Live Episode! Walker & Company: Tristan Walker (2019)

The very first time Tristan Walker shaved, he woke up the next morning with razor bumps all over his face. "I was like, what is this?" he remembers saying. "I am never shaving again—ever." He soon discovered that like him, many men of color were frustrated by the lack of shaving products for coarse or curly hair. Fifteen years after that first disastrous shave, and after countless meetings with doubtful investors, Tristan launched Bevel, a subscription shaving system built around a single-blade razor. Eventually his brand Walker & Company grew to include 36 hair and beauty products, used by millions of men and women across the U. S. In 2018, Walker & Company was sold to Proctor & Gamble, and Tristan became P&G's first black CEO. This show was recorded live at the Lincoln Theatre in Washington, D. C in September 2019. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Guy Raz?

  Our presenting sponsor today is Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Every founder on this show started with a hard question. Not the marketing plan, the 2 a.m. kind. Is this idea any good? Am I the one to build it? Should I quit my job? Anthropic got built the same way. A public benefit corporation founded on one hard question. How do we make sure AI goes well for people? So they asked over 100,000 people their hopes and their fears and are publishing what they find, even the uncomfortable parts. Me? I've got my own hard question about AI. Here it is. If everyone has access to something that can help them write the business plan,

• 0:46Guy Raz?

  build the prototype, analyze the market, maybe even come up with the idea, what separates the people who actually build something from everyone else? I don't have a clean answer yet, so I've been sitting with it with Claude. There's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai/hibt. We get support from U.S. Bank. A question I love asking founders. What's the one decision you almost didn't make? The one that changed everything? Because it's never the obvious stuff. It's never, I decided to start a company. It's the small, boring, Tuesday afternoon decision you barely remember making until you realize it's the reason everything after it either worked or didn't.

• 1:32Guy Raz?

  Say you're 18 months in. Business is growing. You've got expenses coming from six directions. Gas for the van, office supplies, your phone bill, team lunches that are actually client meetings, and you're putting it all on whatever card you grabbed in year one. You're not thinking about it. Why would you? You've got bigger problems. But here's the thing. Path A, you keep going like that. End of the year, you're sorting through statements, trying to figure out what went where. You've left hundreds, maybe thousands on the table in rewards you never earned, money that could have gone back into the business. Path B, you pause and get The US Bank Triple Cash Rewards Visa Business Card.

• 2:14Guy Raz?

  Now you're earning 3% cash back on gas and EV charging, office supply stores, cellphone service, and restaurants. You pick up an extra $750 cash back as a bonus. And you've got a low APR on purchases and balance transfers for 12 months while you're scaling. Same business, same expenses, two completely different outcomes based on one small decision. Visit usbank.com/business to learn more. The creditor and issuer of this card is US Bank National Association pursuant to a license from Visa USA Inc. Some restrictions apply. If you travel often, you'll want to hear about this unprecedented offer.

• 2:58Guy Raz?

  For the first time ever, new Delta SkyMiles Reserve American Express Card members can earn two Delta Comfort round trip flights for travel within the 48 contiguous US states, Puerto Rico, or the US Virgin Islands. Plus, you can earn 50,000 bonus miles towards your next getaway. And who doesn't appreciate an elevated airport experience? Delta SkyMiles Reserve Card members get access to the Delta Sky Club, your pre-flight oasis to recharge with 15 visits and four one-time guest passes each medallion year when flying Delta together. That's up to $950 in annual value.

• 3:40Guy Raz?

  Value estimate based on $50 per visit rate to purchase additional visits or bring a guest to the Delta Sky Club. Make every trip feel more rewarding with the card that upgrades your travel. Apply today at delta.com/cardsocial. Offer ends November 4, 2026. Minimum spending requirements and terms apply. Flights are fulfilled as flight certificates valid for Delta Comfort or Delta Maine to select domestic destinations. Book 21-plus days in advance. Up to $80 per person and taxes and fees apply. Other restrictions apply. When I pull up to a gas pump to fill my car, I'm not thinking about chemistry or engineering. I'm thinking about getting in, filling up, and getting on with my day.

• 4:23Guy Raz?

  And it reminds me a little bit of the founders I talked to on this show, because the best ones obsess over things their customers will never see. Tiny details, invisible improvements, relentless iteration. And not because anyone's watching, but because it makes the product better. That's what the mobile brand does. It engineers fuel the same way great founders engineer their products. Mobile Supreme Plus Premium Gas helps keep engines three times cleaner, which can mean better performance and improved gas mileage. It's for people who care about what's under the hood, even if they never see it. Three times cleaner compared to mobile regular gas in port fuel-injected engines. Actual results may vary.

• 5:07Guy Raz?

  Visit mobili fuels.com for details.

• 5:10Speaker 01

  Support for NPR and the following message come from Jobs, Ohio. Say yes to more. More options, more opportunities, more paycheck. That's what you'll find in Ohio, where the economy is booming, upward mobility is rising, and affordability is the name of the game. Visit findyourohio.com.

• 5:28Guy Raz?

  Hey, everyone. Just a quick note to let you know that we are getting ready for a relaunch of the show in just a few weeks. Nothing about this show that you know and love will change, with one major exception. We are going to start to publish two new episodes a week, not just one. So that means our team is super busy getting everything ready to go. So in the meantime, take a listen to this episode from our archives. It's a great one. Actually, an episode that many of our listeners have named as their favorite. It's the story of Tristan Walker and how he built his personal care business, Walker & Company. Enjoy.

• 6:12Speaker 02

  I remember the very first pitch deck, which was a PowerPoint I graduated to keynote. But we had a PowerPoint of clip art, because I didn't have the things. I remember being so embarrassed. So I had this 15-slide pitch deck that just sold a hope and a dream. And we pitched 50, 60 VCs, and folks were turning this down. And it wasn't until they started to push back that I realized, hmm, they just don't get it.

• 6:48Guy Raz?

  From NPR, it's How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

• 7:00Guy Raz?

  I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how a lifetime of shaving with products that irritated his skin inspired Tristan Walker to build a better shaving and beauty brand for men and women of color, Walker & Company.

• 7:17Guy Raz?

  So one of the guiding principles of creativity is that some of the very best ideas come out of sheer frustration. Products like Honest Tea, or Cliff Bar, or Allbirds, or Dyson, these all came about because their founders couldn't find the beverages, or energy bars, or shoes, or vacuum cleaners that they wanted. So they invented them. But in the case of Tristan Walker, I think it's safe to say that he didn't just start from a place of mild frustration. He actually started from a place of being fed up, even angry, because for most of his life, he had felt completely ignored, totally overlooked,

• 7:58Guy Raz?

  whenever he walked into the shaving aisle of a drugstore. Virtually all the big shaving brands were making products that worked well on men with relatively straight hair. But Tristan couldn't find a high-quality razor that worked on his curly facial hair without leaving razor bumps all over his neck and jawline. And he knew that, like him, many African-American men were dealing with the exact same problem. So he decided to design Bevel, a shaving system with a simple, single-blade razor that was easy on his face. And he wanted everything about the product to look and feel great, not like the dusty boxes of shaving products for African-American men that always seem to be

• 8:40Guy Raz?

  on the bottom shelves of the drugstore. And his ambition? To build a black-owned and-led consumer brand as big as Johnson & Johnson, or Procter & Gamble. But of course, when he first tried to raise money from all those VC firms on Sand Hill Road in Silicon Valley, he got a lot of no's. But eventually, he was able to launch his company with a razor, some shaving cream, a bit of oil, and a brush. And over the past five years, his brand has grown to include more than 30 specialized hair and beauty products for men and women, which are now sold in lots of big retailers across the country. A few weeks ago Tristan sat down to tell me how he did it in front of a live audience

• 9:23Guy Raz?

  at the Lincoln Theater in Washington DC.

• 9:26Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 9:28Guy Raz?

  This is like Tristan Walker Central.

• 9:31Speaker 02

  I'll take it.

• 9:32Guy Raz?

  So, um, so let's start, let's start at the beginning. Tell me about, about your childhood. You, you grew up in Queens.

