Olo CEO Noah Glass: the right to be known

Noah Glass is the founder and CEO of Olo, the digital commerce platform behind ordering, payments, and loyalty for many of America's biggest restaurant brands. He started Olo in 2005 with ordering by text message, before the iPhone existed, took it public in 2021, and took it private with Thoma Bravo last year in a roughly $2 billion deal. In this episode of Summation, Noah and Auren discuss: The $65 million sale that collapsed the night before he told his teamHow Five Guys strong-armed point...

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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

• 0:06Auren Hoffman?

  I was gonna say 75, but now I'll say 40.

• 0:09Speaker 00

  25. 75 of 100 orders in our industry take place outside the four walls of the restaurant.

• 0:15Auren Hoffman?

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

• 0:23Speaker 00

  This was how I started most of my conversations with investors who walk into the room, they're 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.

• 0:40Auren Hoffman?

  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?

• 1:03Speaker 00

  You got it. That's right.

• 1:04Auren Hoffman?

  So that's a really long time ago, before the iPhone even existed, took Olo public in 2021. Last year, took it private with Tomo Bravo, a roughly $2 billion deal. Noah, welcome to Summation.

• 1:18Speaker 00

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

• 1:24Auren Hoffman?

  Okay, amazing. And I'm a huge fan of yours as well. So you, okay, you're doing like mobile ordering by text message before the iPhone existed, which was kind of like the right thing, but also insanely early. Like, it must have taken like a decade before the world caught up to you. Walk us through that journey a bit.

• 1:45Speaker 00

  Okay. It took us really about eight years. I was just, 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 to 2005 when we launched. Truly, we were in market at our first coffee shop in New Haven, Connecticut. Coffee 2, 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 via text message for coffee. So that was a big day. And essentially, what, six months from when we started working on this full-time,

• 2:30Speaker 00

  but we worked on as a nights and weekends project long before that. It took from sort of then until I would say like mid 2013, maybe summer of 2013, for us to really hit product market fit. And so, yeah, text message ordering had to be the MVP of Olo because under 5% of mobile phone users had smartphones back then.

• 2:53Auren Hoffman?

  And even then, you had like a BlackBerry or something or whatever, right?

• 2:56Speaker 00

  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 the iPhone. And so 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 wanted to come pick it up.

• 3:34Auren Hoffman?

  And 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?

• 3:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, it took eight years because this was 2005. iPhone, I don't think was announced until 2008. And then people-

• 3:51Auren Hoffman?

  I didn't get my first iPhone until 2011.

• 3:54Speaker 00

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

• 4:37Speaker 00

  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.

• 4:57Auren Hoffman?

  Got it. And so like, like ordering from your house or something like that or whatever?

• 5:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, ordering from your laptop and getting lunch and then going to pick it up and that sort of thing. One of the first big customers was Five Guys Burgers and Fries, and that was-

• 5:12Auren Hoffman?

  By the way, I freaking love Five Guys, okay? I love it.

• 5:17Auren Hoffman?

  The burgers are good. I love their burgers, but their fries are just amazing.

• 5:21Speaker 00

  I agree. I agree. I'm very partial to the Five Guys French fries. And yeah, that was an incredible win for us. It was like our first big enterprise account. And at the time, it was also the fastest chain in history to go from four locations to 100 locations. And now they're well over 1,000. So we've really grown together with them.

• 5:41Auren Hoffman?

  I'll go to like the most random place, like Madrid, and I see a bunch of Five Guys, stuff like that there.

• 5:47Speaker 00

  And big international presence as well. Now, we're only working with them in the US and in Canada. That's where our business is focused. But yeah, an incredible proof point for us to get a chain like Five Guys and for them-

• 5:58Auren Hoffman?

  Why, why, why is it matter from your business to do it only, like, I imagine delivery would make sense. Okay, we only have to do it in various, you can only roll out in certain locations. But why can't you go international right away in what you were doing?

• 6:12Speaker 00

  A variety of reasons. I mean, there are the obvious things like different currency and different languages as they're solved problems, but also different point-of-sale platforms that we integrate into in international markets. Just a lot of complexity. And there's such a big market here for chain restaurants in the US. That's really what we focus on.

• 6:30Auren Hoffman?

  But if you already have the Five Guys business and they want you and they love it, and now they're like, "I want to do this in Spain." Like, well, why is it so hard? Or is it, how would, why would we not understand that?

• 6:41Speaker 00

  Well, just integrating into all of the other systems that they use is a huge part of what we do. We have now over 400 integrated technology partners just in the US and Canada. So it would take a similar number of new integrations for us to support brands.

• 6:58Auren Hoffman?

  And walk us through, because maybe I don't, like, in today's world where like, sometimes you can integrate into something in like, five minutes where it used to take like a five-week sprint or something like that. Like, why not add the integration? Or is it still just like, it actually is really hard to do it?

• 7:13Speaker 00

  It's really hard to do it. A lot of restaurant technology systems were built in that time period where it's five weeks plus or five, five years in some cases.

• 7:22Auren Hoffman?

  Because they have to do it on their end, or?

• 7:25Speaker 00

  So before you even get to these questions of the technical challenge, there's the whole political challenge. And this is something that I think I'm very proud of as part of Olo's legacy. I think it's an often forgotten part of what we've done in the industry. But these were walled gardens that we were trying to penetrate in the early days. So point-of-sale companies that provide, you know, kind of the cash register technology, touchscreen, payment at the point-of-sale. They were, and to many, to a large extent still are, little fiefdoms where they say, "We want to sell all technology that this brand is going to use." And it took a brand like Five Guys Burgers and Fries saying to its multiple point-of-sale providers,

• 8:09Speaker 00

  "We're growing really fast, and if you don't let Olo plug into you, we're going to go really fast with your competitor." It took them doing that on our behalf to even enable us to get access to API documentation, if there was any, or to build the APIs, which was oftentimes the case. So like, the political jujitsu to make it happen was probably way bigger than even the technical work to actually integrate.

• 8:34Auren Hoffman?

  And some of these point-of-sales are kind of like your competitors too, right? And some of, if you think of like a toaster or something like that, yeah.

• 8:40Speaker 00

  In every case, they have a module that does some of the stuff that we do. I equated to the starter home edition of what we do. And if brands really get serious and they want to have their guest-facing technology not scrapped to the point-of-sale, but have flexibility to change point-of-sale in other systems, having a platform like Olo in place enables them to do that as an open platform. And as one that broke down this kind of walled garden, closed ecosystem world of restaurant technology and brought us into a time when it's really an open platform with 400 integrations. And so restaurants can now kind of build the technology stack that they want to build.

