"Dig Through Your Couches. SpaceX Needs It." Cyan Banister on Luke Nosek's Pitch

29:00and also just not spend many, many hours trying to figure out how to play the game. So it just really depends, but I think it's a great reflection of their inner world. You're also a prolific poker player. I've seen some videos. Yeah, it's really funny because I don't really play a lot of poker, but I'm known for it, which is weird, right? And part of it is because I host a charity poker tournament once a year for inflection grants, and for Edge Esmeralda, we at Long Journey basically put this together with their team and we raised money for these little micro grants, these$2 ,000 grants for young people who write essays to us.

29:42And so I got known for being a poker player because I made it to the final table there once. But to be honest with you, I'm not that good. Really? I'm really not that good. I probably could be better if I tried. but there was a poker tournament sort of thing that I fell into kind of on accident. And I ended up at this table playing with Steve Aoki, Ninja, Phil Hellmuth. And I ended up beating Phil Hellmuth, which was legendary. And part of it was I was playing very, very conservatively because one, I didn't realize the thing was live. I did not realize people were watching. no I had no idea none uh two and then I didn't find out so the commercial break or whatever the break was we like went to this break and they were like hey just you know everybody can see your cards and I was like wait what and they're like yeah every time you put the cards on the thing like it goes up on the television I'm like television and I'm like what and they're like yeah we're streaming this to all of ninja's fans and I'm like what oh my god and so this guy comes up And he's like, what would happen if you bluffed once, just once?

30:48Like, do you bluff? And I was like, no, I don't bluff. And he's like, just one time. So I came back and I waited for a hand in which the pot was large enough. And I'm like, how can I convince myself that I have the best hand? Because that's the only way I think I can bluff is if I think I have the best hand. And so I was just like, I have the best hand. And then I just turned around and I acted like I had the best hand. And I was like, this is great. I have the best hand. So the look on his face, he was just like, there's only one, two cards you could have. And he's like, do you have them? Which means he doesn't have them, right?

31:22So he's on tilt and he's like, so finally he folds and I won the pot. And it was like crazy because everybody was just like, I cannot believe. And then he was on tilt the rest of the time. It was fantastic. It was so good. How do you find yourself in these situations? That's kind of my life. My life is a series of these types of events. Even before I was financially successful, before I was who people know today, I tend to, I always tell people that if I were a tarot card, I'm the fool. I walk off ledges expecting everything's going to be fine. Not literal ledges, but you know what I mean. Yeah.

32:02And I do honestly believe that everything's going to work out. And sometimes it doesn't seem like it's worked out, but in the long enough time horizon, And you look back and you're like, I wouldn't be here talking to you if all those things didn't happen. Like they all had to happen. And so I have this attitude that everything just kind of has to happen the way it does. And it puts me in these strange positions where suddenly like I did not go to Vegas to play in a poker tournament. I was there to help a startup that I invested in called Going Public. And they asked me to be an undercover reporter.

32:35Really? And so I dressed up like a blogger. I put on a wig. It was a terrible wig and nobody figured it out. And I was just trying to like get them to say things that they wouldn't normally say. And then at the end when I revealed myself, they're like, Cyan, come play with us in this poker tournament. And I was like, oh, okay. So I just like wandered in and I just started playing and I didn't realize. But that's kind of my life. Like a lot of the times I'll be in these situations where I don't, the thing that I think, have you ever seen the movie The Man Who Knew Too Little? No. It's with Bill Murray.

33:06It's fantastic. Basically, without giving it completely away, he thinks he's in a game, like a role-playing game, where people are doing things for him. But he's actually really running with, like, criminals. And he has no idea. But that's my life. Not that I'm running with criminals. But, like, my life is sort of a show of sorts, like a Truman show. And I'll show up and weird things happen. And I'm like, wow, that's happening. That's really neat. That's interesting. And I just kind of roll with it. What has that taught you about human behavior, though? Because most people don't live like you.

33:41They're not as optimistic. They could be. How can they be? We have this misconception that our personality is fixed. And we say, this is just how I am. And I hear people say this all the time. I'm a Scorpio. I can't help it. I was born in November. I'm Irish. I have a temper. and the list goes on and on and on and these are excuses for a behavior that you're unwilling to change or don't know how to change it but if you actually become very introspective and I know Marc Andreessen says don't do that but I spend a lot of time being introspective and I would say that he's wrong and I'd love to have a chat with him about this you can actually surgically go in and alter your personality where you can actually change these things but it takes effort and time and a lot of facing the ugly truth about yourself.

34:32Because we tell ourselves lies and we tell everybody lies about who we are. One of my things that I'm thinking about, I run thought experiments every week. A couple weeks ago, I started thinking about it. I'm still thinking about it. But how wide is the space between your values and your actions? If I say, like, I'm an honest person, okay, I strive to be honest. But am I truly honest? So what I'll do is I'll sit down with a piece of paper and say, where have I lied even if it's small? Like I promised to meet somebody on Friday and I didn't. I said I would send this email and I didn't. We tell accidental lies all the time.

35:07Like we, that person in the moment intends to send that email, but the person two hours later is not the same person. And so I spend a lot of time thinking about like how, how to make sure I stay in this place of wonder and curiosity. And I see people who say, I can't be curious. I can't be optimistic. I can't be filled with wonder. I don't allow myself to be a child. I can't be a child. And I would say that's false. That's just like a limiting thought. And you can change that at any time. It just takes a little bit of effort. Why do you think people might be afraid to do that? People are afraid to show who they really are.

35:49You know, we're taught from a very young age to have manners and discipline and how society works. And, you know, you don't want to stand out too much because then you're weird or quirky, especially in places like Japan, you know, like the tallest nail gets hammered down is what they like to say. And so there's other cultures in the world where it is not, you're not celebrated for being different, but everyone's different. Everyone has unique abilities. Everyone has unique insights and they wear these masks to basically shield them from that type of vulnerability. And so if you're really silly, you're just like, oh, people are watching me being silly.

