Tristan Pollock
Artist, Public Speaker, and founder in San Francisco, California
Tristan Pollock is an American entrepreneur, artist and investor. Most recently, he founded Shisharka Skunk Works to develop new projects. He is also an Entrepreneur in Residence at 500 Startups, the world's most active early-stage venture fund and startup accelerator. As a Venture Partner at 500 Startups, Tristan has supported over 220 startups with $30M in funding via the accelerator, seed fund, and his own angel investments.
Before that, Tristan sat on the other side of table and empowered the most creative people in the world as co-founder of Storefront, a marketplace for retail space that has worked with brands from Nike to Kanye West. Hailed as 'Airbnb for Retail' by The New York Times, Storefront is backed by over $10M in venture capital from leading Silicon Valley investors, hip-hop artist Nas, author Gary Vaynerchuk, and former Lady Gaga manager Troy Carter. Storefront merged with Oui Open in 2016 to continue expansion internationally.
His first company, SocialEarth, the Huffington Post for social entrepreneurship, won multiple awards for impact journalism and was acquired by 3BL Media in 2012.
Tristan has also been named to the Forbes 30 Under 30, created street art for a TEDx talk on creative cities, cameoed in NBC Universal's Bazillion Dollar Club, crafted the most read Best Buy email of all time reaching over 23 million customers, and designed a MysteryBot called Shisharka Land whose true origins remain unknown.
A Minnesota native from a family of makers, Tristan now lives and creates around the world while on sabbatimoon with his soulmate and life partner of 12 years, Danyelle. Follow along at @WeDidThat.