• 9:23Auren Hoffman?

  Back in the day, like, I think you almost sold the company for $65 million, which is a lot of money. And, you know, recently you sold it for $2 billion. It's like, why didn't you sell? And, you know, how did you think about it back then?

• 9:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, we were set to sell for $65 million with an M. We were a very small team at the time. This was in that first eight years, kind of at the end of it, when product market fit was starting to happen. We felt it coming. But for a 12-person company, we thought $65 million is a really good exit, eight years of work.

• 9:57Auren Hoffman?

  How much money had you raised at that point?

• 9:59Speaker 00

  At that point, we had raised about $8 million.

• 10:04Auren Hoffman?

  Okay, so great. That's incredible. Yeah.

• 10:06Speaker 00

  Yeah. And at the last minute, the buyer pulled out. And the buyer said, "Sorry, you know, we had a last-minute committee meeting, decided this wasn't the thing for us." And it was a heartbreaking moment because I'd already told all the other people in the company about this thing and what their role was going to be in this larger company. And so this was like the meeting that I'd called the next morning to walk in and tell them the deal was done. And instead it turned into, "I'm sorry, but it's not going to happen." And it was a real, it was one of those moments that you'll never forget, the pit in your stomach, the, "Am I dreaming? Is this a nightmare?" kind of thing. But it was a really important milestone in Team Olo history and in building our culture because-

• 10:52Speaker 00

  Pretty soon, we picked ourselves up. We trudged up the street on Fulton Street down in in lower Manhattan up to a dive bar that was opening, drank some pretty stale beer, and they had this karaoke machine and we started to belt out the song "Don't Stop Believin'." And that has since been the anthem for Team Olo.

• 11:10Auren Hoffman?

  Now, okay, so you've got this theory that, okay, vertical SaaS companies that endure, there's like a long middle essentially, and it's almost the rule, not the exception. Walk us through this idea.

• 11:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I was wondering, I mean, I looked at our 16-year journey from MVP to IPO and thinking about when that product market fit moment happened, and it kind of poetically is eight years in. So I think about Olo as these eight-year chunks, you know, eight years from MVP to product market fit, and then another eight years from product market fit to IPO. And that was really the go-go years from 2013 to 2021. We scaled from 12 employees, which it had been for the first eight years, up to about 600 at the time of the IPO. So 50x growth in the size of our team and happily, and more than 50x growth in our revenue coinciding with that. But it was really the time when every restaurant

• 12:09Speaker 00

  chain out there woke up and said, "We need something like this for our business and who can do it for us?" And Olo became the obvious choice. So we grew dramatically over that time period. But I was curious about, you know, is that a common story in vertical SaaS? And I looked at other companies. I looked at Shopify. I looked at Viva. I looked at Procore. I think Procore is the only company that has a longer gestation period. I think they were 19 years or 18 years versus our 16. But I just thought that was an interesting thing that it took this long for us to become the leader.

• 12:44Auren Hoffman?

  And why do you think it takes that long? Because all of us would love to shortcut that in some sort of way. So why does it take that long?

• 12:51Speaker 00

  I think in our case, I mean, selling into enterprise, that was a skill that we had to learn. A lot of people don't know this about Olo, but we started out B to C. So we started out selling into independent restaurants and with our own consumer brand. And it wasn't until really around that Five Guys win of signing a big enterprise deal like Five Guys that needed something different from us. They needed us to be the platform that they could build their consumer-facing app and website on top of. And then we changed the whole business. We pivoted the whole business to be B to B enterprise software. And so it took us, I mean, it took us the first, yeah, four years to make that change

• 13:36Speaker 00

  and then to get to a point four years later where we were at true product market fit and everybody looked at what Five Guys and others were doing and said, "We need that too." That's really what enabled us to scale. I think some companies start out in enterprise SaaS, maybe shorten that a bit. But for us, it was evolving into enterprise SaaS.

• 13:57Auren Hoffman?

  But if you're giving, like, there's a lot of people here who are running companies, someone which started the company, let's say in the last year or so, you're giving advice to them that they want to shorten this somehow. Like, what's the cheat code? Or is there a cheat code?

• 14:10Speaker 00

  I'm very curious about this. How many enterprise SaaS companies weren't born as enterprise SaaS companies but evolved into it? I think that's a pretty unusual component of our story. If you're born enterprise SaaS, I think you really need to find the shortest path to winning that first proof point of a customer who can then become the

• 14:30Auren Hoffman?

  Like the Five Guys example.

• 14:32Speaker 00

  Like the Five Guys. And then you can say, "Hey, look at the success that they're having. You're experiencing the same problems that they were experiencing before implementing our solution. And now look at the results they're having, having solved those problems. You could experience that too." It becomes something that is the best source of marketing, that case study and reference story. But it's really hard to convince a fast-growing enterprise that you're a capable technology partner, especially with something that could be mission-critical. I think at this point, digital commerce is mission-critical for brands. At the time, it felt like, yeah, this solves a problem. I'm not sure that it's really going to be the central artery of our business. So it was easier for us to get that proof point, even as a 12-person company.

• 15:16Auren Hoffman?

  I distinctly remember meeting you. This is 2004. We were in South Africa together. You're working for Endeavor. You were about a year out of college-ish around that?

• 15:25Speaker 00

  A year out of college. Yeah, I graduated in May of 2003.

• 15:29Auren Hoffman?

  A year before you started Olo, which somehow I should have tracked you somehow and invested, but I was stupid and I didn't do that. Like, how did your experience at Endeavor shape you as a founder? Because there, you're like meeting all these like impressive founders all over the world.

• 15:43Speaker 00

  Well, that was a big thing, was meeting all these founders. So my role at Endeavor initially was to help Linda Rodenberg as we assessed which market we wanted to launch in, in Sub-Saharan Africa. Pretty soon after I joined, we decided Johannesburg was the city, South Africa was the country where we wanted to launch. And then there was a question of how are we going to launch? And it wasn't going to be that we were just parachuting in every couple of months. We needed to have boots on the ground to start things. So I went there initially as those boots on the ground, and it was supposed to be go there for three months, hire a managing director, build up the team, start to find entrepreneurs,

• 16:24Speaker 00

  et cetera, that we're going to winnow down to the first class that we select. I wound up staying on for all of 2004. We hired a great managing director. We hired a team. But I ran what's called search and selection. So I looked at about 161 different companies, and then we narrowed it down to six companies that we selected as the first batch of Endeavor entrepreneurs. So just every day, you're talking to these incredible entrepreneurs who've overcome adversity and built something. And when you have ideas that have been burning in the back of your head for a while, you're just like, "I want to be one of these people. I need to do this too." I was certainly bit by the bug and started to work on what

• 17:05Speaker 00

  became Olo as a nights and weekends project while I was living in Johannesburg in 2004.

