Overview

Gender

male

Investor Type

Angel

Investor Stage

Seed

Scott is an American entrepreneur and angel investor. He is best known as a co-founder of IronPort and an early advisor and board member at PayPal.

Scott Banister started his career as a pioneer in the email business. He was Founder and VP of Technology at ListBot, the largest ASP for business email list hosting. ListBot was acquired by Microsoft. After ListBot, Scott spent his time working with other start-ups as a board member and investor. These start-ups include eVoice, creator of the first email-enabled home voicemail service, which was acquired by AOL in 2001. He served as VP of Ideas at idealab!, where he contributed numerous innovations, including the unique bid-for-placement search engine model that powers Overture. In December 2000, with Scott Weiss, Banister co-founded IronPort, an email appliance provider that was acquired in 2007 by Cisco for US$830 million.

Scott Banister is co-founder and Chairman of [Zivity](http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/zivity), a social networking site co-founded with his wife, [Cyan Banister](http://www.crunchbase.com/person/cyan-banister). He was an early investor in [Powerset](http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/powerset), a startup building a natural language search engine, and sits on the company's Board of Directors. He also sits on the Board of Directors for Slide, a start-up founded by PayPal co-founder Max Levchin.

Other private equity investments include Zappos.com, LiveOps, Facebook, Hi5.com, Tagged.com, iLike, and Causes.com.
Banister attended University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, from which he dropped out in 1996 to move to Silicon Valley. He currently lives in Half Moon Bay, California with his wife Cyan.