From Text Message Orders to a $2 Billion Exit: What’s Next for Olo

Matt Wampler: On today’s episode of the Restaurant AI Podcast, I am joined by none other than Noah Glass, founder and CEO of Olo. For those of you who don’t know Olo, they effectively invented online ordering in the restaurant space. We get into what Olo is today, what they’re doing with AI, second-party delivery, but we also get into the interesting stuff, the early years when online ordering wasn’t a thing and they were too early, and how they got through it. But before we dive in, a special thanks to our sponsor, ClearCOGS. ClearCOGS is the operational decision platform, ODP, for restaurants. It takes the POS data you already have and turns it into tomorrow’s prep, ordering, and labor plan so that operators can make better decisions before the day gets away from them. With that, I give you my conversation with Noah Glass.

Matt Wampler: Noah, happy to have you on. Thanks for coming.

Noah Glass: Matt, thanks. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.

Matt Wampler: All right, so I think myself and everyone wants to know, you’ve done this for 20 years, right? You started online ordering before twenty-one.

Noah Glass: Twenty one. Twenty one. But who’s counting?

Matt Wampler: You do an online ordering before the iPhone came out. You’ve gone public, you’ve gone private again, you’ve seen it all. What’s the journey been like?

Noah Glass: Inspirational. It’s been a wild ride. Definitely a lot of ups, definitely a lot of downs. I think that what I try to do throughout is to maintain equanimity and just be a steady foundation for my team and really all of my stakeholders and that has served us well. The highs don’t get too high, the lows don’t get too low. You just stay steady like water on a calm day. And that’s been my mentality.

Matt Wampler: That sounds nice, but I have a feeling that that probably wasn’t always the case.

Noah Glass: It’s taken a lot of work. It’s taken a lot of work.

Matt Wampler: You were pretty early when it came to online ordering. I mean pre iPhone. I get the sense that it took you guys a while before you really established the company and the category. What were the early years like?

Noah Glass: Yeah. It was really the first eight years of the company that I like to refer to as like the wilderness years or toiling in obscurity years, from two thousand five to two thousand thirteen, before we really hit product market fit. And that whole time we were a twelve person company, no larger, and just kept the faith and kept our sort of scrappy early instincts and passion and values and a real commitment to one another to see it through. And then I remember in 2013, just that feeling of, okay, product market fit has happened. And there were a number of different things that all kind of clicked at the same time that made it clear that that had happened. And then we went from get to profitability, control our own destiny mode to okay, we gotta grow because there’s way more demand than we have the ability to supply. And that’s when we went from, in the next eight years, a twelve person company to a six hundred person company, and happily revenue scaled fifty X as well.

Matt Wampler: So the story the last eight years, right, where things take off. We’ve heard that story. You know, a lot of companies, startups, they become successful, it’s a whirlwind. But there aren’t a lot of people that go through the eight years of wilderness. I mean, being too early a lot of times means death. How did you maintain the belief that this was even gonna happen?

Noah Glass: I think we saw in the world little proof points of the thesis being correct or correct enough. And we saw in our own business in a microway little green shoots of things that we could point to and say, it’s working here. Let’s do more of that. The biggest example of that is we originally launched, most people don’t know the story all the way this far back, but in the original days, the first, let’s see, 2005 to basically 2010, so the first at least four and a half years, we were B2C. We were a consumer brand. And we were spending a lot of money to go and acquire consumers to be part of a two-sided network. And it became really hard to justify that in the Great Recession when we didn’t know if we could raise another funding round. We knew that we had cash in the bank. That was awesome, but we knew we had to make it last. The green shoot that we saw in pouring over our data was we were not actively acquiring consumers in Dallas, Texas. But that was one of our biggest markets in terms of guests that were actively using the platform. And the reason for that is that we got a call after some great press coverage. We were on Good Morning America September twenty-first of two thousand six as the leadoff piece. It was incredible. David Muir taking a coffee ordered through our platform to Diane Sawyer and Robin Roberts on the anchors desk. And six million people saw this piece. One of the things that came out of that was that we got a call from Muya, which is a better burger concept in Dallas, Texas, saying, we know that you’re not trying to build this market yet, but could we use the technology, which at that time was text message ordering? Could we use that technology because it would help us solve a business problem? We will tell our customers. We will be like the marketing engine for you. And when we’re pouring over the data looking for where is this working, what kinds of restaurants is this working in, where we are sure that we’re getting guests who are staying on long enough and where the lifetime value of the guest exceeds the customer acquisition cost? Dallas, Texas. Why? Zero customer acquisition cost. And any guest ordering activity was therefore going to be positive lifetime value versus zero customer acquisition cost. That is really what kicked off a whole switch over to the B2B model and being an enterprise software provider to restaurant brands to build their first party digital ordering platform on top of our software.