• 17:12Auren Hoffman?

  You recently announced a new concept called second party, which is, you're kind of describing it as alternative to first party, alternative to third-party marketplaces. Like, walk us through what second party is.

• 17:22Speaker 00

  First party is kind of the core business of what I just described. It is building the platform so that restaurant guests can order directly from a brand. So stick with that Five Guys example. As a guest, you can download the Five Guys app. You can view the menu. You can order. You can pay with Five Guys. That's a first-party transaction. Third party is the only other model that's really existed in our space up until this time, and that is like

• 17:47Auren Hoffman?

  DoorDash, Uber Eats or something. It's a marketplace.

• 17:50Speaker 00

  Exactly right. So in those cases, the guest is seeing many brands in one place. So it's convenient from that perspective. And when they order, the marketplace takes the payment, and the marketplace sends the order to the brand, but the brand doesn't get any of the data about who that guest is. And they also get a big commission taken out, 20, 30% of the transaction taken out by the marketplace. So there's pros and cons to each model, first party and third party. First party, you know, it's hard to get guests to download your app. And, you know, when they do, it's really great that you are keeping your profit and you're getting all the guest data and you're building up what you know

• 18:32Speaker 00

  about that guest so that you can personalize their experience. Third party, it's a lot easier. You don't have to get somebody to download your specific app. There are a lot of built-in guests. There's a big audience there, but you don't get any of the guest data and you frankly don't get much, if any, profit because this is a pretty thin profit industry. So

• 18:51Auren Hoffman?

  You skip on the food. So, you know, if someone orders from you directly, you give them four shrimp. But if that order for you for DoorDash, you give them two shrimp or something or whatever, right?

• 19:01Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, it's just, it's tricky as an operator when you see an order coming from a third party and you feel like, "I'm more like a wholesaler now than I am like a retailer. I don't have that direct guest relationship." I'm desirous of that guest relationship, but this is not some, it's sort of like OTAs.

• 19:19Auren Hoffman?

  Sometimes you discover new restaurants and there's certainly, like, I'm a huge DoorDash person. There's certain, definitely like restaurants I'd go, I never heard of before that I discovered through that. Now I go to, you know, all the time, sometimes even weekly to the same place or something, even though I maybe have never been there in person.

• 19:36Speaker 00

  That's the happy path. There's also a sad path, which is that a guest who is very loyal to a restaurant, let's stick with Five Guys, migrates their relationship over to the marketplace.

• 19:47Auren Hoffman?

  That's a very good point. If I order from Five, if I know I want to order from Five Guys, if I order from DoorDash now, either they're getting cut or I'm getting a less good service because maybe they have to, they have to cut back on like better ingredients or something.

• 20:00Speaker 00

  And the challenge is that it's impossible when the marketplace is not sharing data, which I know is a topic near and dear to your heart. It's impossible to tell what is actually incremental and what is cannibalization, as we call it in the industry, of a guest who would have come anyway, going instead through a marketplace and having all the profit removed and the guest relationship removed. So first and third party have been the only two models. We introduced in March of this year at our customer conference, Beyond Four, something that sits in between. And because it's in between first and third, we acutely called it second party. But second party fits, you know, from a data perspective, it's about a coalition of brands coming together onto another platform and sharing in a way that benefits all of the members of that coalition and benefits the guest.

• 20:46Speaker 00

  So that's what we're launching in 22 days from today, and we're calling it the Olo App.

• 20:52Auren Hoffman?

  And by the time this comes out, give us the date so we all know, because this

• 20:55Speaker 00

  October 20th.

• 20:57Auren Hoffman?

  October 20th, 2026. Yeah.

• 20:59Speaker 00

  And you can get

• 21:00Auren Hoffman?

  The Olo App itself coming out, which is, it's kind of like a competitor to like a, like a DoorDash or Toast or something like that, right? You're going to go order your food through it.

• 21:10Speaker 00

  I mean, it's not a marketplace. It is a network. And what we mean by a network is you can see all the brands that are part of the Olo network through that one app experience. You create an account or you use an account that you've already used on one of those brands through their first-party experience.

• 21:29Speaker 00

  And we're storing all of that data about you so you don't have to repeat yourself. You also importantly, on a marketplace, typically you're paying 15 to 30% more than you pay at the restaurant for menu prices. Because to offset that commission that they're paying, restaurants have a higher price on marketplace.

• 21:48Auren Hoffman?

  Well, you're either paying more or you're getting something less good, right? I've seen like sometimes the word, you're actually paying the same, but you're again, you're getting the two shrimp instead of four shrimp or something like that.

• 21:59Speaker 00

  That's interesting. Typically, what most restaurant chains do is that they make an agreement that they're going to upcharge by 25% or so on these third-party marketplaces.

• 22:09Auren Hoffman?

  Which makes sense because if you're Five Guys, like, well, it doesn't make, you can't like just take out a pickle or something. Whereas like you're a higher-end Thai restaurant, you can figure that out a little bit more.

• 22:19Speaker 00

  But so you're already paying delivery fee and sometimes service fee and sometime and tip. And then sometimes a priority fee to make sure you're the first thing delivered. And you're paying 15 to 30% more for the same food you could get directly from the restaurant. That is not true on the Olo app. On the Olo app, you're paying menu prices for that order.

• 22:39Auren Hoffman?

  You pick it up, it's a menu price. If it's a delivery, then you just have a delivery charge or something like that on top of that.

• 22:44Speaker 00

  You have the delivery charge, you pay the tip. That's all equivalent to what you pay on a third-party marketplace, but you're paying menu price, not the marked up price.

• 22:53Auren Hoffman?

  Got it. So if I'm doing a pickup, which is like, you know, some cases you want to do a pickup or something like that. I think already on a pickup, you know, someplace like DoorDash do charge a smaller percentage, right? But, uh, but in your case, a pickup would be much more beneficial to the, to, to the restaurant.

