It took him 7 years to hit $1M ARR—now his $1B public company does $1M every day. | Noah Glass, Founder of Olo

In 2005 most people didn't even have cellphones yet. Those who did used flip phones. That's when Noah started Olo, a webapp to let people pre-order coffee from nearby shops. Users had to login on web, add a credit card, create pre-made orders and then send a text to a preset number when they wanted to pre-order. It was way, way ahead of its time. 

Noah and his team 7 years to hit $1M in ARR. In the meantime, they raised a round with 50% dilution the week before the financial crisis, went on live TV to an audience on 6M viewers and had to pivot from a marketplace to B2B SaaS.

But overtime smartphone penetration increased, on-demand ordering became a trend, and then, one day, Starbucks launched their app. All of a sudden, every single restaurant in the world wanted a way to let their users pre-order.

And there was Noah and his team at Olo.

Today, Olo is a public company worth over $1B and generating nearly $300M in sales. Here's the story of how it happened.

Why you should listen:

• How to use guerrilla marketing tactics to get early growth.
• Why PR can move the needle but not in ways you expect. 
• How to pivot from a marketplace to B2B SaaS.
• Why it often takes much longer than you might hope to hit an inflection point.
• Why fundraising was so hard, even though Olo became a $1B+ public company. 
• Why Noah thinks founders should embrace challenges and adversity.

Keywords
Olo, Noah Glass, entrepreneurship, product-market fit, restaurant technology, mobile ordering, startup journey, business challenges, marketing strategies, innovation

Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:02:20) Building an app in 2005
(00:13:20) The Burn the Boats Moment
(00:16:31) Building A Network Business
(00:26:08) The Cold Start Problem
(00:30:33) A Happy Accident
(00:36:55) Going through the 2008 Financial Crisis
(00:51:20) Finding Product Market Fit
(00:57:20) Blueprint of Values
(01:05:11) Best Piece of Advice
(01:06:08) A Big Milestone

Chapters

• 2:20 Building an app in 2005
• 13:20 The Burn the Boats Moment
• 16:31 Building A Network Business
• 26:08 The Cold Start Problem
• 30:33 A Happy Accident
• 36:55 Going through the 2008 Financial Crisis
• 51:20 Finding Product Market Fit
• 57:20 Blueprint of Values
• 1:05:11 Best Piece of Advice
• 1:06:08 A Big Milestone

Transcript

Noah Glass (00:00:00):

If you are so committed to this that you are willing to drop out of Harvard Business School, just withdraw your admission, not a deferred admission. You actually have to say you're not going to go and you can quit and tell Linda at Endeavor that you are leaving Endeavor. If you can make this your only path forward, I'll give you half a million dollars to get the thing started. Embrace the suck. And the idea of that is so hard, it's so painful, there's so much struggle in those early years and really all along the way, but if you can embrace that, if you can realise that the grit to withstand it and get better because of it is going to differentiate you from your competitors, that's going to make you the winner in the end  and that's going to lead to victory. Again, the idea for me as a 22-year-old first sketching out this idea and then a 24-year-old barely when I first launched the company to officially that I would be doing this 20 years later, it was just not at all in my brain as a possibility. We're always at Basecamp. We're not finished with the climb. 

Previous Guests (00:01:04)

That's product market fit, product market fit, product market fit. I call that the product market fit question. Product market fit, product market fit, product market fit product market fit. I mean the name of the show is Product Market Fit.

Pablo Srugo (00:01:16):

Think back to the last few months, the last few years as you've been running the startup, how many different founders have helped you out? The reality is founders help each other out. That's just who founders are. They pay it forward. So help a founder out, take literally five seconds, take your phone out of your pocket and hit five stars. 

Noah, welcome to the show man.

Noah Glass (00:01:34):

Thank you so much for having me. Really a pleasure to be with you.

Pablo Srugo (00:01:37):

So I mean you’re the founder of Olo. It's a public company over a billion dollars doing hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and I was surprised to find out when we had our little precoach, which we have before the show, that there was an eight year period where you were a dozen people, something like that, and then now you're 600. So there's eight years of just not flatlined, but let's just say a lot of punches to the face. So we'll kind of dive into that because I think that's where a lot of the learnings happen and that's a lot of the resilience that you have to go through is really in that time. So maybe take us back to the beginning. I mean this is kind of like the 2005 period. What was going on? What was the kind of original idea?

Noah Glass (00:02:20):

Yeah, the beginning for Olo really is late in 2003 and it really took form officially as a company in 2005, but it was something I've been thinking about and drafting executive summaries and business plans on. The earliest one I can find is December of 2003. I had just moved to New York City. I was living on Wall Street. It's a weird place to live and getting coffee every morning was a chore because everybody was trying to get coffee at the exact same time. You had Wall Street folks coming off of the train trying to get their coffee. You had folks that lived in the area trying to get their coffee. So the coffee shop in my building was just overwhelmed every morning when I was trying to walk in and grab a cup of coffee. 

Pablo Srugo (00:03:06)

What were you doing at the time? What were you working on?

Noah Glass (00:03:08):

I was working at a nonprofit organisation called Endeavor, and Endeavor is all about helping high growth entrepreneurs go to scale in countries around the world. It now is not just a nonprofit, but also has a fund attached to it. Ultimately sent to live in Johannesburg, South Africa, and launched the office there. For those first couple of months that I was working at Endeavor from August of 2003 until on the very beginning of 2004, I was doing some scoping trips to understand the business model of Endeavor in the countries where it operated in Latin America, and then to open up the office in Johannesburg. I wound up moving and living in Johannesburg throughout the year, but just before I left, I'd had this idea of my own, and it was around this coffee experience of wouldn't it be better if I could order and pay ahead of time and then skip the line. I wouldn't have to interact with the barista. I could just go straight to the pickup counter, grab my drink, be on my way. Wouldn't it be good for me? Wouldn't it be good for the operations of the coffee shop? I'd worked in high school as a pizza delivery driver, so I kind of knew restaurant operations and that side of the business and the importance of increased throughput capacity, being able to move more guests through the line faster. So I felt like there was a win-win there better for me as a get-

Pablo Srugo (00:04:32):

But it's a pretty innovative ahead of its time idea right at that point, because obviously later on Uber Eats, a bunch of other people end up doing it, but 2003 you're talking what Blackberry is, Blackberry era, what was the dominant kind of thing back then?

Noah Glass (00:04:44):

The dominant thing was flip phones. The dominant thing was Motorola razor flip phones, the clamshells, those were cool phones, but they were very dumb phones by comparison to what we have today. And I had this, I guess lucky insight of carrying around a palm pilot. It wasn't even a mobile web enabled palm pilot, but it was basically like this mini computer that was in my pocket at all times. Why I was carrying that around as a 22-year-old in New York City in the year 2003, I don't really have a good explanation for, but I had one and that was like, hey, wouldn't it be cool if this thing could get online and let me place an order, pay for it and then skip the line at the restaurant? That was the idea at the time, not even in 2003, but when we had a commercially viable version of Olo in 2005 when we launched it, it was sub 5% of mobile users that were using smartphones. So it was even less in 2003. I happened to be somebody who had a Palm pilot, but that was what the sort of most innovative cutting edge device was. A Palm pilot or a Blackberry that was about sending emails. It was very slow mobile internet, no iPhone to speak of, no android to speak of. This was the primitive days of smartphones. So only 5% were smartphones and not very smart.