Matt Wampler: That’s a big shift. Especially if you’ve been in the wilderness building and spending money to acquire. It’s like, as my co-founder likes to say to the programmers whenever they build something, be ready to drown your baby. You’re gonna put a lot of effort into this. I mean, that’s kind of what you were doing.

Noah Glass: Yeah, my wife is a writer and a legal historian, but an incredible writer, and there’s a phrase that she shared with me that I’ve thought of many times, which is kill your darlings. And it’s, you know, there are times when you love some little turn of phrase in writing, you just love it so much, you polish it up, and then you realize that it’s not gonna fit here anymore based on some other changes I’ve made, and you need to have the discipline to kill or strangle your darlings. It gets very, very violent in this phrase because some writer wrote it. But I feel the same way about business.

Matt Wampler: But also it makes sense because you have such emotions invested in it that it really does feel like you’re killing something.

Noah Glass: Sunk cost fallacy. There’s so much that makes you think like, but we’ve done so much here. An example of that, we killed text message ordering. We built text message ordering. That was the only way to do mobile ordering circa 2005 and six. And then I remember years later, we killed it. We killed our B2C brand. Like these were the big things that people identified our company doing and we shot both of them to go and pursue something that we knew was going to scale faster and get us to profitability and control our own destiny faster and more assuredly.

Matt Wampler: It was Steve Jobs or somebody had used to say that they were more proud of the great ideas that they chose not to pursue.

Noah Glass: Well that too. I mean, there’s a lot of great ideas we didn’t pursue that I’m proud that we had that discipline. But it’s to your point earlier, like it’s harder when you have been pursuing it and you have been investing and you’ve hired people to go and do it, to then say, this isn’t working, we’re going to turn this thing off, stop doing it. That takes a lot of guts and discipline and conviction.

Matt Wampler: Speaking of Steve Jobs, one of the things that whenever I talk about you or ask about you, the single thing I always hear is Noah Glass is one of the nicest human beings.

Noah Glass: Just like Steve Jobs.

Matt Wampler: Well, that was where I was going. I look at the Steve Jobs and Elon Musk of the world that are like these maniacal workaholics, never compromised, trying to pull every last piece of energy out of everyone. And I don’t get those vibes from you. I have to imagine you sat there and thought, do I need to be more like that? How did you become who you are?

Noah Glass: I’ve never shared this fact on a podcast or otherwise, but you’re bringing this back to me that at my high school graduation I won an award, won a couple of awards, I won an athletics award, but I won this award that I’m very proud of called the Bob Sweat Award. And Bob Sweat was a neighborhood friend of ours, it turns out, but in my town, which is pretty big, Newton, Massachusetts, he passed away early and they gave some sort of ongoing donation to the high school for this award in his name. But it was awarded to somebody who exemplified the concept that nice guys could win. And that really meant so much because of the personal connection, but also because I was glad that whoever the committee was that decided on this felt like I was an example of a nice guy who could win. And I’ll say, like, I take much more inspiration from mentors of mine like Danny Meyer, who was an Olo board member from 2014 up until our take private in September of 25, as people who are both really creative, really successful business people, and are just good human beings. I mean, Danny is a model of hospitality. That is the industry that we serve. It would be a weird thing to serve this industry and get to a position of authority in this industry and not be a hospitable human being. So it’s kind of felt like a great fit for me because of, I guess, my nice guy inclinations to be in this industry. But I love what we do as Olo, helping restaurant brands to go out and do a better job of knowing their guests and making guests feel known and like regulars and practicing hospitality and being better businesses at the same time so they can grow and scale and do more of that. I think that what this industry does is really magical and it’s sort of, it’s caring for people. That’s the root of the word hospitality. And I’ve come to love that over the last 21 years and really find my own home in it.

Matt Wampler: That makes sense. I mean, it’s one of those, it sounds great, and it’s how we all want to be, but it’s just not easy to actually do. And there are so few people that have actually done it. How? Is it just worked out naturally or has it been like a real challenge to not be that person?

