Cyan Banister is a venture capitalist, angel investor, entrepreneur and writer based out of the San Francisco Bay Area. Banister is well known for making early stage and seed investments in companies including Uber, SpaceX, and Postmates among others.

Cyan Banister was born in Tucson, Arizona and grew up in poverty living in an Arizona Navajo reservation. Banister was homeless by the age of 15. When she as 16 Banister became a ward of the state after her parents stopped caring for her. She tried hitchhiking from Phoenix, Arizona to New York City but only made it to Springs, New Mexico where she lived in a commune and dug holes to survive. Banister's first job was serving mashed potatos at First Cafeteria, a restaurant on U.S. Route 66.

Growing up in poverty, Banister believed in socialism and thought that business owners were exploiting employees. However, once she received her first paycheck, Banister started to understand the importance of capitalism and how it can improve the life of herself and others. Banister later said "capitalism saved my life" in a speech at TechCrunch Disrupt. One of the philosophies, Banister has followed from her first job was incrementalism. She sets daily goals for herself to try and improve herself. When Banister was homeless she set small goals such as saving up enough to buy a bagel or if she was very successful a $1.60 hamburger from Burger King. Later on these goals evolved, into things such as working towards a raise, meeting new people, or trying new technologies. Banister also looks at life like a game where she levels up as she improves her skills and earns more money.

Cyan Banister was inspired to go into the tech industry after her friend Chris, showed her the Internet Relay Chat on his laptop. Banister was instantly fascinated by the internet and wanted to work in the tech industry. Banister's first tech job was working at Extreme Internet in Phoenix, Arizona registering domain names and providing technical support. Her boss, Lee, noticed her intelligence and told her to read a book on system administratation. Banister was initially skeptical however once she read the book Banister became fascinated by the subject and changed the company's passwords. Seeing her initiative, Lee promoted her to a systems administration role. In 1999, after trying out Google and other new technologies, Banister decided that she wanted to be at the center of the internet boom and moved to San Francisco. She went from earning $15 to $35 when she was hired by NBCi. Banister then worked in various tech roles for iAsiaWorks, Women's Economic Agenda Project, Savicom. In 2003, Banister was hired by IronPort, a security software company as a Standards and Practices Manager. She was then promoted three times eventually becoming a Senior Manager of Security Operations at IronPort in 2005. IronPort was acquired by Cisco Systems for $830 million in 2007. The exit made Banister independently wealthy and allowed her to focus on angel investing. Cyan Banister's husband Scott Banister is the one who got her interested in angel investing. One of the talents that Scott noticed is that Cyan is an early adopter who is great at finding new companies to invest in. They work well together since Cyan is more extroverted and enjoys speaking at events and reaching out to people, while Scott is more introverted and tends to work from home.

Cyan Banister and her husband Scott have invested in more than 100 startups.

Some of Cyan Banister's most successful seed and early stage investments include Uber, Thumbtack, SpaceX, Postmates, eShares, Affirm, and Niantic, Inc. (the creator of Pokemon Go). ^[1]

From 2006-2008, in addition to working on angel investments, Banister also worked as a recruiter. ^[1] In 2006, Cyan Banister co-founded Zivity as a subscription and vote-based artist/fan interaction platform. In 2009, Zivity pivoted and became an online platform for pin-up photography and spun off its fan interaction platform into a new company called TopFans. [6]In 2013, Banister co-founded the Signal Media Project, an organization that promotes and facilitates the accurate portrayal of science, technology, and history in popular media. Banister joined Founders Fund in March 2016 as their sixth partner. She was hired right after the firm received $1.3 billion in capital commitments for their sixth fund. [17]

Cyan Banister is married to fellow angel investor, Scott Banister. The couple met while working together at IronPort.

In 2016, Banister came out publicly as a genderqueer, queer and pansexual in an interview with Jessi Hempel for Wired. Banister does not have preferred pronouns however she is known at work as "dude". Banister considers herself a genderless being and from a young age has felt that she did not fit as either a boy or a girl. Cyan Banister has said that her husband has been supportive of both her gender and sexual identity.

Cyan and Scott Banister were awarded TechCrunch's 2016 Crunchies Angel Investor of the Year Award in February 2016. They received the award for their prescient investments in companies including SpaceX, Uber, and DeepMind Technologies.