This week Bill and I are joined by Bryan Mahoney to mix up a Negroni riff and talk about something we think is under appreciated in the agentic commerce conversation: the data foundation and context layer that are key to enabling agentic commerce operations.
Bryan is the co-founder and CEO of Chord Commerce, a platform built for D2C and omnichannel brands that unifies first-party data to enable operational AI and agents. Prior to Chord, Bryan has spent nearly thirty years in commerce technology across a number of senior roles, including founding CTO of Glossier. Brian also hosts his own podcast, Brilliant Commerce.
With that, please pour yourself something to sip along and enjoy our conversation with Bryan.
Cheers!
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This week’s drink: A Negroni Riff
The Negroni is perhaps Italy’s most prominent contribution to mixology and the cocktail pantheon. The history of the Negroni is relatively clear in its general outlines, but like many cocktail origin stories, there are gaps and perhaps some - shall we say - creative license introduced along the way. The Negroni is also a cocktail that lends itself easily to playful adaptation given it’s dead simple spec - one part spirit, one part vermouth, one part bitter.
The first account of the Negroni was contained in a letter written sometime between the end of World War I and October 1920 by Count Camillo Negroni, a Florentine aristocrat. He apparently was quite the character - having spent time as a professional gambler, a fencing instructor, and even in America as some sort of cowboy.
As he recounted in the letter, once back in Florence after the war he took to having the bartender at Florence’s Caffè Casoni make him an Americano only boozier. The Americano is vermouth, bitters and soda water, and the bartender swapped in gin for the Americano’s water, and voilà! - the Negroni was born. But it was really in Paris that the drink took off during ‘The Roaring Twenties’. It became so popular that American humorist Nina Wilcox Putnam joked that, “All Gaul was divided into three parts; one part gin; one part vermouth, and one part Italian bitters.”
Later, those bitters became somewhat standardized as Campari - but back then they were probably using all sorts of Italian-style orange bitters which are close cousins of Campari. The drink fell out of favor with the rise of Italian fascism and WWII, but then had a renaissance when it was adopted as the drink of dopoguerra (“postwar”) Italy and of la dolce vita (“the sweet life”). Italy was suddenly very glamorous, and the Negroni became the drink of the jet-set in America, Europe, and beyond.
The classic Negroni has inspired countless riffs, since that equal-parts template is so easy to bend. For this episode, we made our own - swapping out the core spec for substitutions that echo the original while bringing something new.
Cheers!
Negroni Riff: Context Layer
2 oz. Gin (London Dry recommended - Beefeater or Botanist)
1 oz. Gran Classico
1 oz. Amaro (Cardamaro recommended)
1 dash orange bitters
Garnish: orange twist
Steps:
Add all ingredients to a mixing glass with ice and stir until well chilled - approximately thirty seconds. Strain into a rocks glass over a large clear ice cube. Express the orange twist over the surface, swipe the rim, and drop it in.
Enjoy!
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Be well, drink well, and here is to good business! Cheers! - Brian & Bill
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