• 23:09Speaker 00

  Yeah. So on the restaurant value proposition, it's about you're getting the guest data, equivalent to a first-party order. So unlike a marketplace, we're, we're sharing all the data with the guest's permission. The guest is deciding to connect with that restaurant. It's a one-click acquisition of that guest data, that guest record into their database. And there's no commission. We don't charge the restaurant to commission on that order.

• 23:33Auren Hoffman?

  If I'm using the app, I've got my information in there. I order from a restaurant. They get my name, my whatever, they, they know who I am now, so they can either market to me or disambiguate me from the other orders, et cetera.

• 23:46Speaker 00

  Know if you're a new user or know if you're already in their database is an example.

• 23:51Auren Hoffman?

  And what about if I want to be anonymous? Like if it's like, how does that work?

• 23:55Speaker 00

  You can decide to order anonymously always. It's really the guest's choice, whether they want to share their data with the restaurant and whether they want to be marketed to by the restaurant. So I've taken a lot of inspiration from an academic thinker. I'm sure you've given your background, heard of this person called Doc Cirels. But the idea of Doc Cirels is the, the inverse of customer relationship management is vendor relationship management. And wouldn't it be great if guests could decide what vendors have their data and are allowed to communicate with them or not? And what channels and how frequently? That's really what we've taken inspiration from and building out the guest experience of the Olo app and how guests give permission to brands to contact them.

• 24:36Speaker 00

  That's a very powerful idea when guests are able to order, the brand is able to collect that data with the guest's permission and full profit on that order. It, it makes the brand feel the same about orders coming through the Olo app as they do about orders coming through their first-party experience.

• 24:54Auren Hoffman?

  Have you thought about like second-party marketing and stuff like that? So let's say I'm Five Guys, I've got a list of folks who go for me and they're doing great. And these are people who order for me pretty regularly, let's say, once a month or something. But you're not going to go to Five Guys every day. I mean, even me who loves Five Guys, like I'm going to go maximum once a week or something to Five Guys. And then, okay, you've got, you know, whatever, the hot chicken place or something. Could you imagine a scenario where like, okay, I could run ads to the Five Guys users? And then the Five Guys people could run ads to the hot chicken place or something?

• 25:32Speaker 00

  I think it's an interesting idea. It's, um, it's something we watch what Shopify does a lot. And we think about what Shopify has built, again, as a B2B platform that became a network through shop pay and shop accounts and now the shop app. And they also have a product called Shopify Audiences, which does exactly what you're describing. Where you can, as a Shopify brand, you can think about who you want to market to through Shopify, based on an affiliation with another brand that's like your brand. We're not there yet. It is something that we think about a lot. Certainly there is a problem in our industry of how do brands go and find new guests? Who actually become guests in their first-party database that they can build a relationship with?

• 26:16Speaker 00

  It's a very expensive proposition today. And we think there are logical ways that our audience, which is now 40 million guests that we have, who have an Olo account. We think that's a very valuable asset for all the brands on the other side of the network.

• 26:32Auren Hoffman?

  How do you help these brands give people better service? There could be a whole bunch of things like, okay, you, there's some things you ordered, you love, and some things you ordered, you didn't like. And just kind of like somehow remind you not to order the things you didn't like. Or, you know, giving this, you know, okay, you, you know, this person like doesn't like mustard on his hamburger. So don't, just make sure, you know, even if they forget to click, there's no mustard. You make sure, you know, you make sure about that. Or, you know, how do we, how do we actually give them like really good, or even like treating them with a friendly, like when they come into the, when they come into the store, be like, hey, Orin, great to see you again. Like, I would love that if I show up to Five Guys and they're like, or a big sign like, hey, welcome back, Orin. This is your 100th time at Five Guys.

• 27:17Auren Hoffman?

  Like, here's some free fries. Like, I'd be like, oh, yes.

• 27:20Speaker 00

  The power of this is if you know more about that guest, if you have more contextual data about that guest, based on orders that they've placed from your restaurant before, or based on orders they placed elsewhere, you can then personalize their experience. At the very like lowest level, you can say, welcome back, Orin, instead of welcome, Orin. And that makes a big difference. That's something that Danny Meyer, who was a long time board member and investor at Olo from 2014 up until last year, 2025, for 11 years. You know, he wrote the book on hospitality.

• 27:53Auren Hoffman?

  I love his book. Yeah. Oh, my gosh. Extreme hospitality. It's incredible.

• 27:58Speaker 00

  In so many ways, we've taken lessons from thinkers like Danny Meyer and Will Goddara. And we've kind of put that into our product. And it's about how do you remember this person? But in a networked approach, how do I remember you as Olo and then guide a restaurant, even if it's your first time ordering, to not give you mustard? Right? How do I say to them, hey, we know something about Orin, coming to you for the first time? Don't put mustard on his burger.

• 28:22Auren Hoffman?

  Give it to him on the side, just in case, if you're not sure. Yeah.

• 28:26Speaker 00

  The other thing you just said, which is, how do you act really generously and recommend something to you? Or give you a little something extra in the bag that you didn't order, but that we know, we have a very high probability likelihood that you're going to love? Because we've done the machine learning, we've done the collaborative filtering. We know that guests like Orin love this thing here.

• 28:48Auren Hoffman?

  So many people, like, seems like almost everybody nowadays has some sort of weird dietary restriction. They're gluten-free, they've got the lactose thing, they're vegan, they're vegetarian. Like, if you already know that, like, yeah, you might be like, okay, if you're ordering for yourself, if you're ordering for your family, there's other things. But like, let's get the profiles in there. Like, hey, who are you ordering from? And, and it's just like, let's, it shouldn't be so hard. And then just show me the menu items that just fit my, my, uh, my dietary restrictions.

• 29:18Speaker 00

  So I eat a plant-based diet, really good, good example here. And it would be great if I didn't have to repeat myself every time I went to a new restaurant's menu. But they just knew to show me the things that are adhered into that diet.

• 29:30Auren Hoffman?

  Hey, like, there's 100 things in our menu. Here's the 25 of them that like you can, you can do. And by the way, I know you don't like olives, so I'm even, I'm, I'm just taking off those other three that have olives in them or something, you know?

• 29:42Speaker 00

  Broad categories like plant-based or gluten-free, like those are obvious. But we can get down to the ingredient level. You know, what is the thing that Orin always removes as a topping from the salad? You can probably mark that as something he doesn't like. And if something has a standard preparation with that ingredient, what if for Orin, we remove that thing and give it to him Orin's way?

• 30:02Auren Hoffman?