Noah Glass: I think it’s pretty natural. I think, going back to high school, that was kind of like who I was then, and I’m glad to hear it reflected back. I think that’s the only way that you can really take that as something that you are is to hear somebody mention it in that way. I don’t know. I grew up as the youngest of three children and I think it’s hard to be the youngest child and have like a big ego or be a jerk. Like you kind of have to find your role in the family. And my older sister was very good in moments when I strayed from my nice guy behavior to call me out on it and keep me on the straight and narrow path. And I just have an incredible family today, my wife, my son, my parents, my siblings. I think that’s where it all begins, kind of like how you treat other people, and then going out in the world and making friends and having colleagues and whatnot, teammates. Sports was a big part of my upbringing. I think all of it just reinforced you’re gonna be more successful as a nice person than as somebody who is not a nice person. And I actually think that there is, I took a course in college in economics called game theory. I actually wrote a LinkedIn post about this recently. And one of the things I took away from that class is there’s one time game versus repeat game. One time game is like we’re just in a transaction, we’re gonna have no future together, and I’m just gonna do whatever I can to win and get the best outcome possible for myself because I know there’s no kind of karma attached to it. Then there’s repeat game, where you’re going to be playing the same opponent many times in the future. And the strategy there is not to take all you can in that moment. It’s to leave a little something on the table and find a win-win because that sets up a good long-term relationship. So I think that concept of repeat game is kind of the essence of hospitality. At least what we hope is that a guest is going to come back again and again. And to do that, you need to make them win while you win and win together, else they’re going to feel like I don’t want to be in a repeat game with this person. I’m going to go to the next restaurant.

Matt Wampler: Well, let’s talk about the game of restaurants, because I feel like not all restaurants, but even the majority of restaurants don’t feel like they’re winning. That margins are shrinking, that costs are going up for labor and food cost. And you’ve got a price sensitive customer. You guys have certainly invented the category of online ordering. And now we live in a world where close to fifty percent of revenue is being driven from digital ordering. But a lot of that’s third party and they’re losing 30%, or 20%, depending on the channel, right? And they may not even be making money on that channel and are getting squeezed more. What’s going on with that game? And how can we unlock the percentage points to make the industry healthier?

Noah Glass: Yeah. May I get on my soapbox for a second?

Matt Wampler: Stand up tall.

Noah Glass: I love this industry so much and I worry for this industry. And the reason I worry for this industry is exactly what you just said. I mean, we have so many headwinds as operators. You have cost of goods sold, I know a topic near and dear to your heart, in the form of food and paper costs higher than ever, labor, and then you have high rent costs. You have consumer confidence as another headwind these days. So it’s harder than ever, it feels like, to be a profitable restaurant. And then on top of that, you’ve got the channel shift of guests going from a direct relationship with you to a third-party marketplace-infused relationship, whereby they’re just showing up as a rented transaction, not even a guest that you can form a relationship with because you don’t get any data, and 25-30% of the ticket is being taken out in the form of a commission. So I see that as draining the already very small profit pool of our industry. And that’s a scary thing, particularly when you see restaurants doing things that are, I think, very short sighted. So I remember back in twenty thirteen, twenty twelve, the whole daily deals mania that was sweeping us at that time. And that felt kind of crazy. But the idea of it was from an operator perspective, at least I will get new guests in the door, they’ll try my food, and then maybe I’ll convert them into long-term guests. And I think the punchline of that story was, not really. Like these are people who are just looking for deals and they’re gonna hop from your restaurant doing the deal this week to another restaurant just like you’re doing a deal next week.

Matt Wampler: It was transactional, not relational.

Noah Glass: Transactional. So I think we’re in a moment like that with third-party marketplaces where restaurant brands have sort of made their peace of, okay, some chunk of this is incremental, some chunk of this is cannibalizing an existing customer. I don’t know, they’re not going to tell me, so I’m just going to kind of hold my nose and do it. They’ve gone from that to now I need to make my quarterly revenue number top line. And so I’m going to dump a lot of advertising dollars sourced from my franchisee ad fund into a third party marketplace ad tool. And that’s gonna get me more attention, more eyeballs, more orders. I get paid on royalties from that top line, so that’s okay. I keep my job, but the franchisees are gonna suffer because they’re not gonna make any profit or they’re gonna be in the red on those transactions with their own ad fund dollars, mind you. And that’s when you see franchises closing down and shuttering, and that is not healthy for a business. So we like to really change the focus area for brands to be drive profitable traffic. And the operative word there is very much profitable. And the way to do that is not by deals and discounts or by dumping funds into marketplace advertising tools. It’s really to go back to the basics of hospitality, which is about knowing who your guest is, personalizing their experience, using what you know about them to make better recommendations about other things that they should try at your restaurant that they haven’t tried, but other people like them have tried and loved. That didn’t used to be possible, but it is now. I mean, we have a 21-year operating record, 100 million plus guests, billions of transactions. That is a very rich pool of data that we can then draw correlations from, make recommendations, use machine learning and use the idea of, because you’ve ordered this, Matt, we’re going to use collaborative filtering to recommend other things to you that look alike guests have also loved. And know that that is a much higher probability of getting a second craving at the brand that’s going to cause you to come back more frequently than if you’re just coming back for one craving. That’s the kind of stuff that we’re focused on and trying to turn restaurant brands to be focused on. And it’s also part of the inspiration for something I’m very excited about, which is the Olo app. And that’s something we announced in March of this year that we’re launching in October of this year. But that is an app by Olo where a guest can come to Olo and see many restaurants in one app experience, see the restaurants where they’ve already ordered from and their order history at those restaurants, and a model in which the restaurant does get the guest data as easily as the guest clicking on that restaurant to follow them. All of their data comes over to that restaurant, and where we don’t charge any commission and the restaurant makes full profit. I think that is a much healthier way for restaurant brands to tap into what is now an audience of 40 million guests who have an account with Olo that can use across the network, to get data about those guests, to get them in their guest data platform. And even on that first order they place, know enough about them that they can personalize the experience and make it a great first experience with their brand. We’re doing that because of our love for the industry and because we think there needs to be an alternative to a channel that’s growing and growing in share and taking the profit out of operators’ wallets, which is a big problem.

