Halfway through Marathon Monday 1993, a 23-year-old brewer across the street from Fenway Park had a problem. Ten days into a home stand, 37,000 baseball fans pouring out of the ballpark, and he was down to two beers. An amber lager called Boston Red and a 9% barleywine called Hercules Strong Ale. By the end of the afternoon, the only options were a Herk and Red or a Red and Herk. People were, by his own account, drunk off their asses. They never brewed Hercules for a home stand again.
A year later, a relief valve blew on a 500-gallon stainless steel tank during a Yankees game. The loudest explosion he’d ever heard, immediately followed by someone shouting the two most dangerous words in the English language: “Free beer!” Beer knocked a customer off their chair and flowed through the restaurant like a very specific kind of flood. That was Bryan House’s early twenties.
Now he’s CEO of Elastic Path. He’s swapped IPAs for APIs. And he might be the most interesting product mind in composable commerce right now.
Bryan House has a degree in brewing from the Siebel Institute of Technology, the oldest brewing school in America, founded in the 1870s, which means it predates prohibition. He brewed beer professionally for eight years. He has an MBA from Harvard. He was a founding team member at Acquia, where he helped build the company to over $170 million in revenue. He ran product at Neural Magic, a deep learning startup. He loves GWAR, and if you have not looked up GWAR, please do, because your Wednesday needs it. His song pick was “Left of the Dial” by The Replacements, which tells you everything you need to know about the man in about three minutes and forty seconds.
What got me was how directly the brewery skills translated. Every one of those 37,000 people walking across from Fenway would come in and ask for a Bud Light. Bryan didn’t have Bud Light. What he had was a craft beer story and about thirty seconds to tell it. Product marketing on the fly, in rubber boots and a jumpsuit, face-down with the crowd on top of you. He told me that’s the foundation of everything he’s done since, the ability to communicate what your product actually is to someone who didn’t know they wanted it. That’s not a keynote skill. That’s a bar-fight skill. And it shows.
Bryan is what I’d call a product CEO, and that matters. The commerce technology space is thick with financial operators, people who run companies like spreadsheets and talk about TAM the way other people talk about weather. Bryan talks about products the way a brewer talks about beer. He believes in what he’s making. He has a self-described bias for the new, and he’s honest enough to call it both a strength and a weakness. The punk rock underpinning isn’t an aesthetic. It’s a disposition. He’s comfortable being different without having to shout about it. That’s rare in a CEO chair,. His shorthand for Elastic Path’s positioning is “commerce for weirdos,” and I am completely here for it.
