About

I've spent my career building ML and AI systems. I'm now co-founder and CEO of Continual, an AI agent platform for business operations.

Before Continual, I co-founded Sense, an enterprise machine learning platform that brought data science tools to the cloud. Cloudera acquired Sense in 2016, and it became Cloudera's data science workbench. I spent three years at Cloudera as CTO for Machine Learning, working on AI and ML infrastructure for large enterprises.

I have a PhD in public policy from Harvard, an MPA from the Harvard Kennedy School, and a BA from Pomona College. My graduate work focused on causal inference and Bayesian methods applied to policy evaluation and development economics. I've published in the Journal of the American Statistical Association, the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, and other journals. I worked at the World Bank and was a visiting fellow at Harvard's Institute for Quantitative Social Science.

I grew up without a TV in Amherst, Massachusetts. I learned to code building a program for the Farmer's Almanac that tracked the moon's position in the sky. My first work in statistics came in high school, building curve-fitting routines to fit spectral lines and infer atmospheric properties. In college I built one of the fastest-growing online social games of the early internet, then moved into economics and policy.

You can reach me at tristan@continual.ai, or X , and LinkedIn . I'm based in Oakland, California.