BROADCASTS.com

This week\u2019s guest invented one of the most impactful things in American beer history \u2014but it\u2019s not a beer style, or a recipe, or a festival, or a piece of equipment\u2014it\u2019s an app.

Untappd grew from a side project for Greg Avola and his partner Tim Mather\u2014one that they moonlighted for on weekends\u2014to a leading social experience for beer geeks in a very short amount of time.

Basically you try a beer, you log the experience, and it keeps track of your history. You can share that experience with others, rate it, post pics, tag bars and breweries where you enjoyed it\u2014each little interaction creates a massive web of crowd data over time.

Some producers find it fascinating and valuable. Others are haunted by it and think it\u2019s ruining beer. Or maybe already has.

But it\u2019s surely, like any software, largely what we make of it.

But what is Untappd itself made of?

This interview follows on co-founder Greg Avola\u2019s recent exit from his role at the company\u2014after it was acquired by Next Glass a few years ago, Greg\u2019s role became less of a product engineer and tweaker, and more of a creative director, working across a lot of other roles, outlining new strategies, and integrating with the ecosystem of follow-on acquisitions like Beer Advocate, and most recently Hop Culture. With the intent to build a B2B and B2C ecosystem that enabled the rating, tracking, promotion and purchasing of the beers people find most interesting. Basically leveraging content to create a new sort of tier in the 3-tier system.

But it\u2019s not without its challenges, both personal and professional.

In this conversation Greg talks a lot about what it\u2019s like to be a founder of a small tech project that goes big. The burden that places on the individual, and how evolving in an acquisition environment is fraught with personal challenges.

But it also outlines how the scope of Untappd is shifting. Their numbers are down in the U.S. but growing rapidly abroad. Not unlike what happened with one of its predecessors, Ratebeer. And the other acquisitions, like Beer Advocate, haven\u2019t really panned out the way it was imagined, leaving most of the creative and strategic onus on Untappd itself, a challenge it seems to have met with some renewed focus on content, events, and overall community-building in the past year.

In Greg\u2019s open letter about his decision to step down, he was uncommonly transparent about his rationale, experiences, and hopes. And that\u2019s the catalyst for us talking today\u2014from one start-up founder to another. I think it\u2019s critical that more people openly share the nature of the sacrifices people like Greg make to see their idea grow.