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Welcome to the A16Z podcast.

I'm Michael Copeland, and we are here today with the founder and CEO of Walker and

company, Tristan Walker, and I'm a new embarrassing right now, but everybody's retail hero, Ron Johnson.

Ron, Rick, welcome.

It's great to be here.

Thank you.

Yeah, well, you're my hero, and yet when my kids want to go to the Apple store, I'm always,

it's like an orb that pulls them in. So I blame you for things too. I'll take that. That's okay.

So we want to talk about retail. And let me just back up. And Ron, you're an investor in Tristan's company. I sort of want to get a little bit of this background on how you two synced up.

Yeah. No, it's actually a funny story. I'm not sure Ron knows the true end-to-end story here. So we were raising our series A round. And then Dris and Horowitz decided to participate. And I remember getting an email early in the morning.

I woke up, I think it was six in the morning.

I got an email from Mark and Dresen.

And Mark said, Tristan, absolutely, no pressure.

I know we're about to close the round.

If you don't want to do this, don't worry about it, forget about it.

But we know Ron Johnson and we think he'd be a great person to help you think through your

business, at which point I frantically emailed Mark back and said, are you crazy?

Ron Johnson has, you know, my retail hero as well.

...