PHOTOGRAPH BY NATHAN PERKEL ● ● ● SEPTEMBER 2019 ● INC. ● 63It’s funny. I wasn’t really that
into beer.
Tim and I met over Twitter in
- I lived in Massachusetts
and he was in California.
We worked on a few freelance
jobs together—me as a software
engineer, and Tim as a web
designer. I’d never heard of
what he was drinking out
West, and sometimes I’d think,
“I wish I could get that beer.”
In the summer of 2010, I was
traveling a lot as a consultant for
KPMG. I remember sitting in
my hotel room in Springfield,
Massachusetts, and telling
Tim, “Hey, we always check in
on Foursquare—what if we
did something related to beer
and location?” Beer is inherently
very social, and there wasn’t
an online version of that
inter action.
I went home that weekend
to work on a prototype, and had
a dirty version of it within 48
hours. We launched Untappd
that October 22. Fourteen days
later, Mashable wrote an article
about it.
Over time, we became two guys
doing what we could to support
millions of people on this app—on the side. Our two main advis-
ers, who’d sold beer startups,
started telling us we weren’t
dedicated because we hadn’t quitour day jobs. Neither said it out
loud, but they heavily implied:
“Hey, you have this successfulthing. Why haven’t you gone
ahead and tried to do this full
time?” Then one of them sat medown over coffee in San Fran-
cisco to talk about Techstars.
The allure was very big. The
greatest things come out of those
incubators, with plenty of fund-ing. But I was so used to corpo-
rate life: You went to work, you
went home, you got a paycheck.This would have meant not
knowing if there would even be
a paycheck. Not knowing if this
is going to last three months—orhow your relationships are going
to hold up.
If we were single and in our
20s, we could’ve made it work.
But we weren’t in college. Wecouldn’t eat ramen noodles for
the rest of our lives, or pick up
and move somewhere else. We
had families. We couldn’t just
drop everything and go for it.We knew we needed to get
bigger, but an investor would
have felt like a boss. We neededa partner we could trust. The
idea of a merger started to make
sense.In 2015, we were approached
by Next Glass. It had structure,but not scale. We had millions of
users. Next Glass acquired
Untappd that December. Thecombined company took our
name—and we quit our day jobs.
And we’ve finally become big
beer fans. The Greg from eight
or nine years ago would beperplexed by how I now like
all these hazy IPAs. He’d say,
“Wow. That’s disgusting.”
My favorite beer now is
Pliny the Elder, a double IPA
from Russian River Brewing. Itwas one of the first beers I
learned about from the Untappd
community.It’s never let me down.
Nine years ago, Greg Avola and Tim Mather created Untappd, a
Foursquare-style check-in app for beer, thanks to an idea and $1,000
from Avola. Even as Untappd took off, the two kept their day jobs—
until they found an unconventional way to devote themselves to their
company. —AS TOLD TO CAMERON ALBERT-DEITCH