Scott Banister

Scott Banister (born 1975) is an American entrepreneur, startup founder, and angel investor. He cofounded the anti-spam company IronPort, and he was an early advisor and board member at PayPal. He invented paid search advertising via keyword auction, the core business model for internet advertising companies like Google and Facebook.

Scott Banister
Born1975 (age 45–46)
Kansas City, Missouri
Alma materUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
OccupationEntrepreneur, investor
Known forCo-founder of IronPort
Spouse(s)Cyan Banister

Early life and career

Banister is the son of Debbie and Bruce Banister (1951–2006), a civil engineer who lived in Kansas City, Missouri.[1]

In the summer of 1995, while Banister attended University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, he cofounded SponsorNet New Media, Inc., with fellow students Max Levchin and Luke Nosek.[2]

Banister left college during his sophomore year in 1996 to cofound Submit It!, "a free, automated resource for bringing your page to the attention of many Web-searching outfits at once", according to the New York Times.[3] Ali Partovi called it "a simple but elegant concept that turned out to be one of the best business ideas in history".[4] Submit It! was acquired by LinkExchange in June 1998,[5] then by Microsoft in November 1998.[6]

Banister has worked with other start-ups as a board member and investor, including eVoice, the first email-enabled home voicemail service acquired by AOL in 2001. He served as VP of Ideas at idealab!, where he contributed the unique bid-for-placement search engine model that powers Overture.[4][7]

In December 2000, with Scott Weiss, Banister "cofounded spam-blocking firm IronPort to stop porn from flooding corporate in-boxes".[8] It was acquired in 2007 by Cisco for US$830 million.[9]

He was an early investor in Powerset, a startup building a natural language search engine. His other private equity investments include Uber, Zappos.com, LiveOps, Facebook, Hi5.com, Tagged.com, iLike, Causes.com, Topsy Labs, Teleport, Inc.[10] and TekTrak.[11] Banister also cofounded Zivity, an adult themed social networking site, with his wife, Cyan Banister, and Jeffrey Wescott.[8]

David Gelles has identified Banistger as one of the "PayPal Mafia", former board members of PayPal, influential investors in "a collection of some of the most valuable technology start-ups ever seen".[12]

Personal life

Banister is a marijuana rights activist and was a supporter of Republican Senator Rand Paul.[13] In 2015, Banister donated $3 million to a Super PAC supporting Paul.[14] He later switched his endorsement to Ted Cruz after Paul suspended his campaign.[15]

Banister lives in Half Moon Bay, California, with his wife Cyan. On September 5, 2018, Cyan Banister spoke at TechCrunch Disrupt, telling her surprising origin story, and how couple met and work together.[16]

Awards and honors

Cyan and Scott Banister won the Angel of the Year Crunchie award at the 2016 TechCrunch ceremonies.[17] Jessi Hempel of Wired wrote that they "won TechCrunch’s Angel of the Year award last spring for prescient bets on SpaceX, Uber, and DeepMind Technologies."[18]

In 2015, Eugene Volokh announced that the UCLA First Amendment Amicus Brief Clinic would be renamed the Scott & Cyan Banister First Amendment Clinic, "in recognition of the Banisters' very generous gift in support of the clinic."[19]

References
  1. "Obituary for Bruce Banister". The Kansas City Star. August 12, 2016. pp. A13. Retrieved January 23, 2021.
  2. "SponsorNet New Media". Freebase. Archived from the original on January 18, 2012. Retrieved February 17, 2011.
  3. Gleick, James (May 5, 1996). "FAST FORWARD; Hall of Mirrors". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved January 23, 2021.
  4. "Bubble Blinders: The Untold Story of the Search Business Model". TechCrunch. Retrieved December 1, 2020.
  5. "LinkExchange Acquires Submit It!". ClickZ. June 24, 1998. Retrieved January 22, 2021.
  6. "Acquisition Enables MSN to Reach More Customers". microsoft.com. Microsoft News Center. November 5, 1998. Archived from the original on June 10, 2007. Retrieved January 22, 2021.
  7. Guth, Robert A. (January 17, 2009). "Microsoft Bid to Beat Google Builds on a History of Misses". Wall Street Journal. ISSN 0099-9660. Retrieved December 1, 2020.
  8. Barret, Victoria. "You Get What You Pay For". Forbes. Retrieved January 23, 2021.
  9. Keith Regan (January 4, 2007). "Cisco buys IronPort for $830 Million". E-Commerce Times. Retrieved May 21, 2013.
  10. "Scott and Cyan Banister". angel.co. Retrieved August 5, 2016.
  11. "iPhone Tracking Service Provider TekTrak Locates Seed Funding". TechCrunch. December 14, 2010. Retrieved March 1, 2011.
  12. Gelles, David (April 1, 2015). "The PayPal Mafia's Golden Touch". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved January 23, 2021.
  13. "Silicon Valley's Libertarian revolution". Politico. Retrieved July 20, 2014.
  14. "Million-Dollar Donors in the 2016 Presidential Race". New York Times. August 25, 2015. Retrieved October 14, 2015.
  15. "This top Rand Paul donor just made a big endorsement in the presidential race". Rare. February 3, 2016. Retrieved November 3, 2018.
  16. TechCrunch (September 5, 2018), Cyan Banister (Founders Fund) tells her surprising origin story, retrieved September 8, 2018
  17. Shivakumar, Felicia (2016). "Scott and Cyan Banister Win Angel Investor of the Year at the 9th Annual Crunchies". TechCrunch. Retrieved September 8, 2018.
  18. Hempel, Jessi (October 11, 2016). "The Venture Capitalist Who Is Both a Man and a Woman". Wired. Archived from the original on December 9, 2017. Retrieved September 7, 2018.
  19. Volokh, Eugene (February 18, 2015). "The Scott & Cyan Banister First Amendment Clinic". The Washington Post. Archived from the original on February 19, 2015. Retrieved November 12, 2018.
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