You are listening to the DFJ Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders series, brought you weekly by the Stanford Technology Ventures Program.

You can find podcasts and videos of these lectures online at eChorner.standford.edu.

So to kick off this quarter, we have a very special guest who is a Stanford alum and only 29 years old.

Tristan is an entrepreneur.

And he's also starting his own company, but also working a nonprofit.

But one of the most interesting things about him is that he grew up in the projects of New York and ended up becoming a graduate, a star graduate of Stanford Business

School, and then, of course, a very successful Silicon Valley entrepreneur. So we're going

to hear his story and learn a lot about what he's learned during this journey. So why don't

you start out by telling us a little

bit about your story? I am very, very, very, very happy to be here and share a little bit

about my story. So, you know, as Tina mentioned, you know, I grew up Queens, New York,

born and raised, pretty humble beginnings, you know, the whole rose that grew from

concrete story, right?

I grew up projects, welfare family, all that stuff.

I realized early in life I had one goal in life, right?

And I was to get as wealthy as possible as quickly as possible, right?

So there's no way I'm going to come back to this, I want to figure it out.

I realize that there are three ways to do it, right?

The first way was to be an actor or an athlete,

right? And that didn't work out for me too well at all. The second way was to work on Wall Street.

You know, I had a good fortune to work on Wall Street, only to realize that I hated it.

It was the worst two years of my entire life. I was a victim of bad culture and realized that in order to kind of reach my potential,

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