Tristan Pollock is an American tech entrepreneur and startup investor who’s built and sold two companies and has invested $30M into startups.
He’s currently the head of community and content at Tiger Global and Slack-backed CTO.ai, a developer workflow platform that is replacing Heroku.
As a startup ecosystem builder and entrepreneur-in-residence, Tristan has supported Google for Startups, 500 Startups, Techstars, and hundreds of other venture capital firms and startup accelerators around the world.
While a VC at 500 Startups in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, Tristan invested in over 220 startups via Fund III and Fund IV via the accelerator program and seed fund producing an above-average IRR.
Before that, Tristan co-founded Storefront — hailed as 'Airbnb for Retail' by The New York Times — and used their $10M in venture funding from leading Silicon Valley investors, hip-hop artist Nas, author Gary Vaynerchuk, and former Lady Gaga manager Troy Carter, to help brands like Nike and Kanye West scale.
Storefront merged with Oui Open in 2016 to continue expansion internationally.
Tristan’s first startup, SocialEarth, the leading source for social entrepreneurship news, won multiple awards for impact journalism and was acquired by 3BL Media in 2012. His passion for the intersection of impact and technology remains.
Tristan has also been named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 List and given a TEDx Talk on creative cities featuring his own art.
You can find his author columns on Entrepreneur, VentureBeat, and Medium.