Pablo Srugo (00:06:08):

So there was no clear way of doing it, it was just a kind of like, would it be cool if kind of idea in the air at that point?

Noah Glass (00:06:14):

Yeah, I remember our first website, so the company's name at the time was not Olo. It started out being called Mobo and Mobo was meant to be mobile ordering in shorthand. And so we had this idea of what I would now call kind of on-demand commerce, and initially there were four ideas. It was about, Mobo was going to help you do these four things. One was order your coffee faster and skip the line at the restaurant to the coffee shop. The second was to buy tickets through your mobile device for events and shows. The third was to hail a car. Obviously that's been done.

Pablo Srugo (00:06:48):

Haha, no way.

Noah Glass (00:06:49):

And the fourth was to pay for parking through your mobile device. You didn't have to run feed the metre. Those were like the four-

Pablo Srugo (00:06:55):

Well, three or four of those became massive, massive businesses. I mean one is Olo, right? But then the other is $10 billion businesses there.

Noah Glass (00:07:02):

All four are happening. Obviously Uber really did that, hailing a car thing quite well. But that was the idea was like, okay, we're all about to get these mobile devices that are smart and they are not just going to be communications devices. They're not just going to be content devices. They're fundamentally going to become the preeminence commerce device and they'll become a remote control for buying things in the world around you. That was really the epiphany in late 2003, thats whats in that business plan. What we became highly focused on obviously was that first box on our two by two quadrant of that food ordering application of the phone as remote control for buying things.

Pablo Srugo (00:07:45):

What happens in between that 2003 and 2005 when you really started?

Noah Glass (00:07:48):

So I lived in Johannesburg for all of 2004. It was supposed to be a one week trip that turned into a two week trip that turned into a three month stay. That turned into why don't you stay there for the full year? And I love that time, I got to help establish the Endeavor office in Johannesburg, South Africa. Endeavor had only been operating in Latin America up until that point. So this was sort of the proving that in the Endeavor model of supporting high growth entrepreneurs around the world wasn't just a Latin America phenomenon but could be applicable broadly, globally. And I got to work with incredible mentors, many of whom are still mentors and role models today. Foremost amongst those was a guy named David Frankel and David Frankel had heard the Endeavor case study as a business school student at Harvard Business School.

(00:08:42):

He was a very successful South African entrepreneur before going to Harvard Business School, heard the Endeavor case study was heading back to South Africa and said to Linda Rottenberg the founder of Endeavor, you've got to do this in Sub-Saharan Africa. This model is great for Latin America, but you should really bring it to Sub-Saharan Africa and make that your next region. And this kicked off David becoming really the founding board member of Endeavor South Africa, helping us to establish an office a board, helping to hire early employees of that team that were going to stay on after I'd left, and then helping as I stayed on to run what Endeavor called search and selection, which is finding entrepreneur candidates, companies run by entrepreneurs and then winnowing it down through that process to the candidates who get selected as the first class of Endeavor entrepreneurs. So I looked at about 161 companies and ultimately we selected six companies, like eight entrepreneurs in total because two had two co-founders as our first class of Endeavor South Africa entrepreneurs.

(00:09:48):

And one of the amazing things about the people I was exposed to is that a lot of them were doing things around mobile software, what we would now call building apps. One company in particular was building a really ingenious application. At the time you didn't have iOS and Android, you had Nokia running the Symbian operating system, and you had Microsoft Windows running Windows mobile, and there's this very interesting problem where most of the devices in the world that were smartphones and had the ability to run applications were running Symbian, but most of the developers were building applications in Windows Mobile. And so this company was building basically a translator that you could write an app in Windows Mobile and run it on Symbian. And that was a fascinating company to get involved with. We wound up selecting them as one of those first companies. And I had had this idea bouncing around in my head for my own entrepreneurial thing, what is now Olo, and I said, I know that you two are super busy working on what you're working on.

(00:10:50):

It seems like a big idea. Do you know anybody who could help to build a prototype of this idea that I have of building an order off of a menu, submitting that order and having it appear on a screen, meant to sort of emulate what a point of sale system would look like. And through that connection, I got introduced to my first partners who were running a consulting firm, Nick Dempster and Craig Stockton running Evol Ventures in Johannesburg building websites. And they said, this is interesting and we can help to build something that's sort of a prototype of this vision. And I said, that's amazing. I don't have any money to pay you. Could we do a sweat equity sort of thing where you're kind of earning equity in what will ultimately become a company? They'd never done that before, but they were into it. That's how we started working on what became the prototype of Mobo and enabled me to then go back to David Frankel who had become this very prominent role model for me in the Endeavor South Africa work that we were doing together and as a successful entrepreneur and say, here's a working prototype of this thing. I can build an order from a very slow, very embarrassingly slow WAP, wireless application protocol mobile web, on a Blackberry

Pablo Srugo (00:12:13):

You're typing with digits, right? You're doing the T9?

Noah Glass (00:12:18):

Yes. And doing it on a Blackberry meant that I could actually-

Pablo Srugo (00:12:23):

Okay, that's a bit better.

Noah Glass (00:12:24):

use the wheel on the side of Blackberry to scroll through menu, so it wasn't just T9, it was also scrolling on that high end device, but it would basically like I could build up a coffee and I could hit submit and then the application that we had running on a laptop was basically pulling every 15 seconds, are there any new orders? Are there any new orders? And then it would ping and make a little alarm sound that you could then open the order and print up a receipt from a receipt printer. That was the early prototype that I showed David Frankel. It was showing him that and showing him the business plan and saying, Hey, I'm looking for your advice. I'm on my way to business school. I was into Harvard Business School then, and I was going to leave and head there the next fall.

(00:13:12):

I'm enjoying my time at Endeavor and excited about expanding beyond Johannesburg into other countries, but I have this burning idea that I really feel like it's the right time in my life and it's the right time in the world to pursue. What should I do? And to his credit, David said, I don't know if this is a big idea or not, but it seems exciting from looking at this prototype and you seem very excited about it and I've come to know you over this year of working together on Endeavor South Africa. If you are so committed to this that you are willing to drop out of Harvard Business School, just withdraw your admission, not a deferred admission. You actually have to say you're not going to go, you're just withdrawing and you can quit and tell Linda at Endeavor that you are leaving Endeavor. If you can make this your only path forward, I'll give you half a million dollars to get the thing started.

Pablo Srugo (00:14:03):

Wow, okay. That's crazy. 

Noah Glass (00:14:06):

That was like the quintessential burn the boats moment. It was you have these other paths cut off those other paths, make this your only path forward. If you have that much conviction in this, I have enough confidence in you and your execution ability that if you have that conviction that this is your only path forward that you'll be successful and I'll stake you. And that was a huge commitment test for me. And ultimately I felt this knee jerk like this is what I've been waiting for. I've wanted to do something entrepreneurial for a long time. I now have these partners who have built up sweat equity. This is going to be good for them and good for me. We can turn this into a real company with a real investment and it's the right time in my life and it truly feels like the right time in the world because smartphones are undoubtedly about to become ubiquitous everywhere.

