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.
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Appearances
The fact that I'm a high school dropout, I didn't go to university is a plus in his mind. He wants to work with investors who never wanted to be investors.
I was homeless at a very young age and I grew up very poor. And I always remember where I came from. And so when I do investments, for example, some of the investments I've made in Postmates or Uber, I always think about the younger me, which is if I could have driven an Uber or I could have delivered a sandwich, that would have been life-changing for me.
And I think a lot of the times when we're investors, we live in a bubble, our lives are relatively comfortable for the most part, and we lose track of what the rest of the world's experience is. Being able to have flexibility in your income and in your work is a dream come true for many, many people.
And so my North Star is around ending poverty, creating different types of wealth categories and income generating categories for people who didn't have access to those in the past. For example, AngelList. crowdfunding, reg CF financing, things like that are really interesting to me. And if you look across my portfolio, that's not always the case.
Sometimes I'm just really interested in a category and I want to invest in it. But for the most part, I would say that anytime someone comes to me and they say, I have a new way for people to reach a market and sell a product that could be life-changing for a small entrepreneur. That's where I really, really, really like to play.
I think that some of the companies, while vilified, like if you look at Uber and you look at Postmates, they've been vilified throughout time. It really, really doesn't take into account that there's people out there that are disabled. There's people out there that have family on hospice. There's people out there that have children in daycare and they need that flexibility.
They need that source of income. And otherwise they would have been locked into a nine to five job with no flexibility, unable to take care of their relatives, unable to take care of their own medical needs. And so I want to invest in things that really change and move the needle in people's lives on a grand, grand scale.
And then I think there's obviously venture returns in those opportunities, but they also align with my North Star and my core values.
Yeah, I really like when a founder has overcome some kind of adversity. So it's one of the questions I ask, which is what sort of adversity have you faced in your life? And I'm not looking for a story like mine. Adversity comes in many, many ways. For example...
You might be a founder who grew up in a family that expected you to become a doctor or a lawyer, and maybe they immigrated to America, and they know that that's a really good career for you to have. And so they push you hard to do those things. And then you say, no, actually, I'm going to go start something else, and I'm going to build this company because...
I really feel like it's the right thing to do. And this is my calling. So answering a call to adventure against your parents could be a form of adversity. Maybe you went to the military and you were deployed and you had to overcome what you saw. That's also interesting. Maybe you were in Parkland and you were at the shooting. And you overcame that adversity.
We have founders who are coming out of those. And I just really think it's remarkable when they come out of one of these experiences with a fresh set of eyes and a new perspective on the world, and most importantly, hope. They're just like, yeah, I had it rough, or I overcame this challenge, but... I'm so excited about living. I'm so excited about innovating.
And I look for those founders and I want to help them and I want to be by their side. Because when you build a company, you're going to be faced with so many amazing challenges. And if you can't overcome them all, if you can't move past them, if you can't put your ego aside and do what's right for the company and always arrive at the best answer, then you probably won't succeed.
I've been thinking about this a lot as I've been writing. And I really honestly think that when you're faced with the question of survival, that was literally my question. I was turned out onto the street when I was 15 years old. I didn't have a job. You have to ask yourself, do you hunker down and just say, this is it for me?
Or do you say, I've got to turn over all the stones and see where the opportunities are. I've got to figure this out. I have to have hope. I have to have faith that something's going to work. And so I chose to have faith and hope route every time. And it always worked out. It always did. And I think that had I gone the other direction and just said, there's no hope, there's no future.
I can't do this. The cards are stacked against me. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Yeah, I was in that moment. So I became a ward of the state and they removed me from my mother's house. And they told me I had 24 hours to find a home. And I didn't have a home. I didn't know where to get a home. They told me that if I didn't find a home in 24 hours, they were going to put me in a group home. I'd been in those group homes. And I knew that that's not where I wanted to end up.
And so I just said, I looked up at the sky and I said, please universe help me. And I got an answer, which was, I knew one adult and I walked over to her house and I said, can I live with you? And she said, sure. Very easily in that moment, I could have just sat there and succumbed to sorrow, to suffering, to all of it. And because it worked out, I just kept doing it.
It was one of those things where I was just like, you know what? I had a stroke five years ago and same thing. I looked at it with curiosity. I looked at it with wonder. And got through my stroke. I lost my ability to walk, my ability to see. If you look at everything with curiosity and wonder and love and hope, you can overcome a lot of things.
And I think that's what people don't realize is that it takes a lot of bravery to be optimistic. It's easy to be pessimistic. It's easy to say that things won't work. It's easy to say, I'm not going to do that because then you don't have to muster up the willpower.
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