  That'd be amazing.

• 30:02Speaker 00

  Because we know who he is.

• 30:04Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 30:05Speaker 00

  So this is the kind of thing that becomes possible with this networked approach and.

• 30:09Auren Hoffman?

  I am shocked that we don't have that today. Like, I'm shocked that just the, the level of personalization wherever I shop, whether it be in restaurants, whether it be a pre-visit anywhere online, even Amazon, which has like information about me for 30 years. Like, it's just like, it's really not that good. I'm surprised that these things just don't have this level of, of personalization like they could.

• 30:34Speaker 00

  I, I agree with that. And I want to pick up on something you just said, which is the, the sort of data exhaust of the 30-year relationship. So we have 21 years of order history, a lot of it tied to these accounts. And so it overcomes this cold start problem of I sign, I download the Olo app, I sign in for the first time and I have to repeat myself and put everything. No, we're actually going to show you the restaurants that you've ordered from, show you the order history from those restaurants, allow you to reorder from those restaurants.

• 31:04Auren Hoffman?

  Oh, great. So in the, in the meta app, in the meta Olo app, you can show me all my Five Guys orders and stuff like that. Oh, that's cool.

• 31:12Speaker 00

  Exactly. As you've ordered them through the first-party experiences that we've powered for 21 years, you now have that in an app where everything is in one place. Obvious things like delivery address and payment details are already there. But down to the, the specific, I remove olives from this when I order it, or I don't like mustard. All of that is captured in your profile from the jump.

• 31:33Auren Hoffman?

  Walk me through how we make the in-restaurant experience better.

• 31:37Speaker 00

  I think about that a lot. It's a meaningful, it's a meaningful, but maybe less meaningful than you think it is component of the industry. So let me do a little quiz here. Out of 100 transactions.

• 31:51Speaker 00

  Because a hundred percent. How many of those do you think happen inside the four walls of a restaurant?

• 31:56Auren Hoffman?

  Well, I would have thought higher, but now that you're quizzing me on this, I'm now going lower.

• 32:00Speaker 00

  No, answer, answer honestly.

• 32:02Auren Hoffman?

  I was gonna say seventy-five, but now I'll say forty.

• 32:06Speaker 00

  Twenty-five.

• 32:07Auren Hoffman?

  What?

• 32:08Speaker 00

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

• 32:14Auren Hoffman?

  It's shocking. So they could be, could be a catering order, could be a delivery, could be a pickup.

• 32:18Speaker 00

  Takeout, delivery and drive-through.

• 32:21Auren Hoffman?

  Drive-through.

• 32:22Speaker 00

  Super high number of transactions. It's only one out of four, twenty-five out of a hundred orders that are happening inside the four walls. So I think about it a lot.

• 32:29Auren Hoffman?

  And this is, you're talking about like a quick serve restaurant more than a.

• 32:33Speaker 00

  The industry overall, the industry overall.

• 32:36Auren Hoffman?

  Okay, got it, got it.

• 32:36Speaker 00

  Seventy-five out of a hundred orders are happening, are consumed outside the four walls of the restaurant.

• 32:41Auren Hoffman?

  All restaurants in America, essentially.

• 32:43Speaker 00

  All restaurants in America.

• 32:44Auren Hoffman?

  Holy mackerel.

• 32:45Speaker 00

  It's wild, but I mean, if you, if you, if you, and as a public company CEO for four and a half years, this was how I started most of my conversations with investors who walk into the room, they're 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, you had to break them down and build them back up. But this was one of the key points that made me credible in saying the industry works a little bit differently than you might imagine it to work based on your own lived experience. And one of those facts is that seventy-five out of a hundred orders are outside the four walls of the restaurant. And then another fact is that, okay, if I ask you the same question, out of a hundred orders, how many of them are delivery orders? What do you think the answer is to that?

• 33:29Auren Hoffman?

  Ten out of seventy-five.

• 33:30Speaker 00

  You got it. That's actually dead on.

• 33:33Auren Hoffman?

  Oh, nice. Okay.

• 33:34Speaker 00

  When you say that, the seventy-five are not consumed inside the restaurant, but elsewhere, everybody goes, oh, it's all DoorDash and Uber Eats, it's all delivery orders. But actually, it's only ten of the hundred and ten of the seventy-five that are delivery. The other sixty-five are made up of takeout and drive-through. Those are the two biggest ways that guests are getting food from a restaurant and consuming it elsewhere. And it's a really, it's a really powerful point, because that is a great understanding of how guests are actually using restaurants. It's not, I'm going and having an experience there. It is that a quarter of the time.

• 34:12Auren Hoffman?

  Now, are you doing anything on drive-through?

• 34:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, we're doing a lot with drive-through. By nature of the fact that a lot of drive-throughs are migrating to guests ordering ahead through digital and then having sort of a fly-through experience where they pull up to a window and grab their order, but it's been ordered ahead of time. And it is one of the first use cases of AI, voice AI ordering at the drive-through. And that typically runs through our APIs and then gets injected into the restaurant.

• 34:39Auren Hoffman?

  Why can't they tie their credit card to my license plate? Like, I just want to drive-through, pick it up, like, I don't want to have to like, like, because sometimes it's far. I have the watch and everything, but I'm like going with the watch over there. Or I'm like, you know, I'm like, you know, leaning out my phone like barely, and all of a sudden the car's going off the road, like.

• 34:58Speaker 00

  It's funny you say that because we released a video about three years ago called The Restaurant of the Future, some of which has happened already. But one of the, one of the experiences we show is the license plate recognition, which is really old technology. But bringing up your profile, your order history, your payment details, and short cutting that entire experience, that is suboptimal and pretty inaccurate and slow relative to what it could be. So the industry is baby stepping its way there. There's a lot of hardened systems.

• 35:27Auren Hoffman?

  Back to the example of just like customer service, like, let's, let's have a good for the customer. Even today, still ninety percent of garages I go in still give you the ticket. And every once in a while, you go to a garage and it just like opens, right? And then, and then when you show up, it like, you still have to pay, which is annoying, but at least you don't have to have a ticket. It knows how long you've been there by your license plate. And then it just tells you, oh, you pay six dollars and forty cents. Great, I'm paying the six dollars and forty cents. It would be even better if they could bill you and you just drive right out, right? That would be the ideal scenario.

• 35:58Speaker 00

  I have heard of garages doing that with, with computer vision, exactly as you say. I mean, just looking at the license plate going in, looking at the license plate going out and just billing the card on file. It seems super logical, but it's amazing that so many experiences don't operate that way today.

