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Cyan Banister

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211
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2024-11-27
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2024-11-27
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  1. “Hat, gloves. It didn't matter what it was, it had to be plaid. When you go into a store and they're like, Can I help you? And you're like, Do you have anything plaid? The answer is usually I have two things, like two items of clothing or three items of clothing. So it automatically forces you to not buy things and to constrain yourself with this weird pattern you've picked for the season.”

    2024-11-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #780: Cyan Banister — From Homeless and Broke to Top Angel Investor (Uber, SpaceX, and 100+ More) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “And I love clothes. I just love them. I love expressing myself with clothes. I love costumes. I love cosplay. I love textures. I love fabric. I love fashion. And so I've always had this guilt around loving these things. And so I tried to figure out how to be the best minimalist maximalist I could be. And so I started playing all sorts of forcing function games and it was came out of reading, you know, Gurgief and Frank Harris and Aleister Crowley and all these things dice rolling oddly came out of all of that. So I went to my friends and family and I said, I am tired of picking up my outfit every day, but I can't get a uniform. So can you guys pick a theme? And so the first theme was plaid. And I was plaid from head to toe.”

    2024-11-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #780: Cyan Banister — From Homeless and Broke to Top Angel Investor (Uber, SpaceX, and 100+ More) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “Story about Frank Harris that magic glasses when you read it is about trying on different perspectives and seeing the world in a new way. And if you were to be able to put on a pair of magic glasses that allowed you to see the world in a magical way, would you do it? And for how long would it be magical before you just relegated those glasses to your drawer of all the other choch keys and novelties that the human brain grows bored of? I started looking around at all the novelties in my life and all the things I had grown bored of and all of the perspectives I had tried on and tossed into the drawer. And I started looking at my wardrobe as being an interesting side effect of novelty. And so I started thinking about that story and thinking about my closet.”

    2024-11-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #780: Cyan Banister — From Homeless and Broke to Top Angel Investor (Uber, SpaceX, and 100+ More) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “He was also a cattle rancher. He became a cattle rancher, and he ended up killing people for cattle. And it's hard to tell what's real and what's fake. But back at the time, this might have happened. You know, it might have been real. But what led me down this rabbit hole was because I was trying to ask a very important question, which is a question I hope that everybody asks, which is why are we here? do any of this, anything that we've talked about at all, like what is the purpose of any of it has been a question, a rabbit hole that has continued throughout my life continues, probably will continue till the day I die. It'll be an unanswered question. I have some answers, but mostly it's an unanswered question. And I started playing with artificial constraints. It first started with my clothing. I realized I can't be like Steve Jobs. I can't be Mark Zuckerberg. I can't just wear a uniform and flip-flop.”

    2024-11-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #780: Cyan Banister — From Homeless and Broke to Top Angel Investor (Uber, SpaceX, and 100+ More) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “Frank Harris, yeah. So by Frank Harris. I highly recommend The rest of her in Karras' stuff is a little more challenging. So he was a cowboy who at the age of 14 basically ran away from home and the Invogue thing when you ran away from home in Europe was you ran off to America. That was your big F you. It's like I'm going to go get on a ship and you'll never see me again. So he ran off to America. He ended up falling into some amazing intellectual groups of writers. And he wrote one of the smuddiest books of the time called My Life and Loves, which was Band Worldwide. And it was an account of every single sexual encounter that this guy had It's a fantastic book, but And tough to read because.”

    2024-11-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #780: Cyan Banister — From Homeless and Broke to Top Angel Investor (Uber, SpaceX, and 100+ More) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “Gosh, I don't even know where to jump off here to tell. I go on rabbit holes and I go deep down these rabbit holes until I'm satisfied. And then I go down another one, another one, another one. And this particular one gripped me because I was interested in mysticism. And I started reading works by Alistair Crowley. Which I'm sure you're familiar with Which led me to this weird publication that he published, which also led me to a weird short story called The Magic Glasses by Frank, I forget his last name. It'll come to me later.”

    2024-11-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #780: Cyan Banister — From Homeless and Broke to Top Angel Investor (Uber, SpaceX, and 100+ More) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “It came up during the pandemic. So during the pandemic, the world was kind of divided into two camps. There was the people that were first responders, critical responders, critical infrastructure for the country who had to continue to go to work. So they were in their own kind of suffering and their own kind of experience of the pandemic. And then there was people who were forced to pause. And I was one of the forced to pause people. And so I started reading all of this early 1920s esoteric philosophy.”