• 9:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, the way I like to describe it, um, is, you know, I had a bit of the Rose that grew from concrete story. Yeah, I grew up Queens, New York, projects, welfare, belts of homelessness, that sort of stuff, right? And I realized very early, I had one goal in life, and that was to get as wealthy as possible, as quickly as possible. Um, I realized three ways to do it. The first was to be an actor and an athlete. That didn't work. The second was to work on Wall Street. That didn't work. Uh, and the last was entrepreneurship. And then thank goodness I came to that realization.

• 10:13Guy Raz?

  Um, when you were a little boy, um, your dad died.

• 10:19Speaker 02

  He was killed.

• 10:20Guy Raz?

  He was killed. Um, and you grew up with an older brother and your mom.

• 10:23Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 10:24Guy Raz?

  What did your mom do?

• 10:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:26Guy Raz?

  For work?

• 10:27Speaker 02

  So my mom worked, uh, three jobs, mainly for New York City Housing Authority, uh, administrative assistant. Um, she spent some time working for Time Warner Cable, um, and she did some retail, all at the same time, within seven days. I don't know how she did it. She did it, thank goodness for her. It was not easy, but she persevered. As a result of, I think, her perseverance, you know, I had the good fortune to be first graduate college in my family.

• 10:54Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 10:55Speaker 02

  Um, and she, she really forced that.

• 11:00Guy Raz?

  What do you remember about like your neighborhood growing up as a kid? Was it, I mean, I don't know, what'd you do? Did you?

• 11:07Speaker 02

  You know, it's funny, I didn't do much because I couldn't do much. Like, my father was killed when I was three years old. I don't remember too much about him, other than the fact that he was killed when I was three years old, which is a little bit telling to kind of the type of environment that I did grow up in. So, you know, I lived probably the first six, seven years of my life in Jamaica, Queens, New York, forty projects. And by the time I turned around seven years old, we moved to Flushing, Queens, to another project kind of development, and it was much of the same, right? And my mother was like, "You're gonna be the one, you're not gonna go through this stuff." So it's very disciplined, "Stay home, get your studies done, you're not going outside." When I snuck outside, she caught me, I got in a lot of trouble. But, you know, that was really kind of my life, right?

• 11:52Speaker 02

  Get to school, get home, do your work, repeat. And, you know, that discipline actually kind of got me to where I am now.

• 12:00Guy Raz?

  Was school easy for you as a kid?

• 12:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:04Guy Raz?

  You were a good student?

• 12:06Speaker 02

  I was a good student. Because of the discipline that was inspired in me, I always excelled, right? I tended to be, you know, at least up until high school anyway, at or near the top of my class, you know? And I kind of slowed down when I say that stuff, because by the time I got to high school, I realized I didn't even know what a verb was, right? I went through this entire kind of time, all the way up until my high school years, doing really, really well, at the top of my class, not even knowing what a verb noun and that sort of thing was.

• 12:35Guy Raz?

  As a teenager, you ended up going to this really elite, private boarding school, Hotchkiss in Connecticut.

• 12:41Speaker 02

  Shout out to Hotchkiss. So, the way I like to describe Hotchkiss is, it was the first time I got to see how the other half lived. I went to school, literally, with Rockefellers, Fords, right? And I learned a couple things. First, name mattered. Two, being wealthy wasn't the same as being rich. And the last, and probably the most important, was I can compete with each and every one of them. While...

• 13:14Speaker 02

  While I didn't know what a verb was, I learned.

• 13:21Speaker 02

  And by the end of my four years there, honor roll, like that sort of thing. It was an absolutely just wonderful experience for me, but transformative and a little bit different from how I grew up.

• 13:34Guy Raz?

  Was it, I mean, was the transition for you when you got there? Because you were, what, like 14 years old?

• 13:39Speaker 02

  Yes, I've been living away from home since I was 13, 14 years old.

• 13:42Guy Raz?

  And were the first few months there hard for you?

• 13:45Speaker 02

  Academically, yes. We get to the school and I realize I don't even have a computer.

• 13:51Speaker 02

  And all of my other classmates had computers, that sort of thing. I went to, I believe it was the English professor who was my advisor at the time. And I remember he took me to this basement where all the used textbooks are. And then there was this old Compaq, like, prazario computer that we had to haul out and take it to my room. So academically it was very tough because I wasn't equipped with the tools to compete. But over the years, that kind of accelerated and went away.

• 14:19Guy Raz?

  So you finish Hotchkiss, you go to Stony Brook University in New York to study economics. You know, most college students don't necessarily know what they're going to do. But did you have a sense of what you want to pursue there and what you thought you would do after?

• 14:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I was always thinking about the after. I wanted to get wealthy.

• 14:37Speaker 02

  I was pretty singular in that hope. Very singular in that hope. And over time, that's kind of morphed and changed and the things that are important have morphed and changed. But I knew, like, I was very, very, very focused on how to get there. And Wall Street was the next greatest option. All this Silicon Valley stuff, I had no idea about. My world was New England.

• 14:57Guy Raz?

  So you were thinking, I'll do this degree and I'll go into finance?

• 15:00Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 15:01Guy Raz?

  That was your plan?

• 15:01Speaker 02

  That was the, I mean, economics. It was the closest degree we had at Stony Brook to get me to Wall Street. And in between my first and second year of university, I got an internship at Lehman Brothers in their back office. Halfway through, I said, I want to try some of this front office stuff. So I left that and joined Trading Desk at the time. Just observing.

• 15:25Guy Raz?

  So when you graduate, you went, actually went to work for Lehman and then as a trader, right? And eventually to JP Morgan. In that time, at that time period, did you still think this is what I should be doing? Like this is my sort of path to?

• 15:42Speaker 02

  It was the worst two years of my life.

• 15:47Speaker 02

  This was 2005 when I joined the company and as a trader, your job is to make money with other people's money to at the end of the year, make money for yourself. Like there was just no fulfillment in it.

• 16:00Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 16:00Speaker 02

  Now, I should also say I wasn't really good at it. But even if I were, I realized that there was an emptiness in it that I just couldn't live with. And also the culture wasn't one that I wanted to be a part of. And the last thing I'd say in all this, and I observed this in not only a lot of friends that I had, but also a lot of folks who've been around for 20, 30 years in the industry is, you know, Wall Street had a good way of locking you in. They pay you more money and they pay you more money and they pay you more money. And at some point, your opportunity cost gets so high.

• 16:37Guy Raz?

  That you don't want to leave.

• 16:37Speaker 02

  That you're unwilling to leave. And fortunately, and kind of unfortunately at the time, I got laid off at a time that made me not have to think about that.

• 16:46Guy Raz?

  You were laid off by JP Morgan at the time?

• 16:48Speaker 02

  I was, yeah.

• 16:49Guy Raz?

  This is the middle of financial crisis.

• 16:51Speaker 02

  Well, actually it was right before. So here's the blessing and this is a true testament to faith. I got laid off in January of 2008. I was applying to Stanford for business school. I applied there in the fall of that year. And fast forward, I started Stanford, September of 2008, crash happens a month later.

• 17:12Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 17:16Guy Raz?

  So you get to Stanford and from what I've read like you didn't really have a sense of what Silicon Valley was and what the tech world was or any of that at all.

• 17:24Speaker 02

  Uh-uh.

• 17:25Guy Raz?

  So what did you like, what was your impression when you got there?

• 17:29Speaker 02

  So at Stanford, I got there, it was 2008, I was 24 years old and very quickly I knew it was where I needed to be. Primarily because I saw that other 24-year-olds not only making millions of dollars but fundamentally changing the world. I'm like, hmm, how come I had no idea about this place? Seriously, you know, I thought Silicon Valley was a place where semiconductors got made.

• 17:54Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 17:55Speaker 02

  That's it.

• 17:56Guy Raz?

  Right, right.

• 17:57Speaker 02

  That's it. This was before kind of, you know, Facebook became what it did.

• 18:02Guy Raz?

  Just before Airbnb.

• 18:03Speaker 02

  Twitter, Airbnb, Uber, all that stuff, right? Foursquare. And I said, wow, I can participate in this and I started to have that kind of hotchus moment again, right?

