Cyan Banister — From Homeless and Broke to Top Angel Investor (Uber, SpaceX, and 100+ More) (#780)

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Cyan Banister (@cyantist) is a general partner at Long Journey Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm focused on early and new investments. Cyan was an early investor in Uber, SpaceX, DeepMind, Flexport, and Affirm and has invested in more than 100 companies. Prior to that, she was at Founders Fund, a top-tier fund in San Francisco. Subscribe to Cyan’s Substack at uglyduckling.substack.com.

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#780: Cyan Banister — From Homeless and Broke to Top Angel Investor (Uber, SpaceX, and 100+ More)

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Want to hear another podcast episode with a world-class investor? Have a listen to my most recent conversation with Oaktree Capital Management’s co-founder Howard Marks, in which we discussed navigating unprecedented uncertainties, crowded versus uncrowded opportunities, the state of the American economy, finding higher-signal sources of information, and much more.

What was your favorite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments.

SELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODE

Connect with Cyan Banister:

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SHOW NOTES

[00:06:16] Early life and education as a white minority on a Navajo reservation.
[00:11:18] Strained family dynamics and a cycle of neglect.
[00:18:20] The intervention of Officer Pratt and becoming a ward of the state at 15.
[00:22:46] Crusty punk survival strategies and life on the streets.
[00:32:02] The positive influence of Cyan’s “second” mother.
[00:34:17] Crass, Chris Collins, and computers.
[00:38:03] An unorthodox path to angel investment beginning with Uber.
[00:48:13] Niantic/Pokemon GO.
[00:56:27] How stalking Garrett Langley led to a Flock Security investment.
[01:00:07] GameCrush, activist investors, and lessons learned.
[01:07:00] Sales lessons from the street.
[01:10:08] A mindful approach to questioning narratives.
[01:15:35] The pre-OnlyFans story of Zivity.
[01:24:44] Views on sex and relationships.
[01:28:47] Magic glasses, esoteric rabbit holes, and rolling the dice.
[01:44:02] How Aleister Crowley and Bill Murray paved a path to ex-atheism.
[02:02:21] Cyan’s billboard.
[02:04:41] Enduring a stroke and its aftermath.
[02:08:31] Meditation, throat-singing, and philosophy.
[02:17:50] The Boston spiritual experience and duck boat baptism.
[02:40:53] A book in the works, the Ugly Duckling Substack, and parting thoughts.

MORE CYAN BANISTER QUOTES FROM THE INTERVIEW

“I’ve always felt like an outsider no matter where I am, and I think that’s been wonderful and incredible for my career. You can certainly look at that and have kind of a victim mindset about it, but I took the opposite path, which was this is what makes me special, that I don’t fit in wherever I am.”

— Cyan Banister

“Once you’re homeless, you can never be un-homeless. It’s really strange. Every time I walk around at a conference or anything, I see all the waste. I see, if I were a homeless person, I could come and I could have this, no matter where I’m at.”

— Cyan Banister

“You have to face something very ugly, which is yourself. You have to look inside and see who and what you really are, and then you have to love yourself even when you don’t like what you see.”

— Cyan Banister

“When people used to say practice self-love, I thought it meant go eat bonbons and go see a good movie and smoke a joint. That was self-love. But it wasn’t getting me anywhere, and I was like, ‘This whole self-love thing is jive. It’s just not working out.’ But I didn’t realize that self-love is learning how to give yourself unconditional love. And the best way I’ve learned how to give yourself unconditional love is imagine yourself as a ball of light and then take that ball of light and visualize it outside of your body and cradle it like it’s a baby. Now, when you look at that baby, would you hurt that baby?”

— Cyan Banister

“My purpose is very simple, which is to spread joy, to lift other people up around me, and to do my best in my own way to end poverty. Now, I’m not responsible for ending poverty. I think we’re all responsible.”

— Cyan Banister

“When you start realizing Oh, I’m in a school, and all of these hard knocks in life are just lessons, you think about them very differently.”

— Cyan Banister

“We’re just a hair away from being crazy, every one of us.”

— Cyan Banister

“We apply a lot of our own perception to everything that everyone says around us. We make up stories that are fiction, and a lot of what people suffer with today are these stories, these narratives that we tell ourselves and one another, and I’ve just always felt like that something that someone said right now, it’s not a hard no. You know when you hear a hard no. I know the difference between an objection and I just have a rebuttal for it versus a hard no. And until it’s a hard no, there’s wiggle room to get something done. And so I’ve just always felt this, and it’s interesting that you ho[m]ed in on it, but it’s definitely been a guiding principle in my life, which is don’t give up. Just try different approaches. Maybe you didn’t ask the right way, or maybe you didn’t give the right incentives, or maybe it was Monday and they’re in a bad mood.”

— Cyan Banister

“My life has only been improved by taking myself out of the decision-making process, because I am the hindrance.”

— Cyan Banister

“We’re all in Earth school, and we inhabit human bodies, but we’re nothing but an energy force inside of them. And that life force does not dissipate, and it doesn’t go nowhere. It goes somewhere.”

— Cyan Banister

“You’re just sleepwalking through life. And the moment you take the reins and you become the narrator of your own story, and sometimes the captain, then that’s when it’s a transformational change.”

— Cyan Banister

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