• 36:13Auren Hoffman?

  What else can we do to give people just like an insanely good, like, let's go to the restaurant, the future from five years from now. Okay, we want to give the people the, the Danny Meyer level of experience, but everywhere, like he, he, you know, you can't always get the, you know, the Union Street Cafe everywhere. Like, we're gonna like, we're just gonna, we're gonna technology mask this rather than, you know, he has to hire like the very best people who just don't exist everywhere. Like, how do we actually get that?

• 36:40Speaker 00

  I'm gonna send you this video so we can put it in the show notes. And it's going to look sort of like futuristic, but also old at the same time. Because we released it about three years ago, but The Restaurant of the Future, as part of that, I mentioned the drive-through experience. It also has an experience where the server has a handheld, and that handheld is basically the way that they understand who you are because of the reservation and the reservation being tied to your order history. Now, that is starting to happen, but I think that is really the best way that you can scale it up and make the knowledge base that the brand has about you, the guest, or that the network now has about you as a guest, transfer over to every encounter that you have.

• 37:21Speaker 00

  And I'm not saying that in a way that I want a robot to be serving you. I want that genuine human-to-human hospitality that is just core to restaurant experiences that we all love. But I definitely want it to be informed by what we can learn about you with your permission from across all of your different dining experiences. And that is something that we're really excited about. We call that, it's our mission of the company, hospitality at scale. You know, I think about, I think it's Dunbar's law, that you can only really hold a hundred and fifty human relationships in your brain. That's kind of the limit to the human brain.

• 38:01Speaker 00

  And, you know, we think about cheers and I can remember, you know, name bar stool and drink. Name, drink, bar stool. I can remember that for about a hundred and fifty people as a great bartender. With a knowledge base, accessible knowledge base, you can imagine that, that limitation disappearing. And that's really the promise of a guest data platform, our customer data platform in other industries, that's at the fingertips of those people who are delivering human hospitality. And that's something that we're, we're super excited about. That was our first acquisition that we did back in October of 2021, maybe November of 2021. We acquired a customer data platform company and stitched that together with all of the order history that we had.

• 38:45Speaker 00

  At that point, sixteen years worth of that data.

• 38:48Auren Hoffman?

  You know, obviously you're a CEO, but you're also a consumer. You go to hotels, you fly, you, you, you, you shop online, you shop in store, you do all these other things. You call, every once in a while, maybe you or someone on your staff has to call Comcast to get your internet deal with or what. Like, walk us through what you want to see as a consumer. Like, how do you want your own experience to be better and where can we be better? Obviously, there's things that you can, you're doing for, for restaurants, but where can we get better overall?

• 39:21Speaker 00

  Well, I think your point earlier ties to this, which is if, people talk a lot about the right to be forgotten. And I believe that that is a sacred right. We should, we should have that right. And I think the inverse is true, that we should have a right to be remembered or a right to be known. And that's what I would like personally. Now, I know that not everybody thinks the way that I do and probably you do. I know that because my wife does not like to be known and feels creeped out when she is known, doesn't feel like she gave permission. I would love to be known. I'd like to walk into a restaurant or I'd like to call into Comcast, to use that example, and have the context that is knowable about me, that I have agreed to be knowable about me, be known by the person or the system that I'm talking to.

• 40:03Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 40:04Speaker 00

  I think that removes friction from my experience. And beyond just sort of meeting the baseline expectations, it enables them to delight me and do things that I wasn't even looking for. But through collaborative filtering and having many other customers, some of whom look like me, they can do for me that I'd say, ooh, I actually, I do want that service from Comcast. How did they know? I mean, there's, there's big data ways to know these things and that gets unlocked. But you need to have a guest remembered and the context of that guest known and then matched up against the context of all the other guests who look like them. And that's what we're trying to do for restaurants, but I believe it's much bigger than restaurants. You can do this in any. Customer service kind of experience.

• 40:48Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, I had, I had an experience where I stayed at a Mandarin Oriental. I haven't been to, I haven't stayed at that many of those in my life, but they were so like they, they, first of all, the, the service was great and they had remembered things from like past days at very different locations. Like it was, you know, I said one in like, let's say Madrid and the other one in Bangkok or, you know, whatever it was. And they were able to, to understand the preferences of our family and they're able to give us a great experience and it was delightful. Now, of course, it's like a super high end, whatever, but like it, there's, there's ways in software to get that service all the way down, right? Everyone should get that level of Mandarin Oriental Four Seasons type service.

• 41:33Speaker 00

  Yeah. As I said, uh, on an interview with Danny Meyer some time ago, and he was our keynote speaker at our customer conference, you know, we want to unlock that full service kind of experience, even in limited service restaurants. And that's sort of democratization of hospitality itself. And what we mean when we say hospitality at scale. I, I had a similar experience. I won't name the name of the hotel, but it's a hotel we've been to many times, not Mandarin Oriental, but one that's kind of in that class of hotels. And they're very gracious and hospitable and they brought us this dessert plate to welcome us back. And it was a cheesecake and my son and my wife and I eat a plant-based diet. So it's not something that, that fit.

• 42:13Auren Hoffman?

  Exactly.

• 42:13Speaker 00

  What, what a miss. Like it's so generous.

• 42:16Auren Hoffman?

  It's a great, so I, I don't drink wine. I mean, my wife does, but I don't drink wine. And so it's like, yeah, it's like, well, why, why, uh, why bring us wine or what? Yeah. Why bring the cheesecake? Exactly. Like they could have known that. They could have known that.

• 42:31Speaker 00

  It makes it feel almost worse that they were like trying but failed.

• 42:34Auren Hoffman?

  The wine bottle to you and you didn't actually drink the wine. Uh, you know, like, okay, why do it the ninth time?

• 42:39Speaker 00

  I think there's a ton of opportunity out there to up level customer service and to truly like add a whole layer of hospitality to fields that have not had it traditionally based on data, really is like guest sharing data and brands sharing data with one another. Again, with the guest's permission, that's absolutely critical and can't be overstated. But once the guest is saying, I want to be known. Here are the things I like. Here are the things I dislike. When you can meet those needs and you can match it on to other guests that are look-alikes to that guest. It's a super, super powerful set of tools that are really the, the way to build a lasting,

• 43:21Speaker 00

  recurring relationship with that guest and not have it be transactional, but be a relationship.

• 43:25Auren Hoffman?

