Tristan Tao
Stuff at FirsthandVC
Los Angeles, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolTristan Tao is a seasoned AI product and engineering leader with 12 years of experience building and scaling AI-driven businesses from early-stage startups to acquisitions. He co-founded HyperArc (acquired by Zendesk in 2025) and has led GTM, solutions, and technical teams at Iterable, growing ARR from $5M to $150M+. Tristan blends hands-on engineering and product strategy with venture investing—serving as a Venture Partner at Pioneer Fund and an active angel investor backing AI and autonomous business software startups. He has deep expertise in agentic BI, ML-driven analytics, and productionizing data-driven systems from his early work in data science and security. Based in Los Angeles, he currently leads stealth AI efforts while continuing to advise founders and funds, often surfacing product insights from customer-facing solutions engineering experience. A pragmatic operator, he’s equally comfortable shipping code, shaping roadmaps, and writing checks to accelerate founder-led innovation.
12 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) Double Major in Computer Science & Statistics, Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) Double Major in Computer Science & Statistics at University of California, BerkeleyS15 Leada, S15 Leada at Y CombinatorS14 Leada, S14 Leada at ImagineK12
Stackoverflow
865reputation
277kreached
21answers
11questions
Github Skills (60)
masters10
bing10
bing-search9
thin9
search-api9
science9
browser-detection8
python8
api8
pandas8
machine-learning8
actioncontroller7
data-science7
rubygems7
cognitive-services7
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
tristantao/kaggle_survivor
Dec 2013 - Mar 2014
Contributions:74 commits in 3 months
tristantao/py-bing-search
Oct 2014 - Nov 2016
Contributions:7 releases, 96 commits, 11 PRs in 2 years 1 month
apipythonbing-searchsearch-apisearch
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