36:30But it turns out they're so caught up in their own shit that they don't care. They might just laugh and be like, oh, there they go again. But I think if you were more authentically yourself, you'd ultimately be happier and more curious and more filled with wonder that was like one of the best pieces of advice that i got early on doing this podcast because i'm like kind of quirky i'm a little bit weird sometimes and the more i show my personality the more like people actually started to engage with it and i was like oh so i don't have to be like stiff just asking questions like another like vc interviewer like nope i can make a little funny jokes yep like just be you pretending i didn't know jack and Sam were related ends up becoming like a viral video every month right it's really funny um for people like I mean I think like change is probably the hardest part and is like a biggest limiter um uh or blocker to like be like limiting yourself right like so um what kind of like changes do people need to make?

37:35Is it like a daily like reminder? Is it like self manifestations? Like what kind of like, what kind of move is that? Is it who you surround yourself with? I prescribe a lot of things. Yeah. I prescribe a lot of things depending on the person. So I do a lot of coaching in this regard and I've started teaching classes. And, um, if you watch my X feed, um, from time to time, I post like openings for awake Academy one-on-one and, you know, it depends on where you are in life and where you are with a meditation practice. And so usually I start people with a meditation practice of five minutes a day, because I say, could you meditate for five minutes a day?

38:15And usually they're like, yeah, I could make time for that. And I'm like, well, let's figure out where to fit it in. Usually I recommend if they drive to do it before they start the car. So you go out to the car, you sit there for five minutes and you just, you don't try to silence your mind. I think a lot of people who think that meditation is, I have to have perfect silence and I have to clear all my thoughts. And I think that actually causes a lot of people to avoid it because they have all of this chatter and noise going on and it confuses them. And then they punish themselves for not being able to shut it down.

38:48That's not what meditation is about. Meditation is about noticing the thoughts and noticing that they're going by like clouds and then noticing that you're noticing. So who is that person? So if you are not your thoughts, then who are you is where I would start. And so if people would just spend five minutes a day, just taking stock of the fact that they're in a body, and I think that's an important phrase, you are in a body, you are not necessarily your body, that you can experience the air and what it feels like, the smells that are around you, the birds chirping, where you are in space. A lot of this we don't think about.

39:27But if you spend five minutes a day doing that, you're off to a good start. The next thing is, you know, when you take a shower, it's a great time to be really, really mindful about washing your body, washing your hair, you know, the water, the ritual of showering. Don't just be in a hurry. Don't just like jump in there and shower every day. You know, make sure that you put that time aside for yourself and really do it right. And the other is waking up right, which I'm not, I do not have down yet. But waking up right means as soon as you wake up, what's your first thought? Usually it's like, oh, at first, the first like 30 seconds, you don't think about anything, but then you're like, I got to get up.

40:08I got to do this. I got to do that. Or I've got to avoid it. I've got to go back to sleep. And you start getting immediately into your routines and that behavioral pattern that you think you can't break. And instead, break it and say, for the first minute of my day, I'm going to feel my toes. That's all I'm going to do. Just going to sit there and feel my toes. And they're there. And it sounds silly, but a lot of us forget we even have toes. And before you even step out of bed, you know, ask yourself, am I awake right now? You know, and you may have to write it on your ceiling. I write it on things.

40:44I leave it in my shower. You know, the mirror, the windows fog up and I write, wake up. So that when it fogs up and I'm taking a shower, it says, wake up. So I leave little reminders, you know, in the fridge all over the place. Because what happens is you start thinking about the future or the past, you start ruminating and you forget the very, very precious only thing that actually exists, which is right now. Is that like the number one thing people, like if you coach people and you've done this for a while, like, is that the number one thing people have issue with? Like, what do you find this commonality?

41:18Yeah, the number one thing that people have issue with is, do you like Rick Rubin? Yeah. Okay. So a lot of people have read Rick Rubin and they see his success and they see his demeanor and, you know, but they don't know how to get there. It's like one of these things where a lot of people struggle with, there's just so much going on in life. There's so much on social media. There's war. There's my family. There's my job. There's my car payments. There's my car. There's my house. All of this is coming at you, and it's part of your left brain. A lot of us, because we're mind workers, never get into the right brain.

41:57And the right brain is where creativity resides. It's where your body movements are. It's the intuitive, sort of non-verbal function of the human existence. And there's a lot of information that you can glean from how you feel. So eventually, you know, we'll talk about investing and I'll tell you like a lot of my greatest investments came with a feeling. And there's a feeling that you get when, you know, you're sure about something. There's a feeling you get when you think something's coming and you don't know why. And if you could become a master of those feelings, you can navigate the world with extra sensory perception.

42:36I hate to say it, but it's true. Like you have more sensory perception of the world than the average person. And we have a lot of gifts as humans that we don't even realize until we like tap into them and realize, oh, if I use my ears, for example, in mafia to figure out information, or if I watch what's sticking out in a room kind of like where's Waldo I start to notice things that don't belong these are pieces of information that you were never taking in before and so what happens is if you just do what you do every day you're going to get the same results but if you shake things up you do things a little differently you're going to get different results and so I think that people that come to me that take my class are often they feel stuck they're like I know I'm on to something I know that I could do great things, but I'm just stuck.

43:30And so my job is to kind of shock them and get them unstuck. The rest is up to them. I can't fix anything. I can just sort of guide people to the answers. Because how I got to where I am with a lot of this stuff was a constant questioning. Like, I think human beings are why machines. And so every morning I get up and ask why. And I don't usually go about my day until I have a why that I'm thinking about all day long. I mean, wow. Yeah. So have you seen, I guess a really good place to go from that is into your investments. Because like, I would imagine once you start following those threads and asking why a little bit more and having that curiosity, it's very energizing.