(00:15:02):

And of course when I came back to New York City to launch the thing, then it was only 5% of mobile devices that were smartphones, but I'd taken the leap and we were going to make this thing work. What we then had to do was figure out how are we going to make this work in a world in which only 5% of mobile phone users, not the general population, those people that are using mobile phones, only 5% of them can use something that is based on the mobile web and it's really slow and really clunky and restaurants don't even necessarily have internet so that they can receive orders that are placed through the internet. How are we going to make this work?

Pablo Srugo (00:15:39):

The biggest thing is how do you even convince restaurants to care? Because it's such a small amount of the people that might even use this. It seems, and frankly restaurants are tough to sell to in the first place. They tend to close the door on our most people. Actually, funny aside, in 2013, before I started the startup I did start, which ended up failing. One of the ideas we had was around delivery and we were in Ottawa and so there wasn't stuff happening here and we kind of did a little bit of a test and went out to these restaurants. Actually my co-founder went out and he kind of came back and he's like, dude, five of them just shut the door on me. Two of them told me I was an idiot. We're not doing this right. And we dropped it and that was with something that was kind of right there, about to happen. I can only imagine, what was the reaction or how did you even take those first few steps and have conversations with our restaurateurs in that era?

Noah Glass (00:16:31):

So we really had to find, as the podcast name suggests, product market fit in a moment in which we didn't have it for guests or restaurants, to your point. So we had to tackle both of these things in parallel and it is fundamentally a network business where you have to build a big network of restaurants and a big network of guests to have it matter to either side. So the first thing that we did was realise that mobile web was not going to be ready for prime time. If 5% could use it, it wasn't good enough. So we had to meet the guest where they were, and at the time it was those flip phones and folks using T9 and text message to send messages to one another. So we built Mobo originally for mobile web, and then we built backwards to text message ordering.

(00:17:28):

Here's how it would work. You would go to the Mobo site, you would create an account, you would link your phone through a double opt-in text message and you would link a credit card to that account. Then you would go and you'd select the menus of the restaurants that were near you and I'll get to those restaurants in a moment, and you'd build your favourite orders and you'd sort of build it like you'd build an online order, on your desktop web. Then you'd send yourself a text to the linked mobile phone of your menu, like my five orders that I get from the coffee shop and the lunch place, et cetera. To order, you would reply to that message whenever with the number that was coded to the order that you wanted to place and then it would build a credit card on file for the amount that order cost.

(00:18:22):

We also built in crazy cool features. Now I can say they're crazy cool and futuristic, like scheduling an order. You could say, let's say my number one was a Turkey sandwich with lettuce, tomato, and mustard. I could say one at 12, and that would send that order at noon to the restaurant, it would schedule it, I could say one at 12W and that would say one at 12 to my work address that's on file, deliver it to me at the work address. So we built in all this functionality to make it applicable for a guest ordering pickup where they could skip the line or ordering delivery at the restaurant, offered delivery to order ASAP or order for the future. And it was all around text messaging. So that was sort of how we solved the, but nobody can use this thing. And the early pamphlets that we would hand out included, here's a lesson in how to send a text message using the T9 format because people were still learning how to do that. So that was the how do we solve the guest product market shit problem.

Pablo Srugo (00:19:35):

Well, just on that, it's so crazy because you think about how much we talked today about onboarding, about frictionless user experience and just the amount of things you had to do then. Then even though it all makes sense logically, you just imagine a user really has to not just find out you exist, et cetera, go online, create an account, link credit card, create the orders, think ahead. Most people it's like I want some. Now you see an ad these days, you click it, log in Apple Pay credit card there, you order a coffee. That's the world of today. Just thinking back now from a timing perspective, do you think you were too early ultimately, obviously I think you fought it out and made it work. Do you think you were too early or do you think actually you had to be in at that point even though it was so hard because later would've been too late?

Noah Glass (00:20:20):

So we had competitors even in that early stage, and so from that perspective, there was a battle for who was going to win restaurants. Even in those earliest days, a big part of our story was migrating from selling into independent restaurants, SMB restaurants in New York City. That was the original focus really from 2005, I guess we launched our alpha location in New Haven, Connecticut, on the Yale campus at a coffee shop. That was November, 2005. We launched in New York City like May of 2006. So from May of 2006, up until probably 2009, we were very much just focused on building out the New York City market. And then something happened along the way that shifted our focus and shifted us to selling into enterprise restaurants, both in the New York City independent SMB restaurant sales game, tons of competition mainly from Seamless, GrubHub, and delivery.com, back in those days. And then as we shifted into enterprise restaurants, also a lot of competition from groups like Kudzu, which became SnapFinger, which became Tillster, ONOSYS, which got acquired by Living Social and then spun out and then merged with a company called Splick.it.

(00:21:43):

It still exists today, but we were competing the whole way. And in this fundamentally networked business, building a big network of restaurants is essential for attracting guests, especially in that B2C posture. When we went to Enterprise, we made a bigger shift, which is not only enterprise but B2B enterprise even. So that is still important to build out a big network of restaurants on the platform for all sorts of reasons, economies of scale, partners on the other side of our platform that add value to our solution and add value to our customers. So I don't think we were too early. It's crazy to say that because we've been at this for nearly 20 years now, but I don't think we could have started any later and have had the success that we've had.

Pablo Srugo (00:22:33):

And so going back to that timeline, you kind of, let's say crack the piece on consumers or at least have an offering for them even if they don't have all the other infrastructure. What do you do with restaurants?

Noah Glass (00:22:45):

So restaurants was just literally going door to door to restaurants and showing them a demo of this. And I remember like it was yesterday, showing one coffee shop owner who was just kind enough in the afternoon where it was sort of a downtime to spend the time with me over a couple of visits to his cafe. I remember showing him the text message ordering and it was pretty novel to have a text message acting like a remote purchase. So I sent a text of an order and the order popped up on the screen and I remember him saying, this is magic. And it was that sort of like, I forget who's quote it is, we can look this up in the show notes, but that technology before it becomes sort of accepted technology seems like magic. That was very much this moment that we had, but it was sort of like, isn't this cool?

(00:23:45):

Isn't it interesting? And of course initially it was, and we're not going to charge you anything, we just want to experiment with you. And our hope is it drives a lot of success and that you can then serve as a reference story and a case study for other customers to join the program. But the initial strategy was it was a lot of friction for a guest to sign up. So for a guest to go through all that pain that we just walked through of registering the phone, registering the credit card, creating the account with a password and all that pain, creating their favourite orders, there needed to be a bunch of restaurants for them to choose from that were relevant. And so we would launch little clusters of restaurants or of the Michael Porter cluster theory, if you will. So we did initially, Madison Square Park. If you think about where the original Shake Shack is, we kind of drew a circle around that and got every restaurant that was a block away from that Shake Shack signed up, then Downtown Financial District where I'd been when I first had the idea.

