Noah Glass
Founder and CEO, Olo. On 2 shows, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutive@nhglass ↗LinkedIn ↗olo.com ↗
Noah Glass founded Olo (originally GoMobo) in 2005, pioneering mobile and text-message food ordering for restaurants years before modern smartphone apps. He guided the restaurant SaaS platform through rapid scale, took it public on the NYSE in 2021, and oversaw its subsequent take-private transaction with Thoma Bravo.
2shows
2appearances
30statements
10resolved
8supported
0contradicted
80%fully supported
24said about them ↓ Everything Noah Glass said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Glass: Excess venture capital dilutes startup focus and performance
“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 no…”
Noah Glass: Olo has a 100x growth opportunity ahead
“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 cu…”
Frankel offered Glass $500k seed funding to withdraw from HBS
“If you are so committed to this that you are willing to drop out of Harvard Business School, just withdraw your admission, not a deferred admission, you actually have to say you're not gonna go. Like, you're just withdrawing. And you can quit and tell Linda at…”
Glass: Software vendors must sell to restaurant headquarters, not just franchisees
“Enterprise restaurants, you need to go through the proper channels and sell into the enterprise and not just work with individual franchisees or operator groups. Cause it really upsets headquarters, if they haven't vetted the things that.”
Olo hit profitability in 2012 by pivoting from B2C to B2B SaaS
“And we had just gotten to profitability as a company on the basis of being a B to B platform for restaurant groups in the enterprise segment. And I remember at the time I said, we used to spend a 150,000 dollars per month, and we would get 10,000 new guests fr…”
Noah Glass: Put team first, investors last to best serve all stakeholders
“Having your stakeholders in that order ultimately is the way to best serve all of your stakeholders”
Glass pitched NYC restaurants on Shake Shack in 2006, closing in 2014
“I was saying that they were going to be a customer. I really believe that they were truly in my heart. Back in 2006, it took until 2014 for them to become a customer.”
Glass: Olo 2008 Series A Took 50% Dilution On $7M Pre-Money
“It was on a seven million dollar pre-money. There was a 20% option pool. Added post money. So new investors got half. Existing shareholders were squeezed down to 30% with 20% options for future hires. Highly dilutive.”
Glass: Olo reached $121M ARR with $6M lifetime net burn at IPO
“When we went public in March of 20, 21, we were coming right up on a hundred million dollars in revenue for the year 2020. And I'm very proud of this fact. We were, I believe, a hundred and twenty one million dollars of ARR at that point that we went public. O…”
Glass: Fast casual restaurants adopted digital ordering before coffee shops or QSRs
“Like those fast, casual restaurants were ready to do this long before coffee shops or fast food restaurants were ready to do this. So I guess finding product market fit in like a very niche market of early adopters before getting to generalized product market …”
Glass: Enduring difficult point-of-sale integrations built Olo's competitive moat
“If we can endure, if we can outlast our competitors, if we can integrate into systems in the restaurant that Point of sale systems that weren't meant to be integrated into, if we can get through that suck, we'll be in a place that nobody else will be able to s…”
Olo closed its Series A on the day Bear Stearns collapsed
“I mean, one of the things that was really an incredible moment in the company's history was we raised in March of 2008. That was our series a round. I believe on the exact same day, March 17th of 2008, when Bear Stearns collapsed, it felt like it was the last …”
Noah Glass raised a $7M Series A at a $7M valuation
“It was seven on seven. It was a very dilutive round, but we were incredibly grateful that we did that round, that we got the seven million dollars on the balance sheet of the company, and that really became this crucible moment of, can we last to the next stag…”
Glass: Olo's primary core value prioritizes family over work
“We actually, as a company, have always had our first value be family first, and what family first has meant is, if you ever have a conflict, if you ever have a tie between your family and Olo, your family will Wins the tie every single time.”
Glass: Restaurant operators would have requested faster drive-throughs over digital ordering
“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 foo…”
Glass: Changing deep founder conviction requires disconfirming facts, not opposing intuition
“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.”
Glass: Capital allocation and attention allocation are deeply intertwined
“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.”
Under 5% of mobile users had smartphones when Olo launched in 2005
“When we had a commercially viable version of Olo in 2005, when we launched it was sub five percent of mobile users that were using smartphones.”
In 2004, Symbian dominated smartphone hardware while developers used Windows Mobile
“At the time you didn't have iOS and Android.
You had Nokia running the Symbian operating system, and you had Microsoft Windows running Windows Mobile.
And there's this very interesting problem where most of the devices in the world that were smartphones and ha…”
Glass: MOBO built for mobile web before pivoting back to SMS
“So we built MOBO originally for mobile web, and then we built backwards to text message ordering.”
Glass: Danny Meyer invested in Olo and joined board around 2014
“Danny Meyer almost concurrently with Shake Shack becoming a customer, became an investor in Olo and joined our board. So he's been a board member for the past 10 years plus as we've been on this journey with Shake Shack.”
In 2008, Dallas was Olo's only market with LTV greater than CAC
“When we were pouring through the data of like, well, where do we have a scenario where the lifetime value is greater than the customer acquisition cost? We couldn't find it except for Dallas, Texas. Why? Because we weren't spending anything on customer acquisi…”
Glass: Olo had lowest net burn in its IPO cohort
“Meritech Capital did a chart of ARR and net burn. We were the lowest net burn of our class of IPOs, and we were the highest ratio of ARR to net burn.”
The other half of the tape: Noah Glass's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 20 times in 6 episodes across the shows. 4 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most David Frankel 13Harry Stebbings 6Pablo Srugo 1
Statements about Noah Glass, by other people (4)
Frankel: I believed my early investment in Olo was a total loss
“I remember saying to my wife on Olo, this is done. We've lost a lot. This was pre-founder collective saying, we have lost our money. Like, Noah is never going to get there.”
Srugo: Starbucks's Mobile App Launch Was the Catalyst for Olo's Growth
“The event was the day that Starbucks launched an app. Is that when Starbucks launched an app, and they went all out on this kind of pre-ordering, mobile ordering, everyone else was like, oh my god, this is actually happening, it's happening not just for pizza,…”
Srugo: Olo Took Seven Years to Reach $1 Million in ARR
“They took seven years to get to a million in error.”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 19
A Product Market Fit Show 1
2026 6 mentions in 1 episode
2025 3 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
2024 8 mentions in 1 episode
2022 3 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
- 20VC: Biggest Lessons and Challenges Building One of the Most Successful Seed Funds, How To Manage Investor Psychology, Self-Doubt and Insecurity & The Secret to Truly Successful Venture Partnerships with David Frankel, Co-Founder @ Founder Collective
- 20 Sales: Zoom's Head of North America Sales on When To Hire a Head of Sales, Why You Should Hire a Head of Sales Before Sales Reps, The 3 Traits to Look for When Hiring Sales Reps & What Sales Leaders Can Do To Make Their Sales Team Feel Like They Are Wi
- every mention in 2022, scene by scene →
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Noah's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PRODUCT MARKET FITLEDGER | Founder and CEO, Olo | 1 | 18 | 75% 6/8 | full record on A Product Market Fit Show → |
| 20VCLEDGER | Founder and CEO, Olo | 1 | 12 | 100% 2/2 | full record on 20VC → |