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HOST: ALICE CHENG
Welcome to Hospitality On The Rise, the podcast about the people shaping the hospitality industry and their journeys. I'm your host, Alice Cheng, founder and CEO of Culinary Agents, hospitality's go-to hiring platform. And I'm here to give you your dose of virtual mentorship.
Here, we'll be sharing the stories, lessons learned, and advice from hospitality leaders who've carved out their own path to success. After all, this industry is where many get their start and go on to do incredible things.
Whether you're a pro, starting out, or just love the hustle, this podcast highlights what makes hospitality extraordinary, the people.
HOST: ALICE CHENG
I'm so excited to have Noah Glass with us today. Noah is the founder and CEO of Olo, a leading provider of digital ordering and delivery solutions for the restaurant industry, Board Director of Portillo's, a fast casual Chicago restaurant chain and widely loved, and Board Director Share Our Strength, nonprofit focused on ending childhood hunger in the United States, and Board Trustee of the Culinary Institute of America, which most of us are very, very familiar with. Welcome, Noah.
GUEST: NOAH GLASS
Thank you, Alice, so great to be here.
HOST: ALICE CHENG
I love it. Right before we got started, we were both saying, like, “We're just gonna wing it and have a conversation.” I basically ran after Noah at a recent CIA event, leadership event, and I was like. “You have to be on this podcast.” And although you're not one of the traditional folks I've been interviewing–like a chef or a general manager or restaurant owner, per se–arguably you have a career path that is not only very interesting, but I think highly inspirational as well as I think people will be really surprised at how much you actually touch people's daily lives and they don't even know it, right? So I'm going to leave that mysterious comment there and then turn it back to you.
GUEST: NOAH GLASS
Okay, let it hang. I like that. I like that.
HOST: ALICE CHENG
We're going with the flow here. Noah, how did it all get started?
GUEST: NOAH GLASS
How did it all get started?
HOST: ALICE CHENG
How did it all get started? I typically start with that because if you're a chef, you're like, “Well, I grew up and I love to eat” and all that stuff. But you have a little different path.
GUEST: NOAH GLASS
Yeah, I do. You know, my love-slash-obsession with food does start from a very young age. So I am the son of a cookbook author. My mom, Peggy K. Glass. I don't know if you knew this about me.
HOST: ALICE CHENG
I didn't know that. I love these. I always find out all these hidden tidbits.
GUEST: NOAH GLASS
Yeah, she was my date to that CIA event a couple years back, and it was really fun to bring her around. But that's really where my love of food began. And maybe because of the fact that she was writing cookbooks and testing recipes out on all of us–which was awesome by the way, especially on, like, chocolate cake recipe weeks–I didn't eat out at restaurants a lot, and it was always kind of a fascination and curiosity of mine what these restaurants were all about. And I did in high school–not my first job; my first job was as a cashier at a convenience store gas station in my hometown of Newton, Massachusetts. But when I got my license, my second job was working as a pizza delivery driver at the age of 17–1998, that summer–in Newton, Massachusetts at a place called Pizza Man.
HOST: ALICE CHENG
Pizza Man.
GUEST: Noah Glass
And it really began my love of the restaurant industry, and specifically the takeout and delivery component of the restaurant industry, that I learned pretty fast and pretty well through that experience over that summer.
HOST: ALICE CHENG
Yeah, and you know, that's a very early… to be thinking about delivery and all that stuff in a different way, it's such an early age. I mean, that's like way before time. I'm going to date both of us, but that's way before time. So that's when your wheel started, gears started moving initially. But did I see correctly that you were initially going to go be a lawyer?
GUEST: NOAH GLASS
Yeah, that's true. I went to college not really knowing what I wanted to do, kind of vaguely thinking that business and entrepreneurship was cool, but how would I possibly start on that path? And my sister, five years older than me, went to law school and was starting law school when I was starting college, and I kind of thought, okay, well she's been my role model, that's what I'm going to do. So I started taking political science courses.
But then I had a life-changing experience the summer between my first year and my sophomore year in college. Through my brother, I got a job at Shutterfly.com. My brother has been the sort of technology whiz kid of our family for as long as I can remember. He's nine years older than me. He was always tinkering with software and hardware and still is. But he was out in Silicon Valley, and it was the summer of 2000. So it was like two summers later after my Pizza Man food delivery experience, pizza delivery experience, and I got to work at Shutterfly, which was, you know, it’s still a cutting edge company today, but at the time really revolutionizing the way that consumers printed digital photos or photos of any kind. That we had digital cameras and you could then get those digital images printed and shipped to you from Shutterfly, and it just blew me away.