  Now you've seen how people order and consume food, millions and tens of millions of people, um, over, uh, long periods of time. What do you know about people that we wouldn't understand?

• 43:40Speaker 00

  There are some very funny, very human patterns that you see in our data, just day in, day out. We get the daily sales report of all the brands. Early on in the week, Monday, Tuesday, people are eating a lot of salads, a lot of smoothies, healthy food. In the middle chunk of the week, Wednesday, Thursday starts to get more variety, more kind of ethnic flavors and spices. Thursday, Friday, Saturday, or Friday, Saturday, certainly, we're into burgers and burritos and pizza. Um, I like to think of people are like really good about their diet when they enter the week and they kind of crash out at the end. It's all about comfort food.

• 44:16Auren Hoffman?

  Cause you think in January, people are really good in January. And then by like, you know, June, they're like less good. Yeah.

• 44:22Speaker 00

  Yes. Like the best days for the salad concepts are like the Mondays in January and the worst days are the Fridays and Saturdays in November and December. It's like a complete, uh, uh, inverse relationship. The other thing is we, we learned this early in, in Olo's, uh, lifespan. And one of the things that we did was enabling a guest to save an order as a favorite. So they also have something called order history, which is obviously just like their, their transaction history. And we let them order from things that are in their transaction history. And separately, we have favorites. And what we found is that people like to save healthy favorites because they think like,

• 45:06Speaker 00

  I'm so good. I ate this salad and I'm going to eat this salad all the time. And they don't like, they don't like to save these unhealthy kind of like guilty pleasure, late night, I comfort food, but they reorder them more often than they do the favorites. So people are funny in that way. And I, I do think that there's some, you know, learning you can do of the course of a week, what somebody who orders the salad on Monday might like, perhaps as a healthier alternative as they're falling off the wagon later in the week. And we've played around, this again, super early on in our history with the idea of could nutritionists come in and kind of design a weekly

• 45:47Speaker 00

  menu for somebody. And I think now that's possible to do at scale. I mean, you can hook into any of these different things, you know, whoop is an example, Fitbit. You can imagine really mapping on to how somebody is eating and the nutrients that they're, that they're putting in their body and sleep patterns, et cetera.

• 46:04Auren Hoffman?

  I, I think you should check, you, you should allow to often your whoop or your Apple Health or whatever into Olo. And then it's like, hey, you know what? You deserve a milkshake. You had a big workout this morning. Normally, you know, but like, hey, this time like treat yourself. Like, I would be like, all right, I'll take that milkshake. Like, uh, this is good.

• 46:23Speaker 00

  I think that that's all coming. I think that's in the future. And part of that I do think is guests wanting to be known. I can imagine a future where a guest are saying, I want to be known. I want to be even more known. And I do want some sort of real time knowledge of what's happening with my body to be piped in so that I get an even better recommendation or so that I get, you know, a, a nod that I have been good this week and can get this thing that I'm, I'm really craving. And it is actually justified based on all the things I've done, uh, over the course of this week.

• 46:55Auren Hoffman?

  When we all have agents, which is coming, I mean, you and I, I'm sure have one, but maybe not everyone has one. We all have agents and the agents are, but my agent still doesn't like order my food and stuff. Like if I need some food for this, for my family or something like that on a Sunday night, uh, which recently I, you know, just went and ordered like it's not, but soon it will be. When you see the agent making decisions, how do you build your company and your product for the agent? And how is that different than when you're building it for the, even though ultimately it's for the human, when you're building it for the human?

• 47:30Speaker 00

  I mean, this is really the why now answer to building the Olo app and what we actually call the Olo network. And it's this data structure of the guests having a relationship with Olo and then Olo having all of these different restaurant brands as options for that guest is we wanted agents to be able to speak to Olo and be able to have the shortest path to getting the guest what they want. Cause I, I do think it's not a today thing, but it is a soon tomorrow thing of you turning to an agent saying, order me lunch. It's Friday, you know, go order me lunch. And your agent saying, Orin loves five guys. Orin has earned his, his cheeseburger. I'm going to

• 48:14Speaker 00

  order Orin his cheeseburger and hold the mustard. And I know that the best path to do that through this connection.

• 48:20Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah. And especially if it already knows what I ate for breakfast and when I'm, and where I, where my reservation is for dinner that night, right? Then it can like, it can, it could, it could calibrate. Just, hey, like surprise me, give me something good. It knows my budgetary, you know, whatever. It knows how quickly I want it.

• 48:34Speaker 00

  Again, we take a lot of inspiration from Shopify and what they're doing with not just the shop app, but all of their work in agentic commerce, super, um, bleeding edge, but, but, you know, the, the right path for Shopify customers. Similarly, I want to be on the bleeding edge of food ordering through agentic commerce, because I don't want that agent to turn around and say, okay, I'm going to order through a third party marketplace where the restaurant gets no data and the restaurant gets 20 to 30% of its profit shaven off of this order, which is sorry, not 20 to 30% of the profit, 23% of the top line. So all of the profit shaven off this order.

• 49:15Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 49:15Speaker 00

  Or maybe 80, 90% of the profit. Restaurant gets the data, guest data, forges that new connection or adds the database they already have, the profile they already have that guest and gets the full profit on the transaction. That is the only way to do a Genta Commerce in a way that is restaurants aligned and guest centric at the same time. And that's really the future that we want to bring about through what we're doing with the Olo network.

• 49:41Auren Hoffman?

  Okay, Tomo Bravo took you guys private very recently and just, you know, and just a few years after going public. Why, why go private and what does it free you to do that you couldn't have done before?

• 49:54Speaker 00

  Tomo Bravo took us private on September 12th last year. So we just hit the one year anniversary of being private again. It was after a four and a half year run almost exactly of being a public company.

• 50:06Auren Hoffman?

  And does being public just completely suck? Like, is it just like a terrible?

• 50:10Speaker 00

  No, it's like all things in life. It's a, it's a mixed bag. There are some things about it that are just awesome. I mean, one of the biggest reasons that we went public to begin with was we'd gotten to a point where we were mission critical for our customers.

• 50:22Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, and you more credibility as a public company, right?

• 50:25Speaker 00

  Yeah. For these big enterprise brands, they just needed to know that we were going to be around for the long term and that they could, in many cases, stop building internally and have us build on their behalf at a much lower cost without opening up some, you know, existential risk for a mission critical part of their platform. But being private has been amazing for the past year because it's enabled us to make this very big bet.

• 50:50Auren Hoffman?

  You could think more longer term when you're private, I presume, right?