(00:24:48):

And then Rockefeller Centre. Rockefeller Centre, the idea was if you work in Rockefeller Centre when it rains, it is really a hard time getting lunch because you have all of these tourists who are exploring the area standing in long lines. Wouldn't it be cool if you could skip the line? And that was sort of the big value proposition for the folks that worked in Rockefeller Centre. I would love to take credit for this idea. It was my wife's idea. She was helping out at the time, and this was her brilliant idea of these little pockets of restaurants in New York City. And there was a nice sort of social proof in that of saying, well, we got that restaurant and that restaurant and that restaurant signed up. We're getting a lot of guests signed up, don’t you want to be on the platform too? And we built up-

Pablo Srugo (00:25:31):

That was going to be my question. The concentration makes total sense, especially for the consumer to open up with the app or whatever it is and see that all the restaurants are there in that area. But on the restaurant side, the challenge is you've got to actually get, I don’t know, 50, 60, 70% of those restaurants to say yes to something that is certainly unproven and very novel and you're going to have that classic early adopter, late adopter in any given of those kind of areas. Getting a few is one thing. You always find that cafe owner, if you're knocking on enough doors, that is just really nice and yeah, okay, let's try it out. How do you get 50%, 60% to say yes?

Noah Glass (00:26:08):

So there's a great book called the Cold Start Problem, and it talks about building out networks and this, I wish I had that knowledge while doing this, but it was something that we learned along the way of getting a couple of early stakeholder restaurants to sign on, would then lead to others signing on. And then you had this restaurant sign on, you build a number of guests on the other side and that encourages more restaurants to sign on. We just kind of ran that play in these three neighbourhoods. I'll tell you, I'm not necessarily proud of this, but it was not an accident that the first neighbourhood was Madison Square Park. A, that's where our first office was, and B, that's where Shake Shack was. And the part I'm not proud of is, I'm pretty sure that when I was walking up to those other restaurants, I said, I'm sure that Shake Shack is going to be on this platform too, and you can look out your window and see how many guests they have.

(00:27:09):

Now I can see that now because Shake Shack has been a customer of Olo’s for 11 years, but I was saying that they were going to be a customer. I really believe that they were truly in my heart back in 2006. It took until 2014 for them to become a customer. And that's actually kind of a fun story. They just celebrated yesterday, their 10 years of being a public company and we've been with them that whole way. And Danny Meyer, almost concurrently with Shake Shack becoming a customer, became an investor in Olo and joined our board. So he's been a board member for the past 10 years plus as we've been on this journey with Shake Shack. But back in 2006, they very much were not a customer, but all the restaurants around that area thought that they were going to be a customer and felt like they can pull a lot of guests into this platform, I know that they can. I don't think I've told Danny that story by the way. I probably should or he'll hear it on-

Pablo Srugo (00:28:03):

I like that one, and it reminds me there's a lot of cases like this, but I remember somebody talking about there were nobody trying to create a conference. And so they went to 10 great speakers and they just said, Hey, do you want to be part of this conference? Here are the other nine great speakers. And just by doing that, there's a risk that maybe they talk to each other that you don't ever know. But it ended up being true because he got, let's say eight or whatever of those speakers to come up. So when everybody showed up, they're like, okay, this is a real thing. But there is that fake it till you make it element again. I don't know, I wouldn't call it lying because it becomes true, but if you don't kind of market it first, then the product sometimes just can't really get there.

Noah Glass (00:28:43):

What I did not say was it's 2006 and I promised that Shake Shack is coming onto this-

Pablo Srugo (00:28:48):

Exactly.

Noah Glass (00:28:49):

In 2014, so you should do it now, but that's what wound up happening.

Pablo Srugo (00:28:54):

And then tell me about the guests in terms of acquisition, you had that half a million dollars, how long does that last? How are you actually getting people to discover, download, et cetera?

Noah Glass (00:29:06):

Yeah, in very scrappy ways in the early days. We had teams of folks, our team and enhance that with some model agency folks that were coming to the restaurants standing in line when there were long lines and talking to people in line about how they could order and pay ahead and skip the line next time around, handing them out these flyers that would explain how to send a text message and how to sign up for the service and giving them some credit for placing their first order. That was the play that we kept on running. We also did a lot of gorilla stuff like be out at the subway stations early in the morning, handing out granola bars with a flyer wrapped around it and telling people about how they could order. What wound up being the most valuable thing was running a promotion. This was down on Wall Street, with a restaurant and coffee shop called Manja, which was actually right across the street from where I was when I first had the idea for Mobo, that became Olo. The idea was you could, without having signed up, send a text message and get a free coffee at Manja. And just sort of try this, I placed the order and I can go pick it up, no payment involved, but just like, Hey, try this out. And then we'd send you a follow-up to sign you up for the service afterwards

Pablo Srugo (00:30:30):

And you were paying the restaurant on the backend?

Noah Glass (00:30:33):

So this is one of these happy accidents. I was on a train back from Washington DC and was in Philadelphia and a guy got on next to me and we started chatting and he was part of La Colombe Coffee, so we were in the same business at a high enough level of generality. And who does he work with? He works with Manja, and we somehow struck up this friendship where he said, I will sponsor La Colombe coffee. We'll give away the product so that you can let people send a text and get it at Manja. It'll be good for you. It'll be good for us to spread awareness about La Colombe, the brand at Manja, et cetera. That's how we did that part.

Pablo Srugo (00:31:16):

Serendipity is a crazy thing. It truly is a crazy thing.

Noah Glass (00:31:18):

Crazy. And there've been so many fun moments where our paths have crossed ever since. Anyway, so the best thing that happened out of this promotion of text and get a free coffee at Manja was not that it drove a huge number of signups. It was sort of successful like everything. But it wound up that we handed a flyer to a reporter for the Wall Street Journal and the Wall Street Journal reporter was like, this is really interesting. I've never seen text messages used in this way to buy real world goods. I've seen ringtones, I've seen wallpapers. You remember you used to be able to pay for a custom wallpaper on your flip phone. I've seen ringtones, wallpapers, maybe games and other stuff like that. Digital goods sold through text message, premium text message. I've never seen it used to kick off a credit card transaction.

(00:32:17):

This feels like something new and newsworthy. He wrote an article came out September 20th, 2006 and then we started to get press inquiries from other news publications including ABC World News. And this led to, later that day on September 20th, me heading up to Rockefeller Centre for an on-camera interview outside of Rockefeller Centre with David Muir. At the time, David Muir was doing stories for Good Morning America. It was before he became the most watched news anchor for ABC World News. But he was on Good Morning America, did this interview, sent in a text message order to Dunkin’ Donuts at Rockefeller Centre and brought the coffee to Diane Sawyer and Robin Roberts on air as the lead off piece the next morning, September 21st, 2006. We were a six person company and all of a sudden 6 million people watched this live.

Pablo Srugo (00:33:21)

Huge.

