Scott Banister

Scott built his career by identifying new markets and shaping innovative products for them. In 1995, he identified search engines as a significant advertising medium and invented the first products to automate marketing across multiple search engines, ultimately creating the bid-for-placement business model used by GoTo/Overture (and now Google AdWords) and serving as VP Ideas at GoTo-incubator Idealab. As an initial investor and Director at PayPal, he was a co-inventor of the ‘email payments’ product now widely used on eBay. In 2000, Scott saw opportunity in the unbounded growth of email traffic, co-founding IronPort Systems and serving as CTO. Now the market leader in anti-spam technology, IronPort was acquired by Cisco Systems for $830 million in 2007.