    2024-11-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #780: Cyan Banister — From Homeless and Broke to Top Angel Investor (Uber, SpaceX, and 100+ More) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “So I got my hands on books, magazines, Cosmo, everything. And it wasn't until probably my mid 20s that my relationships to sex changed and I started having a much more positive outlook on it and enjoying it. But it took some time because in the beginning, I just thought, how did the human species survive? This is just awful. Because when you're young, you don't really know what you're doing.”

    2024-11-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #780: Cyan Banister — From Homeless and Broke to Top Angel Investor (Uber, SpaceX, and 100+ More) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “But I didn't have time for it then. So when I got into tech, I did date and I had some long-term relationships. And then obviously there was the homeless relationship with cuddles that lasted a long time. And my relationship to sex was just kind of like, it's fun. And it's just something you do, but it was never earth-shattering. It was another, I never wanted to build a Taj Mahal. And that was my bar. I was like, that guy, that woman must have been something. you know, to erect a monument to her that is just so grand like she must have been very, very good in bed is what I thought.”

    2024-11-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #780: Cyan Banister — From Homeless and Broke to Top Angel Investor (Uber, SpaceX, and 100+ More) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “Survive, you can't worry about someone else's well-being because you're drowning yourself. Like, you can't worry about someone else drowning. You have to put your oxygen mask on first. So I broke up with him and left and I put him in a little snow globe. I like to call it a snow globe of emotion because it taught me that that was possible, that someday I could love someone. And maybe that person would love me back”

    2024-11-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #780: Cyan Banister — From Homeless and Broke to Top Angel Investor (Uber, SpaceX, and 100+ More) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “There has to be some thing. And it just didn't work. Like I would try different things. I would try different scenarios. I was like, well, maybe I need to be in the racquetball court or I need to be over here or there. I thought it was situational. And then eventually I developed feelings for somebody and I didn't realize that that was the missing ingredient. I was like, wow, feelings for someone else. That's a concept. And I broke up with this guy immediately. So it was my first love. And it was a communist interestingly. He still is a communist. He has the hammer and sickle on his arm and everything. And I still love him to this day. And we're still friends. But I saw myself worrying about him, like where he was, what he was wearing. Did he eat? Has he slept? I started asking myself all these questions that were so weird. And I just didn't have time for them. I had to survive. And when you have this.”

    2024-11-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #780: Cyan Banister — From Homeless and Broke to Top Angel Investor (Uber, SpaceX, and 100+ More) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “Yeah, I love this question because we don't talk about it enough, to be honest with you, and it's, you know, along with eating and pooping and everything else that we do, sex is up there. I mean, it's how we have babies and how we express our love and how we connect with people. And we don't, it's so stigmatized. And I don't think it should be. But I became sexually active when I was 15. And despite finding the pornography and everything like that, it was later in my teenage years. And I was so disappointed. I thought, why did everybody make movies and write poetry and build the Tajmahal for something so awful? And I had a very negative view of sex, so negative that I started experimenting on boys. And this is maybe terrible, but this is what I did is I was determined to find that one connection that was worthy of writing a poem for. You know, there has to be somebody.”

    2024-11-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #780: Cyan Banister — From Homeless and Broke to Top Angel Investor (Uber, SpaceX, and 100+ More) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “I never envisioned Zivity becoming as big as OnlyFans, though. I think OnlyFans has really proven and hit a nerve. And one could argue that maybe it remains to be seen whether a product like this is a net positive for society or a net negative, but we did succeed at enabling this freedom, which I still think is valuable because a lot of people need this kind of freedom so that they can put themselves through school, so that they can buy their first home, so they can start a family and not everybody is blessed with being able to get certain types of jobs. And this gives them that flexibility.”