Noah Glass (00:33:22):

Our phones started to ring and people were like, this is very cool. Why can't I use it at my Dunkin’ Donuts? What is lost, when a news anchor for a national news publication goes to a Dunkin’ Donuts is that it's only available that one Dunkin’ Donuts, not thousands of Dunking Donuts. So one of the calls we got, a pretty angry call was from Dunkin’ Donuts chief information Officer who said, who the hell are you guys and why is my phone blowing up about text message ordering for coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts? Why did you tell people you could do this everywhere around the country? And I had to say, well, we didn't say that. We do work with that one location, but it's just sort of a prototype. It's not something that we do broadly and it's how we learned that enterprise restaurants, you need to go through the proper channels and sell into the enterprise and not just work with individual franchisees or operator groups because it really upsets headquarters if they haven't vetted the things that-

Pablo Srugo (00:34:31):

Did that lead to them taking you down the right channel or was it kind like, I'm so angry, I don't even want to speak with you right now?

Noah Glass (00:34:37):

The latter. We were definitely blackballed from Dunkin’ for a while. Later on, we wound up working with Dunkin’ Brands at Baskin Robbins to do cake ordering and that CIO had left. If that CIO had still been there, I think he would've blackballed us from that too.

Pablo Srugo (00:34:56):

Yeah, it's a pet peeve at that point.

Noah Glass (00:34:58):

I guess illustrative to us of that lesson, but also the most consequential thing from that press hit was getting a call from a brand in Dallas, Texas who said, Hey, this technology is really cool. We know you're not in Dallas, but we are willing to tell our customers about the fact that they can order ahead, pay ahead and skip the line. And this brand was called MOOYAH Burgers. It's a better burger concept if you're familiar with a Five Guys or a Shake Shack, very similar to those. So it would take a long time to even place your order. They were very popular and then it would take seven minutes from the order to it being ready for the order to come out. And so they said it would just be a convenience to our guests. We're not a drive-through, but we're competing against other fast food operators. If they could order ahead, pay ahead, and then just know what time the order is going to be ready. If they could use your text message thing and say one at one, they get their number one order at one o'clock, they could walk in right there and get their order immediately. So they started to use it in really its first test flight as sort of this B2B kind of application of the technology where we weren't spending a dime on guest acquisition, they were doing that work for us. Their staff was telling their guests about, Hey, next time you can order ahead and they'll be ready for you when you get here.

Pablo Srugo (00:36:23):

It was less at that point of, at least in Dallas, you're running less of a marketplace and more of just like a B2B SaaS classic. Here you go. Take it, do what you can with it. 

Oh, you're such a selfish person. I actually can't believe how selfish you are because you've been listening to the show. You listened to this episode, you loved it. You've listened to a bunch of other episodes and you haven't told anyone about it. You haven't told any of the many founder friends that you have about it. Think about how many founders have helped you out when you're building your startup. So don't be selfish. Tell your friends about this episode. Tell 'em about the show and help me help them.

Noah Glass (00:36:54):

So years later, and I'd say this is really 2008, when we had just raised a series A, the financial crisis was happening and it felt like no one was ever going to raise another funding round again when we were pouring through the data of like, well, where do we have a scenario where the lifetime value is greater than the customer acquisition cost? We couldn't find it except for Dallas, Texas. Why? Because we weren't spending anything on customer acquisition. So all of the lifetime value of those guests was upside for us, and we decided to pivot the business entirely as a way of preserving cash to that B2B use case, and finding more brands like MOOYAH Burgers and fries, where that benefit for the guest of, you don't have to wait in line, and you don't have to wait for the food to be prepared. You get to skip the line and get your order faster, would be a great benefit for the guest and a great benefit for the operator. And these were typically restaurant brands that were kind of the fast casual kind of restaurant where everything was personalised and customised and made your way, so it was being built for you and therefore there was that double wait of the wait to order because these were popular restaurants and the wait for your order to get customised and made for you. And that became the big focus and when we changed from being Mobo the company, to Olo, the B2B platform for restaurants to do on-demand commerce or digital ordering.

Pablo Srugo (00:38:31):

So I want to go down through that part of the storyline, but just to back up a little bit because we just had the huge PR thing, which back to the original question about being too early, I would say, this is one of the big benefits of being very early, is that nobody cares about your startup, but they do care about at the Wall Street Journal at least, they care about the bigger story around what you could do with your phone when the phone is getting smarter and everybody's kind of interested in obviously the mobile phone revolution and so on, and you kind of become a story that rides that wave. And once they tell your story, they're not going to talk about the next one that also enables something like this. But my question is once you go out on that news programme and 6 million people see it, does demand, at least there's people that call you from out of state and at least those deals, but what about demand within New York City? Does it explode? Is it what you thought would happen or is there kind of a little blip and then it just goes back to normal sort of thing,

Noah Glass (00:39:27):

A little blip and back to normal. The best things that came out of that press hit were expanding into the Dallas market through that MOOYAH partnership and actually, talent acquisition. So we had people calling. We had one guy who called every day for about two weeks and said, I saw this story, I love what you're doing, I'd love to come work for you. And his dogged persistence, his passion for what we were up to and his desire to come and work for us, at some point, we were so convinced in his sales capabilities that we just said, we've got to bring this guy on as a seller for Olo, and his name is Juan George, and he was with us from that point in 2006, he’d just graduated from, I believe Hunter College in New York and he stayed with us up until 2022. So an incredible 16 year run as a seller and then doing customer success and then retraining himself into an enterprise seller and helping to lead the charge in Olo’s radical expansion into what is now 700 enterprise brands that are on our platform. But that was one of the very best things that came out of that press. It certainly was not a huge guest acquisition event.

Pablo Srugo (00:40:47):

I think that's actually pretty classic, the press for recruiting piece. I actually see that happening quite a bit. Walk me through just a little bit the fundraising history, like you mentioned, the half a million that kind of got you started, and then there's a series A that comes in between there. Is there other fundraising going on?

Noah Glass (00:41:05):

Yeah, so we struggled with fundraising in those early years and we were struggling in general in those early years, but we kept the faith, we found reasons to believe, and that became a big theme at Olo of, Don't Stop Believing. That's become our anthem over the years. But we had in David, somebody who was sort of pot committed and very founder aligned, and in March of 2008, we were able to close, now when I look back it was on pretty heinous terms, but still we were able to close on a series A investment led by RRE ventures here in New York and Core Capital Ventures in Washington DC.

Pablo Srugo (00:41:46):

How much was it?

Noah Glass (00:41:47):

It was a $7 million series A.

Pablo Srugo (00:41:50):

That's a solid A for that time. No?

Noah Glass (00:41:53):

It was, it was on a $7 million pre-money.

(00:41:58):

There was a 20% option pool added post-money, so new investors got half, existing shareholders were squeezed down to 30% with 20% options for future hires, highly dilutive. And yet at the moment it was like the best deal that we had somehow pulled out of a hat right before the financial crisis. It was March 17th, 2008, the Bear Stearns collapse was that week and then there were just no funding rounds. We felt so lucky despite those heinous terms to have pulled this off and to have secured our future. And then we turned our focus to how do we make 7 million last forever or until we get to profitability because we need to operate as if there will never be another funding round again in this company.

