Cyan Banister has fascinated me since my friend Scott Britton hosted her on his podcast. Her approach to life overlaps with many of the ideas that bounce around the Bend Reality community I founded.

To put it simply, she experiments with the nature of reality. More on that in a moment…

She is one of the most successful early-stage investors of the past decade, with a portfolio that includes SpaceX, Uber, DeepMind, Postmates, and Affirm among more than 100 companies. She was the first female partner at Peter Thiel's prestigious Founders Fund and now leads Long Journey Ventures, where she continues to invest in transformative early-stage startups. 

What makes Cyan’s story remarkable is not just her investment track record, but also her unconventional path to success: she experienced homelessness at age 15, dropped out of high school, and became a self-taught engineer before discovering her talent for spotting breakthrough companies before anyone else. 

She credits much of her pattern-recognition ability and investment edge to consciousness experiments she's conducted for years. Cyan treats reality itself as something to be tested, documented, and understood through empirical observation rather than abstract belief.

I created this very short handbook to make it easier for both you and I to adopt some of Cyan’s fundamental practices, as I understand them thanks to podcasts, videos, interviews, her writings and search engine results. Cyan did not participate in creating this handbook, and any mistakes are mine alone.