Introduction
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.
Early life and career
Banister is the son of Debbie and Bruce Banister (1951–2006), a civil engineer who lived in Kansas City, Missouri.
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.
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. Ali Partovi called it "a simple but elegant concept that turned out to be one of the best business ideas in history". Submit It! was acquired by LinkExchange in June 1998, then by Microsoft in November 1998.
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.
In December 2000, with Scott Weiss, Banister "cofounded spam-blocking firm IronPort to stop porn from flooding corporate in-boxes". It was acquired in 2007 by Cisco for US$830 million.
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. and TekTrak. Banister also cofounded Zivity, an adult themed social networking site, with his wife, Cyan Banister, and Jeffrey Wescott.
David Gelles has identified Banister 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".
Personal life
Banister is a marijuana rights activist and was a supporter of Republican Senator Rand Paul. In 2015, Banister donated $3 million to a Super PAC supporting Paul. He later switched his endorsement to Ted Cruz after Paul suspended his campaign.
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 the couple met and work together.
Awards and honors
Cyan and Scott Banister won the Angel of the Year Crunchie award at the 2016 TechCrunch ceremonies. 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."
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."