• 18:14Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 18:15Speaker 02

  This is something new, but I can do it.

• 18:17Guy Raz?

  While you are a student at Stanford, you start to reach out to Foursquare like this, I mean, what's the story? Like what was Foursquare at the time?

• 18:28Speaker 02

  Foursquare, it's a location-based app, had 10,000 users at the time. It was getting me to explore my city, it was getting me to do things that I didn't want to do, it was getting me to go to the gym more, right? And I was like, how is this thing actually inspiring me and changing my behavior? And I said, wow, like I want to figure this out. Found the founders' emails on the internet, this is the classic story. I emailed Dennis Crowley, the CEO, founder, eight times and the eighth time, he emailed me back. And I'll never forget this, he said verbatim, he said, after all these ideas I shared with

• 19:07Speaker 02

  them, you know what, comma, I just may take you up on some of this, period, are you ever in New York? Question mark. Dennis.

• 19:19Speaker 02

  My wife and I were watching Lost. We were binging on Lost at the time. I remember this very vividly in the living room. And I looked at her and I was like, what should I do? And five minutes later, I said, actually, yes. I was planning on being in New York tomorrow. So I booked my flight that night, flew out the following morning.

• 19:36Guy Raz?

  You show up at the office and you're like, I'm here.

• 19:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, that's literally what happened. I, uh, it was 36 Cooper Square. We were on the fifth floor.

• 19:44Guy Raz?

  Were they surprised to see you?

• 19:45Speaker 02

  I opened the door. Dennis was facing the back. He turned around and he looked at me surprised as if like I wasn't actually going to come. And there's this awkward moment, like, what does he do now? And it so happened that there were like two empty desks. He was like, yeah, go over there, go over there. And throughout the day, I mean, he had a meeting, he had a couple of meetings. And then when he's done with it, he came over. He's like, all right, so what do you want to do? I was like, I don't know.

• 20:14Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 20:15Speaker 02

  And, you know, I sent him some ideas over email around kind of signing up retailers, merchants, that sort of thing. Anyone who's familiar with Foursquare, it's very small business focused. He wanted to get merchants on the platform to start engaging with their customers. He said, all right, I'll tell you what. Sign up 30 merchants by the end of the week and you get a job. And he's like, what do you want your title to be? And I was like, uh, business development, cause it has the word business in it. And I go to business school, so it makes a lot of sense.

• 20:45Guy Raz?

  And how many people, by the way, how many people worked at Foursquare?

• 20:48Speaker 02

  There were two and a half. There was Dennis Naveen, they were co-founders. And then Harry, who was leading engineering, but he wasn't quite full time yet, but I guess theoretically.

• 20:57Guy Raz?

  So he's, he gives you a challenge. Sign 30 businesses up by the end of the week and we'll see what we can do.

• 21:02Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 21:02Guy Raz?

  And what happened?

• 21:03Speaker 02

  Signed up 300, 400, something like that.

• 21:07Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 21:11Guy Raz?

  So you end up going to work for Foursquare after you graduated from...

• 21:16Speaker 02

  Nope. It was actually, it was in between my first and second year of business school. So I worked full-time at Foursquare during my second year of business school. And Foursquare gave me a gift. You know, because I was so early there, I felt as, it was as much as my company as everybody. It was a family there. We were doing something completely different. You know, we had folks like Facebook trying to come after us. And that felt, that was energy. I loved it. And I felt like my work wasn't done. So, you know, Dennis was kind enough to let me work on the West Coast. After I graduated, he didn't ask me to come to New York. He was like, "Yeah, you can stay out West." The company was growing.

• 21:56Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 21:56Speaker 02

  There's a lot that I had to learn too, right? And through that process, in not only kind of, kind of growing the business, what does it look like to go from two employees, 150, to raise tens of millions of dollars, to build something uniquely authentic? It was an education that I wouldn't have gotten alone.

• 22:16Guy Raz?

  So you were there, like, I think, three and a half, almost four years.

• 22:19Speaker 02

  Three years.

• 22:20Guy Raz?

  Three years. So you decide, that's run its course, and I'm gonna do the next thing. And it turns out that you either met or you knew Ben Horowitz, the, one of the partners of Andreessen Horowitz, and he convinced you to become an Entrepreneur in Residence there. How did that happen? How did you meet?

• 22:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, so when, so Ben Horowitz is on the board of Foursquare. So they were one of Foursquare's largest investors. I had known Ben, not very intimately, it was just kind of as a board member, and he knew of the work that I did. So when I told Dennis that I was leaving the company, Dennis reached out to the board, told them that I was leaving, and then Ben reached out to me a day or two later. He said, "Tristan, I get it, right? I understand. You should not be an Entrepreneur in Residence," right? And he gave me the reasons why. And he said, "But if you're gonna be an Entrepreneur in Residence, you should do it with us."

• 23:13Guy Raz?

  And what were you going to do as Entrepreneur in Residence? Basically, come up with ideas and pitch ideas to them, and in theory, they would fund those ideas?

• 23:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, so in, as I think about the job, it's one of the craziest jobs in the world. You get paid to think of ideas all day. He said, "Come spend six to nine months with us to figure this out." And I was like, "I'm gonna spend all nine months to figure this out." Being an Entrepreneur in Residence, it's interesting, because I've never met one who's enjoyed it. That's myself included. But it's spending a lot of time to think about things in an inauthentic way.

• 23:47Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 23:49Speaker 02

  You know, the lesson that I learned and Ben taught me a lot, he's like Tristan, you gotta understand that you need to do the thing that you fundamentally believe that you are the best person in the world to do, right? Where you have a unique proposition, given your story to solve that problem. So again, if you're doing something that's like inauthentic, this is hard enough, right? You can't do that. And it took me seven months to realize that I needed to do the thing that I felt that I was uniquely positioned to do.

• 24:17Guy Raz?

  You were basically trying to come up with an idea that you thought they would back.

• 24:21Speaker 02

  Well, I was trying to come up with a good idea.

• 24:24Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 24:25Speaker 02

  And the lesson that I've learned and Ben, I have to thank him for this, he said Tristan, usually what looks like good ideas are bad ideas. And usually what looks like bad ideas are good ideas. The problem with good ideas is that everybody tries to do them. Right? And as a result of it, there's so many people working on the same things, there's no value to be created.

• 24:43Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 24:44Speaker 02

  Like Airbnb was a bad idea.

• 24:46Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 24:47Speaker 02

  Right? Like folks actually like renting out.

• 24:49Guy Raz?

  Yeah, rooms to strangers.

• 24:51Speaker 02

  It's a terrible idea! But they've created tens of billions of dollars in value to do it, right? It's those ideas that actually create the value.

• 25:00Guy Raz?

  And were you thinking at that time, tech, tech, tech, tech? Cause you were in Silicon Valley, was that where your head was?

• 25:06Speaker 02

  I was, I was trying to do the thing that I felt was the most ambitious that would make the folks who supported me proud of what I was doing. As opposed to doing the thing that I was uniquely positioned to do.

• 25:17Guy Raz?

  Let me, let me ask you about that. I mean, you come up with a bunch of different ideas. I think one was like a hair extension mail order idea, right?

• 25:23Speaker 02

  I still think that's a great idea. You guys should take it.

• 25:26Guy Raz?

  Direct to consumer hair extensions, right?

• 25:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a lot of money.

• 25:30Guy Raz?

  So I, so at some point, you, you come up with, with this idea for...

• 25:37Speaker 02

  Sorry, it's a good idea.

• 25:42Speaker 02

  Or a bad idea, but yeah, you get it.

• 25:44Guy Raz?

  So, at some point, you come up with this idea for a razor. Just describe, first of all, before you tell me how you pitched it, how did the idea come to you?