    2024-11-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #780: Cyan Banister — From Homeless and Broke to Top Angel Investor (Uber, SpaceX, and 100+ More) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “Well, back then it was a lot more controversial to do what we were doing. And they thought that my mere presence at a conference meant that I was going to pornify them in some way. Like I was going to start taking pictures of them or taking my top off or I don't know. I don't know what they thought, but they thought that I was going to do something. And Facebook actually asked me to come and speak to a group of engineers. They had a wonderful event and I was the headline speaker and there was a protest that happened and they held a protest across the street. And at our event, we did nothing but talk about code and engineering and at their event they did nothing but talk about porn. This day laugh about”

    2024-11-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #780: Cyan Banister — From Homeless and Broke to Top Angel Investor (Uber, SpaceX, and 100+ More) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “And we did register a domain called TopFans. And we did experiment with what OnlyFans is. But what happened is I just ran out of gas. I ran out of the ability to run that company and I was far more successful as an investor. And I was tired of fighting. I was really, really tired of fighting everybody. Like I was not allowed to be in the Apple App Store. I wasn't allowed to advertise on Instagram. I wasn't allowed to use normal payment processors. I wasn't even allowed to have an office at WeWork. I was protested at tech conferences. There were women who would come and protest me.”

    2024-11-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #780: Cyan Banister — From Homeless and Broke to Top Angel Investor (Uber, SpaceX, and 100+ More) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “Figured that out with Zivity at the very end, but I shut down Zivity when I was at Founder's Dun. I ran it for 10 years. We were the first company of our kind to raise venture capital, and we couldn't see eye to eye. The board, myself, the executive team, on what Zivity should be, because people thought it was about beauty, it was about an aesthetic, and I argued that it has nothing to do with beauty, that nobody really cares about that. Because they wanted to editorialize it like Playboy. And I had this insight. which ended up being right, which is anybody can be a model and anybody can make money as long as they have more than one fan.”

    2024-11-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #780: Cyan Banister — From Homeless and Broke to Top Angel Investor (Uber, SpaceX, and 100+ More) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “You're encouraging people to vote multiple times because each vote was basically worth a dollar. And then when you cast that vote or you voted, 70% went to the artists and was split between the photographer and model. Eventually we started bringing in makeup artists and costume designers. A lot of people don't realize that a lot of these really, really beautiful photo shoots involve a lot of people. There's a lot of people there and then they, you know, the compensation chain is complicated. But the person who does the hardest work is the model. So the model is the one who talks to the fans. And what I figured out with Zivity, actually, which only fans has figured out and a lot of these other platforms figured out, is it's about not about the content at all. Because over and over again, I would get told, why would anybody pay for this content's free? It's all over the internet. There's porn everywhere. What isn't free is the real human interaction with the person.”

    2024-11-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #780: Cyan Banister — From Homeless and Broke to Top Angel Investor (Uber, SpaceX, and 100+ More) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “And at the time there was webcam girls, they did exist, and you could buy packages and they've got some portion of the package, but their micropayment system was not really a thing. And so we started coming up with, we didn't know what to call it. It was technically tipping, but we didn't want to use the word tipping with the content that we were putting on Zivity. So Zivity was a nude, fully nude platform with no sex acts on it, actually. We didn't want to call it tipping because we didn't want to equate ourselves with a strip club. We wanted to bring up the class of what was happening more. So later on, Patreon figured out it's called patronage and Kickstarter figured out it's called backing somebody. But we didn't have the marketing language, so we called it voting. Now voting was a very, very confusing word of a call to action for anybody because you're not supposed to stuff a ballot box. You're not supposed to vote multiple times.”

    2024-11-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #780: Cyan Banister — From Homeless and Broke to Top Angel Investor (Uber, SpaceX, and 100+ More) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “And then they would get famous, and then they would use these images, and they had stage shows and all sorts of things. This is pretty standard, though. They weren't doing anything wrong. It was the industry standard. It was the Hollywood standard at the time. And I thought to myself, there has to be a better way. There has to be a way where photographers and models can have a fan interaction that's meaningful and then the fan becomes a patron of the art that they're making.”

