Scott Banister

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. Ali Partovi credits him with the conception of paid search advertising via keyword auction, a core business model for internet advertising companies. According to Jimmy Soni,

Banister's original intent in attending UIUC was to become a professor of computer science. Michael Ellsberg wrote that like other entrepreneurs, Scott Banister relentlessly looked at the outcome he wanted to produce in the world and relentlessly focused on how to achieve that outcome. Characterizing Banister as a "self-educated serial entrepreneur", Ellsberg quotes Banister: "I found quickly that, by day I was going to class, learning a bunch of abstract, theoretical stuff, whereas by night, I was working on a business. I could see that business is how things actually get done in the world, and how people make money in the world: you build stuff, things that consumers want." He and friends posted a free registry service, ListServe, the precursor of Submit It!. The three had set up office at the university's chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and the Department of Computer Science newsletter reported they had "installed a microcontroller on a vintage Dr Pepper vending machine and hooked it up to the internet so that students could buy soda by swiping their student ID cards".

Banister was the first of the three friends to leave for Silicon Valley and the first to sell a start-up. 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, and Microsoft acquired LinkExchange in December 1998. Submit lt!, ListBot, and Banister's ClickTrade then became a part of MSN's LinkExchange. The anti-spam company was acquired in 2007 by Cisco for US$830 million.

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.

He was an early investor in Powerset, a startup building a natural language search engine. His other angel 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. He invested in PayPal's earliest version, and he served as a founding board member. In that article, Ganato and Yoon provide a net graph showing the interconnections among PayPal Mafia members' investments.

Personal life Banister met his wife Cyan when she was managing IronPort's blacklist of spammers, and they married two years later. At UIUC, he served as president of the College Libertarians, and co-founded Campus Atheists & Agnostics. In 2015, Banister donated $3 million to a Super PAC supporting Paul's presidential bid. He later switched his endorsement to Ted Cruz after Paul suspended his campaign.

Banister lives in Half Moon Bay, California.

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".