Andrew Batey is sitting in Mocama Brewing Company in Fernandina Beach, Florida — part brewery, part coffee shop, and most days something closer to a community center with taps. He’s wearing a black shirt and ripped shorts he swears he did not buy ripped (“They’ve ripped over time, and I thought, you know what? I feel like that style’s in these days”). His staff keeps turning the music up; he keeps turning it down. He owns the place. And the place, like the man, is hard to define.
What Batey does for a living resists a job title. He is co-founder and co-CEO of Beatdapp, the leader in fraud detection for the music industry — software that sits on top of the streaming services’ data and analyzes “hundreds of trillions of data points” to separate real listeners from fake ones. “Every artist who streamed music last year made 20% more money because we exist,” he says, “whether they know it or not.” He is founder and general partner of Side Door Ventures — fourteen funds, nearly three hundred investments, a deep-tech calling card: one of the first checks into K2 Space, which builds mega satellites and is now, he says, worth almost $7 billion; early money into Varda, manufacturing drugs in orbit; a bet on Intramotev, whose railcars move themselves — “like autonomous cars, instead of needing a caboose to pull the entire row.” And, since last year, the brewery.
Ask what he’s most excited about and he starts to say Mocama, catches himself, and lands on Side Door, because of what the work does to his brain: eight to ten thousand companies a year, every one a sector to learn at speed. “It’s like a mental gym,” he says. “You’re constantly being challenged in new ways.”
“That’s been my superpower my entire life — I can consume large amounts of information, distill it, and then see how all the dots connect before other people.”
He didn’t always know that about himself. In his twenties he was “the Facebook hacking guy” — early on Facebook, one of the first beta advertisers on Twitter, a specialist in using systems in ways their designers never intended. He once turned a job posting into a growth channel: list it in two hundred cities, follow with a survey that ends, almost innocently, do you follow us on LinkedIn? Nine thousand followers — about $18,000 of value — in a week. He tells these stories with the fondness of a retired safecracker, and one verdict on the era: “Hacks have a time on them. You’re only as good as your last hack.”
The turn came at business school, of all places. Batey barely paid attention in undergrad — “undergrad for me was just trying to party” — but between then and his MBA at Trinity Western University in British Columbia, he built and sold a company. On the school’s traveling case-competition team, the case he still remembers is a Chilean mine that needed community support it didn’t have; his team built a framework for winning stakeholders one at a time. Did he ever think he’d care about mining? “I never cared. I never cared since.” What he cared about was the discovery underneath: “I didn’t know why stuff worked, I just knew that stuff worked.” Now instinct had theory under it.
Then came the room where growth itself was being invented — the invite-only program that became Reforge, started in Brian Balfour’s living room with Andrew Chen and Casey Winters. “Growth isn’t really a category yet,” went the pitch. “We’re creating this category.” Theory from the MBA, practice from the living room. “When I go into any company now, I just feel like I can immediately be 80% directionally correct on how things need to be set up.”
All of which is context for the thing Andrew Batey says quietly, and has never said on a panel.
“My businesses are art, whether or not you see them directly on the face.”
“People who see a great architect are like, that guy’s great — they would consider him artistic,” he says. “I do the same thing with businesses. It’s how they’re constructed. The economics of how they work, what partnerships are, how they interconnect with each other, why product is this way.” He’s only understood himself this way for five or six years, and when I tell him I’ve never heard him say it, he shrugs it off the way his musicians would. “You make the art and you move on to the next art.”
Mocama is the current canvas. Where everyone else saw a struggling brewery with a taproom, Batey saw a production facility running at 20% of capacity — and, in his other hand, a career’s worth of musicians. The hypothesis: nobody buys beer online from a stranger, but fans will buy their favorite artist’s beer. So there’s a family beer coming with Cyndi Lauper, her son Dex, and her husband; another with the band flipturn; direct-to-consumer sales in 42 states; a 2,000-person concert series threaded through a working taproom. “Fish can only get as big as the pond they’re in,” he says. “Birds can scale with the same infrastructure and fly high. I think Mocama has the potential to be both.”
And that, finally, is his definition of the thing he’s reluctant to claim. “People always say it can be beautiful or it can be functional,” he says. “With businesses, you actually have both. The art is the function. It working is the art — is my art. And then when those pieces combine, everyone looks back and goes, oh, that makes sense. I should have seen that.”
Every great structure looks inevitable once it’s standing. The art is being the one who saw it before it was there.