    2024-11-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #780: Cyan Banister — From Homeless and Broke to Top Angel Investor (Uber, SpaceX, and 100+ More) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  20. “Come look at my porn in my locker. So I really, really felt that it was a beautiful art form that deserved a little more respect and that started very, very early. When I set up to start a company, at the time there was MySpace and then there was a competitor which became a friendly competitor of mine called Suicide Girls that had launched. And I tried to start Zivity before Suicide Girls even, but then suicide girls started and I was like, well, they're doing a fine job. I don't need to start a company because suicide girls is doing most of what I wanted. But what they didn't do was I didn't like the financial model of how they acquired content and how they treated the artists. So what they would do is they would buy a photo shoot that an artist did for $500 and you would sign a release for your likeness and your name and they pretty much owned it in perpetuity. So if I'm Cyan on suicide girls, I can't be cyan anybody's place else. And so a lot of these young women had no idea what they were signing.”

    2024-11-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #780: Cyan Banister — From Homeless and Broke to Top Angel Investor (Uber, SpaceX, and 100+ More) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  21. “This was like, holy cow, this is next level. Women are beautiful. And I dreamed about being beautiful like that someday. I was like, you know, I want to be beautiful like that. I want to be like that someday. Beauty back then in those magazines was very natural and very accessible. You could be that beauty. Whereas the beauty of Playboy later, when Hefner was older, became a very unaccessible beauty. But my mother also is an art teacher and she kept around all of these books with these Chinese sculptures. where they were doing very, very lewd sexual acts. And so to shock my friends at school, I would sneak these books to school and show them in the locker. Sometimes charge people for it.”

    2024-11-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #780: Cyan Banister — From Homeless and Broke to Top Angel Investor (Uber, SpaceX, and 100+ More) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  22. “A Playboy magazine. And I looked in there and I was like, that has to be the most beautiful at the time. These were vintage Playboys. Depiction of the human body I had ever seen. Because before this, I thought that the Sears Robux magazine was like the sexiest thing I'd ever seen, the underwear section.”

    2024-11-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #780: Cyan Banister — From Homeless and Broke to Top Angel Investor (Uber, SpaceX, and 100+ More) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  23. “This dog shows up, and this dog is so pick. And I'm so small. And they have these fierce looking eyes. And this thing, I'm like, this thing could eat me. But she would come in and she would eat the steak and she would roam around his apartment and stare at me and then she would, you know, do her thing and then eventually leave. And then I could lock up and then go. But Wolfie didn't come. She doesn't work on a schedule. So I would go over there and sometimes have nothing to do. So I started going through this guy's drawers, his cabinets, his books, his everything. There was nothing to do. It was so boring. Eventually I found.”

    2024-11-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #780: Cyan Banister — From Homeless and Broke to Top Angel Investor (Uber, SpaceX, and 100+ More) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  24. “Yeah, so you know. And this guy said, okay, all you have to do is come over to my house, you open the door, you go to the freezer, you get out of steak, you microwave the steak, and you crack an egg on it, and you leave it in the door frame. And Wolfie will just show up. And I was like, okay, I could do this. And it was a great summer gig.”

    2024-11-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #780: Cyan Banister — From Homeless and Broke to Top Angel Investor (Uber, SpaceX, and 100+ More) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  25. “Is basically a wolf, and you don't own a wolf. Like, they're very, very wild and untamable creatures. I don't know if you've been to a wolf sanctuary, but you can't let them.”

    2024-11-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #780: Cyan Banister — From Homeless and Broke to Top Angel Investor (Uber, SpaceX, and 100+ More) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  26. “I mean, I think it goes back to that. So it's a great story, but I got a summer job. I want to say I was 11, 12. I know this is going to sound disturbing, but it's really not. I got a job watching a wolf dog.”

    2024-11-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #780: Cyan Banister — From Homeless and Broke to Top Angel Investor (Uber, SpaceX, and 100+ More) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  27. “And Founders Fund pays for the whole thing. So our hotel room, I'm in a hotel room right now that's paid for, our meals are paid for. It's just incredibly generous for them to give this gift to the community. I know they source deals out of it. I know they get something out of it, but at the same time, I know how much effort it takes to roll up your sleeves and do what Mike Solana has done. And it's probably my favorite conference I attend by far. It's my number one favorite place to go.”

    2024-11-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #780: Cyan Banister — From Homeless and Broke to Top Angel Investor (Uber, SpaceX, and 100+ More) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  28. “As possible and what we were going to build, and it didn't turn into any of that, I would argue that social media and things like that did not do what we set out to make them do. But for the most part, I had thought that this optimism had died because of things like Uber, because of the backlash against tech people, that we had become pariahs. But this has this feeling of it coming back together and people are discussing the things that matter again without the fear of being canceled. I think that's the other thing that happens here is it's Chatham House rules. I think some things are leaking out on the internet, but for the most part, they're not. And you're encouraged to be yourself, and you're encouraged to be respectful, and you're encouraged to make friends across the aisle.”