Pablo Srugo (00:42:55):

How do you do that? Because like you said, you didn't have the best, from what I understand, economics at that point, the path was not clear to profitability yet.

Noah Glass (00:43:03):

So we had made some hires on a VP of sales who is a seasoned executive, a VP of marketing who is a seasoned executive, and we gave that VP of marketing a meaningful budget for guest acquisition. We had to part ways with those two executives, so we had to cut out that marketing budget and then we ultimately had to turn our focus to what was happening in Dallas.

Pablo Srugo (00:43:24):

So you raised and cut back. That was kind of the motion.

Noah Glass (00:43:28):

It didn't happen immediately, and I fought it for too long. I will say, I fought it for probably a year where I said to my new board members, I hear what you're saying, but we can build through this. We can build a big consumer business in the same form that we have been. We can raise more funds later. The economics will prove themselves out. We get to scale. I just had in my mind, we were going to build a big B2C business that Mobo was going to be the vehicle through which we scaled. And what became abundantly clear, and I'll credit Tom Wheeler was the investor and board member from Core Capital, he later went on fun fact to be the FCC chairman under Barack Obama and left our board as a result. But I remember him saying, you can build a really big business as a B2B provider to restaurant brands.

(00:44:26):

Look at what's happening in the data. Look at that lifetime and customer acquisition cost math in Dallas, Texas. That is telling you something. And at some point you just couldn't deny that there was a better business to build an easier path to scale in the B2B model. And I remember just flashing into the future, at the end of 2012, Tom had me come and speak to a group of early stage entrepreneurs in the Washington DC area, and we had just gotten to profitability as a company on the basis of being a B2B platform for restaurant groups in the enterprise segment. And I remember at the time I said, we used to spend $150,000 per month and we would get 10,000 new guests from those efforts, $15 per guest. At this point, we're now getting paid $150,000 per month in SaaS fees and we're getting a hundred thousand new guests every month. This is a better business model. This is a way better business model. We've cracked it in making the shift from B2C over to B2B.

Pablo Srugo (00:45:42):

Your timing is prescient though, because I mean, you got into the smartphone world right before, like you said, 5%, it was just so, so small, but you also got into B2B SaaS well before. I mean people still today are like B2B SaaS is the holy grail. We're talking 15 years later, so this is the very beginning of B2B SaaS as a category.

Noah Glass (00:46:02):

I think that's right. Yeah. At the time it felt like there were a couple other restaurant technology providers that were doing this, not so much the traditional technology providers like point of sale providers, but there were other companies doing online ordering in this way. There were companies doing loyalty programmes or gift cards in this way in a B2B SaaS model, and we just jumped on that bandwagon and we're able to really scale out the platform in this B2B SaaS methodology. And then years later we realised guests are using this a lot and restaurants are getting a lot of value out of it, and we've kind of capped ourselves and just charging a flat fee per month per store. We're not participating in any of the upside of the value that we're creating. And I'll credit Danny Meyer for that epiphany. I remember being in a board meeting and I was showing kind of the growth in order volume and it was just sort of the traditional hockey stick of exponential growth. And then I put up revenue growth and it was just like-

Pablo Srugo (00:47:01):

This is when by the way, what year is this?

Noah Glass (00:47:03):

This is probably late 2014 at this point. Danny joined our board in October of 2014. It might've been early 2015, but I remember Danny saying, I was so proud of this chart. I remember Danny saying, stop showing the board this depressing chart. I mean, he said it in the board meeting in a very Danny kind of way, and I was like, what do you mean? Isn't it great? Look at all the value that our restaurant customers are getting out of the service. He said, your revenue is not growing along with the value that you're creating. We need to think through how we create something that is not just B2B SaaS but has a transactional element where we are growing our revenue as our customers grow the value they're receiving from our platform. And we were able to do that, but it was a big epiphany to hear those words from Danny and it changed our business forever. And then we really caught onto the growth in delivery. Third party marketplaces and first party delivery, and then things just went hyperbolic for obvious reasons, during the Covid moment.

Pablo Srugo (00:48:11):

What did it end up being, by the way, the way you captured that value? Was it just kind of a classic, if I send you an order I'm taking 10% or something like that?

Noah Glass (00:48:17):

No. So what we did, we had two models, and actually there's now a Harvard Business School case study that I teach every year about this decision to launch the first model, which was helping brands to take orders through their website or through their app and still offer delivery even if they didn't have their own delivery fleet. We call that product dispatch. And basically we created a network of third party delivery service providers, and on any given order, we'll ping those APIs and find the best delivery driver based on where they are at the time to collect the order at the restaurant just in time, and then deliver it to the guests. That model enabled brands to offer delivery, even if they didn't have their own fleet, enabled them to preserve their economics, enabled them to preserve that direct relationship with the guest and build their guest book of direct digital relationships. So that was the first thing that we launched in 2016, maybe 2015, I forget exactly.

Pablo Srugo (00:49:14):

And you're taking obviously a cut of those transactions.

Noah Glass (00:49:17):

In that model, we charge a transaction fee to the restaurant for basically doing that matchmaking, and we charge a transaction fee of the delivery service provider as well. So we have value creation on both sides of the two-sided network. Then we launched a product in early 2017 called Rails. And Rails enables our restaurants to syndicate their menus out to DoorDash, Uber Eats, GrubHub, et cetera. I think there are about 20 different marketplaces that we now integrate to. And then when orders originate from those third party marketplaces, they come through our platform and directly into the point of sale. So restaurants don't have the tablet held that you see where they have a tablet from each of the different service providers and someone needs to monitor them. They all come into one platform and they're able to keep their menu in sync with all the third party platforms.

(00:50:08):

That was another transactional SaaS component to the business. Those two things together really made Olo into a rocket ship at the time of preparing for our IPO. And in fact, we were preparing for the IPO in January of 2020, and then we put pencils down in March of 2020 when Covid hit not knowing what was going to happen to the industry or our business, and it effectively doubled over that year. So when we went public in March of 2021, we were coming right up on a hundred million dollars in revenue for the year 2020, and I'm very proud of this fact. We were, I believe, 121 million of ARR at that point that we went public, on a net burn of $6 million over the lifetime, the 16 years from 2005, 2021, MeriTech Capital did a chart of ARR and net burn. We were the lowest net burn of our class of IPOs, and we were the highest ratio of ARR to net burn.

Pablo Srugo (00:51:16):

I mean, you burned less than your Series A in those entire 16 years.

Noah Glass (00:51:20):

So we were very scrappy the whole time until we found product market fit. But ironically, we haven't even really gotten to that moment of when product market fit really happened and we went from this scrappy 12 person company into a 600-

Pablo Srugo (00:51:34):

Well, we were in that 2009 period where you decide, okay, let's just go after this B2B SaaS opportunity.

Noah Glass (00:51:41):

We had a couple of early wins there and those were key. We won MOOYAH, as I mentioned, that helped us to win Five Guys burgers and fries. That was just crazy rocket ship to work with Five Guys from four locations when they started franchising. I think we started working with them when they were at about 500. Now, well over a thousand locations.

