Olo CEO Noah Glass: the right to be known

Noah Glass (0:00)

Out of 100 transactions, how many of those do you think happen inside the four walls of a restaurant?

Auren Hoffman (0:06)

I was going to say 75, but now I'll say 40

Noah Glass (0:10)

Seventy-five of 100 orders in our industry take place outside the four walls of the restaurant.

Auren Hoffman (0:15)

My guest today is Noah Glass. Noah is the founder and CEO of Olo, the digital commerce platform for restaurants.

Noah Glass (0:23)

This was how I started most of my conversations with investors who walk into the room like, all right, I don't know what I was just talking about, but I definitely know about restaurants. I know how restaurants work as a business. You had to break them down and build them back up.

Auren Hoffman (0:40)

Hello, fellow data nerds. My guest today is Noah Glass. Noah is the founder and CEO of Olo, the digital commerce platform for restaurants, powering ordering, catering, payments, loyalty, and marketing for a very large chunk of America's biggest restaurant brands.

He started doing mobile food ordering by text message back in the day. I think it was 2005 Is that right? You got it.

Noah Glass (1:04)

That's right.

Auren Hoffman (1:04)

So that's a really long time ago. Before the iPhone even existed, took Olo public in 2021

Last year, took it private with Thoma Bravo at roughly $2 billion deal. Noah, welcome to Summation.

Noah Glass (1:18)

Oren, thanks so much for having me. It's super fun to join you after being a friend and a fan for so long.

Auren Hoffman (1:25)

Amazing. I am a huge fan of yours as well.

You're doing mobile ordering by text message before the iPhone existed, which was the right thing but also insanely early. It must have taken a decade before the world caught up to you. Walk us through that journey a bit.

Noah Glass (1:46)

It took us really about eight years. I posted on LinkedIn this morning about the MVP of Olo up until the PMF product market fit. That took eight years. It was from June 1st, 2005 when we launched. Truly, we were in market at our first coffee shop in New Haven, Connecticut, Coffee2, November 27th of 2005, to be precise. A day that will forever live in my memory. My grandmother actually came in from Indiana with my mom from Boston to place the first and second order.

We had text message for coffee. That was a big day and essentially, what six months from when we started working on this full time. We worked on it as a nights and weekends project long before that. It took from then until I would say mid 2013, maybe summer of 2013, for us to really hit product market fit.

Text message ordering had to be the MVP of Olo because under 5 percent of mobile phone users had smartphones back then.

Auren Hoffman (2:53)

Even then, you had like a Blackberry or something or whatever.

Noah Glass (2:56)

To call them smartphones is being very generous. These were very dumb smartphones. Blackberries, Palm Treos, I think were just coming out at the time. Very baby Internet as Steve Jobs called it when he announced to iPhone.

We had to build text messaging so people could set things up in advance and then trigger an order through a text message. But it did all the same things. It sent your personalized order prepaid into the restaurant for them to produce ahead of time so you could walk in and skip the line and get your order at a certain time that you want to come pick it up.

Auren Hoffman (3:34)

Why did it take eight years? Was it because it was a technology thing? Like we had to get like the everything has to move faster and everything or?

Noah Glass (3:43)

Yeah, it took eight years because this was 2005 iPhone, I don't think was announced until 2008

Auren Hoffman (3:51)

I didn't get my first iPhone to 2011

Noah Glass (3:54)

Yeah, I mean, that was the thing. It was announced then, then it had to be produced and rolled out and be itself ready for prime time.

Then it took a while for consumers to adopt iPhone and Android, and then start to use it not just for the obvious things like communications and content, but also as a commerce tool. So it took sort of immensely available, Uber and other on-demand services for consumers to start to feel like, I should be able to use this to order my food faster or get it delivered to me. Then it took even longer for restaurant executives to come around to saying, huh, this thing that I'm using all the time is going to impact my business and I should be on-demand friendly as well. So that all really came to pass in 2013 And in between, we were starting to do more online ordering and finding the early adopters who could benefit from online ordering, even though we knew mobile ordering was going to be the really big moment for the industry and for kind of e-commerce in restaurants.