• 25:53Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm. This is the first idea that came to me, actually. And it was the culmination of 15 years of experience. I, when I went to boarding school for high school, you know, it was in Lakeville, Connecticut. Right? There's no retailer nearby if you went. Um, you know, if I had to shave, you know, you get the peach fuzz on your face, right? Uh, it's like, oh, it's the rite of passage time. Um, and I'll never forget, I went to, I believe there's like a CVS-type store, um, uh, in the area. And you pick up your multi-blade razor with the shave gel, 'cause, you know, I didn't have a father at home to teach me how to shave. My brother didn't shave, that sort of thing. Um, took it home, uh, to the dorm, shaved, woke up the following morning, my face completely broken out in razor bumps. I was like, what is this?

• 26:38Speaker 02

  I'm never shaving, ever. That was the last time I had shaved until I started Bevel. Um, so, uh, what did I use? Um, I used for 15 years, this thing, for folks who are not familiar with it, called the depilatory cream.

• 26:54Guy Raz?

  Which is like a chemical.

• 26:55Speaker 02

  Uh, it's gross. So, folks who aren't familiar with it, um, you know, a lot of women are familiar with it, 'cause it's an air.

• 27:03Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 27:04Speaker 02

  Um, yeah, see? Um, but a lot of black men are too, because that's all we're able to use, right? So a depilatory cream is this cream, it's thick. Um, you put it on your face, it sits for six to eight minutes, and you just wipe it off, and the hair goes away.

• 27:18Guy Raz?

  It dissolves, it dissolves.

• 27:19Speaker 02

  Which is crazy, right? You know, the funny, one of the most interesting things is if you actually read the back of the pack, um, the caution statement says, "Do not use this two days in a row," right? It's something that smells, it burns your face, it discolors your skin, but there is no other option. Uh, and in January of 2013, I remember being fed up. My wife is fed up. I said, "I've had to do this for 15 years. I wanna shave, 'cause this is terrible." Um, so I wanted to learn how to do it. Look, I'm not thinking about a business idea at all.

• 27:56Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 27:56Speaker 02

  I just wanted to solve the problem.

• 27:57Guy Raz?

  You just wanted to.

• 27:58Speaker 02

  Just wanted to solve the problem.

• 27:59Guy Raz?

  And you didn't want to get razor bumps.

• 28:00Speaker 02

  I did not want to get razor bumps. It's not a good look.

• 28:03Guy Raz?

  And the entire, right, the market for razors in the United States had been two, three, four blades, right?

• 28:10Speaker 02

  Five, six, seven, eight.

• 28:11Guy Raz?

  That was seen as like the, you know, it was all about a close shave.

• 28:14Speaker 02

  That's right, but not everybody needs that. You know, I realized that our kind of trying to get the closest shave possible causes the issue. Um, and I said, all right, if I can do this, um, and combine it with kind of products to help ameliorate this issue for people who look like me. I know that 80% of people who look like me, men or women, have this issue. I know 30% of people who don't look like me have this issue. It's the worst. And, um, I remember walking in to the specialty retail store.

• 28:45Guy Raz?

  Like one of those like art of shaving or.

• 28:47Speaker 02

  Correct. I did this a couple of times in different cities just to test it. I'd go to the salesperson and I'd say, you know, I've had to deal with this issue related to razor bumps my entire life. What should I use? Now, um, these salespeople are totally incentivized to take me to the on-brand like multi-blade razor with a nice handle.

• 29:08Guy Raz?

  They're expensive.

• 29:08Speaker 02

  That costs a hundred and fifty dollars and all that stuff. And none of the stores did they do that. They've always taken me to use what they recommend, which are these off-brand, single-blade, double-edged safety razors that your grandfather, grandfather's grandfather used to use. Right? I was like, okay, let me try it. Took it home, used it, no razor bumps on my face. And that got me to try to understand why that was actually the case, right? Um, and I'm not going to belabor the point too much, but it turns out that a single blade cuts the hair level with the skin, not beneath. If I have curly hair and I have blades cutting the hair beneath my skin, it grows into your skin. Gross. Um, and it's one clean cut, so there's no pulling or tugging or anything like that.

• 29:51Speaker 02

  So this solution has existed for the past hundred years. Right? Just no one had the incentive to sell it because there's no more patent protection on it. And that's when I knew I had something. And this was around the time when a lot of the e-commerce companies started to pop up. I was listening to their pitches. I understood the types of companies that got funded and the types that didn't. And it was just great timing to start something like this. And to go back to the kind of Ben Horowitz thing, who else in the world was uniquely positioned to share that story to venture capitalists, to raise the money to do this, to build a health and beauty products company for the majority of the world? I couldn't think of anybody else who was able to do that.

• 30:33Guy Raz?

  So when you talked about this idea to friends of yours who had similar issues, were they like, this is exactly what I've been waiting for. I need this?

• 30:41Speaker 02

  I didn't have to talk to them. I had to give them a safety razor. They shaved and didn't get razor bumps the following day. This was like a first moment of truth thing, that when folks woke up the following day and didn't have to have this issue, that's transformative. My first internship on Wall Street, you're told you got to shave every day. I remember being mortified. I was on the trading floor. I opened the doors and there's a gentleman who got up, I can't curse, I can't curse. He said, "Take that bleep off your face."

• 31:13Guy Raz?

  Hmm. Wow.

• 31:14Speaker 02

  And I was like, okay, I can't because I don't know what to use. That story scales.

• 31:25Guy Raz?

  When we come back in just a moment, how Tristan used that story and many others to pull together a very convincing pitch, and why dozens and dozens of VCs looked him right in the eye and said no. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This.

• 31:50Guy Raz?

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• 32:32Guy Raz?

  The agents bring speed and scale, and people bring taste, judgment, and control. Learn how you can get more out of your site from a Framer specialist or get started building for free today at framer.com/built for 30% off a Framer Pro annual plan. That's framer.com/built. Rules and restrictions may apply. AI isn't just opening new business opportunities, it's changing the way businesses get work done. The questions they ask, the decisions they make, the routine tasks they can hand off. That's the idea behind NetSuite Next, the next generation of NetSuite with AI woven into the tools your business already relies on.

• 33:17Guy Raz?

  NetSuite Next surfaces insights exactly when you need them, puts agents to work on routine tasks and problems, and lets you ask complex questions in plain language, like talking to a knowledgeable colleague. But technology is only part of the story. AI is also reshaping how people and teams work together, and that shift is already underway. That's why NetSuite wants to put a new, expert-created business guide in your hands today. It's called "A Lining for the Agentic Era: How AI is Changing Everyday Work." And right now, it's yours, absolutely free. Inside, you'll discover how AI could reshape Work across your entire organization and how to position your business to prosper from it.

• 34:02Guy Raz?

  If your revenues are at least in the seven figures, get NetSuite's free business guide, Aligning for the Agentic Era: How AI is Changing Everyday Work, at netsuite.com/built. The guide is free to you at netsuite.com/built. Netsuite.com/built. Stripe is built for whatever comes next because the pace of change has never been faster than it is right now. New business models, new currencies, and new expectations for speed, reliability, and scale. Stripe builds financial infrastructure that helps businesses start, grow, and operate globally. From payments and billing to fraud protection and cross-border payouts, Stripe is built

• 34:47Guy Raz?

  to support the new pace of commerce. They're trusted by the companies building at the frontier, from 86% of the Forbes AI 50 to global leaders like Salesforce and OpenAI. In fact, more than 1.6% of global GDP flows through Stripe, with Stripe's users processing a combined $1.9 trillion last year. So if you're already thinking about what's next for your business, see what's possible at stripe.com.

• 35:24Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's early 2013, and Tristan Walker has this idea for a new razor designed specifically for black men. And he goes to his current boss, venture capitalist Ben Horowitz, to ask him what he thinks about it. So when you had this idea, you go to Ben, and what was his response?

• 35:47Speaker 02

  Well, in fact, Ben really wanted me to do the hair extensions idea. And at that point... At that point, I knew he was in because he had, he understood an insight that folks were unwilling to down the rest of Sand Hill Road. So by the time I came to him with the shaving idea, then he was really into it because he was like, that's you, right? Like, you've got it and you have a uniqueness here that can help you accelerate. Let us help you in that vision.

• 36:16Guy Raz?

  All right. So you've got sort of the sign off from Ben and you've got to start to look for money to pursue this idea. And just to get a sense of where you were, was the initial idea to just start with a razor or was it to start with a whole kind of ecosystem of products?

