Welcome to Long Journey Ventures

A few people know who we are, but we haven’t made ourselves widely known. I’d like to pretend that was by design, but it was more circumstantial. There were so many things going on in the world that were above our pay grade, that we decided to focus on what we do best, which is finding and funding amazing founders.

We’re a hodgepodge of varied people -- from chocolate factory owners, avocado farmers, former world class soccer players--to formerly homeless people -- we’re all very different and all pretty weird. I’m biased, but I think we are the most interesting group of early stage investors out there.

Every member of the Long Journey team has started a company and invested personal money into startups for close to a decade. Many of our partners operate their own companies. We not only like that, but encourage it. We feel this is important for a variety of reasons, most obviously, that we understand founders and their journey. We’ve walked that path and we feel we can be good sherpas for the travels they have ahead of them.

More importantly, this has let us build a unique model that other funds don’t have, which we like to call a “Federation of Angels/Operators.” The “federation” part is important, because it allows us to attract world class talent as true partners and keep our fund relatively small. This means that founders get an incredible group of experienced veterans for minimal dilution.

Through the ups and downs of starting companies we’ve built one of the best investing track records there is. We have collectively been a part of 30+ unicorns from the earliest days. We wrote some of the earliest checks to companies like SpaceX, Uber, Compound (COMP), Postmates, Affirm, Notion, Loom, Rappi, Crusoe Energy, Mindbloom, Flexport, Niantic, IRL, and many more. By the way— most of these companies were dismissed as too weird at the time of their founding....

We’ve also built strong relationships with amazing founders and operators and are excited to say that many of them have invested in Long Journey.  People like Alfred Lin (via Sequoia Capital), Peter Thiel, Marc Andreesen, Chris Dixon, Keith Rabois, David Sacks, Lee Fixel, Chris Ovitz, Adrian Aoun, Jeff Fluhr, Marty Cagan, Emil Micheal, Elena Verna, Steve Eidelman, Lenny Rachtivksy, Andrew Chen, Micheal Arrington, and many more.

I am really proud of what we have done in the first fund so far. We took some risks, it is still early, but in general, I think I can safely say we are one of the top-performing funds of our stage out there.

My investing story started like so many of the new generation of investors on AngelList.

I didn't have access to Silicon Valley companies or much cash in the beginning, but I was determined to invest. I went to Brazil to find companies and when Naval announced AngelList syndicates in 2013 I had my chance. I was the first person to complete an AngelList syndicate, and after that-- I was hooked. I joined the AngelList team full time in 2015 and over our love of Chocolate that was being made by Todd and Elaine at Dandelion Chocolate, I raised a small micro-fund called Edelweiss with my operator friends Brian Balfour, Elaine Wherry and Jonathan Bruck. Brian is the CEO of Reforge and there is no one in the world better than Brian at thinking about how to grow a company. Elaine is an encyclopedia when it comes to leadership and building world class teams. Bruck is a master at helping founders achieve product-market fit and he created Pocket-a loved consumer app with millions of users. We learned a lot in those years, we’re still learning, but mostly how much we enjoyed helping our fellow entrepreneurs, and it gave us the confidence to go bigger.

In 2020, we renamed the fund Long Journey Ventures as it truly embodies what we care about expanded the team with two amazing new partners,- Pascal Levy-Garboua and Cyan Banister.

Pascal is ridiculously talented, has an insane angel track record, and also under the radar. I tend to like and be drawn to people like this. Scrappy hustlers who do what it takes to get things done and are self-driven. Pascal was one of the first investors in Notion, Checkr, Caviar, Kin Insurance, Spotter, Wyze, among other amazing startups. He was the first executive to join Checkr and help scale the company toward their multi billion dollar valuation. If you don’t know who he is — you really should.

While I knew for many years that Cyan Banister and I would work together, many were surprised when she announced her departure from Founders Fund and joined us. Why would one of the best angel investors ever leave a big firm to join a smaller one instead of doing her own thing?  Well, to understand the answer to that question — you have to understand Cyan. She doesn’t do anything anyone expects of her, she charts her own path. This is something I deeply admire about her. Working with her for almost two years now has been the greatest joy of my career. Her positivity and her deep belief in the human spirit, is a constant reminder of why I came to Silicon Valley in the first place. She is a wonderful tornado of randomness and she always keeps you on your feet.  We don’t always agree and she pushes my boundaries to uncomfortable levels, and this is one of the many reasons I love her.

So now we’re like Voltron and I feel like we’ve been forged in fire (ok-Cyan told me to write this part-I don't really know who Voltron is). While we’ve been part of seriously awesome businesses, we don’t take ourselves too seriously. We like to think of ourselves as the Bob Ross of VC. Some things are on purpose and some, well, they are just happy little accidents. There’s an art to what we do, but there’s also good fortune. We think of our founders as artists and the world as your canvas. We are here to provide paint and all of the necessary tools to help you achieve your life’s masterpiece.