Matt Wampler: I have so many questions, but just to start with, you said that you’re not going to take a cut for that. How do you make money? Who’s forking the bill for this?

Noah Glass: It’s very much like first party in the way that a restaurant receives the order. So there’s no difference from a restaurant’s perspective on guest data, whether it’s through the Olo app or on their first party app. There’s also no economic difference. They’re economically indifferent between a first party order or an order through the Olo app. We are going to charge a network fee to the guest. So the guest is going to pay a fee for ordering through the Olo app. And there’s precedent for this. And it will for a guest still be something like 25% less expensive than if they’re placing the equivalent order through a marketplace. Why is that? Well, guests are familiar with delivery fees and tips being associated with delivery and also things like service fee and priority fee and whatnot. Hold all that to the side. The actual menu price listed on marketplaces, because of the commission that marketplaces are charging restaurants, restaurants are offsetting that by charging a higher price than their actual menu price when you’re ordering the same basket of goods on the marketplace. Typically, that’s like 30% markup of menu prices before you even get to delivery fee, service fee, tip, priority fee. As a result, guests wind up paying 35, 50% more for a marketplace order than they would be paying for menu prices in the restaurant. So it is a classic Jeff Bezos, whose name we already said, to think, you know, their margin is my opportunity. We can still charge a fee of the guest and have it be radically less expensive than ordering through a marketplace for what I would argue is a better experience, and still maintain our posture of we’re on the restaurant side. We’re always on the restaurant side. We’re not charging a commission. We’re helping to get more guests and get more profit into your restaurant.

Matt Wampler: So like E-Trade coming out and saying, hey, you can now trade on E-Trade and you don’t have to pay your broker. It was good for everybody.

Noah Glass: Or Robinhood even more recently. But yeah, very similar idea.

Matt Wampler: I guess though the real question is, so you’re a better version that’s not taking too much out of the transaction. But what prevents a, what’s called a second party, a person like you, from just becoming the third party?

Noah Glass: I think guarantees to the restaurants in contractual form of saying to them, you’re always gonna have the data. We’re never gonna charge a commission, full stop. I mean, that is our promise of the Olo app. And the Olo app is actually part of something larger that we call the Olo Network. So if you’re part of Olo Network, the principles are we’re gonna make it really easy for guests to one click follow your brand and share their data with you. We are going to enrich what you know about that guest based on what Olo, the platform, the network, knows about that guest. And you’re gonna pay zero commission on those orders. Those principles, as part of the network, we’re then taking beyond just the app, as we’re thinking about agentic commerce and how in the future, when you say, I don’t want it to be Matt interfacing and ordering, I want Matt’s agent to do that work. Agent, go and order me lunch. That’s the route that we want the agent to take is ordering through the Olo network so that the restaurant is getting your data, the restaurant is getting its full profit and not paying commission, and so that you’re getting a much lower price. And all of the knowledge that we have about you is helping your agent to make a better decision of what you would like for lunch.

Matt Wampler: And I want to get to the agent thing in a second, but what you’re describing almost sounds more like a CDP than like an ordering system in some ways. It feels like those lines are becoming blurred more and more, especially with AI coming in.

Noah Glass: Yeah, that’s very insightful. I think it’s not a surprise that our first ever acquisition as a company in twenty twenty one was to acquire a CDP. And it was precisely because we thought we have all of this ordering data about this huge mass of guests, but that’s one slice of the digital fingerprint of those guests. What if we also added in all of these other digital touch points into a full CDP view of the guest? So that’s the first acquisition that we made in 2021. And it led to Olo really being more bidirectional, not just about commerce of guest orders from restaurant, but also restaurant understands guests and can then impact, yes, communications to that guest, but also the way that the commerce experience is personalized for that guest based on what we know about that guest. That’s really a big part of what we do. However, it’s done in a siloed fashion today through first party. The Olo network goes beyond that and says, well, what if we knew that guest beyond the slice that is their experience at that brand? What if we knew that guest across all of the brands where they use Olo? And that means that we can, as Matt is placing his first order somewhere, bring that to bear to personalize what you’re shown, what we know is going to be the most likely best first experience for Matt.