    2024-11-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #780: Cyan Banister — From Homeless and Broke to Top Angel Investor (Uber, SpaceX, and 100+ More) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  29. “It's because some of the best ideas look heretical at the time when people claim that they can do something that is indistinguishable from magic, for example, they might be labeled a witch back in the day. When you make a technological advancement, it is indistinguishable from what looks like witchcraft sometimes. And then people, in order to get to the best possible answers, we need to have debate. And so this conference is about people debating and completely oppositional viewpoints. So there are people here who are hardcore atheists. There are people here who read tarot cards. There are people who are anti-AI and there's people here who are AI is going to save the world and it might even bring the second coming of Christ. It runs the gambit. I mean, it's just so exciting. And one of the things I love about it, Tim, is it really reminds me of early 90s tech futurism back when we thought everything was.”

    2024-11-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #780: Cyan Banister — From Homeless and Broke to Top Angel Investor (Uber, SpaceX, and 100+ More) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  30. “Yeah, for the other GPs and some of the founders I've invested in are here and Earl Palmer Lucky is here and I invested in Endural. And there's a few others. There's TrueMed that's here, Mind Bloom, which we invested in that does psychedelic medicine, ketamine therapy for PTSD.”

    2024-11-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #780: Cyan Banister — From Homeless and Broke to Top Angel Investor (Uber, SpaceX, and 100+ More) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  31. “It's easy to be a victim, it's easy to say that things happen to you or the circumstances. I easily could have rolled over and said, I was homeless, woe is me. I can't succeed in life. And instead, I was like, you know, this life is just a big old game and we've got to play it. And a lot of it is cosplay and suggestions. When I was younger, I saw these people dress up in their suits and you just kind of realize they're grown children dressing up in suits adulting. You know, it's a costume. So I look at everybody walking around in their costumes with the narratives and the stories they're telling themselves. And I like to analyze it and I like to think about it a lot.”

    2024-11-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #780: Cyan Banister — From Homeless and Broke to Top Angel Investor (Uber, SpaceX, and 100+ More) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  32. “The amount of time, so I'm at a convention right now that I've heard people apologize to each other for saying something rude in the past, and the other person not even remembering it. And I'm thinking about how this poor person carried around that trauma with them for how long. I've heard it twice now. Because right now there's something happening in the world that I'm really excited about those that people are starting to apologize and starting to own being wrong for the first time in a long time. And I think one of the things that I am hyper accountable. So I take responsibility for my every reaction and ideally my every thought. And that's really hard for a lot of people because.”

    2024-11-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #780: Cyan Banister — From Homeless and Broke to Top Angel Investor (Uber, SpaceX, and 100+ More) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  33. “I meditate a lot and I practice mindfulness as often as possible and I try to remind myself to be conscious whenever I can. And being conscious to me is being aware and present and being here now. And a lot of times you'll hear that and it doesn't really mean a whole lot until you've practiced mindfulness for a period of time and you start to realize what now is. And so anything that I tell you happened, it's gone. You can't go back to it. I can't do it again. It's a fiction that becomes something in my mind that people put too much weight on that fiction. I'm not saying that nothing matters. A lot of things matter, but the human mind and the ego is so capable of spinning up fictions and creating narratives that we hold as truths to the point where it leads people to paralysis.”

    2024-11-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #780: Cyan Banister — From Homeless and Broke to Top Angel Investor (Uber, SpaceX, and 100+ More) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  34. “And how exactly Mondays. You know, all of these things are just things that we make up truths, but what if they're not true? So you've got to always question these narratives that you tell yourself and that other people are telling you.”

    2024-11-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #780: Cyan Banister — From Homeless and Broke to Top Angel Investor (Uber, SpaceX, and 100+ More) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  35. “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's 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. You know, and so I just always felt this. And it's interesting that you honed in on it, but it's definitely been a guiding principle in my life, which is don't give up, you know, just try different approaches. You know, maybe you didn't ask the right way or maybe you didn't give the right incentives or maybe you didn't, maybe it was Monday and they're in a bad mood.”

