A few years after graduating from the University of Virginia, Jordon Durst was at his Goldman Sachs desk in Los Angeles by 5:30 a.m., suit on, preparing for the stock market to open in New York. Across the city, Bryan Pollard was teaching himself how to code between projects at AEG, one of the largest entertainment companies in the world.
Once college roommates, then roommates again in Los Angeles, their careers looked nothing alike – until they came together to start a company.
Durst and Pollard are cofounders of Tallee, an artificial intelligence visibility tool helping major brands understand and improve how they appear in tools like ChatGPT. Their customers include Lowe’s Home Improvement, Celsius, Calm and more.
Tallee’s lead investor is Village Global, a top Silicon Valley venture capital firm backed by Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos. Other investors include Andreessen Horowitz’s Scout Fund; Cav Angels, a UVA alumni investment group; and NBA players Ty Jerome and Anthony Gill, both former UVA standouts.
The beginning
Durst and Pollard met as undergraduates at UVA. Durst, then a second-year student from Ashburn, offered Pollard, a first-year student born and raised in Charlottesville, and a mutual friend a ride to a Bible study on the Corner. The car ride turned into a friendship.
But their paths at the University immediately diverged. After switching majors a few times, Durst enrolled in the McIntire School of Commerce and landed an internship at Goldman Sachs the summer after his second year. He turned down a return offer to study abroad at the London School of Economics and in Valencia.
He wondered at the time if he was making a huge mistake by turning down the return offer. Looking back, he has no regrets. “I would do it a million times over,” he said. “Studying abroad was the most formative experience of my life.”
Pollard took a different approach, choosing to major in sociology. “I believed that learning about people would serve me better than a traditional business path,” he said. “That turned out to be right.”
As a first-year student, Pollard landed an internship at ICM Partners, one of the world’s largest talent agencies. He worked every summer on projects connected to Samuel L. Jackson and Spike Lee. Two days after graduating from UVA in 2016, he was on a plane to Los Angeles to continue working full-time.
Building Tallee
When ChatGPT launched in 2022, Pollard got early access and built an AI concierge called AskAlex that could book reservations to every restaurant in Los Angeles based on user preferences. To test it, he went to a bar and offered buy-one-get-one drinks to anyone who downloaded the app. The first night cost him $70. By the third night, his tab was over $8,000, and he had 3,500 downloads. “That’s when I knew I had something,” he said.
What he was missing was a partner. “I asked Jordon every day for a year to leave Goldman and start a company together,” Pollard said, “so by the time he said yes, I had the pitch down cold.”
Together, they built AskAlex into a service with thousands of users – and then walked away from it. Restaurants, they learned, operate on thin margins and have more immediate concerns than AI marketing.
The roadblock brought them a bigger opportunity. While consumers increasingly turn to AI tools rather than search engines, major brands have little insight into what those tools reveal about them or why. So, the duo created Tallee, a business-to-business platform that tracks how brands appear across AI platforms and gives them concrete steps to improve their presence.