• 50:54Speaker 00

  Precisely. I mean, so we were 20 years into the journey when we got taken private again. And I've said, you know, I would love to personally run Olo for 100 years. You know, if I could be the first founder and CEO to run a company from founding at 24 years old to, if I can live that long, 124 and do it for a hundred years.

• 51:14Auren Hoffman?

  I think you will. You're probably the youngest looking person I know. So I think you will be able to do that. Yeah.

• 51:19Speaker 00

  Very kind of you. But I, I love this industry. I love what we do for this industry. And I think the role that we have to play is massive, particularly as we go from being a platform serving 850 brands individually to a network that puts all those brands onto the Olo network and then opens up these new demand channels in a way that meets their needs and is better for the guest experience at the same time. That transformation is something that I think would have been really hard to pull off in the public market. It's why this vision of the Olo network and the Olo app as the tip of the spear was why after, you know, the deal happened September 12th last year, my wife, my son and I sat down

• 52:01Speaker 00

  and we decided to put 75% of our proceeds back into the company as part of the Tomo Bravo investment. And they made space for us to do that. That's because of the conviction that we have in this next chapter that's ahead of us and just what a long runway it is. Cause we serve a $1.5 trillion industry. I mean, from a vertical software perspective, that is one of the biggest ones out there. And when I think, okay, we do about $30 billion of GMV, in one way, I feel really good about that. It's a lot of GMV. In another way, I think that's less than 2%. We have such a long runway to go. Um, you know, let's, let's hunker down for the long journey ahead, even though it's been a long journey to get to this point.

• 52:43Auren Hoffman?

  All right. Three personal questions before we leave. The first is, okay, you, you are a very talented lacrosse player. Like you're kind of like a major league lacrosse player. Like, that's like an interesting side hustle. Like, walk us through how you've been able to do that while you've been CEO and what you've learned from both.

• 53:02Speaker 00

  Oh, to be clear, I have not played lacrosse since, uh, let's see, I had college and then I played in the, the All-Star game in college. I got drafted by the Boston Cannons, the Boston team. Um, I wound up doing Endeavor, moving to South Africa and not reporting to training camp. So lacrosse is a thing in the, in the rearview mirror at this point. That's how I do it. Cause I just don't do it.

• 53:25Auren Hoffman?

  Okay. God, you just no way to do it at the same time. Okay. The second question, how are you personally using AI? Like in your day to day?

• 53:33Speaker 00

  I mean, I use it extensively. I use, uh, at, at Olo, we use a lot of Claude. I use Gemini. I use ChatGPT personally a lot of the time.

• 53:43Auren Hoffman?

  Are you building like agents for your family or building, are you, are you in the code for your company?

• 53:49Speaker 00

  No, I aspire to be, but I'm not, I'm not there at this point, to be honest. I mean, I use Claude extensively. I'm not in Claude code at the moment. I'm doing a lot in, in cowork. I'd say, you know, the thing that I do with AI that is most fun for me is my son, Nolan and I, uh, have played music together since he was very little. And, uh, I sang in an a cappella group in college. I taught myself guitar. He plays piano. We do a lot of songwriting and now we use an app called Suno that, um, we have a common, we have a common investor in David Frankel and Founder Collective.

• 54:27Auren Hoffman?

  Who also was in South Africa with us.

• 54:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly right. And is the seed investor in Olo and the seed investor in Suno. But we, Nolan, my son and I love to play with Suno and write songs and listen to them and publish them.

• 54:39Auren Hoffman?

  What kind of songs do you write?

• 54:40Speaker 00

  We write songs about, you know, things that are interesting to us. We write like goofy songs that make us laugh. I don't know if you can put a label on it, man. It's just, it's all over the place. You can look us up once you know, we're, we're, I think NH Glass is, is, uh, is our, our handle.

• 54:56Auren Hoffman?

  NH Glass? Okay. I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm going to start listening. But is it like Flight of the Conchords or anything like that? Or those are like my favorite or Weird Al?

• 55:03Speaker 00

  Maybe. Yeah. Okay. Those, those could be good references for our work.

• 55:08Auren Hoffman?

  Okay. All right. Which is more like our play. Last question we ask all of our guests, what conventional wisdom or advice do you think is generally bad advice?

• 55:15Speaker 00

  I think anybody looking at Olo's story, and we started out this way, I'll return to it, would say you guys were way too early and there's no difference between being too early and being wrong. There are some cases, and I would say vertical SaaS probably has a number of stories pro core from my research for, you know, my LinkedIn post today seems to be another one of these. There are times when like the MVP to the product market fit journey can be really long and easy to lose heart during that journey and say we were too early or we're just wrong in toto. But there are some cases where being around and gaining that credibility over time is imperative and it's necessary for the overnight success

• 55:56Speaker 00

  that you look like years later. So I, it's a tough one. You don't want to like throw away good years of your professional life on something. If you actually are wrong or you are so early, it's never going to come together. But I think the conventional wisdom that you're always wrong if you're too early. I mean, by definition, too early means that yeah, you're too early. I think we were just early and right and it took a long time for product market fit to happen. And when it did, it was just that exponential rocketship kind of growth, hockey stick kind of growth, um, that enabled us to IPO and get to where we are today with, yeah, $30 billion of GMV flowing through our platform, um, and, and much more to come. So I think our story should, uh, you know, expose that too early is, is

• 56:41Speaker 00

  the equivalent of being wrong, uh, as, as a, a bad, a bad piece of conventional wisdom.

• 56:47Auren Hoffman?

  Thank you, Noel Glass, for joining us on Summation. By the way, I appreciate our 22 year friendship. This is incredible. Um, and I really, uh, this has been really great. You're an incredible founder and entrepreneur. I really appreciate you being on.

• 56:59Speaker 00

  Orin, thank you for all of your inspiration over the years. I still quote that Business Week article that you wrote about going by the board and boards and advisory boards and the difference between the two. It's been hugely helpful to me and I like to think of you as one of those founders and entrepreneurs who inspired me and, and convinces me to spend a lot of my time giving back to other founders and entrepreneurs. So thank you for all that you do.

• 57:22Auren Hoffman?

  One more thing before we go. I read a blog called Summation. It's the same as this podcast. The blog is about non-obvious idea sharing on business, talent, data, longevity, and random contrarian takes. If you like the conversations on this show, you'll probably like the blog. It's free. New content comes out twice a month. You could subscribe at orin.substack.com. That's orin.substack.com.