• 36:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, so came up with the idea in January. My ninth month was April, so I knew I had to hurry up.

• 36:39Guy Raz?

  Your ninth month as entrepreneur in residence?

• 36:41Speaker 02

  As an entrepreneur in residence. And that's when I was thinking about starting to go out and raise money. So my thought was, all right, I had this razor, also had kind of a set of other products. There was kind of the blades, priming oil, shave cream.

• 36:54Guy Raz?

  And did you create a prototype at that point?

• 36:56Speaker 02

  So, it's a great question. Two things here. There's the razor and the design for the razor. Then there's the products that go into the bottle. And then there's like the design for the bottle, each of which had to kind of coalesce before I actually started pitching.

• 37:10Guy Raz?

  And you needed some seed money for that.

• 37:11Speaker 02

  Correct. So, you know, it's cart before the horse kind of thing, right? In order to kind of start what we did, you need like $2 million to do it, right? But I knew that there are things that I can do to get that $2 million to do it. The first was on the razor design. I actually found some folks who were ex-IDO, wonderful, brilliant, brilliant folks. My pitch to them and their pitch to me was as follows. Tristan, for this razor, we can do it. We will design six types of razors that you can select from.

• 37:43Speaker 02

  If you decide to choose one, you just need to pay us $10,000 to do it. But if you don't, then we just get to keep these designs. So I was like, okay, let me have these designs. I could put it in my pitch deck, right? And if I raise the money, you'll get your $10,000. Then for the kind of oils and creams that go into the bottle, there was a website that actually had a list of all the private label manufacturers in the country. I click on the link. I point my finger out to the screen and I find Cosmetic Specialty Labs in Lawton, Oklahoma. I call them up and I say, I'm thinking about starting this concept. I think it's going to be great. I could potentially have the backing of all these kind of VCs.

• 38:28Guy Raz?

  This is a company that made like lotions and shaving creams and things like that? Okay.

• 38:31Speaker 02

  They did it for small companies and some big as well. And she said, great, like I can get you these samples for free. Like, let me make you some samples for free. I didn't have to pay for any samples. Now, that never happens, right? Like, never happens. So by the time the end of April comes, I have designs for razor, like a hard good. I have formulations for the soft goods that I need. And then one of my best buddies, he's one of the best package designers on the planet. He helped me with some initial designs for what Bevel could be.

• 39:02Guy Raz?

  But this was all on paper? You didn't have any physical, like, prototypes yet?

• 39:06Speaker 02

  Um, correct.

• 39:07Guy Raz?

  But that would allow you to make the pitch deck, to show what it could look like?

• 39:11Speaker 02

  Kind of. The pitch deck, actually, I remember the very first pitch deck, which was a PowerPoint. I graduated to keynote. But like, we had a PowerPoint of like clip art, because I didn't have the things. I remember being so embarrassed. So I had like this, you know, 15-slide pitch deck that just sold a hope and a dream.

• 39:30Guy Raz?

  And, I mean, you, at this point, this is like 2013, I guess, was this the thing, the first thing since, I don't know, you graduated college that really got you excited? That you thought, this thing could have legs?

• 39:43Speaker 02

  It was the first time I realized that I saw something that people, like, other people didn't.

• 39:52Guy Raz?

  They didn't see.

• 39:53Speaker 02

  Now, I had some of that for like Foursquare, but... It was the first time that something came to me that I actually had a competitive advantage based on my just being, right? Like 15 years of experience of trying those terrible products, right? And I knew that I can compete here with kind of some of the best venture capital firms on the planet.

• 40:14Guy Raz?

  All right. So at this point, before you even have a prototype, right? What was your sort of value proposition? Because there were products on the market for razor bumps and you could get shaving cream that was designed to ameliorate that issue. But what was the problem with those products, in your view?

• 40:33Speaker 02

  Here's my pitch. I would walk people through this story. I always have to go to a retail store. At their retail store, you have aisle 15. Aisle 15, if you look up, it says ethnic beauty aisle. The ethnic beauty aisle is always next to aisle 14, which is beauty aisle, which never made any sense to me. I have to walk down that aisle in the ethnic beauty aisle, which is never really an aisle because it's a shelf. And then there are products in packages that are dirty with kind of old folks in it from the 70s with like jerry curls on it. And this packaging has not changed. So here's what's really, really interesting.

• 41:17Speaker 02

  This is exactly what I tell people. I walk them through this whole story and the VCs laugh. And the first slide that I show them are photos of the packaging and they all shut up, right? Because it hasn't changed. I don't Photoshop those things. Now, what's the pitch? Folks of color spend more money in every single health and beauty category than anyone else. Folks of color, or especially when you consider black folks, and I'm one of them, the most culturally influential demographic group on the planet. When we think about folks of color, not only will we be the majority of this country in 20, 30 years, we are the majority of the world, right? So if you're a VC, right? Why wouldn't you invest in that?

• 41:59Speaker 02

  And it wasn't until they started to push back that I realized, hmm. They just don't get it. That we're after thoughts, right? And that's just a testament to complacency. And I can compete when there's complacency.

• 42:14Guy Raz?

  Just to understand, I mean, essentially, what you were saying was, look, there is a, an opportunity here to create really great, beautiful products for a market that just is totally underserved. Like, was that what you wanted?

• 42:29Speaker 02

  I had the graph, it was up and to the right. I had the kind of beautiful inspiration and all that stuff. Like, look, VCs say they want founders that they've worked with in the past that have pedigree and experience with the blue ocean opportunities, like, check, check, check, check, check. And folks were turning this down.

• 42:48Guy Raz?

  But, I mean, this is what I'm curious about. You're going there, you're showing them the numbers. You're saying, this is a, you know, there's a trillion dollars or whatever, however much money there is when it comes to consumers of color in the United States. This is a market where African-American men particularly, or women are spending more money than any other group in the country. And VCs were saying what to you?

• 43:14Speaker 02

  Razorbuns is not a problem. Go figure. Literally, I had one VC who was like, oh yeah, is this like that, that Chris Rock movie with good hair? Like, I was like, there's no...

• 43:26Guy Raz?

  No, but I mean, I'm curious.

• 43:27Speaker 02

  No joke.

• 43:29Guy Raz?

  You would sit with VCs, and presumably, most of them were men, most of them were white men.

• 43:35Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 43:36Guy Raz?

  And people are saying, this is not something I've ever heard of as a problem.

• 43:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, they just didn't want it to be a problem. I mean, and it wasn't only kind of the white men, it was like folks of color too. And we pitched, gosh, 50, 60 VCs. It, you know, like Silicon Valley, particularly venture capitalists who are investors who've never operated before, almost have this really interesting kind of worldview that, you know, they're always right. But you also have to realize, it's their job to be wrong 90% of the time. And I had to realize that very, very quickly. Maybe it was the case that they just haven't caught up to the concept yet, but they will. You know, we spoke to 60 of them. There were another 60 behind that. Like, we were gonna figure it out.

• 44:23Guy Raz?

  Did you, would you get irritated during pitch meetings?

• 44:25Speaker 02

  Oh, all the time. I mean, like, those Chris Rock comments used to piss me off. But I knew, like, every time they were saying no, I knew that bad idea was good as hell. Like, I just knew it.

• 44:36Guy Raz?

  Why, why did you, what was it?

• 44:37Speaker 02

  I just knew it.

• 44:38Guy Raz?

  It was just intuition?

• 44:39Speaker 02

  No, I just knew if they were turning them down, they're not gonna fund anybody else that was trying to do this. Like, if, if anybody else, like, if anybody else was qualified to do this, it was me. We didn't have any competition and still don't.

• 44:54Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 44:55Speaker 02

  You know, it gets to some point where even if folks wanted to go and pitch this idea, they'd say, well, let's see if Tristan's works first. And by then, it's too late.

• 45:03Guy Raz?

  I, I'm curious, like, for people who have straight hair, right? Most of them, most men with straight hair, don't think about shaving. They shave and then they go to work and whatever. Were you sort of trying to explain to, to investors, like, this is a really big issue? This is like something that black men, men of color, don't talk about, but is sort of painful?

