Tristan Walker has gone from oil trading to hawking shaving cream in six years. As an economics major at Stony Brook University in Long Island, Walker — who was at the top of his class — became enamored by New York City’s flagship industry: finance. “I knew I wanted to try it,” he said.
Walker liked how quantitatively the finance industry defined success. “In trading, your performance is objective; you look at your profit and loss statement at the end of the day, and you know that you’ve succeeded.”
While being a trader on Wall Street was literally a way out of Queens, it eventually lost its luster, and Walker then followed the traditional finance career path of applying to business school, getting into his only choice, Stanford, where he encountered the startup scene for the first time. He got as far away, literally, from Wall Street as possible.
“It really was the future of the world,” he told me over the phone about his first impressions of the tech world,” and I had to be a part of it.
I hustled my way through the Valley,” he said, referring to his first job as a business development lead at Foursquare, where he brought in the American Express deal among other things, and how it shaped him.
He still views Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley as one of his inspirations.
“Dennis at Foursquare is the brand,” he said, and that’s why the company has come this far. “That’s the one thing that’s really stuck with me, as [Walker’s mentor] Ben Horowitz has said, ‘You gotta do the thing that you’re uniquely positioned to do, otherwise you’re going to be roasted pretty hard.’”
This mentality explains Walker’s latest endeavor, Walker and Co, a startup that he likens to a Proctor & Gamble for black people. Walker and Co is opening up direct orders of its inaugural product this week: Bevel, a shaving system that is uniquely suited to men with coarse, curly hair. The product will start shipping regularly on Monday.
It is also launching its redesigned website, which provides education and advice for men who haven’t shaved this way before.
Walker touts Bevel as the world’s first “end-to-end shaving system.” For an initial $59.95 a month and $29.95 each additional month, Bevel customers receive a set of 20 blades, a weighted holder, a shaving cream brush, primer, and an aftershave lotion. The kits contain a 90-day supply (60 blades in a replenishment kit), which amounts to about 90 shaves at a cost of a dollar a shave.
When asked what he viewed as his closest competition, Walker did not bring up Harry’s or Dollar Shave Club, or other VC-backed subscription shave services. Instead he mentioned razor alternatives like electric clippers and depilatory creams and, yes, a credit card, because black men have “just given up on putting a razor to their face,” he says. “All of [the alternatives] are just really bad,” he sighs.
Bevel is a single-blade razor, and Walker is really passionate about how the Keep It Simple Stupid principle is really the best strategy for shaving.
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