Matt Wampler: That makes total sense. I guess in my mind I’m trying to figure out where the continuum ends. So as you start to bleed into the CDP side of things, you’ve now got all the data on the customers, right? You’re sharing the data. Where does the next logical extension continue to?

Noah Glass: Well, I think as we’ve talked about Olo Network and sort of who it’s for on the guest side, it’s for everybody. On the restaurant side, the first big cohort is brands that we already work with, where we already are the ordering infrastructure for those brands. The step after that is to open it up, truly democratize access to the guests on the other side of platform and say, even if you’re a brand that doesn’t use Olo, because maybe you’re an SMB and you use an SMB oriented digital ordering provider, even if you’re a top 25 brand that has built its own digital ordering stack and maintains their digital ordering stack and doesn’t use Olo, we’re still going to give you access to the Olo app so that you can list your restaurants there, menus there, and have those guests who we know a lot about be able to access you through the Olo app. And we’re not going to charge you a commission and we’re going to share guest data with you. So the goal is really to build an industry-wide solution for all restaurants and for all guests of those restaurants. And we’ve taken a lot of inspiration on the consumer app side, on the guest side, from this thinker named Doc Searls. And he writes about this concept, it’s the flip of customer relationship management. He calls it vendor relationship management. And the idea of VRM is you, Matt, should be able to control which vendors have access to your data and what data they have access to. That’s sort of the spirit of how we’ve designed the Olo app. So it’s not a marketplace experience where it feels like I am the product. I’m getting all these ads that are put in front of me. It is my curated restaurants that I care about and my data that I’m storing there. And then the interplay of the two, which parts of my data am I sharing with which restaurants? What communication rules do I assign to the different restaurants who I follow on the Olo app? That’s sort of the longer term view of what we’re building and why we’re building it on the restaurant side and the guest side.

Matt Wampler: Talk to me about building the app today because it feels like things are changing so quickly with AI. There’s a lot of uncertainty. Architecting a new app and thinking through what the modern day version of it looks like is probably an interesting exercise.

Noah Glass: It is. It’s fascinating watching it all come together on the TestFlight account that I get to play around with every day. So much of what we’re building, I need to give credit where it’s due, so much of it is based on what Shopify has built with the Shop app and just done incredibly well. I mean, so much of what we’re building in all things Olo Network are connected to what we’ve seen Shopify build over the years. That idea, the 40 million guests who I referenced are all guests who have an Olo account. An Olo account is an Olo network level login, email address, mobile number, where we send you a one-time password to log you in. You don’t have to remember and have a password. That was inspired by the Shop Pay experience, which is brilliant. And the evolution of that from Shop Pay to a Shop account to the Shop app is the same path that we’re on.

Matt Wampler: Interesting. Going back to the restaurant side of things, it’s funny when we talk about revenue, it feels very much like a zero sum game, right? There’s a finite number of discretionary dollars for customers to spend. They’re gonna spend a percentage of it on restaurants. Restaurants are fighting over those same dollars. I always look at the restaurant industry, if it was just a giant ETF, it would be valued based on the earnings of the restaurant. But some are gonna go out of business, some are not, they’re still kind of fighting. But if they were to increase their profit margins, cash flow, that index becomes twice as valuable, creates a lot of economic benefit. Talk to me about the back of the house side. Because we’re seeing today, whether it’s CDPs, the good ones know their customer and when they’re coming in and have all the data on that. But the back of the house, as you said with the franchise, they kind of care about revenue, hasn’t really been addressed. What is your take on the actual economic profitability of restaurants today and what technology is gonna help change that equation?

