Cyan Banister
speaker
346 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Cyan Banister’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
So, you know, how does this impact M&A? I mean, it's still pretty slow out there. You know, some actions better than no action, but like Niantic was just bought by Scopely.
I was.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's a Saudi conglomerate. And so that exited for 3.7 billion. And I think we're going to start seeing some movement, especially with the new administration.
Oh, my gosh. As soon as they spun out when Alphabet formed and spun them out as their own entity. There's a funny story for another time about how I got into the deal. But I realized it was my only opportunity to get in as early as possible. And so I stalked the founder and sat at his door. Oh, tell us the story. Okay.
Yeah, it's a great story. So before Pokemon Go, they had this game called Ingress. And I started playing it with my friends and I started noticing that my friends were doing some really unusual things. They were like charting helicopters and like traveling all over the world to cast these invisible triangles over the earth.
Basically, it's a game of green versus blue and who can cast the biggest triangle. I was like, why are these people spending so much time? And not only that, but why are they going around taking pictures of points of interest? for Google. Like, what is Google actually doing with this asset was my number one question. So I realized that Ingress was part of a bigger mapping plan.
I mean, if you look at the team, you look at John Hanke, they all come from Keyhole, and they're obviously part of the Maps team and helped build Google Earth. So this wasn't just a game. Pokemon Go was a joke. It was basically an April Fool's joke where the founder of Pokemon said, wouldn't it be cool if we put Pokemon on the map and we just tried to find them?
And John Henke's like, yeah, let's turn this into an Ingress-like game. I went around telling everybody like if I had a chance to invest in anything, it would be Niantic. And because they were part of Google, I thought there was no chance. And then I got a call one day and they said, hey, my friend of mine was like, did you hear Niantic spun out?
I was like, oh my gosh, I don't know anyone at Google. How do I reach John Hanke? And I realized I'd invested in this company called Hentwater and they were giving out game codes on the bottle cap. And I was setting up her ticketing system one day and helping her out in her office. And I saw all these tickets coming in with the subject line that said Ingress Game Code.
And I was like, what is this all about? And I just connected the dots and she introduced me to John Hanke. And then I went there with two engineers because I figured I got to show up with some value here. two badass engineers who were players. We sat on the front stairs and basically sat there and said, please take our money. He's like, I don't need you. I've got Nintendo. I've got Google.
I've got, and we're like, no, you really need us. And he gave one of those engineers a job offer pretty much that day. He gave me a key card to the office. And so I can come and go from Niantic as I please, which is pretty awesome. But it's just a fun story, you know? Yeah.
Just quickly, you know, one of the things that really concerns me is how we've been so high on cheap supply for so long. Like if you look at Shein and Timo before this pandemic, podcasts, I wouldn't looked up that their prices are up by 27% or something like that. And so when you used to be able to get a garment for $18, you're now paying $37 and Zara is like 75 for an equivalent.
And I think people really liked getting packages in the mail and feeling like their dollar went further and it's not going far. And so when you have a bunch of people who can't buy anything and consumerism is a big part of our, unfortunately, in some ways, our culture, you know, what does that do to You know, if you're looking around, there's urban blight everywhere in retail.
And, you know, we can't fill our malls. We don't have brick and mortar stores. They're shutting down. Forever 21 just shut down. You know, these are the types of things that, you know, people really care about is whether, especially in a time where, you know, you do have a recession, people want to buy a tube of lipstick or a dress to feel better about their life.
And right now they can't even do that. And so that's what concerns me is thinking about the retail future and then, you know, the consumer landscape of how this all affects everybody.
Well, obviously, Boeing is the big loser here. It's interesting to me how bad they just fumbled this. And then there's the political element. I don't know if we want to get into it. about how we weren't able to save these astronauts and they were stuck up there.
We were seeing it landing in the water, but what you're not seeing is they couldn't walk when they got out and they were only supposed to be there for what, like 10 days?
Yeah, eight months, which is horrendous because one of the things that I believe that America stands for is we don't leave people like that. And it's an American issue, not a political one. And so there's no reason why we shouldn't have engaged SpaceX sooner. It was offered and they turned it into a completely political issue and Boeing fumbled the ball.
And so, you know, I think hopefully this is a message that's loud and clear. And one of the things I'm so excited about is little kids watching this and seeing this and what it means for the future of our country, because they're looking up to people like Elon and they're going to be the next political class in the future. And that will matter. You know, this is the equivalent of the moon landing.
Showing 241–260 of 346 · page 13 of 18
← Previous
Next →