Noah Glass: Two Decades of Online Ordering and He’s Still Hungry
Entrepreneur isn’t a job title. It’s a calling. For the best, it’s a way of being that never shuts off. For twenty years, Olo Founder/CEO Noah Glass has proven that true entrepreneurs don’t stop when the road gets hard. More impressively, they don’t let up when it gets easier, either.
Noah started Olo before smartphones. Well before Uber Eats. He had a vision for how we’d order food that would take the industry decades to digest. That’s why, I couldn’t be more excited to cheer him on as he leads Olo into a new era following the $2B acquisition by Thoma Bravo.
Having had the pleasure to work with Noah for two decades, I want to share a few reflections:
It would have been easy for Noah to stop in the first year, when ordering from a T9 phone seemed like a novelty instead of the next big thing.
It would have been easy to stop in the decade that followed, when growth came painfully slowly.
It would have been easy, after ten years of toil, to sell Olo to a customer and start over.
It would have been easy to let a banker organize a sale for hundreds of millions of dollars once he started landing clients like Five Guys, The Cheesecake Factory or Mr Beast Burgers.
It would have been easy to let up as CEO after a few years leading a public company.
But Noah never stopped.
Olo didn’t need to go public. The business was, and is, strong. Noah didn’t need it either. He’s had no shortage of easy outs in his journey: setbacks and endurance tests that would have crushed most founders, and opportunities that would have set him up for life.
For most founders, a major transaction marks the beginning of an exit. For Noah, I think this is just another inflection point in what has truly become his life’s work. Noah has shown that the relentless compounding of effort, relationships, and belief can turn an early hunch and a hunger for success into an industry-defining company.
I was proud to be Noah’s first investor. My day-to-day involvement with Olo ended last week. However, my admiration has not. Over the span of two decades, he’s taught me one of the most profound lessons of my career: true entrepreneurs don’t look for finish lines, they just keep racing towards the next mile marker.
