Cyan Banister is an early stage investor in Uber, Niantic, SpaceX, many others. She’s a partner at Long Journey Ventures and spends most of her time dreaming about what the future could look like. In this NFX conversation with James Currier, they talk about the opportunities of AR, VR and the future of human connection. 

Highlights from the conversation:

- Allow yourself to become obsessed with something. Really obsess about the product and dream about what it can become.
- Invest in things that will become part of your life. 
- Futurism is more than being intellectual, it’s more about daydreaming, it’s about how you feel and how you live.
- Silicon Valley is getting too serious. Where did the hacker mentality go? AR, and crypto are real frontier categories where there is still bright eyedness of “we don’t know what’s going to happen.”
- Endless curiosity helps identify people who are solving problems that are actually real problems.
- Be curious about how systems work. Analyze businesses and what makes them special. Try to figure out the economics of everything, anything.
- Sometimes it makes sense to paint inside the lines, but sometimes you really have to paint outside the lines.

Regarding the future of VR: There's no reason why you and I, if we want to hang out, that we have maybe 8 options… go to dinner, have a phone call, see a movie, maybe go for a walk… but why aren't there thousands of options? There should be so many, that's why Founders need to think bigger.