44:12Oh, it's really wonderful. Discovered amazing things. So in terms of investments, how has that led you? I mean, you've invested into SpaceX, Uber, Anderle, Flock Safety. I can name like 40 companies maybe right now, but like you've invested in so many companies. How is that and what are some stories? I think I like to talk about Niantic Pokemon Go as one of the whys. So the first thing I noticed was that these people were playing this game called Ingress. My friends were playing it. I started noticing other people playing it. But it was a fringe game that not a lot of people were playing. But the behaviors that they were displaying, they were renting helicopters.

44:52They were chartering boats. They were ditching their friends at DEF CON in Las Vegas to go out into the desert to claim these invisible things that didn't exist other than in this app. So I started watching it and I was like, that is remarkable. What could get people to do this? And so I started playing it and I started learning about the mechanics and I immersed myself in it. And then I started asking myself, why is Google doing this? So I realized, oh, Google ultimately is a mapping company. They're gathering points of information. They're getting these players to take pictures of it, categorize it, tell them exactly where it is, and to scan that information, it's basically like free mapping data.

45:39And once I realized that, I was like, this is really clever. I wish I could invest in it, but it's Google, so I can't. And the minute that alphabet spun out, I got all of these messages from my friends, and they said, you realize they're spinning out Niantic, and it's going to become its own entity. And I was like, oh, if I ever had a chance to invest in anything, it's right now. and I don't know how to reach anyone there. So I started thinking, I have a really strange mind where I form associations really, really fast. So like I realize it's kind of like a web of thought. I was at Hintwater, which is another investment of mine, and I was helping them set up their ticketing system.

46:25And these tickets were coming in that kept saying Ingress code in the subject line. And so I stopped for a moment. I'm like, I don't mean to pry. I'm not really reading your tickets. Like don't want to invade privacy. But why do these subject lines all say Ingress code? And she said, oh, because we work with Niantic at Google on these free game codes in the bottle caps. So right when Niantic spun out of Alphabet, I realized I had to email her. It's not obvious. It's like, but that has, that's just paying attention, right? If I wasn't paying attention to what was coming to the inbox of that ticketing system.

47:00And how did I even end up there in the first place? That's the other miracle, right? And I reached out to Kara Golden and I said, hey, how did you do that biz dev relationship with Google? And she said, I worked with John Hanke, who's the CEO of Niantic. And I said, is there any way you could put me in touch with them? And she's like, yeah, sure. Within five minutes, I'm finally in touch with the head of Niantic. And I said, I'm in Montana right now, but next week I can come to the office. And he's like, we're not raising any money. We don't need your money. Like we've got Nintendo, we've got Google, like we don't need you.

47:34And I was like, please just hear me out. Like just take an hour of my time and I guarantee you, you will not regret it. And so he let me come in and I brought my best friend who's a player. He ended up hiring my best friend pretty much on the spot and realized that I knew a lot of really good engineers and that I had a lot of really good feedback because I'd been playing the game and I wasn't your ordinary investor. And so there's an example of how just paying attention and a gut feeling that there's something special here and I'm witnessing it. And then I found out about Pokemon. And then I was like, oh my gosh, you put Pokemon in this world?

48:15Like, that's insane. It's going to blow up. Trying to convince people after that, after I invested to co-invest with me was impossible. Really? They were like, no one's going to hold their phone up and look at invisible Pokemon. No one's going to go. And sure enough, I don't know if you were there the day that Pokemon Go came out. I always say it's the closest we've come to world peace. It was one of the most magical few weeks of my life. And probably many people's lives was when that game came out. And, you know, the same thing with Uber. Uber, I started asking why. why can I not get a taxi when it rains?

48:53Why are there sometimes I come in at night at the airport and the taxis aren't there? Why is it when I take a taxi from the airport, they drive like a bat out of hell and I think I'm going to die? And what you do is you ask them, you say, hey, what's your life like? Like what is your day like? And the taxi drivers would tell me like, well, I wake up, I go to the taxi yard, I give them$200. I'm in the whole$200 from the moment I walk in. I drive my car out of the gate, I immediately have to make that$200 back. So you imagine that they're rushing around and they're pretty cranky because they're not in the money yet.

49:28And then once they're in the money, half their day's already gone and they're cranky and tired and they're now finally making money. And then they get a customer that stiffs them, a customer that throws up in the car, you know, and you think about their life and you're like, wow, that's miserable. And people complain about Uber, but what they don't understand is what life was like before Uber. They never lived it, so they have no idea, so they just complain about Uber as being this evil entity. But before that, there wasn't flexible employment. Taxi drivers, you would lose your stuff in it and never get it back.

49:58You were in the hole$200. There was a lot of things that were broken about that. So when Uber arrived and I found out about it, I'd already done the pre-thinking. So when you ask why about everything in the world, it's just going to make you a better investor, it's going to make you a better entrepreneur, a better everything. You know, when you're sitting around idle at a restaurant, don't just sit there and like stare or doom scroll, like ask yourself, like, why do they bake bread at Tartine that way? Like, why are they using that device? You know, would robotics improve any of this or not, you know, and just really ask yourself questions about where the world is going to go, especially if it's like a science fiction sort scenario and just play with it and make believe and and it'll lead you to these amazing outcomes do you find it interesting that a lot of things that happen in sci-fi movies become real yeah it's almost prophetic it's very very strange like her is becoming a thing um there's so many science fiction movies that have have turned into reality let's just hope that terminator isn't one of them we don't want that reality people really like to bring up skynet all the time.