Pablo Srugo (00:52:01):

The beauty, by the way, I'll mention really quickly, not only do you not have to market to users, you get to go coast to coast right away after that decision.

Noah Glass (00:52:09):

Yes, that's right. So every new store that they open is getting lit up with Olo inside all those guests signing up, joining the platform. So been an incredible journey, but we landed some of these early fast casual fast growers. But even then, it really wasn't until 2013. I remember very clearly, August of 2013 when we went from being a 12 person company into hiring a very important employee. Number 13. Employee number 13 was a guy named Matt Tucker who came on as Olo’s, COO. And Matt has gone on to do great things post Olo, but was with me for eight years from 2013 through 2021. And when he came on, it was explicitly to scale the company. We were profitable. We had been since the end of 2012.

Pablo Srugo (00:53:00):

You were where revenue wise, scale wise, you were doing what-ish?

Noah Glass (00:53:04):

Small, I mean sub 10 million at that point. Clearly three things had happened that made me say to our board with full conviction, we're in a different moment. We've fought our way to profitability after all these years. Now we need to hire somebody who can really help us to scale because there's so much demand for what we do. Smartphones obviously come out. You had iPhone and Android. We got to that point of ubiquity of smartphones. But more importantly, services like Uber had come out and people all of a sudden have this mental availability of the mobile phone is a remote control for buying things. Look, you can get a car and it can take you to a place and you can walk out. I can use this to buy other things and I want to buy food with this thing. So guests kind of understood that.

(00:53:50):

Restaurant operators who are also, of course, guests of other restaurants came to understand that. Domino's Pizza Hut and Papa John's, the earliest in the online ordering game, had all eclipsed 50% of their sales coming through digital channels. So that was a huge proof point that this business could be majority digital. And then I think the biggest starting gun for product market fit, Starbucks came out with its own app, allowing guests to order and pay and skip the line for coffee. Now all of a sudden we were like rail to rail from pizza to coffee available through digital. Every restaurant brand then said, oh my God, we need to have an Uber-like experience. We need an app that lets our guests order ahead, pay ahead, get their food faster for pickup or for delivery. We don't have the resources that a Starbucks does to build that. We need to use some other provider to do that. And so being a SaaS provider enabled us to meet that need. But we were a 12 person company and all of a sudden we were like, how in the world we've survived so long to get to this point? Now how are we going to meet the moment and supply all the demand?

Pablo Srugo (00:55:03):

And was that something you go out with? You're like, Starbucks is doing this, you want to do it too as a campaign or you just start seeing it inbound? There's just this crazy demand.

Noah Glass (00:55:11):

Both. I mean there were other brands that were competitive with Starbucks saying, I didn't think this was going to be a thing in coffee, but clearly now it is. We need to do this. Can you guys help us jumpstart into this? There was just a fever pitch of excitement for restaurants were going to go digital. Every other industry, there's going to be a digital transformation in this industry. It's not just about pizza, it's about everything. And I remember I was sitting in a kind of early morning coffee breakfast gathering where Fred Wilson, legendary investor for me and Square Ventures was giving a speech about product market fit. And I was sitting next to David Frankel who'd been with me on this ride since 2005. And here we are in 2013. Eight years later, Fred starts talking about how you can feel this product market fit when it happens. And I’m just like, a knee jerk reaction has elbowed David in the rib cage. I was like, that's what's happening right now. That's why we need to bring Matt on. Because it had been this whole thing of can you bring somebody who's such a high powered executive into the company that's been so scrappy for so long?

Pablo Srugo (00:56:20):

What was happening emotionally? What was happening? It was just the amount of demand that just seemed overwhelming.

Noah Glass (00:56:25):

The demand was completely overwhelming. A 12 person company could have never satisfied this demand and if they weren't going to do it with us, they're going to do it with somebody. And we just knew we needed to scale up our capacity. And so Matt is sort of like a specialist in scaling up capacity. He'd done it in two other portfolio companies from RE Ventures, and he brought with him Marty Hanfeld and Scott Lamb to be our head of sales and head of customer success. And then the board was like, hold on, you're going to bring three really seasoned executives into this little 12 person company? Tom Wheeler, who's not shy of making sort of bombastic statements was like this is jumping out of an aeroplane and trying to do open heart surgery and then pulling the parachute before you hit the ground. It'll never work. But to Matt's credit, and Marty and Scott's credit, they came in very kind of confidently but humbly understand they didn't know our space.

(00:57:20):

And there was a lot of good in what we built over eight years. And Matt said, Hey, you and the other folks of this 12 person team write down the values that are important to you that have kept you together despite so many headwinds and so much pain and suffering over these eight years. What's kept you together? Let's make that into the blueprint of our values and let's go higher and build out capacity consistent with that. And I'm proud that we wrote down three values then, which remain our values today. And true to his word, Matt really sort of built the company. I mean during his tenure from 12 up to 600, very faithful to those values that made Olo this special culture. So the three values are family, drive, and Excelsior. I'll break those down. One by one. Family was about all of us had this very close connection to our families and we felt like we had become almost like a second family to one another, that it was the next most important thing.

(00:58:26):

That family always came first, but the next most important thing in everybody's life was the company. And that we were here fighting through hard times together, laughing despite some difficulty along the way. That became a key part of that early group. It felt like I could never leave this thing. This is the next most important thing in my life, next to my family. So that was number one. Number two is drive. And drive is just sort of about sheer will and determination. And we demonstrate this. I played the sport, lacrosse, in college and I talk about a ground ball mentality. It's about the ball's on the ground. It's a 50 50 opportunity between you and the other team who's going to merge with the ball. And it comes sort of down to sheer will and desire. And the team that gets the most ground ball is the team that typically has possession, has the most shots on goal, has the most goals, wins most games.

(00:59:22):

So that's a big spirit. A lot of us were competitive, whether that was in athletics or some other facet of life. And we captured that sort of determination and grit. And then the third Excelsior is the New York state motto, and it's Latin for ever upward and it's our commitment to continuous improvement and always finding a better way of doing things and really just having a growth mentality. And those are the three values that have really resonated with the original gangster team and everybody who's joined Olo, they feel like those are the things that make this their place where they can do their best work. And of course ,around all of that is, I'm going to use my time and talent toward helping this industry, the restaurant industry because I love what the restaurant industry does and represents, hospitality and making people feel cared for and you're on their side. If we can be kind of a force multiplier for hospitality in the world, we're all deeply connected to that for one reason or another. But that really got written down for the first time in 2013, and here we are nearly 12 years later and those remain the core values.

Pablo Srugo (01:00:37):

Well, it's the sort of optimist values, but that can only really be born out of years I would think of adversity. I mean it wouldn't mean that much. I think if on day zero you just wrote them up. But after riding together for so long, they mean a lot.

Noah Glass (01:00:51):

One of the sort of sub values within, I believe its drive, is something that we stole from the US Marine Corps, which is embrace the suck. And the idea of that is it's so hard, it's so painful, there's so much struggle in those early years and really all along the way, but if you can embrace that, if you can realise that the grit to withstand it and get better because of it is going to differentiate you from your competitors, that's going to make you the winner in the end and that's going to lead to victory.