Noah Glass: I want to get to this question. However, I also want to push back on one word that you used, which is discretionary. This is something from my four and a half years as a public company CEO that I would say all the time to investors as something that was different about Olo from a platform like Shopify. I don’t see food spend as discretionary. Food spend, if you broaden the aperture to look at food away from home and food at home, restaurant and grocery by another name, people have to eat. People are gonna go hungry otherwise. As long as there are people, they will have to eat. It is not discretionary to eat. So over time, more and more of the food dollar has shifted toward restaurants and away from food at home grocery. I think that continues to be true, although it may have receded a bit back to grocery because of some of the consumer economic uncertainty of late. But I think that’s an important point that if you really zoom out and you look, 55, 60 years ago, it used to be grocery was 85 cents of the food dollar and restaurant was 15. And I remember that around the time that we went public, for the year before, 2019, 2020, restaurants rose to over 50 cents of the food dollar in aggregate. So that’s an amazing trend line to watch. That as we use restaurants more and more, as we’re kind of outsourcing food prep, the restaurant is sort of the surrogate of the home kitchen. And I think that is a really good thing for our industry, and your industry ETF that you’re thinking of, is that, holding economic uncertainty aside for a moment, the arc of food consumption bends toward restaurant food consumption. I think that’s a really good thing. Now, as an industry, restaurants are really unproductive relative to pretty much every other industry. I mean, you look at the labor dollar and the revenue tied to it, and the industry is very low, maybe the lowest of any other industry that I’ve seen. It was interesting to look at data, I forget whose data this was, might have been National Restaurant Association, but productivity had a huge bump during COVID. And part of that is because you didn’t have servers inside of dining rooms serving the guests. It’s because everything shifted to drive-thru, or if you didn’t have drive-thru, digital. Huge growth. We went from 8% digital to 16% digital just during that year. Coincidentally, that was the year after which we went public, our revenue had doubled in that year, following that trend. But productivity increased. And I think the more you can take human manual work out of the transactional elements of ordering and making change for somebody or just doing the financial transaction part, the more productive you get. And some people then hear me say something like that and say, now you’re talking about ordering from kiosks and robots delivering tacos. And I don’t want restaurants to look like, I love that restaurants are warm and hospitable. So do I. Don’t hear that wrong. I want restaurants to be able to redeploy labor on the high hospitality components of the restaurant experience. And that can even look like, when a guest is coming in to collect their order, there is a host there at the pickup area to hand them their bag, make eye contact, smile, and have a conversation with them about what they ordered and what they might want to try next time. And that’s the kind of thing that I love seeing restaurants experimenting with. I wrote a post recently about Naya, who is one of our newest customers, and how they do that really, really well, at least during rush hour. They have that person who does sort of handoff hospitality at the pickup area, but it can also apply to front-of-house full service operations and how they think about deploying their human labor to be human and deliver that human hospitality. But you asked about back of the house, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t say it is an area that I think a lot about, and no surprise, I think most about how to take orders that are coming in from all channels, inclusive of digital channels, and keep the kitchen as productive as possible and as profitable as possible. And a big thing that we do is either reading from the KDS system to keep it as productive as possible and inform digital make times and promise times, or use our own tool, which is something called Expo, which we developed probably a decade ago as a back of house tool that lets the restaurant stay organized in how they actually do the orders and hand off the orders at the right time when the guest is on premise or the delivery driver is on premise. And I think that’s an area that is ripe for innovation and can really help to make the restaurant back of house operate more profitably than it has historically.

Matt Wampler: Go back though to building the app today and how things are different and how you guys are looking at bringing AI and agentic ordering in. How do you even approach that today?

Noah Glass: The only way that I know how is to look at apps, and I already talked about the Shop app, but look at apps that are doing a really good job with novel features, and not just restaurant apps, but across different industries and guest experiences. And then take the best things that are inspirational and include them into your experience. And I don’t think that is a one-time thing, that is an ongoing, iterative process that we’re going to continue to invest in. But I think about the ability for guests to use voice ordering or the ability for guests to order in almost a conversational way, similar to text message ordering, by the way, all the way back to 2005, but have the back and forth interaction with a chat bot that then injects the order once the order is complete. I think all of that is different than how you would traditionally think about how digital ordering works. But there are a lot of good experiences that are being built in that fashion today that we should incorporate into the way that the Olo app enables guests to order from their favorite restaurants.

Matt Wampler: I guess the thing that I’m wrestling with is this. It’s a little different in the sense that it’s moving really, really quickly. So there aren’t a lot of examples. And the technology is usually ahead of where the applications are. And it feels like the ground is shifting beneath your feet because every six months there’s some groundbreaking new advancement that makes something that you had to build around or were solving for now just natively built into the AI. Is that the kind of thing that you worry about as you build, or how do you approach it?

Noah Glass: I don’t worry about it. Maybe it’s my Pollyanna-ish perspective, but I see it as a great opportunity to make the experience even better for a guest or to remove even more friction from the experience to make it even better. But I look at something like playing around last week with ChatGPT voice and just what a massively better version of voice interaction that is. It didn’t exist two weeks ago. I mean, if you look six months ago at what any AI experience was like versus what it’s capable of now, it’s mind-blowing. The thing is, all of that is going to improve the guest experience and the operator experience. That I’m sure of. The connective tissue between the two is the thing that we occupy, and I love playing that role of we’re the synapse between you and the guests, and we’re going to continue to keep our ear to the ground and iterate and make it better and better for the guest experience and for your experience as an operator, uplift data so that you understand guests better because of what’s now possible to mine the data and show to you. And oftentimes have you as the human in the loop who makes the final decision of, yeah, that does make sense for us to run that campaign for these guests. But it’s a really exciting time to be an entrepreneur. I don’t fear it. I fear sort of getting complacent and saying, this thing is done now and it can’t get any better than it currently is, because I just see so much innovation and opportunity on a daily basis. It’s hard to keep up with.

