Tristan Couvares
I find the value in people and systems before it’s priced in — then I build.
I’ve helped take companies from a dozen people to a few hundred, been close enough to a billion-dollar IPO to feel it, and I still write code most weeks to fix things that annoy me.
Los Angeles
Buddy
/ about
The short version
I’ve spent fifteen-odd years doing essentially one thing under a rotating set of titles: being early on people and companies, when the evidence is thin and the price is low. The seat changes — the instinct is older than any of the jobs. I was a kid taking machines apart, a teenager posting code to forums, a sysadmin before I could legally drink.
I think about the world in terms of edges and asymmetries: where is something mispriced, what’s the downside if I’m wrong, what’s the upside if I’m right. That frame works on hiring, on markets, on code, on nearly everything I find interesting. I’d rather be dangerous across a few domains than narrow in exactly one.
/ builds — things I’ve made
I ship small things
Unglamorous tools, mostly to scratch my own itches. A sample — the rest lives on GitHub.
Wired a language model into iMessage, back when that was a weekend project rather than a product in everything.
Reshapes messy CSV exports into the exact shape a finicky system will actually accept. Boring; used constantly.
A backtracking solver, written mostly because backtracking is quietly satisfying to watch work.
/ track record
Bets that paid
- Was early at TrueCar, and watched it turn into a billion-dollar public company.
- Helped an electric-vehicle startup go from around a dozen people to roughly 250.
- Ran my own small operation for a decade, quietly making unlikely matches between people and companies most hadn’t heard of yet.
- These days I do a version of the same thing at a company building AI products.
The titles vary. The job is always the same: be right about people early.
/ preoccupations — otherwise
What occupies me the rest of the time
Basketball
UConn, specifically, and to a degree that mildly concerns the people around me. I know more about the program’s history than is strictly useful.
Thin markets
How scarcity gets priced when almost nobody is trading. I collect a few things, mostly as an excuse to keep thinking about why they’re worth what they’re worth.
Uncertainty
Priors, base rates, and the gap between a good decision and a good outcome. Most people confuse the two; I try not to.
Staying dangerous
I take real CS coursework for fun — an algorithms sequence out of Stanford, a Python specialization — because I’d rather understand the machine than rent it.
/ contact
Say hello.
I’m easy to find and I read everything, even when I’m slow to reply. Building something, backing something, or an argument about a basketball take — all welcome.
notice · build · sleep · repeat
Footnote, since a site should have one: in a previous life I handed six weeks of my daily decisions to the internet as the subject of an ESPN web experiment. It went roughly how you’d imagine.
© 2026 Tristan Couvares — Los Angeles-ish