Greg Avola, the co-founder of beer review mobile app Untappd, announced his departure from a day-to-day role at the company last week in a series of tweets.
While this isn’t the most important news of the day, it’s something that I feel is important to the @untappd community. I am stepping down from my position at @untappd, to focus on my personal happiness, family and wellbeing. (THREAD 1/6)
— Greg Avola (@gregavola) January 20, 2021
Avola cited the desire to focus on his “health, happiness and family” as his reason for stepping down, which he elaborated on in a post on his personal website. His last day as a full-time employee was January 20. He will remain a part owner of Next Glass.
“This was a HARD decision for me personally, and it’s been an emotional process,” he wrote on Twitter. “Untappd has been 1/3 of my life and I’ve loved every minute of it. However, all good things come to an end, and I felt that I needed to focus on myself and my family by stepping back.”
Avola and Tim Mather founded Untappd in 2010. The platform merged with Next Glass, a wine recommendation platform, in 2015. Until the merger, Untappd had remained a side project for Avola, who held another full-time tech job, and he was working 80 hour weeks to maintain the app, which had grown to 4 million users in five years.
“It was really a crazy thing,” he told Brewbound. “People always assumed that we were a bigger company back then, and we were getting emails from people saying ‘Hey, I can’t believe the founder of Untappd is emailing me back — you must have a support team, right?’
“Nope, I’m the support team,” he continued. “It was pretty interesting from that perspective.”
Since its founding, Untappd has gained more than 9 million users, who have racked up nearly 1 billion beer check ins, according to a post on the company’s blog about Avola’s departure. Avola will remain with the company as executive advisor to CEO Trace Smith, according to the post.
“We all owe Greg a deep debt of gratitude for co-founding and building, line of code by line of code, the app users all over the world have come to love,” Smith said in the post. “Without Greg’s dogged determination since founding Untappd in 2010, Untappd would not be what it is today.”
Avola said he hopes Untappd continues to foster connections with its community of beer drinkers and their interactions with breweries and each other.
“Untappd’s main mission from Day One is to engage the community, to educate them about beer and get them to explore new beers,” he said. “That’s how all the badges started to work — simple, it was just an aspect of getting you outside your comfort zone, trying an IPA or a barleywine or something that got you discovering different things.
“I hope that the future of Untappd continues in that same realm — education, discovery, and a lot of fun,” he continued. “That’s the whole point of it, as well as to find friends, discover beers, discover breweries and venues.”
After 10 years of building and running a company — in his case, a globally used app — Avola urged that fellow business founders take stock of their own physical and mental health.
“It’s really important for founders out there to kind of look at themselves, look at their whole personal happiness, their health and put those things ahead of it,” he said. “Workout, go on runs, take breaks, take vacations — I never did that. It’s gonna build up over time, so always be able to take those breaks and be able to step away.”
Avola’s exit follows an eventful 2020 for Untappd’s parent company:
- In February 2020, Next Glass acquired online beer review forum and festival producer Beer Advocate;
- In April 2020, Next Glass received an investment from Boston-based equity firm Providence Strategic Growth, which focuses on media, communications, education and software;
- In October 2020, Next Glass struck a deal to acquire alcohol e-commerce platform Oznr, formerly CraftCellr.
- The company ended the year with its third acquisition reaching, a deal to acquire digital beer magazine Hop Culture.