    2024-11-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #780: Cyan Banister — From Homeless and Broke to Top Angel Investor (Uber, SpaceX, and 100+ More) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  36. “Yeah, I think being homeless taught me that a lot of things that people do are suggestions. When I was homeless and I was selling necklaces, One I learned about rejection. But before I did the necklaces, I also had a weird job at Greenpeace for a period of time where I was a phone canvaser. And I lied about my age and they allowed me to work there. So that was another funny, weird job I had. But I also did telemarketing as well. So I did a lot of telemarketing when I was 17, 18. And then, of course, tech support, dial-up tech support was a thing that I did for a while. So I spent a lot of time being rejected and being on the phone and being abused in customer service. And I don't believe in no until it's the final no. And I also think that, you know, when you're an investor, and especially if you start to get good at it, people want to hear from you. They want the opportunity for you to invest in them. I just never seen that anything is a barrier. To me, it's like a sport. It's a game. Not that money is a game, but getting into the deal and winning the deal to me is a”

    2024-11-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #780: Cyan Banister — From Homeless and Broke to Top Angel Investor (Uber, SpaceX, and 100+ More) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  37. “I realized then I could adjust and make that decision in the next investment that I did where I could try to find out more information. And even if I committed before those docs are signed, it's not done. That was a learning lesson there because I always thought that my word is my bond. And if I say something verbally, it's as good as signing something. But sometimes people misrepresent things and they lie.”

    2024-11-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #780: Cyan Banister — From Homeless and Broke to Top Angel Investor (Uber, SpaceX, and 100+ More) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  38. “Before signing, like if there was anything that I could have figured out before then, which there were some little things, like some little things that were signs.”

    2024-11-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #780: Cyan Banister — From Homeless and Broke to Top Angel Investor (Uber, SpaceX, and 100+ More) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  39. “Yeah. But Game Crush was a great learning lesson. I also learned that just because you commit to something, if there was a period of time in there that I was able to get material information as to a decision that I made may not be a good one, I have the right to say I'm not investing, which is something that has been challenging for me because I don't know if you watch Game of Thrones where they say a Lannister placed their debts while a banner pays her debts.”

    2024-11-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #780: Cyan Banister — From Homeless and Broke to Top Angel Investor (Uber, SpaceX, and 100+ More) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  40. “Yeah, who's the tiebreaker? Like, who's actually ultimately at the end of the day is their fault. We're going to all point at and blame. And with HQ trivia, there was nobody to point at and blame. As matter of fact, it became more of a game of thrones for the position and was tragic and ended up with one of the founders dead.”

    2024-11-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #780: Cyan Banister — From Homeless and Broke to Top Angel Investor (Uber, SpaceX, and 100+ More) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  41. “Yes, multiple founders always a recipe for disaster. And they were putting forth someone as the CEO, but it was really clear that he was only the CEO just for the fundraise. And after the fundraise, it was a bit of a shell game. And I've seen this happen. I learned this interestingly with another company, HQ Trivia, which I would argue is a much bigger disaster and failure. And that was due to two founders who ultimately could not see eye to eye and had a 50-50 partnership. I broke my rule where I normally never invest in a company where there's a 50-50 partnership or there's not a clear delineation of who's the CEO and who's not. And for a variety of reasons.”

    2024-11-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #780: Cyan Banister — From Homeless and Broke to Top Angel Investor (Uber, SpaceX, and 100+ More) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  42. “Yeah, this was early in my investment career, actually, and so I was learning a lot of lessons from that particular company, the check size that I wrote was rather large for the time. I think it was like 250K, which was pretty big. And the warning signs that I saw were how disorganized the company was after we did the first closing of that round. They invited us to a dinner, which I brought Byron Singerman and a few other people. And it was really clear that there was just leadership issues. But by that point, we'd already committed capital. You're not going to change your mind. You can't withdraw anyway.”

