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
We can all create magic in the world for other people and for ourselves if you think about a situation and you act in that moment.
Yeah, so I think when I first started investing, I made a lot of mistakes. We hear about the wins, but you don't hear about the losses because you're really tuning your antenna in the beginning. My first check ever obviously ended up being a wild success, but there was lots of checks after that that did not. You have to accept those failures as a lesson.
As you go forward and then internalize those lessons. What did I do wrong? What did I not see? It wasn't out of my control. Did I still do the right thing, but then it was the wrong timing, et cetera, et cetera. And then you hone that into your gut feeling so that when the next time comes around, you can make hopefully a better decision. Now I've been at this hundreds of companies.
I was at Founders Fund, obviously was on the investment committee there, have seen many, many, many deals. My antenna is getting better and better and better. I think my job now is to teach future generations how to trust their gut. So when I left Founders Fund, I joined Lee Jacobs at Long Journey Ventures. And he's a decade younger than me. He's just starting out and hitting his stride.
He's been at it for a while, but his early investments are starting to bear fruit. For example, he was a seed investor in Loom and Loom just exited. So he had his very first exit. So he's got his first story right now, which is really, really exciting. Hopefully help him and inspire him to, one, I have no doubt he's going to be wildly successful. Same thing with Ariel.
I just want them to follow their North Star in the end, which is what causes do you care about where as you are successful, you can make a real dent in them. In the beginning, it was about making the money and continuously deploying the money and the causes that I was supporting through the actual companies themselves. But now I'm starting to think about all my actions.
How do they help the bigger whole? So sometimes you'll see me doing things with companies that we have very small investments in, and you'll see me putting a lot of time into it. even though I know that the returns aren't going to be huge because it doesn't really matter. That person's out there doing something incredibly important. It's not about opportunity costs.
I'm a firm believer in whatever you put out in the universe comes back to you. You know, if you do good things, good things come back. It's just how it works. So what's changed for me is just being more methodical about my time, how I'm spending it, who I'm spending it with, what kind of vibrational energy is around me. Am I lifting up the vibrations of the world around me?
Are they lifting me up and so forth? And that's all I want to focus on because I just want to make a venture firm that's going to be around long after I'm dead. And my spirit is inside of it somehow. It lives in the values. It lives in the discussions that we've had. And so I believe that our thesis around investing is the combination of the three of us. But my spirit is definitely in there.
Founders Fund has a spirit. It comes from Luke Nosek, who was one of the original founders of Founders Fund. he dared to disrupt the venture industry to create the first truly founder-friendly venture firm. And this is not about being value-add, by the way. It was about not ever firing a founder and removing them from their company. That's it.
That's their biggest value proposition, which is they will not mess with you once they've invested in you. That seems like Kind of a simple thing to hang your hat on, but it's actually in the end comes down to be incredibly important as they think that the soul and the spirit of the company lives in the founder.
Yeah, my philosophy isn't quite as far as Founders Funds. Founders Fund is like, we invested in you and now you're on your own and it's your job to extract value from us. A certain founder loves that because they know how to get value. They look at that group of people and they know who they're connected to and they know what to ask for.
We are a little bit to the left of that if they were on the far end of the spectrum. We are more hospitality oriented because I think at the seed stage, being hospitality oriented is important. What that means is one of our values is be a bubby. Bubbies are grandmothers who give you hard advice, but they love you.
And so our job is to give honest feedback to the founders, but give them unconditional love. What a founder needs to hear is the hard stuff. They need to hear like, you're not performing compared to the rest of our portfolio companies of the same vintage, maybe in the same space, or this person you've hired is probably not cutting it.
The other thing is to letting them know when they have done amazing things that you notice and giving that feedback, just like a Bubby would do. Then being there for them in the hard times, because the one thing that all CEOs are afraid of is really revealing all their cards to investors because it could backfire. That's why they always say it's always up and to the right. Everything's great.
We're killing it. And then you later on find out that's not really the case. If you can form a true relationship with your founders, they're going to tell you when things are not going right because they want you to lean in and help. We want to be there
When you've had a loss in the family, we want to be there when your best friend, something happened to them because we are human beings at the end of the day, it's a mental game. So we do a lot of things around like mental coaching and presence of mind and things like that with our founders. We think that all the rest of it is got to be a core competency of the company, right?
Like we're not going to help with marketing. We're not going to help with hiring or any of these things, unless we have a candidate that lands on our lap. And then we do place them in companies. We absolutely do do that, but we're not going to go out and be recruiters. All of that needs to be core to your business. And I think that's what truly matters, especially at the early stages.
So I was talking to Justin and my partner and they said, you really should look into IFS and try it out. So then I tried it out and I went in skeptical and came out realizing, oh my gosh, how amazing is that? For people that don't know what IFS is, you basically view all your parts of your personality as there are no bad parts involved.
Every part is there to serve you, including the ones you might not like. And they come online to serve you because they're trying to defend you and protect you, yourself, that's underneath all of that stuff.
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