Cyan Banister - Investing for a Higher Purpose

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
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**SPEAKER_2** (1:48)
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**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (2:17)
My guest today is Cyan Banister. Cyan's life story is remarkable. She was homeless at a young age, dropped out of high school, and five years ago she suffered an extremely rare stroke. Yet in spite of all of this, she is one of the most optimistic and curious people you can hope to meet.
Cyan is also one of the great angel investors of this era, having invested very early in SpaceX, Uber, Postmates, Deepmind, just to name a few. She became the first female investing partner at Peter Thiel's Founders Fund and now invests at Long Journey Ventures. Our conversation is as much about investing as it is about the essence of life and how connecting with that will help us in our professional pursuits. It's also full of awesome stories about people and companies like SpaceX and Bill Murray. Please enjoy this fantastic conversation with Cyan Banister.
So Cyan, this is a hard one to know where to begin, but since we were just talking beforehand, you sort of gave me the perfect opening question. Do you think that spirituality is an investable category for venture investors?

**Cyan Banister** (3:18)
I absolutely think that spirituality is an investable category and it's been long overlooked. So I remember when pray.com was raising and everybody thought, who's gonna actually use this? Which target demographic actually wants this? And I think that there are a lot of people, especially coming out of the pandemic, who spent two years wondering why is this happening to us?
What is this all about?
What is my purpose? And then looking inwards and then looking outwards. And I think people are seeking these answers more than ever before, because when you look online and you read what's going on in the world, it seems like it's increasingly getting darker out there.
I would say that it's not, but this is where spirituality comes in and lets people know where the light is. I think spirituality comes in many different ways. It comes in the form of prayer. It comes in the form of meditation. It also comes in the form of potentially even psychedelic medicine. So I do think that it's a hugely investible category. And you look at the success of Angel Studios. Well, Angel Studios basically crowd funded ticket sales as well as the development of a film and it ended up being the best box office film at the time. And it went completely out of a studio model. And they basically put out this piece of art that people were clamoring for. And the studios themselves didn't think that it was an investible category.