• 45:24Speaker 02

  I mean, I, I think there's even bigger. It's, it's me, my trying to explain to people that people are different. You know? And that wasn't even registering. You know, if you can't even level set there, you know, you're gonna have a pretty steep uphill battle.

• 45:43Guy Raz?

  When we come back in just a moment, how Tristan Walker finally launched his shaving subscription box and eventually got his products into retail stores, and how that led to maybe the most transcendent moment ever experienced by anyone in a Target. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This from NPR.

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• 47:43Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2013 and after eight months of trying to raise money, Tristan finally gets a handful of investors to invest in his idea for Bevel, a new subscription razor company primarily for African-American men. He's got about $2.5 million, a preliminary design for a razor, and some ideas for the shaving products to go with it. So you have the seed money. Where do you go next? Where do you get them manufactured? Who do you call?

• 48:14Speaker 02

  So I had to pay him $10,000.

• 48:16Guy Raz?

  The, the design firm, $10,000, okay.

• 48:18Speaker 02

  Now I own the razor. And then as, as far as the soft goods manufacturer, we started manufacturing, or actually like-

• 48:25Guy Raz?

  With that, with that company in Oklahoma?

• 48:27Speaker 02

  Cosmetic Specialty Labs, yeah. We went through for each of the products, four or five different kind of prototypes until we got to something that we were excited about.

• 48:33Guy Raz?

  Tristan, how did you know about, I mean, you know, how did you know what ingredients to use? Shave butter, cocoa butter, I don't know. Like, how did you?

• 48:40Speaker 02

  So, a couple of things. Number one, you relied on experts, right? So that's actual scientists.

• 48:45Guy Raz?

  At, at their, right?

• 48:46Speaker 02

  That's right. And then my own experience. Like, I'm a black man who needs to deal with these issues, who knows that there are certain ingredients to help ameliorate these issues for us. So include those things. The shave butters, the tea tree oils, the salicylic acid, the witch haz, like, all that stuff, right?

• 49:03Guy Raz?

  Things that soften skin.

• 49:04Speaker 02

  And the wonderful thing about, like, what we have built is that we've just developed things that solve problems. And it's not rocket science. We just package it together in a way that's delightful and works. We haven't kind of traveled around the world to find that ingredient that's like in the earth, right, that we like put into the bottle. No, these things exist. We've packaged it in a way that is proprietary to the needs of the audience that we serve, and we've continued to do that for the past six years.

• 49:34Guy Raz?

  And so for people who are familiar with the blade, just describe what, what it, what it looks like.

• 49:38Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, a double-edged safety razor is, you know, think about this kind of single blade that has kind of two different sides. It's very, very sharp, right? So you take this single blade, house it within a safe head. That's why they call it a safety razor. So, there's two different plates, one up top, one at the bottom.

• 49:57Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 49:58Speaker 02

  You squeeze it together, blade's in the middle, and you attach a handle to it, and now you can shave.

• 50:02Guy Raz?

  And you shave straight down, right?

• 50:04Speaker 02

  Thirty-degree angle.

• 50:05Guy Raz?

  Thirty-degree angle.

• 50:06Speaker 02

  That's right. So that actually started the mass-market shaving industry back in 1904, 1905. There's this guy, his name was King Gillette.

• 50:14Guy Raz?

  That was what razors were.

• 50:16Speaker 02

  That's right. That's right. That's what razors were. That's what- Razors still are today if you find them and use them, but efficacious enough. So attaching a handle to a head and shaving with it, you know, we know it now today is just razors. It's just the amount of blades that you bring along with it.

• 50:34Guy Raz?

  I read that you were really like interested in like the whole unboxing experience, right? Like when you get an iPhone, it's so beautiful. It's simple. You just pop off the top. You open it up, no instruction book. It's seamless. It's clean. What was sort of your idea of what you wanted that razor?

• 50:50Speaker 02

  I wasted a lot of money on packaging, boy.

• 50:54Speaker 02

  Look, I mean, I felt if we were going to deliver an experience to folks who have not been treated well, we have to wow them with that experience. We went through like 10, 12 different prototypes of the amount of suction that like comes up when people lift the top box from the bottom.

• 51:16Speaker 02

  It matters. When folks kind of lift it up and it takes that kind of two and a half seconds lift up and they see this beautiful razor underneath, that's something that they deserve. And those 10 to 12 prototypes had to happen.

• 51:31Guy Raz?

  What do you remember when you, when you got the first shipment and you saw this idea in your head?

• 51:37Speaker 02

  Funny enough, the first shipment actually froze on a truck because we,

• 51:42Speaker 02

  we were doing the manufacturing in December.

• 51:47Speaker 02

  And, you know, you film it in Oklahoma, right? Like that sort of thing. And a few of the trucks actually had things freeze on it. So before we kind of shipped, we had to do like another batch run in order to deliver it to customers.

• 51:59Guy Raz?

  This was going to be a subscription model from the very beginning?

• 52:02Speaker 02

  Subscription in the beginning. Yeah, that was the thing that actually got me to get the funding that I needed. Because a lot of these VCs were subscription, subscription, subscription.

• 52:11Guy Raz?

  And was like Harry's and Dollar Shave Club, were they out in the world at that point?

• 52:16Speaker 02

  I believe Dollar Shave Club is in the, in the world at that point. Harry's launched a little bit before we did.

• 52:22Guy Raz?

  And so there was this sort of sense, you're saying there was a sense among VCs or there was excitement around the subscription model?

• 52:28Speaker 02

  Like this was like Warby Parker days, bonobos, right? Like that sort of thing. So fortunately, we had good timing because that kind of fell out of favor very quickly. But we started with subscription and the subscription model worked for us because we wanted to build that habit, right? You got to keep shaving and we had this promise, we had this clinically proven solution that would work if you use our product for the first four weeks. So it naturally lended itself to subscription.

• 52:55Guy Raz?

  All right, so you've got all of these boxes made and it was the razor, it was going to be a system, right? Razors, shaving cream, oil, a brush.

• 53:03Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 53:04Guy Raz?

  But you had $2 million. How do you get the word out? You've no marketing budget.

• 53:07Speaker 02

  Yeah. So funny enough, when you build something that works, people talk about it. That first moment of truth, when you don't wake up with razor bumps on your face, you're going to talk about it. Even today, well over half of our customers come organically.

• 53:25Guy Raz?

  A friend is like, you've got to try this razor. Right? Well, I mean, now it like Nas is rapped about it and stuff, so.

• 53:30Speaker 02

  You know, that helps.

• 53:31Guy Raz?

  Yeah, so, but that helps. But before he.

• 53:34Speaker 02

  We didn't ask him to do it.

• 53:35Guy Raz?

  But before he talked about the fade and the blade.

• 53:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right.

• 53:38Guy Raz?

  How did you get? I mean, okay, day one, you got to sell the products, you got a website. How do you get people to start buying it?

• 53:45Speaker 02

  So I've been fortunate, particularly from my Foursquare days, because we did so well and had a whole bunch of publicity, that sort of thing. I was building relationships with journalists from way back when.

• 53:57Guy Raz?

  So you had a little bit of a network.

• 53:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, and like the thing, you know, Walker Companies had a ton of press that we're very, very thankful for. But I was speaking to a gentleman who's written a number of articles about us around like, why is it that we've gotten so much press? And he said, you know what, Tristan? You don't kind of treat journalists transactionally. You know, like you build relationships with them. So by the time you're actually working on things, they want to talk about it. So we launched with a whole bunch of folks that were willing to talk about it. It was a time when we were talking about diversity in technology, right? So not only did I have this new company that had raised money, I had my not-for-profit that was thriving at the time.

• 54:41Guy Raz?

  And your not-for-profit, we should mention, it was a Code 2040 was nonprofit to help train black and Latinx coders.

• 54:49Speaker 02

  Yep, to get internships in Silicon Valley, get them full-time offers, mentorship, that sort of thing. And that's continued to thrive.

• 54:57Guy Raz?

  So you had some attention from that.

