About

Distance Zero is a service of Pollen.io, focused on one thing: getting AI-assisted software into the hands of the people who actually understand the problem it needs to solve.

Pollen.io

Pollen.io is Tim Cull’s boutique software consultancy, founded in Berkeley, California, in 2009. Its broader practice builds data engineering and application infrastructure for organizations working on data-heavy problems. Distance Zero is Pollen.io’s newest offering: instead of building a system on your behalf and handing it over, we sit down with you, the domain expert, and build the tool together, in real time.

Tim Cull, Principal

Tim founded Pollen.io in 2009. In addition to serving Pollen’s clients, he’s led engineering teams at very different scales and in very different industries: a 35-person real-time data organization inside Adobe Advertising Cloud, geospatial climate-risk software at UrbanFootprint, trading and portfolio systems inside BlackRock’s asset management business, and the fast-moving, low-budget technology stack behind the nonprofit Swing Left during the 2020 election.

That range is the point. Distance Zero exists because the same skill that let Tim walk into a hedge fund’s back office, an ad-tech pipeline, or a climate-risk team and start being useful quickly also works for an economist, a chemist, or a marketer who just needs one working tool built around how they actually think about their problem.