Brian Wool ⚡️

Almost five years after starting Rye, I’m excited to share that we’re joining Jolly! We started Rye in 2021 with a pretty ambitious idea: make commerce on the internet programmable. Give developers a set of APIs that could connect any experience to any product and actually complete the transaction. The five years since have been a crazy journey. We built a lot, changed direction a lot, worked with companies ranging from tiny startups to some of the largest companies in the world, and had an incredible team figure out how to build things that, at the time, mostly didn’t exist. If you’ve followed Rye recently, you’ve probably noticed I’ve been quieter publicly. For the last few months, a lot of my time has gone into figuring out what the right next leg looks like for Rye and for the technology we’ve spent years building. Agentic commerce is going to be a huge part of how people buy things. The last year for us has been a series of learnings on where that usage is and where it will be moving forward. What's been clear is that the true 10X here is applying this technology to industries that are already solving problems for people at scale. We’ve spent a lot of the last year in rewards and loyalty, and Jolly is probably the best example of why. They already support hundreds of thousands of frontline workers through their platform. Adding what we built at Rye gives them a completely new set of ways to turn those rewards and incentives into things people actually want and can use. That’s what got me excited about working with Dean and the Jolly team. They’re an amazing team, move incredibly fast, and already have the scale. Rye gives them a full commerce layer to build off of and Jolly gives our technology a place where it can actually reach a lot of people. Some of the Rye team will be joining Jolly, and I’m excited to see them take what we built and supercharge it from here. After almost five years building Rye, I’m going to take a little time before figuring out what I want to build next (with how exciting it is to build right now, I doubt that break will last long :P). There are far too many people to thank in one post: every person who chose to join our crazy company, our customers who trusted a startup to power important parts of their businesses, our investors who backed us, and all of the friends and founders who helped us through every version of the company. Building Rye has been one of the hardest and most rewarding things I’ve ever done. I’m incredibly proud of the team, what we built, and that a big part of that work gets to keep growing from here. Let’s go!