Bevel

By the time he started obsessing over razors, he had already lived a Silicon Valley career most people would envy. He ran business development at Foursquare from 2009 to 2012 during the location app's hottest stretch, then landed a coveted entrepreneur-in-residence seat at venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, where the job is essentially to think up a company worth backing. What he kept circling back to was a problem from his own bathroom: roughly fifteen years of post-shave bumps and irritation that drugstore multi-blade cartridges only made worse on coarse, curly hair.

The fix turned out to be old, not new. A friend handed him a double-edged single-blade safety razor, the kind your grandfather used, and after one shave the bumps were gone. That rediscovery of a century-old tool became the product thesis. Rather than sell a razor in a box, he wrapped it in a subscription system, blade, brush, oils, and creams arriving on a schedule, a direct-to-consumer model that let the brand own the customer relationship and the recurring revenue. Investors noticed: the venture attracted notable backers including rapper Nas alongside the firm where the idea was hatched, rare validation for a consumer brand built explicitly for an audience the grooming aisle had ignored.

The expansion since then followed the logic of the original insight. A single razor became a full grooming system, then a skincare and body-care range, the toner pads, gel moisturizer, face wash, priming oil, and restoring balm here all extending the founding promise of head-to-toe care formulated around the realities of coarse hair and pigment-prone skin. Walker has been candid that the goal was always bigger than shaving, building durable consumer brands for a demographic that controls enormous spending power yet was treated as an afterthought, a mission that outlasted his own eventual exit from day-to-day leadership.

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