Matt Wampler: Well, as the ground shifts and these models get better, I imagine it’s on your mind, hey, am I just gonna order through ChatGPT and that’s gonna be the one stop shop. What are the things that you have enough conviction in as far as the technology and the business that you can actually make multi-year roadmap plans?

Noah Glass: The thing that I think about when I think about ordering through ChatGPT is that yes, that is absolutely going to happen. How is it going to happen? The next question is, is that going to be through a first party experience, or is it going to be through a marketplace experience? Or is there an opportunity for us to get our network of restaurants in the right data format right now to set the table for something different? And I think something that is ideal relative to first party or third party. I’ll tell you what I mean by that. If you’re ordering through ChatGPT as a guest, the way it currently works is you would have to connect an app for each brand that you want to order from in order to access their menu and punch an order into their ordering platform. Having witnessed how many apps guests are downloading on their phone, they’re not going to every brand. I mean very, very loyal guests, very high frequency guests, they will do that. Certain food types, coffee, sure. A guest will do that. But for a typical restaurant, you’re not going to download and connect every single one of those apps to your assistant or your agent. The other option is not a good one though. The other option is it goes through third-party marketplaces, a lot of selection there, and the guest only has to do it once. The problem is really high commissions to the restaurants, no guest data shared, and the guest is paying way more than menu price for that order. So the fact that both of those options for ordering through ChatGPT, which I agree is an inevitable future, are bad, is part of why I think the much better option is to connect once to your Olo account and then have all of the restaurants there where the data is shared, where the restaurant’s getting its full profit, not paying a commission, and where the guest is paying menu price for that order and not a 30% plus marked up price. I think that’s the best of all worlds. And the thing that I know is that the role that we play there is essential, and not just for ChatGPT, but for all of the different agentic experiences. And that we need to get our restaurants aligned and onto this network, and we hold out the Olo app as the first very mentally available way to get onto the Olo network. But it’s sort of the starting line. It’s not the end line. It is from here, we’re then going to find other demand channels where as a network, guests can access using that account and get a better experience, pay a lower price, and have it be more aligned with what you as a restaurant want.

Matt Wampler: I don’t know if you get this feeling, but AI has actually been kind of stressful in a way. And it’s been stressful because it used to be you didn’t have the bandwidth to go handle everything that you wanted to handle, right? You had a finite amount of time. Now it’s like, well, you could go have AI do it. So the amount of work you can take on is almost unlimited today. Is there anything in your world that you guys are saying we’re not gonna go pursue these areas? Drawing the bounds of the box for what you guys pursue?

Noah Glass: Yeah, I do fundamentally believe in humans, I guess, and the human touch. And I coincidentally wrote a LinkedIn post about this very thing yesterday, about you really can’t outsource the human touch. You can augment the human touch with AI and with understanding data that you wouldn’t have been able to understand before without the help of AI. And that’s kind of exactly what I mean by, we say it all, hospitality at scale, or using a CDP, what we call a guest data platform, to gather all that data about the guest to inform the human at the right moment of what they should be talking to Matt about, what they should be recommending to Matt based on your order history, based on other guests like you. But I feel like humans must be the delivery mechanism of that. I don’t outsource email communications to my customers for the exact same reason. I want customers, I want prospects to feel the humanity of me connecting with them. And that’s a big part of our brand at Olo, is a lot of sophisticated stuff underneath the hood, but the delivery mechanism or the interface needs to feel intuitive, simple, human, warm, in a way that people like using it and feel seen and comfortable using it, and not like I’m dealing with something that is from an alien planet.

Matt Wampler: I think we’d be in a better place if more companies felt that way.

Noah Glass: It’s so easy to be like, there’s an opportunity. You could totally cut out labor and just send a robot waiter with a tray to deliver the order. And there are companies that do this. And it is a big turnoff for me because that is flying in the face of that human layer of hospitality that I love as an individual guest. I love that. I love developing a rapport with a server or a host and having them understand me and how I eat and my family and how my family eats and things that the chef is thinking about doing that they want us to try and give feedback on. I love those experiences. They’re very hard to scale and it’s tempting to say, let’s just do away with that so we can scale faster. I want to do both. I think it’s a yes and thing. I want high powered tech and better hospitality as a result, not tech that kills hospitality.

Matt Wampler: Yeah, I was having the conversation with Josh from Big Chicken and he was basically saying, there’s two types of relationships. You can have an actual relational relationship or a transactional one. And if it’s a transactional one, you’re purchasing, you don’t care from where. It’s almost like getting on Amazon. I want the lowest price, the quickest, most convenient. If you want loyal guests that evangelically associate themselves with your brand, there’s that human aspect. It’s not transactional.

Noah Glass: Yeah. That is the difference of the one time game versus the repeat game, is exactly that. Something that’s transactional versus something that’s relational.