• 54:59Speaker 02

  We had a ton of attention from that. So it told a cohesive story that folks were willing to continue to talk about. And that's the little push that we need and the rest just came from people using the product.

• 55:10Guy Raz?

  And were sales brisk right away or was it sort of a slow, a slow climb?

• 55:14Speaker 02

  Slow grind. I mean, we, between the first and second year, third year, I think, are kind of growth rates, two, 300% first year, 200% the second. And then we started to get into this world where we couldn't raise money. So it started to slow down.

• 55:29Guy Raz?

  But before that point, I mean, you started to attract more, more money, right? Eventually you raised, I think, almost $30 million.

• 55:35Speaker 02

  Raised $39 million and the story goes, and I tell a lot of entrepreneurs this, I wish I didn't raise a cent of it. Every single problem that I've had at the company was a result of our having raised money.

• 55:48Guy Raz?

  Because?

• 55:49Speaker 02

  Growth.

• 55:50Guy Raz?

  They expected rocket, hockey stick growth.

• 55:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, the thing about raising money that a lot of people forget is you got to return it.

• 55:58Guy Raz?

  And they want it fast.

• 56:00Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, here's, I would go and kind of pitch, I wanted to build a company that was around 150 years from now. I mean that. VCs have a 10-year horizon. That leads to some interesting board conversations, right?

• 56:15Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 56:15Speaker 02

  And we weren't ready for the growth. And raising more and more money, particularly in a world where your competitors are raising hundreds of millions of dollars, like $39 million is a lot of money, but not when your competitors are raising hundreds of millions of dollars, right? VCs weren't going to fund it if they didn't see kind of more opportunity in more things, right? Oh, you're just a subscription company. Subscription's not hot, right? I need to see more innovation, more distribution, that sort of thing. So we accelerated, kind of, you know, we started with the shave system. Then we launched this electric trimmer. And then we launched this haircare brand, delivering solutions to this audience.

• 56:58Speaker 02

  Now, my biggest mistake is launching each of those things too quickly. And that got us in this, you know, now you're managing two brands, right? Thirty-six different products, crazy supply chain, you got to market it, etc.

• 57:12Guy Raz?

  And how many people were working at Walker & Company?

• 57:15Speaker 02

  Twelve.

• 57:16Guy Raz?

  Twelve?

• 57:16Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 57:17Guy Raz?

  And what was your life like? Was it just like non-stop, grind, grind, grind?

• 57:22Speaker 02

  It was hard. I mean, we... I was wearing multiple hats, right? I'm the CEO of a company, the chairman of the board of that company, new father, a two-year-old at the time. So it was challenging. It was a lot of work. You know, being a CEO is the worst job in the world, but the most rewarding one, and I can't think about anything else I'd ever do.

• 57:46Guy Raz?

  One of the things that I noticed you did, which really reminds me a lot of Away, the suitcase, the travel suitcase company, and Glossier, the makeup company, is it wasn't just the products that you were selling. You had websites, you had Find a Barber, you had barbers do videos, you had videos of men using the razors and testimony of how... These really beautiful videos and kind of men talking about how, you know, this is the thing that I have been waiting for.

• 58:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 58:17Guy Raz?

  I mean, was the idea also to kind of build a self-care sort of lifestyle brand?

• 58:23Speaker 02

  Yeah. Six months before we started and started shipping, we actually launched what was called at the time Bevel Code. Bevel Code is this kind of online digital magazine talking about styling, grooming for men of color. Think about this for a second. You know, I'm thirty-five years old right now. I still, to this day, do not know where to go, with the exception of Bevel Code, as a black man, to know what moisturizer to use for my face. GQ, Esquire, all that stuff, it does not exist. And we're serving kind of this consumer by telling these stories. Not only what moisturizers to use for your space, but what it's like to feel like when you wake up with razor bumps on your face and you got an interview that morning, right?

• 59:06Speaker 02

  Like, these are stories that need to be told, need to be scaled, and people should hear it, because it's real.

• 59:13Guy Raz?

  You, I think by 2015, did a deal with Target, where at this point, you could get the razors, you get the products at Target, so it wasn't just mail order, it was just direct to consumer. Why? I mean, was that sort of a shift in the model?

• 59:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was a huge shift. So, we started distribution in February 2016. The way we got there, I'm pretty involved with all of our customers, I read all of our consumer success tickets. You can rate us from 1 to 10 how likely you are to recommend the product to friends. And then you could write your review of like the brand in it. So, I remember reading it one day, there's one guy, you could see the email of the person, I'm not gonna put his name, his first name dot last name at target.com, wrote this glowing review, he was a subscriber of ours for a long period of time. Two customers beneath that, first name dot last name at target.com, glowing review, he was a customer for even longer. So, it's like, hmm, what do I do here?

• 1:00:14Speaker 02

  So, I go to LinkedIn, I realize like, alright, the first gentleman, he actually was running personal care for Target at the time. He was a Stanford GSB graduate, and a black man. So, it's like, I'm gonna hit you up.

• 1:00:28Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 1:00:29Speaker 02

  And then...

• 1:00:30Guy Raz?

  So, this was just like, just like serendipity?

• 1:00:32Speaker 02

  Serendipity. And then, the gentleman that was two beneath him, he ran the shave category at Target.

• 1:00:40Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 1:00:41Speaker 02

  This is a true story. So, I emailed them, and, gosh, about a month later, we met, three months later, we were in the store.

• 1:00:47Guy Raz?

  Wow. Amazing. But that was only because you were paying attention to the comic, right?

• 1:00:54Speaker 02

  If I was not reading those things, we would not be in Target right now.

• 1:00:57Guy Raz?

  And how important did Target become for your sales?

• 1:01:00Speaker 02

  Retail now is the majority of our business.

• 1:01:03Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 1:01:04Speaker 02

  It became, really, you think about marketing, it's a billboard for our brand. And I think more important, it was a statement for the movement that we were trying to create. So let me kind of give you a quick story. And this is probably the proudest moment of my entire career so far. My son was two. We started distribution in Target February 2016. So I was like, alright, I'm gonna take my son. This is gonna be like one of those momentous occasions, right? Like, father takes son, sees the product. He's in the cart. We turn into the shave aisle. I get down about a quarter of the aisle, and all of a sudden I hear my son say, "Dada." Right? So I turn around, and I'm on one of the packages. I'm on the razor box.

• 1:01:48Guy Raz?

  Your face is on the box.

• 1:01:49Speaker 02

  My face is on the box, and he saw me on the box. And I realized two things at the time. First, this was his first time ever in a retail store. Now, he's a two-year-old, has no idea about it. But his first experience in retail is not down this ethnic beauty aisle, right? The fact that he's a black child, will-be-black man, who deserves this experience and is getting it. But even more important, he realized that, or he will realize, that he can also produce. Right? So not only is he a great consumer, but can be a great producer for an audience that needs to, that has gone underserved for so long.

• 1:02:28Speaker 02

  So I say and thank, I thank Target for the movement push. Because that story needs to be scaled. And it wouldn't have happened otherwise. And it's getting scaled, as we speak.

• 1:02:44Guy Raz?

  So Target essentially takes a product from just being a direct-to-consumer, or a product that would have been in the "ethnic" aisle, and it's in...

• 1:02:53Speaker 02

  They made a bet, and they made the right bet.

• 1:02:55Guy Raz?

  So...

• 1:02:58Guy Raz?

  All right, so you guys are steadily growing.

• 1:03:01Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:03:01Guy Raz?

  You've got this growing product line.

• 1:03:04Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:03:04Guy Raz?

  You're starting to gain momentum. Things are exciting. And you sell the company.

• 1:03:10Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's a few things happening in between then.

• 1:03:12Guy Raz?

  In 2018, Procter & Gamble buys the company out for an undisclosed amount of money. Now, my read of this, I think a lot of people hear that and think, okay, that's your exit. And you walk away and you're swimming in cash and goodbye. But that's actually not what it was. Why did you sell it to Procter & Gamble when you were gaining momentum?

• 1:03:38Speaker 02

  Yeah. 2018 was a crazy year. Couldn't raise money.

• 1:03:44Guy Raz?