51:12Yes, because it's an unfortunate possible reality. One of the things I like to ask people is what worries you? Peter used to ask me that at Founders Fund. And it's a very important question because what excites you is interesting, but what worries you is also interesting. And I am worried about us moving more and more into a surveillance state that is operated by AI and there's robotics. If you have a leader that you trust, maybe it's not a big deal or you have a government that you think is kind of operating, maybe not a big deal. But if you have a totalitarian state or you're in a country that isn't America, it starts to get kind of weird.

51:56Right now, we're moving towards a future where you won't be able to get into a car and drive yourself somewhere. And if you think about it, that freedom of movement is a human right. What if someone says, you know what, you're just not going anywhere. I'm just going to shut your Waymo down. And not only that, but I'm going to lock you inside, you know, because you're a dissident, because you're saying things we don't like. There's an underbelly to all of this. There's a utopian future and a dystopian future. And it's kind of like a gun can be a paperweight or a weapon. You know, AI is the same.

52:28And so we really have to think about how to be responsible and how to, you know, I'm all about acceleration, but I'm also about thinking through, should any of this fall into the wrong hands, how could it be used? And so that's why I tend to back things that are open source and decentralized control. Because I think that the internet started out, and I'm old enough now that I got into this industry in 1999, that we originally started out for this whole ecosystem to be mostly open source and decentralized, but it went the opposite direction. It became incredibly centralized and closed source. And you're seeing that happen with open AI and Anthropic.

53:13It's the wrong path because everyone needs to have their own models. Everyone needs to be able to be able to compete. And you don't want one company with one ideology ruling at all. That's dangerous. Wow. Damn. Yeah. Sorry. That is a worry. It is a worry. It worries me. It's what keeps me up at night. I think about that. And I think about children. I think about people wondering, like, what are they going to do? if a lot of this stuff becomes automated? Like what is the future? What should they be studying right now? It's unclear. It's really, really unclear. I almost want, if you're not getting into medicine or like a hard thing that requires four to six years of school, I'm not sure people should be going to school right now.

54:01Really? Yeah, I don't think so. What should they be doing? I think artisanship is going to be on the rise, being creative. So the one thing I have not seen AI be capable of, so let's talk about what I'm excited about. I'm really excited about AI being a new paintbrush and a new tool to unlock all the creativity in this world that has been dormant. So there's a lot of people out there with a million-dollar idea that want to go on Shark Tank, and they can't. But what if they could Vibe Manufacture? What if they could vibe code the app, which they can now, and put up a website and create a product that the market has never seen that actually improves lives?

54:42I think we're going to see a lot of maybe not venture scalable businesses, but a lot of newly minted millionaires that are going to figure out how this all works. And they're going to set up a completely agenticized business where there's no real employees. That's going to happen. And they're going to do it from their basement. and I'm really excited about that future. I don't, I'm not scared of it. And I think that the other thing is I'm really excited about art. So right now I know it's very controversial. A lot of the models were trained on, on art and, and basically stole art for training data.

55:20Um, eventually after a hundred years, all art becomes part of public domain. You can train on it anyway. So So it's kind of like, if not now, it's going to happen. And then what's really going to happen is China will sell our art back to us. So they're going to steal it all anyway because they don't care. And they're just going to basically come back to us with these models, which we've seen with DeepSeek and everything else that's trained on our IP. And then they're going to sell it back to us. So it's going to be kind of hilarious that we're going to be buying South Park remixed that's completely not approved from probably pirate operators from China.

56:02But what these tools will do is now I can be a filmmaker. Like there are hundreds of movies inside of me. And I couldn't get a team of camera people and editors and all this stuff to make that happen. But now I can make it happen. And of course, there's a bunch of people who say it's slop. It's not good. But where this is right now, we're in a period where it's the worst it'll ever be. It's going to be to the point later in the future where you're going to be able to scan yourself and make 100 different versions of your show, you know, in different languages and all sorts of stuff. You couldn't do that before.

56:37And you're going to be able to reach people in ways that you never even dreamed of in the future. And so I'm really excited about that. I think it's going to be really, really neat. I mean, that is so, it's like very, it's very top of mind right now. I mean, we just came off of config. And so we were talking to a lot of designers, a lot of artists. Talked to Dylan Field, like, and I asked a lot of them, like, what's your hottest take on AI right now? Like, what are you most worried about? Also, like, what's the worst design ever? Someone said showerhead. I thought that was really funny. but with AI a lot of the kind of like where it's centered back to is that AI just helps create the average and then it is up to the human the person to take the risk and pull it out of the bell curve and like make it exceptional and very cool and like that is something that it has not been able to do yet and another through line that like and these are all just completely different people like We talked to a professor of the MIT Media Lab.

57:39We talked to a designer of human robotic interface at Boston Dynamics. Talked to the head of product design at OpenAI, Dylan Field and Nico over there. And a lot of them, they're just like, you... It kind of came down to you have to be an active player. So that's why with the school thing, it's like, I don't really know because maybe some of the schools aren't letting you be an active player. I don't think they are. It really comes down to thinking. A lot of the points were down to thinking. And I joked with Zach Lieberman, who is a professor at MIT Media Lab. I'm like, there was a campaign once that was think different.

58:21Now we just need to drop the different and just go with think. Exactly. I think you're absolutely right. There's so much that AI cannot do. And for example, if you try to write a book with AI, you'll start to notice, which I am doing, you'll start to notice phrases and the way it does things are the telltale signs that it's AI. Anyone who's used enough of it or read enough of it knows the signs. And so, but however, it has these nuggets that maybe you didn't think about and you're like, oh, I could do it that way. And your job is to massage it back into a human form. So it takes a lot of the heavy lifting off, but it's not a complete replacement for any human.