    2024-11-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #780: Cyan Banister — From Homeless and Broke to Top Angel Investor (Uber, SpaceX, and 100+ More) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  43. “The streamers couldn't be in various states of undress. They couldn't even be sexy. They couldn't be in bikinis. They couldn't, they wanted it to be where technically I guess younger people could get on, but it was never meant to be for kids. It was supposed to be for adults. Adults with adults. And it just got weird because they wanted to make a very mainstream product. They wanted to be Twitch. They weren't onto something. It's just that the product was never ever designed to be that. And I think that they'd stuck to that niche. They would have done quite well, incredibly well, as a matter of fact, because they could have expanded later into something had they completely monopolized that audience because that's what drove people ultimately at the end of the day to watch Twitch is these girl streamers.”

    2024-11-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #780: Cyan Banister — From Homeless and Broke to Top Angel Investor (Uber, SpaceX, and 100+ More) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  44. “Wanted to remove the sex appeal and what made this entire product special, and the whole reason I invested it in the first place. They cannibalized it. And so after that, Twitch took off, but they didn't have the right tools or the right anything to be a Twitch. And they had all these amazing girl streamers, which just jumped ship as soon as, you know, they could go someplace where they could actually show more than what game crush was allowing.”

    2024-11-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #780: Cyan Banister — From Homeless and Broke to Top Angel Investor (Uber, SpaceX, and 100+ More) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  45. “Activist investor is someone who invests in a company and decides that they want to play CEO or operator and they start telling the founders and the employees what they should be doing with their company. And if you've structured your company correctly, you can take that advice and then tell them to pound sand. But if you haven't, the power dynamics are not in your favor. I'll just put it that way. And then there's people who, because people gave them money, they think they have to listen to them, but then they don't. And that was the situation.”

    2024-11-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #780: Cyan Banister — From Homeless and Broke to Top Angel Investor (Uber, SpaceX, and 100+ More) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  46. “Yeah, Game Crush was a brilliant business, actually. And at the time, let's put this in perspective. There was my Came out and was sort of on the rise. Twitch didn't exist. Discord didn't exist. None of that stuff existed. There were webcam sites and then there was a site I started called Zivity. And what I saw was really interesting because they brought women who were, mostly women, men also played off of MySpace who were a little more provocative and wanted to play more provocative gaming. And so it was a way for you to pay to play games with girl gamers And it was growing like crazy, and everything was fantastic. And then they started getting activist investors who wanted them to get rid of the more adult and nature content. This happens with company after company after company.”

    2024-11-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #780: Cyan Banister — From Homeless and Broke to Top Angel Investor (Uber, SpaceX, and 100+ More) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  47. “Make these connections. So, a lot of the best deals I've ever done have these interesting things in common, which is I see something, I put the pieces together, I'm like, oh, for example, hint water, bottle caps is going to get me in this deal. I had to think very quickly about that. But same thing here is just, you know, I didn't wait. I didn't email the guy. I decided to go be a creeper. And it ended up being fun. It ended up being totally funny.”

    2024-11-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #780: Cyan Banister — From Homeless and Broke to Top Angel Investor (Uber, SpaceX, and 100+ More) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  48. “Know who I am. He was like looking around how do you know? And then it was killing him and he finally asked me, he said, I'm so sorry. I need to know how you know who I am. And I'm like, are you sure you want to know? And he's like, yeah. And I said, well, you tethered your phone to the Wi-Fi and it says Garrett Langley's iPhone. And Curiosity just got the best of me. And we ended up getting the last allocation of that round and sharing the Series A with Bedrock. It's now valued at over $6 billion. I tell this story because one of the things that I think makes me good at what I do and other people is identifying patterns and opportunities and striking when you see them. And for whatever reason, I am gifted with the ability to”

    2024-11-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #780: Cyan Banister — From Homeless and Broke to Top Angel Investor (Uber, SpaceX, and 100+ More) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  49. “Know, and he starts looking around, and he's like, Because YC his batch hadn't demoed yet, and I he hadn't seen him at YC”

    2024-11-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #780: Cyan Banister — From Homeless and Broke to Top Angel Investor (Uber, SpaceX, and 100+ More) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  50. “Looked at him and I said, Garrett Langley, and he said, Yes. I said, I'm Cyan Bannister of Founders Fund. We'd like to bring you in for a meeting. Sounded very official.”

    2024-11-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #780: Cyan Banister — From Homeless and Broke to Top Angel Investor (Uber, SpaceX, and 100+ More) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT