The Exchanges

Q That is so kind of you. It's amazing how far a posh British accent goes, but I do want to start with some context. It's incredible to see Olo today and all that you've built, but where did it all start? How did you come to Found Olo, and what was that aha moment for you?

A Yeah, well, it first started when I first moved to New York City, and that was in 2003. And when I moved here, I was one of those weird people in 2003 carrying around a Palm Pilot personal digital assistant. And I was really inspired by this device and particularly an application I was using on it called Vindigo and really looking at points of interest around me on a map and seeing restaurants and Zagat reviews, ratings and that sort of thing. Coming to believe that we were all going to have devices like this in our pockets, web-enabled devices, and once we did, that they would be more than just communication devices or content devices, but fundamentally they would become commerce devices. So that was sort of like one seedling of inspiration. The other side was experiencing a busy coffee shop that was in my building every morning, and I was living on Wall Street at the time, which was a very weird place to live, and every morning there was this crush of people trying to get coffee at the same time. And so I thought, if I could get that coffee faster, If it could be prepared and ready and waiting for me, and I could skip the line, that would be a great experience. I also had worked in the restaurant industry, so when I was 17 years old, back in my hometown of Newton, Massachusetts, I worked as a pizza delivery driver, and I saw that there were operational inefficiencies on the r…

AI assessment note: “putting all those things together, I really felt like, ok, a mobile device”

Q That is so kind of you. It's amazing how far a posh British accent goes, but I do want to start with some context. It's incredible to see Olo today and all that you've built, but where did it all start? How did you come to Found Olo, and what was that aha moment for you?

A Yeah, well, it first started when I first moved to New York City, and that was in 2003. And when I moved here, I was one of those weird people in 2003 carrying around a Palm Pilot personal digital assistant. And I was really inspired by this device and particularly an application I was using on it called Vindigo and really looking at points of interest around me on a map and seeing restaurants and Zagat reviews, ratings and that sort of thing. Coming to believe that we were all going to have devices like this in our pockets, web-enabled devices, and once we did, that they would be more than just communication devices or content devices, but fundamentally they would become commerce devices. So that was sort of like one seedling of inspiration. The other side was experiencing a busy coffee shop that was in my building every morning, and I was living on Wall Street at the time, which was a very weird place to live, and every morning there was this crush of people trying to get coffee at the same time. And so I thought, if I could get that coffee faster, If it could be prepared and ready and waiting for me, and I could skip the line, that would be a great experience. I also had worked in the restaurant industry, so when I was 17 years old, back in my hometown of Newton, Massachusetts, I worked as a pizza delivery driver, and I saw that there were operational inefficiencies on the r…

AI assessment note: “putting all those things together, I really felt like, ok, a mobile device”

Q When you think about crucible moments where you made the wrong decision, can you take me to one of those? I'm too interested.

A We've only made the right decision, Harry. I mean, come on. No, I mean, so look, I remember in 2019 pre-COVID, I came to feel that we were at such a moment in the restaurant industry that Olo needed to go public, that Olo needed to become a company that was not a startup and not a company that Large restaurant brands who were our customers and our prospects would have any sort of doubts about, are they going to be around next month? We needed to be a company that was rock solid. In order to do that, we wanted to show the scale we were operating at. We wanted to show audited financials that showed that we were profitable. And of course, we wanted to show that we had a lot of cash on the balance sheet. So I became very fixated on this idea that Olo must go public. That is the thing that is gating our growth with the large enterprise restaurant brands. And I pushed really hard, and the board was not a hundred percent aligned on that. There were some that were saying, I think that's right. There were some that were saying, I don't really know, but I'll go along with Noah, because he tends to be right about things. And there were some that were dead set against it. Looking back now, it was at best a toss-up, and maybe would have been too early in 2019.

AI assessment note: “Looking back now, it was at best a toss-up, and maybe would have been too early”

Q Can I ask, on the CEO coach, how often do you see Patrick? What do you think makes a great CEO coach in your relationship with him?

A I see Patrick once a week, and it is a very high priority meeting that I do not like to move. Sometimes I have to move for one reason or another, but It's almost always once a week for an hour, and I think what makes him great is he has his toolkit, and he's teaching me the different tools that he has used and he's taught others to use, but every meeting starts with, is there anything that's top of mind that you need to talk about right now? I love the Eisenhower matrix as a way of thinking and understanding low urgency and high urgency, low importance and high importance, and understanding that so many people conflate things that are important to And things that are urgent, and they believe that the urgent things are the things they have to spend their time on, and they forego spending time on the important things. Patrick asking that question of anything that's top of mind is a real gift, because every time it sort of takes all these urgent things that are swimming around in my brain, and we deal with them, and then we're able to focus on the important things after that. That's amazing, because most meetings, you're thinking about something else, and it's distracting, and you're not really bringing your best focused self to The discussion at hand, the debate at hand, unless you've cleared that, and I think clearing that is so important, and I really appreciate that he does th…

AI assessment note: “I see Patrick once a week, and it is a very high priority meeting”

Q Can I ask, on the CEO coach, how often do you see Patrick? What do you think makes a great CEO coach in your relationship with him?

A I see Patrick once a week, and it is a very high priority meeting that I do not like to move. Sometimes I have to move for one reason or another, but It's almost always once a week for an hour, and I think what makes him great is he has his toolkit, and he's teaching me the different tools that he has used and he's taught others to use, but every meeting starts with, is there anything that's top of mind that you need to talk about right now? I love the Eisenhower matrix as a way of thinking and understanding low urgency and high urgency, low importance and high importance, and understanding that so many people conflate things that are important to And things that are urgent, and they believe that the urgent things are the things they have to spend their time on, and they forego spending time on the important things. Patrick asking that question of anything that's top of mind is a real gift, because every time it sort of takes all these urgent things that are swimming around in my brain, and we deal with them, and then we're able to focus on the important things after that. That's amazing, because most meetings, you're thinking about something else, and it's distracting, and you're not really bringing your best focused self to The discussion at hand, the debate at hand, unless you've cleared that, and I think clearing that is so important, and I really appreciate that he does th…

AI assessment note: “I see Patrick once a week... I think what makes him great is he has his toolkit”

Q do you not think some decisions are data-less, intuition-led? You just feel it. Data cannot prove it. But I tell you the customers will want this. I know the data doesn't say it, because they tell me they want this. Go back to the Henry Ford, customers want another horse. The data says they want fucking horses. They don't want a car. How do you think about those intuition-gut-led decisions?

A I absolutely believe that. In fact, I believe that the very origin story of Olo, exactly that. If you'd asked a restaurant operator, what do you want? They would have said, I want a faster drive-through. They wouldn't have said, I want on-demand ordering so that the entire paradigm shifts and the drive-through is no longer the fastest way of getting food. So I absolutely do think that there is room for intuition. I really thought about this from the side of when I feel conviction in something, and when I have the tenacity to be holding on to that conviction, and some might say that's stubbornness. I can change. I love changing my view on things, but if I'm dug in like that, the thing that will help me to change is not a different intuition. It's a fact that disproves something at the core that has led me to this belief. So I think that is a very important part of how I like to engage and debate with others and make decisions, and also rethink decisions. I'm a big fan of the Jeff Bezos type one and type two decisions. There are some that are permanent, and there are Many, in fact, most, that are reversible decisions, and I think entrepreneurship is really all about re-evaluating small assumptions that you've made along the way, getting to truth so that you can steer in a better direction going forward.

AI assessment note: “I absolutely believe that. In fact, I believe that the very origin story of Olo”

Q When you think about crucible moments where you made the wrong decision, can you take me to one of those? I'm too interested.

A We've only made the right decision, Harry. I mean, come on. No, I mean, so look, I remember in 2019 pre-COVID, I came to feel that we were at such a moment in the restaurant industry that Olo needed to go public, that Olo needed to become a company that was not a startup and not a company that Large restaurant brands who were our customers and our prospects would have any sort of doubts about, are they going to be around next month? We needed to be a company that was rock solid. In order to do that, we wanted to show the scale we were operating at. We wanted to show audited financials that showed that we were profitable. And of course, we wanted to show that we had a lot of cash on the balance sheet. So I became very fixated on this idea that Olo must go public. That is the thing that is gating our growth with the large enterprise restaurant brands. And I pushed really hard, and the board was not a hundred percent aligned on that. There were some that were saying, I think that's right. There were some that were saying, I don't really know, but I'll go along with Noah, because he tends to be right about things. And there were some that were dead set against it. Looking back now, it was at best a toss-up, and maybe would have been too early in 2019.

AI assessment note: “I remember in 2019 pre-COVID, I came to feel that we were at such a moment”

Q I have one final question I could talk to you all day now, but my final question to you is, how do you advise founders who say, I get you, don't raise and be more conservative, but if I don't raise, my competitors will, they'll outspend me, and so I have to raise. How do you advise them in that situation?

A I think that out-raising can be a blessing, and it can be a curse. I do believe that there are some times when there is an opportunity That is truly a once in a lifetime or once in a world history opportunity. That's what I came to believe about Olo's opportunity when we took on the funding from David Frankel. If I don't do this now, someone's going to do it, and this is the one time that it can be done. If I'm off of business school and I come to this years later, I'll be too late. Another form of that is not having the capital to really gobble up all of the demand that's out there at the right time. So I do think that that's legitimate in some cases, that you need to raise the In order to capture all the opportunity and the opportunity and totality that's out there, I think far more often people convince themselves of that. And they convince themselves that, oh, we won't be able to compete if we haven't raised as much as this competitor. And the curse part of raising too much money is you have to spend the money. You have to go and do things. And oftentimes that can breed a huge lack of focus. And that can mean that you're trying to do too many things at once. You're stretched too thin. And nothing that you're doing is really best in class. And you can have a very focused competitor who is doing one thing really well. They're able to win on that one thing and use that one thi…

AI assessment note: “the curse part of raising too much money is you have to spend the money”

Q do you not think some decisions are data-less, intuition-led? You just feel it. Data cannot prove it. But I tell you the customers will want this. I know the data doesn't say it, because they tell me they want this. Go back to the Henry Ford, customers want another horse. The data says they want fucking horses. They don't want a car. How do you think about those intuition-gut-led decisions?

A I absolutely believe that. In fact, I believe that the very origin story of Olo, exactly that. If you'd asked a restaurant operator, what do you want? They would have said, I want a faster drive-through. They wouldn't have said, I want on-demand ordering so that the entire paradigm shifts and the drive-through is no longer the fastest way of getting food. So I absolutely do think that there is room for intuition. I really thought about this from the side of when I feel conviction in something, and when I have the tenacity to be holding on to that conviction, and some might say that's stubbornness. I can change. I love changing my view on things, but if I'm dug in like that, the thing that will help me to change is not a different intuition. It's a fact that disproves something at the core that has led me to this belief. So I think that is a very important part of how I like to engage and debate with others and make decisions, and also rethink decisions. I'm a big fan of the Jeff Bezos type one and type two decisions. There are some that are permanent, and there are Many, in fact, most, that are reversible decisions, and I think entrepreneurship is really all about re-evaluating small assumptions that you've made along the way, getting to truth so that you can steer in a better direction going forward.

AI assessment note: “I absolutely believe that. In fact, I believe that the very origin story”

Q Next 10 years for you and Olo, if we do this in, God, twenty-thirty-two, where does the world look like and where are you then?

A So we are driving toward what I call digital entirety, which is every restaurant transaction being digital, and I think what that will unlock is something that I call digital hospitality, where a restaurant brand will be able to serve you better, provide a higher hospitality experience because of all the data that they have about you, and because of all the data they have about other guests like you. I think that Olo itself has a hundred X growth And then some opportunity ahead of us, more restaurant locations, more orders per location as we get to digital entirety, and then more revenue per order from Olopay and other products that we can sell into our customer base. I think ultimately what this means for consumers, I envision a world in which you walk into a restaurant for the first time, it's the server's first week on the job, and yet you get treated like you've been a two-decade regular at that restaurant. So the vision that every guest is now a regular is something that we're talking about internally and getting excited about as the manifestation of this digital entirety, digital hospitality vision.

AI assessment note: “Olo itself has a hundred X growth And then some opportunity ahead of us”

Q Were there times in the early days when you were just going, I really don't know if this is going to work. The restaurants are not biting. It's not getting what I thought it would do from a response. And how did you respond to that? So did those times happen and how did you respond?

A There were so many times that we felt that way, and we really had to look at these little green shoots of hope and little instances of success and celebrate those wins and almost forget about all of the failures to be able to see things like, we're doing twice the number of orders in this restaurant this month as we were last month. What's working well here? What can we take from that small example and extrapolate beyond just one restaurant as we think about scaling up into future restaurants? We were a team that was really good at embracing the suck and having a high pain tolerance, but also celebrating the wins and really being in it together.

AI assessment note: “There were so many times that we felt that way, and we really had to look at”

Q Now, you said the word stubborn there. I spoke to your cap table, and some were too scared to tell me a weakness, and about half gave me a weakness, and everyone who gave me a weakness told me that you were incredibly stubborn. Would you agree that you are stubborn and it's a weakness, or would you say it's a strength? And how do you feel about that?

A I agree with the old adage that every strength is also a weakness, and every weakness is also a strength. I think the flip side of being super high conviction and having tenacity is that to the outside world, that can appear like stubbornness, like you're holding on to a bad hand for way too long. Many, many people have said that. Many investors have said that throughout Olo's journey. I can't tell you how many pitches I've had where people say, look, I really like you. You're a great entrepreneur. That's clear. Don't like this business that you're running. I don't think that this is the right thing. I don't think it's going to work. And I had to say, like, I disagree with that. I obviously, like, have poured all of myself into this because I have conviction that it will work. Like I said, I welcome debate. I think debate makes us better, and I love having data and not just judgment masquerading as facts when I'm faced with somebody with an opposing view. Of course, if it's a compelling case that they make, if they erode the case that I've made, I'm willing to change my mind, and I don't think that that's stubborn. I think I'm stubborn on The big vision, and I'm very flexible on the details, and that's another Jeff Bezos quote that I particularly like.

AI assessment note: “I think I'm stubborn on The big vision, and I'm very flexible on the details”

Q Were there times in the early days when you were just going, I really don't know if this is going to work. The restaurants are not biting. It's not getting what I thought it would do from a response. And how did you respond to that? So did those times happen and how did you respond?

A There were so many times that we felt that way, and we really had to look at these little green shoots of hope and little instances of success and celebrate those wins and almost forget about all of the failures to be able to see things like, we're doing twice the number of orders in this restaurant this month as we were last month. What's working well here? What can we take from that small example and extrapolate beyond just one restaurant as we think about scaling up into future restaurants? We were a team that was really good at embracing the suck and having a high pain tolerance, but also celebrating the wins and really being in it together.

AI assessment note: “There were so many times that we felt that way, and we really had to”

Q Noah, as a leader, you're very much a statesman. You're very much very serene, calm, Almost political leader. Has your leadership style changed over the years? And if so, what have been some big developments in your own personal way that you lead and manage?

A I think one thing, I was listening to a number of episodes of yours. I remember I listened to the Whoop episode. I was really struck by, as a Whoop user, I was really struck by how Will talked about the disassociation between the entrepreneur and the venturer. Or the CEO in the business, or the founder of the business, however you want to say it. I really struggled with that early on in a big way. When I was hearing Will speaking these words about a bad day for the business felt like a bad day for me, a good day for the business felt like a good day for me, I was just nodding my head like I have felt that so deeply. In these whiffio moments, these moments where it feels like you're going to go under as a business, it feels like you are an absolute failure. It feels awful, and you need to be able to Create a little bit of daylight between you and the business. I think I've been able to do that over the years with a lot of outside help and a lot of support from my family, which is my number one support structure, my wife primarily. With that, also understanding that I didn't have to do everything. I didn't have to make every decision. I could bring people into the company who weren't doing it for the first time on instinct, but had experience. I could delegate things to them. The ability to, to delegate, I picked this up from what Aaron said from the box episode, it is so critica…

AI assessment note: “separating yourself from the business and delegating are really closely”

Q Now, you said the word stubborn there. I spoke to your cap table, and some were too scared to tell me a weakness, and about half gave me a weakness, and everyone who gave me a weakness told me that you were incredibly stubborn. Would you agree that you are stubborn and it's a weakness, or would you say it's a strength? And how do you feel about that?

A I agree with the old adage that every strength is also a weakness, and every weakness is also a strength. I think the flip side of being super high conviction and having tenacity is that to the outside world, that can appear like stubbornness, like you're holding on to a bad hand for way too long. Many, many people have said that. Many investors have said that throughout Olo's journey. I can't tell you how many pitches I've had where people say, look, I really like you. You're a great entrepreneur. That's clear. Don't like this business that you're running. I don't think that this is the right thing. I don't think it's going to work. And I had to say, like, I disagree with that. I obviously, like, have poured all of myself into this because I have conviction that it will work. Like I said, I welcome debate. I think debate makes us better, and I love having data and not just judgment masquerading as facts when I'm faced with somebody with an opposing view. Of course, if it's a compelling case that they make, if they erode the case that I've made, I'm willing to change my mind, and I don't think that that's stubborn. I think I'm stubborn on The big vision, and I'm very flexible on the details, and that's another Jeff Bezos quote that I particularly like.

AI assessment note: “I agree with the old adage that every strength is also a weakness”

Q I have one final question I could talk to you all day now, but my final question to you is, how do you advise founders who say, I get you, don't raise and be more conservative, but if I don't raise, my competitors will, they'll outspend me, and so I have to raise. How do you advise them in that situation?

A I think that out-raising can be a blessing, and it can be a curse. I do believe that there are some times when there is an opportunity That is truly a once in a lifetime or once in a world history opportunity. That's what I came to believe about Olo's opportunity when we took on the funding from David Frankel. If I don't do this now, someone's going to do it, and this is the one time that it can be done. If I'm off of business school and I come to this years later, I'll be too late. Another form of that is not having the capital to really gobble up all of the demand that's out there at the right time. So I do think that that's legitimate in some cases, that you need to raise the In order to capture all the opportunity and the opportunity and totality that's out there, I think far more often people convince themselves of that. And they convince themselves that, oh, we won't be able to compete if we haven't raised as much as this competitor. And the curse part of raising too much money is you have to spend the money. You have to go and do things. And oftentimes that can breed a huge lack of focus. And that can mean that you're trying to do too many things at once. You're stretched too thin. And nothing that you're doing is really best in class. And you can have a very focused competitor who is doing one thing really well. They're able to win on that one thing and use that one thi…

AI assessment note: “I think that out-raising can be a blessing, and it can be a curse.”

Q Noah, as a leader, you're very much a statesman. You're very much very serene, calm, Almost political leader. Has your leadership style changed over the years? And if so, what have been some big developments in your own personal way that you lead and manage?

A I think one thing, I was listening to a number of episodes of yours. I remember I listened to the Whoop episode. I was really struck by, as a Whoop user, I was really struck by how Will talked about the disassociation between the entrepreneur and the venturer. Or the CEO in the business, or the founder of the business, however you want to say it. I really struggled with that early on in a big way. When I was hearing Will speaking these words about a bad day for the business felt like a bad day for me, a good day for the business felt like a good day for me, I was just nodding my head like I have felt that so deeply. In these whiffio moments, these moments where it feels like you're going to go under as a business, it feels like you are an absolute failure. It feels awful, and you need to be able to Create a little bit of daylight between you and the business. I think I've been able to do that over the years with a lot of outside help and a lot of support from my family, which is my number one support structure, my wife primarily. With that, also understanding that I didn't have to do everything. I didn't have to make every decision. I could bring people into the company who weren't doing it for the first time on instinct, but had experience. I could delegate things to them. The ability to, to delegate, I picked this up from what Aaron said from the box episode, it is so critica…

AI assessment note: “separating yourself from the business and delegating are really closely”

Q Do you not think also with the important things, things today that feel important, in five or 10 years, you'll barely remember them. Now they feel very important today, but that hire for that new head of sales in APAC, it won't be that important in five years' time. So I guess, how do you feel about, like, the gravity of important decisions over time?

A Well, I think that is a good way of thinking about it. I would say that those things that seem really important right now, but won't be over a long time, those are really what I mean by the things that seem urgent. Like, I need to figure this out right now, but is it really going to matter five years, 10 years down the line? I would define that really as the urgent tasks or the urgent things versus the important things. But I think time horizons can be different depending on your role and depending on sort of what you're thinking about in terms of the future and the time scale. I do think thinking clinically about separating those two things. Another thing like this that I think about a lot is separating facts and judgments. From one another. So many times you'll get into a debate with somebody, and they'll be very passionate about something, and you realize that what they are arguing is purely a set of judgments and not really rooted in fact. And being able to say, I think you're judging this differently than I'm judging this. The facts are this. Now let's look at this and think about it fresh from the set of facts, removing the judgment from the conversation. That is another very clarifying framework that I use I love debate and discussion, and I love ultimately changing my mind on things, but I need facts to do that. There's a great Michael Bloomberg quote of, in God we trus…

AI assessment note: “I would define that really as the urgent tasks or the urgent things versus the important things.”

Q Do you not think also with the important things, things today that feel important, in five or 10 years, you'll barely remember them. Now they feel very important today, but that hire for that new head of sales in APAC, it won't be that important in five years' time. So I guess, how do you feel about, like, the gravity of important decisions over time?

A Well, I think that is a good way of thinking about it. I would say that those things that seem really important right now, but won't be over a long time, those are really what I mean by the things that seem urgent. Like, I need to figure this out right now, but is it really going to matter five years, 10 years down the line? I would define that really as the urgent tasks or the urgent things versus the important things. But I think time horizons can be different depending on your role and depending on sort of what you're thinking about in terms of the future and the time scale. I do think thinking clinically about separating those two things. Another thing like this that I think about a lot is separating facts and judgments. From one another. So many times you'll get into a debate with somebody, and they'll be very passionate about something, and you realize that what they are arguing is purely a set of judgments and not really rooted in fact. And being able to say, I think you're judging this differently than I'm judging this. The facts are this. Now let's look at this and think about it fresh from the set of facts, removing the judgment from the conversation. That is another very clarifying framework that I use I love debate and discussion, and I love ultimately changing my mind on things, but I need facts to do that. There's a great Michael Bloomberg quote of, in God we trus…

AI assessment note: “Another thing like this that I think about a lot is separating facts and judgments.”

Q Sorry, is it not harder today, though, for you, because you have this continuous ticker on your company? Well, like, at least in private markets, you don't actually have, like, a live price. Now, you do.

A Yeah, that's true. I guess that's right. I guess I don't put nearly as much weight in that Because it's not something that I am in full control over. There are so many exogenous variables that impact a stock price. There is sort of what's happening in the market, what's happening in the world. I focus on the things that I can control, and I do have a lot more separation today from the business than I did in the earliest days when it just felt so deeply personal, and like, I was strapped to the mast of this thing. I think on other advice, I'm really proud to be In addition to founder and CEO of Olo, a founder partner at Founder Collective, and you've talked to David and sort of know about the philosophy that I know you share, Harry, around being scrappy and not taking on too much capital. I really subscribe to that. I think Olo is really a poster child for it, having a net burn of just six million dollars to get to one hundred and twenty two million in ARR at the time of our IPO. I really think that capital allocation and attention allocation are Intertwined with one another. And it's so hard to do one thing well and to be best in class at that thing. It's nearly impossible to do many things well. That is, by the way, why I eat at Pan-Asian restaurants. I think you can only really be good at one cuisine, not every cuisine in an entire region of the globe. I think that sort of fo…

AI assessment note: “I don't put nearly as much weight in that Because it's not something that I am in full control over.”

Q worrying her with what I say, and then two, being negative to the extent where she feels she can't talk to me about her problems because I've got too many of my own. Do you see what I mean? How do you think about not worrying her too much, one, and then two, not making it difficult for her to open up just because you're going through a difficult time?

A Well, I think that's one of my favorite things about our relationship is that we work in completely different fields almost because of that. Lack of direct experience in one another's fields. When we talk about work, we're almost always speaking from first principles. Reasoning with a beginner's mind, and that's really helpful sometimes. Sometimes you can have so much of your thinking that has been derived from preconceived notions, or things that you think you know, or old assumptions that are no longer valid, and just bringing it to somebody who's from a completely different field, and having them say, okay, take me through this from the elemental pieces, and let's reason through it. Is just fantastic. My wife has been a huge supporter, worked in the business in the earliest years as our initial CMO, when we were really just getting started and had a number of brilliant ideas on the go-to-market strategy, but is a legal historian, and just our joke is, I sort of think about the future, she thinks about the past, and we get to coexist in the present, and that's been a fantastic partnership. Over the years, since literally moving in together, On June first of 2005, that was the day that I incorporated Ola, was the very day that my girlfriend and I moved in together, my now wife, and she has been a partner along the journey with very little expectations. There was no expectation…

AI assessment note: “one of my favorite things about our relationship is that we work in completely different”

Q Sorry, is it not harder today, though, for you, because you have this continuous ticker on your company? Well, like, at least in private markets, you don't actually have, like, a live price. Now, you do.

A Yeah, that's true. I guess that's right. I guess I don't put nearly as much weight in that Because it's not something that I am in full control over. There are so many exogenous variables that impact a stock price. There is sort of what's happening in the market, what's happening in the world. I focus on the things that I can control, and I do have a lot more separation today from the business than I did in the earliest days when it just felt so deeply personal, and like, I was strapped to the mast of this thing. I think on other advice, I'm really proud to be In addition to founder and CEO of Olo, a founder partner at Founder Collective, and you've talked to David and sort of know about the philosophy that I know you share, Harry, around being scrappy and not taking on too much capital. I really subscribe to that. I think Olo is really a poster child for it, having a net burn of just six million dollars to get to one hundred and twenty two million in ARR at the time of our IPO. I really think that capital allocation and attention allocation are Intertwined with one another. And it's so hard to do one thing well and to be best in class at that thing. It's nearly impossible to do many things well. That is, by the way, why I eat at Pan-Asian restaurants. I think you can only really be good at one cuisine, not every cuisine in an entire region of the globe. I think that sort of fo…

AI assessment note: “I don't put nearly as much weight in that Because it's not something”

Q worrying her with what I say, and then two, being negative to the extent where she feels she can't talk to me about her problems because I've got too many of my own. Do you see what I mean? How do you think about not worrying her too much, one, and then two, not making it difficult for her to open up just because you're going through a difficult time?

A Well, I think that's one of my favorite things about our relationship is that we work in completely different fields almost because of that. Lack of direct experience in one another's fields. When we talk about work, we're almost always speaking from first principles. Reasoning with a beginner's mind, and that's really helpful sometimes. Sometimes you can have so much of your thinking that has been derived from preconceived notions, or things that you think you know, or old assumptions that are no longer valid, and just bringing it to somebody who's from a completely different field, and having them say, okay, take me through this from the elemental pieces, and let's reason through it. Is just fantastic. My wife has been a huge supporter, worked in the business in the earliest years as our initial CMO, when we were really just getting started and had a number of brilliant ideas on the go-to-market strategy, but is a legal historian, and just our joke is, I sort of think about the future, she thinks about the past, and we get to coexist in the present, and that's been a fantastic partnership. Over the years, since literally moving in together, On June first of 2005, that was the day that I incorporated Ola, was the very day that my girlfriend and I moved in together, my now wife, and she has been a partner along the journey with very little expectations. There was no expectation…

AI assessment note: “Well, I think that's one of my favorite things about our relationship is that”