59:04And so, you know, I have friends who wrote scientific papers and used AI for it. And of course, people could tell, you know, they're like, you used AI for this, didn't you? And it doesn't matter that it's accurate and it's conveying exactly what they wanted to say. You're still going to have people who are going to be dismissive of it no matter what, because they're going to like it's hallucinating, it clearly can't be trusted, et cetera. So we're, I don't think people should be that afraid, but at the same time, a lot of skills that we go to school for, you can now learn. I learned so much just using chat GPT and Grok.

59:39I'll just say, I want to learn about this philosopher, set me up a lesson, you know, and then I can interrogate, you know, this bot that's talking to me. I can walk around and have it in my ears and just listen. You know, A lot of that you don't even need to go to school for anymore. You can be self-taught. It's actually possible now. It's so interesting. I know we got very well into the conversation and we haven't really talked about investments that much. But I think with Long Journey and your background, you guys love the Magically Weird. Yes. And you do follow your curiosity. And it comes off very effortlessly with your track record, which you, Cyan, are savage.

1:00:19I don't know if you know that. You're low-key savage. Thank you. And it's really, I mean, I think it's hilarious. Every time these like angel reports come out, they're obviously using the same graph over and over again, but like you probably are, and especially with Scott too, like the number one on the list. I think the two of us combined are definitely number one in the world. Yeah. And it is frustrating, but I also understand and have sympathy for the fact that we are a team and a duo, and that doesn't fit nicely into boxes. You know, it's kind of difficult to figure out, you know. And the other thing is a lot of people don't realize that married people share capital.

1:00:58Like everything that's mine is his and everything that's his is mine. And we've been partners since we started investing together, which is over 20 years now. And so some deals obviously he sourced, some that I sourced. And so it's very difficult to figure it out. But even when we break it down and we divvy it up between the two of us, we're still in the top of that Stanford list, for example. we would both be in the top 10. But combined together, we're number one. And so it's just whether or not they're willing to combine us together. TechCrunch gave us the Angel of the Year award. And they originally were only going to let me accept it.

1:01:33And I said, I don't want to go on stage and accept an award that my husband also deserves. And so it's kind of like we're left and right brain and we're one human. And so I understand that does not fit into people's nice clean you know how every the world is supposed to look damn but we're really good because we're a great team well i'm gonna name some of those okay you put it in a list so i'm gonna name all of them oh okay all right buckle up we have spacex and roll by the way congrats on spacex thank you big that's my first check do you get anything cool with that uh are you still lockup probably still lock up okay well um so spacex andrel uber zappos paypal affirm flexport checker density flock safety that's a really cool company um brave zen control labs depop substrate also very underrated uh carta together ai turing postmates niantic cargo matic diamond Foundry.

1:02:38Very interesting. Upstart, Fivetran, Forge, Opendoor. Had a lot of fun with Kaz. We did a really fun recent interview there. Calm, TrueMed, and Crusoe. Yeah. So what's your favorite? It's like children. You can't pick your favorite. I mean, there's CEOs and that group of people that I have loved working with closely. John Hankey, who I mentioned before, is definitely one of my favorite CEOs I've ever had the opportunity to work with. How he sees the world and how he manages people from sort of behind and not in front is, and he's very humble. I like seeing people's different leadership styles and they're so wildly different.

1:03:21And then it's really such a joy to see a company grow up. You know, you, you start out in a space kind of like this, where there's a couple of people and an idea. And then the next thing, you know, like you're touring and Earl and you know it's like whoa there's thousands of people here it's like really grown up and so that process you know I always take pictures of billboards because I call it seeing my investments in the wild and it just gives me such delight to see any evidence of an investment that makes it further than the garage you know I'm just like oh wow look there they're on the side of a building oh look the products on the shelf in the store and you know like I invested in cafe x which has these uh coffee shops at the airport that's robotic coffee very fun and very fond of them and um but they need disco balls um that's my gripe my biggest complaint is they need some disco balls in there i keep sending it to the founder um but when i see that i just i get tickled that i'm even a small part of the change in the world you know that i'm making my own little butterfly effect every time that I do one of these.

1:04:28How did you get into SpaceX? Ah, how did I get into SpaceX? Luke Nosek. Okay. So if you haven't interviewed him, you should put him on your list because he's really cool. So Luke is part of the PayPal mafia. He's the co-founder of Founders Fund, the co-creator and inventor of PayPal. And he went to college with my husband, Scott Bannister and Max Lebtchen. And they met in a computer lab back at University of Illinois. Interestingly, Max had to stay because his parents said, you can't drop out. You have to get a degree before you go to Silicon Valley. So Scott and Luke basically came out west together, and they had walkie-talkies because there were no cell phones at the time.

1:05:10I've got a fun picture of this, by the way. And eventually, Scott started a company called Submitit, which sold to Link Exchange, which got bought by Microsoft. and he ended up working with Bill Gross and going kind of on his own path. But he was one of the first investors in PayPal and was on the board. And then, of course, Max came, ended up starting PayPal, teamed up with Luke, and then eventually Peter came on board. And then the Elon part also happened. And so Luke formed a relationship with Elon, and I would say probably was his strongest second believer. You know, I've never seen anyone champion a company or a person with more heart than Luke.

1:06:00And so I didn't know Elon and Scott kind of barely even overlapped with Elon at PayPal. So there was no connectivity there. A lot of people, the number one thing they ask me is, what's it like to meet Elon? And I'm like, well, I only see him at weddings. Really? Yeah, like he's like a wedding guy. You know those people that you only see at funerals and weddings? Well, Elon's that guy for me. Oh, my God. Yeah, so when my friends get married, he's there. And which is amazing that he makes the time, by the way, that he actually like, like, oh, if we should probably stop for a second because there's a clock going off.

1:06:31Anyway, there's, it's amazing that he makes the time and actually shows up to these weddings. But what got me to invest in it was Luke came over to our house. And he pretty much, he's a very emphatic person. And he wears like these Vibram shoes. And, you know, he gets on the floor and he's like, banisters, I need you to dig through your couches, whatever, you know, money that you have that's spare. Anything liquid you have, I need it. You know, SpaceX needs it. Oh, my God. And at this time, the rockets were blowing up on the launch pad. People all around were just like, you know, private citizens have no business, you know, in space.

1:07:08And that's why it's failing. A lot of people don't realize that in order to get an airplane in the sky to fly, we had to crash a lot of planes. And this type of engineering is not easy, and it involves a lot of failure. And failure is part of the progress. And so a lot of NASA people knew this. They knew, like, in order to get a rocket, you've got to fail, fail, fail, fail, fail. And a lot of people said he'll never have reusability. He'll never be able to do it. But it was Luke's conviction. And at the time, I had just exited from Ironport. I had my first liquidity event and I was like, what do I do with this?

1:07:42And so Luke and Scott convinced me to put everything that I made in Ironport when we sold to Cisco and to SpaceX. What? They basically said, if you're an able-bodied person, you're infinitely employable, you know, you're young, you have a safety net, like this is what you do with it. And I was just like, YOLO. so I did it and then afterwards I was like what have I done you know because I had a startup at the time that was struggling that I was building and I was like wow I just literally put all my chips you know on a color and just let it ride for 20 some odd years now and it ended up being the best investment I'll probably ever make in my life um has completely changed the trajectory of my life.

1:08:34And, um, yeah, that is insane. Yeah. At the time it did not look like the smartest investment at the time. Like I had friends who were just like, you just let your money on fire and you didn't sell any of it. No. What? No, not, not. I mean, I diversified a little bit like when I was at founder's fund, but for the most part, no. Wow. I'm glad I asked that story. Yeah. That's a good one. What did that, what did that teach you about risk? What did it teach me about risk? Well, you know, a lot of people already know my background story. I was homeless for a period of time and I had to take a lot of risk being a homeless person.

1:09:11But at the same time, I had a lifetime of conditioning of people saying, you know, you need to get a job that has a retirement plan, a 401k or some sort of pension. And then if you ever have any savings, you should be putting it into the S &P 500 or buy land or things that are less risky. When my peers and my friends were telling me, no, you need to actually put it into high-risk startups because the alpha is there. And they started explaining me words that I had never even heard before. I didn't even know that angel investing was a category of investing you could even participate in. That's the thing that actually upset me the most.

1:09:54So when I started investing, I started and realizing that I was part of a special club, that I lucked into a special club, that was not available to everybody. And as an engineer, you know, I was an accredited investor, so I could have put$5 ,000,$10 ,000 into Uber or any of these companies. After SpaceX, I started taking more risks. I became a little bit addicted. And Scott just basically said, you know, I don't like meeting lots of people. I don't like going to these demo days. I don't want cold emails. I don't want any of this stuff. So if you want to, I want to farm my existing network in my little PayPal mafia world.

1:10:31And I want you to go out and establish yourself. And so for the first 10 years of my investment career, I was at, you know, TC40, TC50, Disrupt, Launch Demo Days, YC, up at TED, you know, like networking, my ass off. It was not overnight success story. So I wrote a lot of checks that failed and I had to calibrate my sort of pattern matching over time. In order to become good at early stage investing, you really have to lose a few times. One, you learn how to internalize that, how to treat the founder, what to be attached to, what to be unattached to, and how to learn from if there was a mistake there of any kind, what you can learn from it.

1:11:20So I think it definitely made me very risk tolerant. Today's episode is sponsored by VCX by Fundrise, the public ticker for private tech, allowing investors of all sizes to invest in venture capital. Learn more at getvcx.com. Some of you may not have heard this yet, but our sponsor Public just launched something called Generated Assets, and it brings AI into investing in a way I've honestly never seen before. Here's how it works. You type in an idea like AI-powered supply chain companies with positive free cash flow or defense tech companies growing revenue over 25 % year over year. Publix AI then dispatches a swarm of agents that scan every single US stock, evaluates them, and instantly builds a custom index around your thesis.

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1:12:39Set up payroll for any country in minutes, hire anyone anywhere, get visas handled fast and get back to building. Visit deal.com slash sorcery. That's D-E-E-L dot com slash sorcery. So which of the companies either in your angel portfolio or I'm sure in the long journey portfolio are you most excited about right now? Oh gosh. There's no favorites, but yeah. Substrate and then I would say Becoming Bio. Becoming Bio is the substrate of biology and And then substrate, obviously, is the substrate of technology. And I think both are necessary for the future that's coming. Diamond Foundry as well, which is one of the companies that you listed, makes man-made diamonds in diamond wafers.

1:13:28And also industrial diamonds for cutting. And a lot of people, when I invested in that company, said that all they could see was that they were going to make fancy diamonds, which is what they used to fund the company, and they couldn't see past that. They were just like, you can only sell so many diamond rings. You know, people aren't going to want synthetic diamond rings. And that's just not true. But the real money was in the industrial diamonds and then the wafers and seeing the AI and, you know, crypto was coming, which the founder saw. And so I think, you know, those three are probably my most exciting investments right now that are inflecting.

1:14:01But obviously, there's a lot of really smaller investments. like I'm really kind of interested in how AI and personal devices are going to turn out like like little stuffed animals we're starting to see a lot of those and I think one of them is going to end up being a tamagotchi or a labubu but it's going to be actually useful rather than just a little thing that you have to feed or it dies you know it's actually going to help you in life right and so I'm kind of interested to see like where that goes I'm interested in seeing how people use this new paintbrush in new ways to, I think in two to three years, we're going to see a consumer wave.

1:14:38Like right now, we're just trying to figure out like, you know, how it all works and which companies can use it and where the value is. But eventually it's going to be a huge consumer wave and signs are going to change outside. Fashion is going to change. If we can somehow work out our stuff with China, manufacturing will come back by manufacturing, which I brought up is going to be a thing. You're going to say, I have this little widget. If only I could print it and get it made and get a million of them made, then I can also just go direct to consumer and you're going to start seeing a lot of that.

1:15:07So I am still looking for the Alibaba of the Americas. I haven't found it yet. I'm still turning over stones there trying to find. So I always like to put that out there in the wild in case someone claims they have that company. I've had many pitches. None of them have panned out yet. What else am I excited about? Yeah, I think those three, I mean, bringing a computer, like, basically bringing semiconductor manufacturing back to the Americas is a really important problem to solve. There's also some defense companies we're in that we're excited about. Power generation. A lot of deep tech right now.

1:15:47Deep tech is cool. Yeah. It's very cool, very hard, but very cool. I mean, you, especially with your track record, have been a strong proponent of America. Oh, yes. And reindustrialization. Yes, from day one. When does that consolidate down? Well, I think the cost of manufacturing and robotics has gone down considerably. And so the ability to play and come up with prototypes and also the fact that SpaceX paved the way for a VARTA, you know, for other types of startups to dream that they could even exist in that space. You know, it took a SpaceX in order to even open up that category. Most people wouldn't have touched it.

1:16:25And so I think that's part of why now. I think the other thing is I was reading an article that there's a space war going on where we have, you know, satellites by non-allied countries collecting data, you know, and they're destroying some of our satellites and there's this race to the moon. And so we're in a bit of a, I wouldn't call it a cold war, but it's definitely a war, a technology war with countries that don't have our interests. And so I think that's another reason of why now. Drones, wars are going to be fought with robotics in the future. There's not going to be humans on the battlefield.

1:17:04There's going to be robots and there's going to be technology and battle bots is going to be a thing. And so if you look at Endural, for example, they have this product that can take out a whole drone swarm in one go. We're going to start seeing things like that where maybe people don't want to work with Endural, so they want a competitor. Maybe the other defense primes need to have a product. So you're going to see a lot of startups playing in that world. I do think that obviously Endural is going to consolidate a lot of it and become one of the top defense primes over time. but they're already well on their way.

1:17:41So I think that's why now I tend to not play in the why now space though. I tend to play in the what's coming space. And so I think what's coming is nanotech, biotech. I'm much more interested in that. I'm also really, really interested in what bottlenecks get removed because of AI or information that we're able to to get and analyze for the first time in history. So there's all these really, really neat data sets that once you start looking through them, we're going to be able to solve some of the world's hardest math problems and the hardest problems and be able to take us more into this, you know, Star Trek future that we could have.

1:18:20And so I'm thinking about that. So when people right now are investing in things that are hot, I did the infrastructure layer for that. Because six years ago, we were thinking about the infrastructure layer of crypto and AI, because we had a bunch of friends at Singularity who've been talking about AI for years. And so now I'm thinking, okay, what does this all enable next? And what are the problems of it? And what are we going to see? Because the alpha is there. It's not in what's happening today. If I'm chasing everything in the hyper-competitive deals of today, I'm going to lose money. So I've got to try to find things at lower prices that are still a moonshot that I can get a good percentage of ownership like a good seed fund should do.

1:19:03You know, I tend to not chase many deals that are really hot today. So is that science secret to success? Yes, it should be all seed funds secret to success, but it's not really. So as we close out I like to do our Brex question. So Brex is all about performance, spending smarter, moving faster, but I kind of take it more of like a personal bend to it. I do think that performance is about who you surround yourself with and the relationships that you keep, ones that have like mentored you a long time or inspired you. So for you who are like a couple people, maybe one or two that have inspired you?

1:19:42Well, Peter Thiel, obviously. Mark Andreessen. Despite the two of them probably would not want to be in the same sentence together, being heralded. But Peter Thiel, hopefully is obvious to people why I love him. And, you know, he was my partner for four years at Founders Fund. And I always liked to joke that I didn't go to university, but I went to the Peter Thiel University. And he taught me so much about myself and about investing and about the world. I've never met anyone more tolerant, more open-minded. He gets such a bad rep for a lot of things, but he's just probably one of the most poorly understood people.

1:20:23Why do you think that? Because he's inaccessible, because he does weird things that no one can predict, because he thinks really long, and he's also operating a thousand feet above everybody else, right? Like his mind is not like other minds. And so when you encounter something like, it's kind of like Elon, you know, you don't know what to do with it. So it's just easier to hate it. And the other thing is, you know, he is libertarian, right-leaning. That is not the most attractive, sexy thing to a lot of people. Marc Andreessen was my hero when I was a teenager. And I used to see him on the cover of magazines.

1:21:02And what he basically, he was, you know, the Netscape was his thing and Netscape changed my world and changed the whole world. And so seeing kind of his contributions to changing the world, I told myself when I was a teenager, I'm going to meet that guy someday. I'm going to, I'm going to sit in a room with him and he's going to ask me a question and he's going to value me. And I didn't meet him until that was true. And so, you know, I wouldn't say he's a mentor actively, but he's a mentor. My mentors are far off. You can learn a lot from people without ever knowing them, just by watching them and observing them, and kind of like a metagame in Mafia.

1:21:42You don't need to know Peter necessarily. You can listen to the people who've been around him. You can witness him if he gives a talk and you're lucky enough to see it, and maybe you'll be in the same room with him someday, but for the most part, he can be your mentor without ever meeting him if you're open-minded and you ask yourself why. Why would he do this? And don't make assumptions. Like don't assume things about Peter. Just say, why would he do this? You know, here are the 50 different reasons why potentially and one of them might be true. I'm trying to think of who else. Scott Cook. I love Scott Cook from Intuit.