  You could not raise money?

• 1:03:45Speaker 02

  Could not raise money.

• 1:03:46Guy Raz?

  Because they just didn't believe in the potential?

• 1:03:49Speaker 02

  It was a multitude of things. I think you start to get into a weird vicious cycle when you're raising money. You know, if there's one investor who's unwilling to kind of give you the money, other investors aren't willing to do it, then if you're not raising the money, you can't kind of spend as much on innovation and marketing anymore, which makes it harder to raise money. Like, you get into this like really weird cycle. As a result of that, also in 2018, we had to lose some really wonderful folks, right? In a layoff. Like, because we couldn't...

• 1:04:18Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:19Speaker 02

  The company needed to thrive. And this is all happening as like revenues are still kind of like growing. It's like this weird thing. Anyway, at the beginning of the year, we started to get a ton of interest from all the CPGs.

• 1:04:32Guy Raz?

  The big companies, Unilevers and Johnson & Johnsons, whoever they were.

• 1:04:35Speaker 02

  I can't say.

• 1:04:36Guy Raz?

  You can't say it, right?

• 1:04:37Speaker 02

  Um, but a lot of the big companies, and you realize, you know, if you're starting to have these chats, you better be serious about it because it's going to take a lot of time away, right?

• 1:04:46Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:46Speaker 02

  So we came to the conclusion, all right, we're in this world, we can't raise money. We have this 150-year vision. We want to serve this audience, continue to kind of do what we can, but in a way that's kind of uber-competitive. In September, August, September of last year, Procter & Gamble came knocking on the door. And we realized very quickly our values aligned. Procter and Gamble reaches five billion people every single day. Five billion people around the world use their products every single day. The majority of whom are people of color, right? They came to us and said, Tristan, we believe in what you're doing. The way you touch these consumers, the way you speak to them is unique. It's authentic. We still want you to be an independent company. We will not touch you.

• 1:05:28Speaker 02

  But get to leverage our access to five billion people, billions of dollars of research and development to do what you do, right? And, you know, fast forward a few months later, we closed the deal. It only makes me now think about the things that I have to do every day. I no longer have to worry about going out and raising money.

• 1:05:46Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 1:05:46Speaker 02

  Being distracted by that.

• 1:05:49Guy Raz?

  Because they will invest back into the company.

• 1:05:51Speaker 02

  Correct. I mean, Procter and Gamble's been doing this for 180 years, right? The thing that like is really, really important for me is that we are set up in a position to maximize our ability to serve. Procter and Gamble set us up to do that. And that's really all that I care about.

• 1:06:08Guy Raz?

  Well, I mean, I'm interested because in the beginning of our conversation, you talked about your goal in life was to become wealthy. It sounds like that was changing because you could have kept the company and grown it and maybe become a billionaire, whatever. But it sounds like that that ceased to be your...

• 1:06:28Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:06:28Guy Raz?

  It didn't, it wasn't about being wealthy?

• 1:06:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, I mean, I, that changed very quickly when I had my first son. I have two sons now. And my kind of definition of ambition changed. That moment when I took my son to Target and he said, Dad, made me think about the world in a different way. And kind of the goal that I have now, you know, I reflected back on this. When I was 20 years old and I think, all right, when I was 30, like, what did I want? Right? You know, the house, right? The wonderful wife, the children. I don't need anything else anymore, right? This idea of like more money won't get me anywhere. Like, the thing that I care most about is being a virtuous human, a virtuous person, so that my sons know how to live this world virtuously, right? That matters to me.

• 1:07:16Speaker 02

  I beg you.

• 1:07:21Guy Raz?

  When you...

• 1:07:22Speaker 02

  Oh, and one other thing I should say, just so you folks know, you talked about this idea of not really being an exit, what the movement means. Procter and Gamble's been around for 180 years, and I'm the first black CEO in the company's history. The amount of impact that that means for the world, and like what we can do and the investment in that, is very, very important.

• 1:07:43Guy Raz?

  When you were acquired by Procter and Gamble, you also told them, "By the way, I'm moving this company from Silicon Valley, and I want to run it in Atlanta, Georgia," which is where you are now based.

• 1:07:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:07:56Guy Raz?

  So, tell me the story, why?

• 1:07:58Speaker 02

  Yeah. Atlanta, I think, is the most important city in the country right now. It has one of the fastest-growing economies in the country. You think about diversity, particularly upward mobility of black folks in the country. I'm raising two black boys in this country, and kind of their ability to see upwardly mobile black folks matters to me. And my son, we lived in Palo Alto for some time. He had wonderful education, right, with no diversity. And that really started to impact me. Walker and Company needs to be in Atlanta. Most of our customers are there, our highest revenues are there, culture happens there.

• 1:08:42Speaker 02

  It is the city, and they have embraced us with wonderful, open arms. And Procter and Gamble's been incredibly supportive of our moving there, which is wonderful.

• 1:08:52Guy Raz?

  We could do a whole conversation about black tech leaders in Atlanta and entrepreneurs. How, what is your vision? Put this into context. How big do you want this thing to be? What do you want Walker and Company to be in 10 years from now, 20 years from now?

• 1:09:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:09:14Speaker 02

  When we started this chat, we talked a little bit about Hotchkiss, Rockefellers, and Fords. And again, like, I saw that there was purpose in name, right? Proctor, Gamble. You know, a lot of people ask, "Well, why'd you put your name on it?" That's kind of selfish. And I think I did it because there's an accountability there, right? And I want that accountability to this Walker name to mean something. To mean something for an audience that deserves to be served as first-class citizens. So, you know, what's my goal in the next 10 to 20 years? To be put in a position where I can ask that question of myself again for the company,

• 1:09:59Speaker 02

  right? This is a company that needs to be around 150 years from now. I want this to outlive me, and I will be around for as long as that takes.

• 1:10:08Guy Raz?

  You want in 150 years for people to say Unilever, Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, Walker & Company.

• 1:10:16Speaker 02

  I want people to say Procter & Gamble, Walker & Company.

• 1:10:20Guy Raz?

  Tristan, when you reflect on your journey, how much of all of this do you attribute to your intelligence and your hard work? And how much do you think it was just luck?

• 1:10:37Speaker 02

  It's faith. I've learned 2018 was a trying year. I don't know if I told you this. It was the first time that I realized that good seasons end and bad seasons end. By the time I moved to Atlanta... I had my last kind of session with like a therapist I was working with. I started with her in June of last year. She said, Tristan, man, you've come a long way. When we started, you weren't thinking about selling the company. You weren't moving to Atlanta.

• 1:11:22Speaker 02

  You weren't having a kid, right? You didn't do kind of like the layoffs you had to go through at the time. Like, all this stuff happened all at the same time. And the only thing that got me through it was knowing that I had a faith that was strong enough to get me to the end of that season. And now I'm in this like wonderful season of like immense bounty, right? Like, Procter & Gamble has afforded our ability to really revel in that, but also know that season's going to end, which is fine. But I know now that like my faith will get me to the next one, and the next one, and the next one.

• 1:11:57Guy Raz?

  Do you feel lucky?

• 1:11:59Speaker 02

  I feel fortunate and blessed and thankful.

• 1:12:04Guy Raz?

  I love that. Tristan Walker, founder of Walker & Company. Thank you. I spoke with Tristan Walker at the Lincoln Theater in Washington, DC. And by the way, if you have a minute, you should really check out some of the Bevel videos. They feature tutorials, tips, and men talking about their own hair care experiences. Some of them are incredibly powerful. And they include guys like Ryan Leslie, Big Daddy Kane, and the Roots MC, Black Thought. Hey, thanks so much for listening to this live episode of How I Built This. Our show was produced this week by J.C. Howard with music composed by Ramtin Arablouei. Thanks so much to our live events team, Jessica Goldstein, Ali Prescott, Ellen Jorgensen,

• 1:12:48Guy Raz?

  and Andy Huether. Thanks also to Neva Grant, Jeff Rogers, Casey Herman, Julia Carney, Alex Chung, Liz Metzger, Keri Thompson, and Elaine Coats. Our intern is Margaret Serino. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This. This is NPR.