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

**Molly O'Shea** (0:00)
Congrats on SpaceX.

**Cyan Banister** (0:01)
Thank you. That's my first check. Luke came over to our house, and he's like, Banisters, I need you to dig through your couches. Anything liquid you have, I need it. SpaceX needs it. So Luke and Scott convinced me to put everything that I made in IronPort when we sold to Cisco and to SpaceX. I think the two of us combined are definitely number one in the world. 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. If you get invited to a Peter Thiel event, go. 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.

**Molly O'Shea** (0:34)
SpaceX, Anduril, Uber, Zappos, PayPal, Affirm, Flexport, Checker, Density, Flock Safety. That's a really cool company. Brave, Zen, Control Labs, Depop, Substrate, also very underrated. Carta, Together AI, Turing, Postmates, Niantic, Cargo, Matic, Diamond Foundry. Very interesting. Upstart, Fivetran, Forge, Opendoor. Had a lot of fun with CAS. We did a really recent interview there. Calm, TrueMed, and Crusoe. So what's your favorite?
All right, so we are at Long Journey's HQ. It's called the Boobies Place, the Bubbies Place.

**Cyan Banister** (1:20)
Bubbies.
Bubbies Place, yes. Bubbie might have some boobies, but it's Bubbies Place.

**Molly O'Shea** (1:32)
And we're in a very special room right now. With Cyan Banister, the star, one of the stars, because I also called Dylan the star of Mafia. You're all stars of Mafia in your home.

**Cyan Banister** (1:45)
Yep. Well, we are in Long Journey's headquarters, and this room that we're in right now, they call it Cyan's Lair. Oh. I have a tendency wherever I'm at, including at Founders Fund, I was behind the bookshelf, that turns.
I really like darkness and artificial light is not my friend.

**Molly O'Shea** (2:07)
Oh, my God.

**Cyan Banister** (2:09)
I'm going to tolerate this today, but in general, I like natural light or dark. If you come to the office, you'll tend to find me in here.

**Molly O'Shea** (2:18)
Tell us, if you're not looking, you should watch the video if you're not listening. If you're listening on Spotify, look at the video right now. We're in this crazy, very beautiful, charismatic room with lots of fun imagery. Could you just explain what's going on behind us? It's also entirely around all of the walls down here in the lower level.

**Cyan Banister** (2:40)
Yes, everything's covered.

**Molly O'Shea** (2:41)
What is this?

**Cyan Banister** (2:43)
So this is done by an artist named Dave Zacken, who lives in Brooklyn. And I discovered him on Instagram.
I was just scrolling through Instagram one day, and I saw this guy wearing a pair of glasses that were, that looked like 3D glasses, but they're red and green instead of red and blue. And I had to wear those after I had a stroke. And so in order to learn to walk again, that was one of the things I had to do. And so I recognized and immediately thought, here's a person who's obviously going through something that I went through.
I want to learn more about him. So I started looking at his feed and realized he was a ceramicist. And he was stuck in the hospital for a month where he couldn't make ceramics. Oh, wow. And so his friends started bringing him pieces that he could paint in bed and, you know, ways of making an income. And I thought to myself, if I ever get a chance to buy his stuff again, if he ever makes it again, I'm going to buy as much of it as I can. Because I want him to start, you know, bringing a lot of this joy to the world. And then one day I had this fantasy that I was like, wow, I wonder if Dave Zakken, this is, he's made a full recovery at this point, but I wonder if he would do a mural. And I would love to see him, I would love to see a hotel like this.

**Molly O'Shea** (3:54)
Yeah.

**Cyan Banister** (3:54)
It would just be super fun. And I reached out to him and I said, hey, can you come paint our office? And he's like, you're not going to believe this, but I'm painting my first mural right now as we speak. And he sent a picture of himself up on the ladder. So I figured it was a sign. And we flew him out here and he spent a week living pretty much in this room, and painting the walls. And a lot of this is organic and unplanned. It was just based off of what he heard us talking about, you know, the vibe of the team. And he would just come hang out with us for a little while and then come down here and paint.