Highlights of this episode:
“Embrace the Suck” –Noah Glass’s company Olo went public on the New York Stock Exchange in March 2021, but it wasn’t an accelerated trajectory. The act of getting there has become a rallying call for the Olo team (with the motto of “Embrace the Sock”) and the foundation of their wonderful culture.
digital hospitality mindset , CEO Noah Glass Values hard work, and understands the value of labor. Olo strives for its technology to help shift workers from a worker mindset to a hospitality mindset in order to provide the most enjoyable, memorable experience for every customer.
every day is the first day — Noah Glass has achieved a lot with Olo over the years. Thanks to inspiration from a notoriously big recording, he and his company are able to keep up their appetite for coming in every day as if it’s day one.
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When Olo was listed on the NYSE, it was 5,769 days for the company.
But for CEO Noah Glass, it was Day 1 — and still is.
Even if you haven’t heard of Olo by now, if you’ve ever ordered food from your phone, it’s almost guaranteed that you’ve used their software.
Olo – short for “online ordering” – has partnered with over 600 brands that represent more than 82,000 restaurant locations. With those numbers, it’s safe to say that Olo has been a part of your life.
After graduating from Yale, Noah Glass took a job, and literally lived on Wall Street. At that time people used to come and go in the area. The increase in population meant large crowds at coffee shops, diners and dining venues during the time of the historic rush. Disappointment mounted, but the long wait for coffee in the morning made for a long time to daydream.
Noah Glass of CaliBBQ Media’s Restaurant Influencers host Sean Walchef says, “I just wondered if there was a way you could order ahead, pay ahead, prepare the order, have it ready and your Wait.” ,
With a Palm Pilot in his hand and digital software, now known as apps, downloaded to help spot points of interest nearby, Glass had a starting point for his vision.
Only one problem: Smartphones weren’t invented yet.
In what would still be the smartphone era, Noah Glass worked with a company in Johannesburg, South Africa. His job allowed him to get into Mobile Software Developers (previous title for App Developers), enabling him to pitch his idea. Developers Craig Stockton and Nick Dempster helped Glass build a prototype, but the turn came when he brought his idea to David Frankel.
“It was classic – if you want advice, ask for money. If you want money, ask for advice,” Glass tells of that encounter. “I was really just asking for advice and that’s when they said, ‘I think there’s something in it. I think you have the drive to make it into something.’”
The next sentence was life-changing for Noah Glass. David Frankel offered to invest $500,000 in Glass’s venture under one condition: he had to go all-in. Meaning, he recently had to withdraw his admission to the infamous Harvard Business School and push his proverbial chips to the middle of the table. Past Restaurant Influencer guest Matt Horn would call this process “burning the boats.”
Seventeen years later, that momentous decision turned a vision at Olo, which has more than 85 million customers placing orders through the platform. The most exciting aspect of GLASS’ development has been to reach a larger number of people with digital hospitality “by connecting all the points of digital data that can be derived from guest interactions with restaurants”.
Glass and Olo have big aspirations. The group has become a family bound by the general mentality of coming every day as if it is the first day. The hunger, passion and motivation that comes when entering a new endeavor is encouraged to be renewed daily at Olo.
Noah Glass has gotten this Day 1 mindset from the words of the infamous BIG. The sky is the limit,
Episode Link:
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