Matt Wampler: All right. So I got one last thing for you. You were early when it came to online ordering. You lived through that eight-year period. I’d love to know whether you have any ideas that you feel like are still just too early, or if you’ve had any companies you’ve talked with that have pitched you and you’re like, gosh, that’s the idea. But guys, you’re just too early.

Noah Glass: I haven’t really felt like that recently. And I hear out there ideas, but when you see how fast things are moving, I mean, when somebody tells you that we’re gonna be colonizing Mars in two thousand three, you’re like, nah, that’s crazy. That’s gonna be like my grandkids’ grandkids kind of thing. But the rate of change and the rate of progress is so profound right now that I hesitate to say that anything is kind of ahead of its time or too futuristic. So I take everything at face value and I think about kind of working backwards from when would that happen. Okay, at some point, probably sooner than I think, and what needs to happen in order to make that possible. And I think about that, you know, like back to the Olo app. For many, many years, I was coming to our operating team summer meeting and saying, okay, for next year, I have this big idea. We’re going to do this thing that’s back to our roots a little bit of B2C, but using the network that we built. And the feedback from the team, rightly so, I think, up until this last year, was it’s too early. It’s too early. We’re not ready for that. The scale, the network isn’t there, guests aren’t ready for it. There was one reason or another why it didn’t make sense. It really clicked last year. It was around this time last year that we greenlit this and decided this is something that we’re going to make a push and do and announce at our customer conference in March of twenty twenty six and then launch in Q four of twenty twenty six. And it feels like the right time. And I’m thrilled that we didn’t hit the snooze button on that for another year.

Matt Wampler: Why? What changed to make now the right time?

Noah Glass: Honestly, the biggest thing that changed is that we went from being a public company to being a private company again. And that might sound like a small distinction, but it enables you to do big transformative things like this outside of the public markets. It would be very hard to explain to public market investors who invested in Olo, the B2B enterprise software company, that we’re going to also then create this other B2C component of the business. There aren’t many corollaries that you can draw and be like, yeah, just like so and so. So doing this as a private company with a very bought-in investor who understands what we’re building, why we’re building it, how it is the right thing for the restaurants and for guests, and it in fact strengthens the software platform to do this, that takes a special kind of alignment that I think you can get in a private company that would be hard to do in a public company setting.

Matt Wampler: Do you have, when you think about the future of restaurants, they’ve gone through so many different technological shifts, online ordering, third party, digitized cloud POS. But at the end of the day, not much has changed for the restaurants. It’s still a low margin business, it’s still tough. Do you have hope that AI is going to somehow be a different innovation that will change the industry?

Noah Glass: That it will change the fundamental economic model of the industry? I think it will always be, relative to other industries, low productivity, so high labor cost, another way of saying that, high cost of goods sold if you want to pass along a high quality product to the guest. And I think because of those big two, it is an economically challenged industry. I don’t see a future where we’re gonna, as a trustee of the Culinary Institute of America, I hope this is true, leap to robot chefs. I think we’re going to need human chefs for a long time. More and more of the back of house will be mechanized. But I think that the fundamental economic model for as long as I can see into the future is going to remain the same. However, it is very, very important to a restaurant where an order is originating, whether it’s from a direct channel or something like a direct channel where they’re getting guest data and getting profit, or coming through a third-party marketplace. It’s as important to a restaurant as to a bookseller is, is this coming through Amazon or is this somebody walking into my shop to pick it up? I’d say booksellers experienced this maybe first of any industry when Amazon came onto the scene and started selling books online. But it’s very, very important. And I think if we can get this right in this use of AI, that it’s not just the Olo app, but the Olo network, and that that is the way that agents connect to restaurants, I think that will make a massive difference for the profitability of the restaurant business. I really do. That is the core intent of what we’re doing, is get profit back to restaurants and stop having it leak out of our industry into third-party marketplace ad platforms at the expense of restaurants, which I do not want to happen. That is a very bad future for our industry and everybody who loves it.

Matt Wampler: Well, Noah, first off, on behalf of the industry, thank you for doing that. We’re all rooting for you. For all the customers out there that want more information on Olo and using your services, where can they find you?

Noah Glass: Olo.com is the best place to find us.

Matt Wampler: Not aloe.

Noah Glass: Not aloe. Olo with an O, two O’s. And if you want to learn more about the Olo Network or the Olo app, that’s just Olo.com slash Olo dash network. And you can also find it on Olo.com. But check us out. Like I said, we’re gonna first onboard all of the Olo restaurant customers on the restaurant side, and then we plan next year to open this up to non Olo customer restaurants. So either cohort that you’re in, we’d love to hear from you and get you involved in what we’re building.

Matt Wampler: I love it. Well, Noah, thank you for coming on.

Noah Glass: Thanks, Matt. I appreciate you having me.