Pablo Srugo (01:01:24):

Was it always like that or was there some point around that 2005 to 2012 period where you thought, you know what, this might be the end. Maybe this is as far as the kind of story goes?

Noah Glass (01:01:35):

Oh man. Tons of moments like that. I read The Hard Thing About Hard Things, a great book, and the idea of wifio moments of, we're fucked, it's over, really resonates. I mean there are so many moments where you're just like, oh, I guess that's it. I guess there's no more company after the-

Pablo Srugo (01:01:58):

Do you remember one in particular that stands out?

Noah Glass (01:01:59):

Yeah, very early. I remember, I won't name names, but one of our early competitors in the B2C world sent us a very scary legal letter, a cease and desist letter, and it was accusing us of inducing, what was it? It was tortious interference. We were inducing customers, restaurants, to breach their contract with this competitive service by also accepting our service because they were exclusive with these restaurants. When you're a young company, you get one of these very, now I know boilerplate letters, cease and desist. You're like, oh my god, if we can't butch any of their restaurants we're cooked, it's totally over. Of course. We then sent it to our lawyers at Cooley and they're like, these guys, this is ridiculous. What is tortious interference? Anyway, they sent back another nasty gramme, and we reached a stalemate. We continued on what we were doing, but at the moment it felt like, how will we ever recover from this?

Pablo Srugo (01:03:02):

Just in terms of numbers, walk me through that period. By 2013 when Matt comes, you're just sub 10, how long did it take you from 2005 to get to let's say even a million?

Noah Glass (01:03:12):

I want to say it took us until probably 2012 to get 2 million. So if I think about 150,000 a month being what we were getting paid at the end of 2012, that pencils to what? 1.8 million? That's what I'm going by.

Pablo Srugo (01:03:27):

But that 2013 is really, then you probably go from two to six or eight or something like that really quickly, and then Matt comes and then the rest is history. 

Noah Glass (01:03:35):

I think 2018 we were shooting for 20 or something like that. So it started to really ramp, particularly when we had the dispatch and rails modules and that transactional SaaS engine humming. But yeah, Matt, Marty and Scott joined really early employees, 13, 14, 15, and together we went from 15 up to 600 employees, staying true to the culture and really becoming the big blue of our space.

Pablo Srugo (01:04:08):

You're one of the companies I think that maybe on the show most exemplifies that product market fit line because primary fit is nebulous, a bit of a spectrum, but you really have this pre-product market fit, not flat, but the slow growth and then inflexion point up into the right completely changes.

Noah Glass (01:04:24):

Yeah, and I think a good set of lessons in finding the early adopters, both like the early adopter guests and the early adopter restaurants, like those fast casual restaurants, were ready to do this long before coffee shops or fast food restaurants were ready to do this. So I guess finding product market fit in a very niche market of early adopters before getting to generalised product market fit was part of our story.

Pablo Srugo (01:04:52):

So  let me ask you just the last question that we always end on having gone through everything you've gone through 20 years and counting, what is some of the most maybe top pieces of advice that you would give an early stage founder that's kind of still in that early phase of finding product market fit?

Noah Glass (01:05:11):

My best piece of advice, and I think I live this, I've heard Jeff Bezos being credited with this quote, and I've heard variations of it elsewhere, is be stubborn on the vision and flexible on the details. I like to say be focused on the vision and flexible on the details. I knew what a scaled Olo could look like or scaled Mobo could look like a scaled network of many, many restaurants on one side and many, many guests on the other side. The way in which we got from the earliest days to here had to take many different tacks and we had to be flexible in the details. I wanted this to be B2C, it had to be B2B, and that's probably the best example of something that is very different now. But we're here in this place where we now have 85,000 restaurants, 85 million guests.

Pablo Srugo (01:06:08):

And you're celebrating a big milestone, right?

Noah Glass (01:06:10):

Celebrating a big milestone, yes. There are two big milestones later this month. We will be four years from our IPO March of 2021, so we'll celebrate on St. Patrick's Day, four years of being a public company. Incidentally, this is weird, but that 2008 series A was exactly 13 years to the day before our IPO March 17th, 2008, March 17th, 2021. So now March 17, 2025, 4 years being public, and then June 1st of this year, we're going to celebrate being 20 years old as a company. So we are officially already in our 20th year. But again, the idea for me as a 22-year-old, first sketching out this idea and then a 24-year-old barely, when I first launched the company officially that I would be doing this 20 years later was just not at all in my brain as a possibility. I really had seen two models. Companies that start and fail quickly and then you reapply to business school and you go on your way or whatever you do, or companies that get acquired and become part of larger battleships.

(01:07:24):

The idea that we could become what we have become over this long period of time, and in that process I could find what I feel to be my calling, is really helping restaurants to make this digital transformation. And while doing that preserving hospitality and their ability to make guests feel seen and the restaurant is on their side and they're receiving genuine tender loving care from restaurants. It's something that I'm deeply passionate about and I feel like that is what Olo represents in the world today, and I'm thrilled to be doing it. Aside from being a good member of my family, this is the most important thing to me that I get to propel forward every day in my work. And it's a weird thing. I was really fired up 20 years ago to build this thing, but in many ways I'm more excited about the opportunity and our position to go and execute now than I ever have been along the journey, and I'm super grateful for that.

(01:08:32):

As I say to my team, I'm grateful and I'm grateful for everything that's led to this point. I'm also hugely unsatisfied. I have big, big ambitions for this company and I say all the time, it's like we're climbing Everest right now. We're at base camp, we feel like we've climbed for so long. We're at this beautiful resting point, but Everest is that way and there's a much steeper climb ahead and it's going to be hard, but to get up there when we get to the top, it's going to be truly beautiful and we're always at Basecamp. We're not finished with the climb.

Pablo Srugo (01:09:07):

Well, Noah, thanks so much for sharing your story. It's been great.

Noah Glass (01:09:11):

Thank you, Pablo. I really appreciate it and I'm thrilled that folks get to hear this part of the story. I feel like in so many other podcasts and so many other forms of media, you just sort of hear the success and sort of where the company is now. So hearing some of here's how the sausage was made, there was a lot of pain and suffering along the way, I feel like I wish that I'd had more examples of that during my own journey. It would've made it feel a little bit less lonely along the way. So thank you for what you’ve done.

Pablo Srugo (01:09:40):

Well, again, thank you. I mean, it's a painful part and maybe it's a C stage VC, but it's also for me because the most fun part of building startups, so I love to dig into it and we can only do it because people like you are willing to do it. So thank you.

Noah Glass (01:09:54):

Adversity builds character. If it were easy, everybody would do it.

Pablo Srugo (01:09:59):

So guess what? I met this founder who listened to every single episode of the Product Market Fit show. He just called me and he sold his company for over a billion dollars. That's right. If you listen to every episode of the product Market Fit show, that's what's going to happen. I can't say it's guaranteed, but it's what I've seen. It's what I've seen in the past, but you won't know for sure unless you tried it out for yourself. So go back because over a hundred episodes of the product Market Fit show and you haven't listened to most of them, check them out.