ATLANTA RISING
“LOOK AT THIS, MAN,” TRISTAN WALKER SAYS AS HE LEANS INTO A WOODEN LAWN CHAIR IN HIS BACKYARD.
He forms his thumbs and index fingers into a rectangle and squints through it at the seven-bedroom literal house on a hill before us. It’s a warm April afternoon, too early yet for Georgia’s notorious swelter. Blues singer Tyrone Davis’s “Baby, Can I Change My Mind?” plays from a glowing Bluetooth speaker that doubles as a sleek outdoor light. “When I was 20 years old, and I was like, ‘What does the vision of [my] world look like?’” he recalls. “This frame is it.”
Walker and his family have been in this house, in Atlanta’s northern Buckhead neighborhood, for all of two weeks. It’s the first time the Queens, New York, native has had a backyard, and he’s been stringing lights, planting hydrangeas, and kicking around a soccer ball with his 4-year-old son, Avery James. In the fall, Avery James will attend a nearby private school with a black headmaster who, Walker informs me, is a patron of Bevel, the shaving system geared toward men of color that Walker launched in 2013. Walker’s wife, Amoy, steps out of the kitchen to greet me and announce that she’s making salmon burgers. In a month—on Mother’s Day—she’ll give birth to their second son, August Julian. “I’ll have a kid born in Palo Alto, and a kid born in Atlanta,” Walker tells me. “It’s a reset moment!”
Atlanta is where the Walkers were supposed to end up after they graduated from New York’s Stony Brook University, on Long Island, 14 years ago. Amoy had hoped to start their married life surrounded by a like-minded community in the southern city. Instead, Tristan took a risk on Silicon Valley, lured by its promises of meritocracy and innovative business thinking. He interned at Twitter and attended Stanford University’s business school; after making his name as the business-development lead for Foursquare, he became an entrepreneur-in-residence at the Menlo Park–based venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, then raised more than $30 million to create Walker & Company, a hair-and-skincare-product company focused on solving the needs of people of color. As a rare black founder raising money on Sand Hill Road, he got a lot of attention, and smartly used it to raise awareness for his brand and advocate for inclusive hiring and product development in the Valley. (Palo Alto, where Walker was headquartered, is only 1.9% black; San Francisco’s black population has dropped from 9% in 2017 to just 5% today.) He also cofounded the not-for-profit Code2040, which trains black and Latino college students in STEM and places them in Bay Area internships.
By 2018, though, Walker realized that he’d been
