[whbk]

Sorry to see this. My last year of college, with absolutely zero experience in tech I tried to build a fintech startup that needed seamless processing of micro-payments and so I pinged Tristan in the early days of Square's beta program when they were just shipping out card readers asking if they might expose an API in the near future. Small interaction, but he got back to me and coming from the Midwest, that was my first experience with how open Silicon Valley can be, with a co-founder at one of the hottest startups taking the time to respond to some random college kid interested in kicking the tires on his project. My project went nowhere but I had fun exploring the tech involved, decided to learn to code, made it out here and am now running a venture-backed startup after a couple engineering jobs. I thought just the fact that he responded was really cool at the time and try not to blow off cold emails like that as a result.

[kethinov]

I went to high school with him. That's how he was with me as well when I randomly said to him one day, "Hey you seem better at this computer programming thing than me. Let's hang out." I too credit Tristan with helping me transition from computer programmer novice to computer programmer professional.