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
And at the time I had a pretty strict rule about only investing kind of in my backyard because every time I tried to invest outside of my ecosystem, I got hosed. I didn't know the players in New York or the players in Austin or Europe. And I couldn't get follow-on financing for the companies. That's all changed, especially since the pandemic and people have become remote.
But then I was just like, ah, so I put Ryan Graves' card away. Fast forward, David Hornick has this amazing event called The Lobby. I went to it. And basically, The Lobby is based around the fact that most amazing conversations happen in the lobby of the hotel. It's not the content. It's not any of it other than that. And it's absolutely true.
And it also happened in the swimming pool and the hot tub and the various things when you're offsite at a resort that happen. Like you go snorkeling together, you go swimming together. So a huge group of us were in a hot tub and there's this guy, Travis Kalanick in the hot tub.
And he had just exited from Red Swoosh and he basically announced to everybody he was on the bench looking for his next thing. As an investor, you always pay attention when somebody says something like that. We trade on secrets. So I took stock of his personality and his personality was very alpha. It was very aggressive. You could tell that everybody sort of quieted down when he spoke.
There's a lot of things you look for in a leader. And I noticed that. And so I thought, well, I'm just going to watch this guy and see what happens. So a few months later, I got invited to Open Angel Forum, which is a thing that Jason Kalkanis did for a while. And I'm sitting there and like the second presentation that comes up is Travis Kalanick presenting UberCab.
And I wrote to my husband and I said, we need to invest in UberCab like today, right now. I don't understand what's going on with Ryan Graves, but it's kind of irrelevant. And we did meet Ryan Graves and we loved him, but we knew, or at least I knew that Ryan Graves would step aside with a person like that.
He's going to want to be the CEO or Ryan would even recognize he was the natural fit for it. I'm not sure what happened on the back end, but Ryan did step aside. He became the COO and the rest is history. And so there's an example of just being really curious and following the white rabbit, so to speak, down the rabbit hole. You take that curiosity and you see where it goes.
And then you strike the moment you have that lightning bolt. The lightning bolt hit me when Travis got up.
I believe that one was $8 million.
That's the first round.
There's this beautiful period when the company is small and you can send emails to the CEO and they respond. And that's usually when they're under 100 employees. And then that disappears. And it's natural. Every angel investor, every early seed stage investor should understand that this could happen. Travis becomes more unreachable.
Emil becomes more unreachable because you're not their most important problem of the day. They're fighting so many fires. And it's not because they don't like you or love you or aren't even thankful for that first investment. It's because they've got to run a company. And so there's this period after 100 employees that they lean on you a lot less.
that's where you kind of just sort of surrender to the big players that are going to write the checks and hope for the best outcome. There's very little you can do. You know, in the case of Uber, Chris Saka got involved very early. He rolled up his sleeves and he actually showed up to board meetings, to planning sessions. And they saw a lot of utility in that.
And so that's one way that you could stay connected to the business. For me, that's not my style. I tend to like to be somebody's backbone and they call me whenever they need a door opened or they need something fixed or they want my particular type of advice. The uncomfortable part happens when the company does really, really well.
And then suddenly everybody starts speculating about your personal wealth and starts telling you what you should do with it. And you start getting written up in articles and your privacy starts getting invaded. And that can be pretty daunting. That happened for a period of time. And then of course, when they go public, there's a holding period.
Yes, yes. I actually think that it's best psychologically for people to not think about specific outcomes, to set it and forget it, literally. To say, I will be pleased with whatever happens because that needle is going to move all over the place. There were times that we thought that our shares would be worth something and then the next day they're not. You're in for a wild ride at that stage.
And so I just think you shouldn't become too attached to it and you should just come up with a plan for why did you do this in the first place? And what are you going to do with that money once you have it? So this is something I always try to advise my partners and anyone in the investing spaces. Why do what we do if it doesn't serve a higher purpose or higher power?
So if you are lucky enough to have an exit of any material means to you and your family, I think it's really, really important to align it with your North Star, whatever it is. You see Warren Buffett do this.
You see the most amazing people in the world, high net worth individuals who figure out charitable causes to support or how to align their investing by starting a fund and getting institutions that they believe in alongside them. So that every dollar you write, you maximize that dollar. You're solving cancer research or you're helping kids go to school or you're helping a pension fund.
Then you're actually really making a dent in the world through capitalism. And I think capitalism has like such a, I don't know, people use it like a dirty word. And I think it's one of the most beautiful concepts in the world that we have to protect. because it absolutely can move the needle in innovation and change things on multiple levels.
Showing 81–100 of 346 · page 5 of 18
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