Millbrook local leads tech startups from solar-powered farmhouse

MILLBROOK — Technology and tradition are often at odds. But on John Merryman’s Millbrook property, they have coalesced. Familiar sights remain: The knees of his jeans are spattered with mud after a morning planting grass seed. The tires of his solar-powered farm cart are similarly smudged. It’s just another day tending to the various needs of Merryfield Farm, Merryman’s Millbrook horse farm.

Merryman purchased the property in 2022, seeking to turn aging stables into a haven for his passions. Since then, he’s turned the property into a home for his tech business and his horses.

Many of Merryman’s chores are standard fare. His beets and potatoes are already in the ground, and the horses always need looking after. Others, however, hint at the bright-eyed farmer’s many interests. Maintaining the fiber optic cables that run all over Merryfield, for example, or trimming the shrubs growing around Merryman’s massive solar panel array to allow for maximum exposure. Some afternoons, he welds. Others, he uses his pilot’s license to take to the air.

Then there’s the inside work, those moments when Merryman steps inside to check the status of his AI team. There’s a bank of four monitors in his office. Some are filled with computer code, others showing new updates for Merryman’s latest tech venture, a Ticketmaster competitor called PlayHouse.

It’s a dichotomy echoed in the property itself. “The barn and house were rented out, and they weren’t taking care of it,” said Merryman, who grew up in nearby Irvington. “I love projects. I love working with my hands and building things. And it’s kind of what I do for work, but it’s also what I do for fun.”

Merryman’s career grew on a track parallel with that of the internet. He was fascinated by computers from a young age. His first consulting job came when he was still in high school — Merryman built an HR database for the French bank Credit Lyonnais.

Soon thereafter, he graduated from Johns Hopkins in the midst of the dot-com boom and quickly found work as a sales engineer in New York City.“Everyone knew the internet was going to be big,” Merryman said. “People’s behavior was fundamentally changing.”

But it wasn’t changing fast enough. “The companies building products for the Internet were so far out ahead of customers’ behavior change,” he said. “They were assuming that this huge amount of revenue would materialize. It took longer than anyone thought.”

By the end of 2002, the dot-com bubble had burst, wiping out about $5 trillion from the economy and causing a recession. The similarities to the current AI frenzy are not lost on Merryman. “I think it’s likely that there will be some high profile bankruptcies or contractions,” he said. “But I do fundamentally believe that AI is legitimately incredibly valuable. I just think it’s going to take people longer than they think to use it.”

Merryman landed on his feet after the crash. His first CTO job was at Yodle, an online advertising startup. Merryman was the eighth employee — when he left 10 years later, the company numbered over 1,500. “I was definitely on the front lines,” he said. “I was an active coder, did a lot of hiring, figured out how to get people across multiple functions to work well together.”

By the time Yodle was bought out in 2016, Merryman was seeing a shift in the industry: archaic systems were being replaced wholecloth by technologies that could perform their simple tasks without the clutter of spreadsheets and manual data entry.

The AI revolution was still in its infancy, but it wasn’t long before Merryman saw opportunities to test its mettle. He partnered with a former co-worker from Yodle, Brian Battjer, to create TowFlow.ai, a system that automates barge logistics for commodities traders. Merryman was encouraged by how quickly the program could catch an antiquated process up to speed. “You’re catching people up to speed who otherwise would be left in the dust,” he said. “It’s never scaled to the point where we’re going to take away all their jobs … we want to make them more efficient at busy work.”

The two linked again when Battjer was approached by an old friend, Tyson Ritter. Ritter is the lead singer of All-American Rejects, a rock band popular in the early 2000s. The band saw their popularity spike unexpectedly last year when, fed up with Ticketmaster prices and fees, they started performing at unconventional venues like backyards and roller rinks.

Ritter reached out to Battjer about turning the concept into something repeatable, that other bands could use to escape Ticketmaster’s predation. Battjer turned to Merryman, and the two started building the infrastructure for PlayHouse.

Merryman saw the AI potential immediately. Using a combination of Claude Code and Cursor, he built a platform where local fans can express interest in seeing a specific band. If enough people show an interest, the bands can start selling tickets and looking for a venue.

“As an artist, you can prove your demand before you lock in a venue,” Ritter told Forbes earlier this month. “you can throw your weight into a room and say, ‘Hey, I’ve got 150 tickets sold. I need a place to do it.’”

“I like having an impact,” Merryman said. “I like building something that people actually use. It felt like fundamentally, there is a real need for this…anybody who knows much about what Ticketmaster has done does not like them.”

That includes the federal government. Last month, a jury found Ticketmaster guilty of antitrust violations, including overcharging for tickets and a monopoly over concert venues.

The full ramifications of the ruling have yet to be felt, but the need for an alternative is clear. Merryman is building one from his farm, using little more than his four monitors and a server.

“Those tools have done everything from build the code to run operations,” Merryman said. “I troubleshoot when things go wrong, but you can get an enormous multiple on your productivity.”

PlayHouse is currently fielding applications from more than 60,000 bands. They’ll be rolling out new artists each week, and in the meantime, Merryman has plenty to keep him occupied. “I enjoy the act of figuring something out,” he said. “If something’s hard, I want to figure it out even more.”