Tristan Walker
Tristan Walker
Tristan Walker is the Founder & CEO of Walker & Company Brands. Prior to his founding Walker & Company he was an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Andreessen Horowitz. [1] He was raised in South Jamaica Houses, Queens, New York. [1]
Early Life and Education
Walker was raised in a couple of the roughest neighborhoods of Queens in New York City. He was one of the 50% of black children in the U.S. who grow up in fatherless homes–his was shot and killed when Walker was only 4 years old.
“Me being introverted is partly a function of my upbringing,” Walker says of his generally reserved demeanor. “You couldn’t go outside as much, out of fear of what might happen.”
Tristan's brother, Sean, who is 14 years his senior, filled in as a father figure, pushing him to excel in sports.
His mother, Bettie, worked two jobs, six days a week–as an administrative assistant at the New York Housing Authority from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., then at Time Warner Cable from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m.–and enrolled Walker in an after-school program at the Boys Club of New York.
In eighth grade, he tried out for a basketball team that played against a variety of prep schools around New England. He didn’t make it, but one of the coaches knew that Walker was a straight-A student and suggested he take the SSAT and apply to one of the boarding schools the team played. He did, and one day found himself with a full scholarship to Hotchkiss, a prep athletic powerhouse perched aside bucolic Lake Wononscopomuc in Connecticut. Tristan has studied at the Hotchkiss School from 1998 to 2002. [1]
Education
He holds Bachelor's Degree in Economics from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Walker also has a Master's Degree in Business Administration and Management from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business.
Career
Tristan Walker didn’t know anything about Silicon Valley until he was 24 years old. He’s gone through stints at Twitter, Foursquare and Andreessen Horowitz, emerging as a leader in efforts to boost diversity in tech.
Walker is a celebrity in Silicon Valley, known primarily for his success and creativity as head of business development at Foursquare, which he joined in 2009 and left in 2012. Foursquare was one of the original location-based “check-in” apps, and Walker put the startup on the map by landing hundreds of partnerships with merchants and brands such as American Express and BravoTV. His regular appearances at South by Southwest, on television, and on Twitter –where he’s garnered an audience of nearly 300,000 followers–promoted both Foursquare and Walker himself. By the time he left to become entrepreneur-in-residence at Andreessen Horowitz, everyone wondered, “What’s next for Tristan?” Walker’s hustle and charisma aren’t the only reasons for his fame. In Silicon Valley, even in 2014, a visible, successful African-American is big news. The technology industry's lack of minority representation is deplorable. Venture capitalists, startup founders, and big-time CEOs like to brag that the tech business is a color-blind meritocracy, but their boasts don’t reflect the facts.
Toward the end of his first year in business school Walker sent an email to David Hornik, a partner at August Capital, and asked to stop by his office and pick his brain.
“He was incredibly charming,” says Hornik. “[People] come to Silicon Valley to make money and engage in transactions, rather than to build relationships. His goal is not to optimize the economic value of any given relationship, but to meet smart, interesting people. If it provides value to him in the long run, it’s a lucky circumstance.” [10]
Hornik, who knows Twitter co-founder Ev Williams, helped Walker land an internship at Twitter. Walker spent the next five months leading a team of other Stanford grad school students performing market research on how Twitter could be used for business applications. The project formed the foundation of what is now the “Twitter 101” section of the platform’s site for corporate users.
But Walker’s career didn’t really take off until the following summer, when he emailed Dennis Crowley, co-founder and CEO of Foursquare, eight times asking for a job. After Crowley half-seriously offered to meet him, Walker hopped on a flight to New York the next day and showed up at their offices, laptop in hand. Stunned, Crowley and co-founder Naveen Selvadurai challenged him to sign up 30 small businesses as Foursquare merchant partners within a month. He found 300 in a little over a week. After that, he was asked to become the company’s first director of business development.