1:22:21Okay. He's definitely one of my heroes. I love him. I've never met anybody in my life with more executive function who has a complete understanding of the lay of the land of his company, his employees, his culture, his board, and kind of the emerging technologies of the world who is so down to earth, so wonderful. Like Scott is probably like the gold standard, I would say, for just fine human being in an executive position. And then Rick Rubin. Ooh. It is my dream. I'm going to put it out in the universe that I get to meet Rick Rubin someday because I do think that he's the first person besides Bill Murray that I've ever seen in my life who I think my mind is similar to and comes up with the answers to things based off of this openness to, for lack of a better term, the universe presenting to you solutions.

1:23:21I hope you guys meet. I hope so, too. I really, really want to meet. He has a podcast. Why don't you go on it? I don't know how to reach him. I don't know how to reach his team. Really? I just keep putting it out in the universe, and I figure it'll eventually happen. Okay. We'll put it out right now. Yeah. Tetragrammaton. I hope I said it right. Yeah. But you made a really hard word as your podcast name. Cyan needs to come on. Yeah. He brought on Bill Gurley, and I'm sure they talked about Uber, but we brought Uber to Bill Gurley. Oh. Hey. Hey. That's the source. Maybe that'll get me on. I don't know.

1:23:54We'll see. That's exciting. Okay, we'll put that out in the universe for you. We'll put that out in the universe. Well, thank you so much, Cyan. This was such a thoughtful and invigorating and really deep conversation. And then it's also just really, it's so fun to spend time with you and get in your brain and just understand how curious you are and unapologetically curious. I think there was a tweet last week and people were all complaining about the Peter Thiel event. Like, oh, someone said that they were embarrassed to go. It's like go to events. Go to events. Take the pictures. I really feel like we need to get over this shame by association.

1:24:34You should be curious and have your own thoughts. You are an entity. You know, it's kind of like we're glasses with water inside, but we're separate and together. But at the same time, if you stand next to another glass with water inside, it doesn't mean you're filled with that water. You know what I mean? Like you can be curious and for a place that like talks about restorative justice and talks about, you know, we give people who've murdered people more of a chance than we give someone who said the wrong thing. You know, that's what needs to end is, you know, Peter holds these events where people talk about everything.

1:25:11and I love it because they go from anywhere from, you know, child rearing to, you know, what's better having atheism or Christianity to rule, you know, a nation, what should be more prevalent, right? It's not because he believes any of these things, it's because he wants to hear them all. Yeah. You know, because he wants to figure out where he stands on it and in order to figure out where you stand on anything, you should hear all sides and not only that, but try to understand it completely before you make, you know, that decision internally. And tribalism in that regard should stop. So I thought Ezra's apology or whatever it was, you know, it's like, I went to an event, but I didn't like it.

1:25:54It's like, come on. It's so awful. I'm so tired of seeing this. It's like, you went to the event, you had a good time. You wanted to be there. Trust me, just say it yeah you know if you get invited to a peter thiel event go like do not shy away from it it does not make you anything that anyone's going to accuse you of you don't eat babies you don't you don't know epstein by proxy you know like you are not a you are not a you are not a just go don't be afraid of those words because i think that um we've weaponized them to the point where they're going to become meaningless and we don't forget what they really are.

1:26:34Racism is real. It's a problem. And so if we call everyone a racist, then we can't find the real ones. We call everyone a p***h. How are we going to find the real p***h? We need to be very careful with this, of pointing fingers and trying to blame people and signal that we're like our group is somehow pure. It's just, it's got to stop. And so that's why I sent that. I was like, proud to know Peter, not going to change. And if it gets me canceled, I really don't care. That was a banger. You do eat Mars babies. Yeah, I eat Mars babies. I was like, yeah, I eat babies, but only from Mars. I thought that was pretty funny.

1:27:09I'm glad you liked it. No, that was hilarious. If they stop and think about it, they're like, there's no babies on Mars. Yeah, because I don't eat babies. One of my friends has a quote that I really love. He said, and this is going to be a little controversial, so I apologize. Let's go. He's like, I've all the people I've ever wanted to, which is none right he doesn't want to yeah I've eaten all the babies I've ever wanted to which is none so it's uh the other thing is you can tell the health of a nation by its ability to tolerate comedy and rap music those two things have to exist for freedom rap music and comedy and if either of those start to disappear you're in trouble and comedy started disappearing from our universities first.

1:27:53And so that should have been a warning sign to the whole nation that we were in trouble. And unfortunately, we didn't speak up for them. We didn't speak up for the Republicans that got booed off campus and had cement bombs thrown at them. And now we're in this situation where we're starting to see a lot of civil unrest around speech and things like that, like what can be said and not said. And so we have to fight for people's right to say uncomfortable things and things that you disagree with. And so that's something that I care deeply about. And a lot of what I do and what I invest in is for that purpose, which is I want to support free speech.

1:28:29It's amazing. Yeah, it's my number one cause. So a lot of people want to, there's nothing wrong with it, want to save the oceans, want to bring water to Africa, want to cure cancer. I want to protect free speech. And this is why you must follow Cyan on X and on Mafia. Hopefully there's another season. I don't know if I was interesting enough to come back, but we'll see. I don't know. Silent killer over here. I'm a silent killer. Thank you, Sian. Thank you, Molly. This is awesome. Hey, it's Molly. If you enjoy our interviews, check out our newsletter, sorcery.vc, where we deliver a once a week top deals and tech headlines email and also go deeper on our podcast interviews.

1:29:09Subscribe to Sorcery today. And don't forget to subscribe to the podcast on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you listen. Link in description to sign up.