Career
In the summer of 1995, Banister cofounded SponsorNet New Media, Incorporated., along with fellow University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign students Max Levchin and Luke Nosek. Banister created the Submit lieutenant! service while in college. He left during his sophomore year in 1996 to co-found Submit lieutenant! Incorporated., where he served as vice president of technology.
The company"s other products included ListBot and ClickTrade.
Submit lieutenant! Incorporated. was acquired by LinkExchange in June 1998, which in turn was acquired by Microsoft in November 1998. Banister then spent time working with other start-ups as board member and investor.
These start-ups include eVoice, creator of the first email-enabled home voicemail service, which was acquired by America Online 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 United States$830 million.
He was an early investor in Powerset, a startup building a natural language search engine, and sits on the company"s Board of Directors. Other private equity investments include Uber, Zappos.com, LiveOps, Facebook, Hi5.com, Tagged.com, iLike, Causes.com, Topsy Labs and TekTrak. Banister is a marijuana rights activist and was a supporter of Republican Senator Rand Paul.
In 2015, Banister donated $3 million to a Super Public Affairs Committee supporting Paul.
He later switched his endorsement to Ted Cruz after Paul suspended his campaign.
