, I think the promise, you know, in terms of what you're talking about here is AI does have the potential to become a sort of mental capacity multiplier, right? I think one of the great things about AI that has turned out to be really useful is it serves as a general interface between different domains of expert knowledge that are otherwise locked in their silos. So if that trend continues and is fully realized, what you're talking about here can be unlocked. All these different domains of nanotechnology, bioengineering, and so on and so

  5. 15:56

    of worth can become something that a small A small number of individuals now have the power to actually understand and utilize through AI that they could not do before. So I think that's a really powerful and interesting... Yeah, we'll have polymaths on steroids, which is kind of crazy. When you say a small number of individuals, do we believe that humans are generally intelligent?