It was sort of the time of the summer of 2000, kind of the peak of that first dot com boom, where I just saw that I could be part of a company that was changing an industry and using consumer technology to do so. And a little bit of e-commerce. And just all of the dreams that you have out in Silicon Valley in 2000, imagine that. That's what was hitting me. And then looking at the one person there at the company who was a lawyer, and I think had one of the most interesting jobs that a lawyer can have as a business development person for a fast-growing startup company, and thinking, I don't want to do that. I want to do product management, and I want to build things and test things and have people in my life get to use them and experience them and give me feedback. That seems really fun, and maybe there is a path for me to go and do this in some way instead of law school.
HOST: ALICE CHENG
Yeah, I always say that's such a great example of like, look at the person who has the job that you want and figure out how they got there. Right? Like what skills you need, how do they get there, etc. Because sometimes you think you want something, and then you get a little bit of experience or you see/experience it through someone else's eyes. You're like, oh, that doesn't look so interesting. It goes either way. But great.
So when did you initially have the idea for Olo when you were starting? And by the way, I will preface by saying it's a publicly traded company.
GUEST: NOAH GLASS
That's true.
HOST: ALICE CHENG
So you know, mind you, even though I've known Noah for over a decade, I'm kind of nervous doing this podcast. So we're just going to go with that.
GUEST: NOAH GLASS
It's all good. It's all good.
HOST: ALICE CHENG
But it's not about me. It's about you, Noah.
GUEST: NOAH GLASS
I've been well-trained, no material, non-public information, I promise. I will not disclose anything. Well, so I first had the idea for Olo a couple of years later. So this was maybe three years after my time at Shutterfly, after college, after doing a little bit of consulting work, after knowing that I was gonna be heading to business school in two years and starting to work for a company called Endeavor, which is based here in New York–the global headquarters–but worked all around the world at that time, really only in Latin America, but working with high-growth entrepreneurs in emerging market countries around the world at the time that I joined in 2003.
But working for a nonprofit, I needed to live somewhere affordable in New York City. I wanted to be in Manhattan. I moved down to an apartment with three of my best friends from college on Wall Street. It was a very strange place to live. It may be a much more normal place to live now, 23 years, 22 years later. But it was a very strange place to live then. And I randomly, at the time when I came to New York City, I had a PalmPilot that I was using.
HOST: ALICE CHENG
Oh yeah!
GUEST: NOAH GLASS
And that is a real throwback, and we'll date this. But I was using this thing for keeping my calendar and all that, my contacts, but I was also using this really cool piece of software called Vindigo. And what they'd done with Vindigo was to show you an interactive map of where you were and information called POI–points of interest–that were around you. And they'd done this really cool thing right before I'd moved to downtown Manhattan, they had integrated Zagat reviews into the map. And I was totally blown away and fascinated by this, of this thing that I was carrying around with me in my pocket at all times, where I could walk into a neighborhood and I could read about all the restaurants and the reviews and the Zagat score through Vindigo.
And I had this idea, and I think it really came from my background at Pizza Man doing pizza delivery, a little bit of my time at Shutterfly and product development, but I just had this image of what if I could do more than just look at these points of interest? What if I could actually interact? What if I could transact? What if you could order and pay before you went to one of these places, and the food would be ready for you when you got there and you could “skip the line” past all the other guests who were ordering in the old-fashioned way?
And particularly in my building on Wall Street, there was a Starbucks location. And it was probably the busiest Starb–I mean, every Starbucks in the morning is busy. This was probably the busiest Starbucks in the world because it was everybody who lived there trying to get their coffee and everybody who worked there. There's a ton of people who work in downtown Manhattan. So every morning it was just jammed with people, and this need of “Wouldn't it be better for me if I could order and pay ahead and have the coffee waiting for me?” And from my time working at Pizza Man, wouldn't it be better for the throughput capacity of the operation if they could get these orders without having to hear somebody correctly, enter it correctly, take payment for it, but they could just prepare it, have it off to the side, I could come in and get it, they could move faster. It's a win for the guest and a win for the operation. And that idea was really in 2003, so 22 years ago now.
HOST: ALICE CHENG
Wow.
GUEST: NOAH GLASS
And it sort of sat in the back of my head for a while. I'm very proud that we are recording this podcast episode a couple of days before June 1st of 2025. That is going to be our 20-year anniversary as an actual company.
HOST: ALICE CHENG
Wow.
GUEST: NOAH GLASS
I started the company June 1st of 2005. And I'm also very proud, I got to post something just before I came on about our work at Olo with Starbucks. We do the mobile ordering in store for the Starbucks Reserve Roastery. It's not something that we'd ever talked about before, but I got to talk about it today in connection with our 20-year anniversary that's coming up and how that was the inspiration way back in 2003, and today we get to do some work with Starbucks, and I'm super proud that it's come full circle in that way.
HOST: ALICE CHENG
That is so incredible. I'm going to give a moment here for that because there's a lot of parallels that can be drawn between a startup company, whether it's a tech startup or whatever, and a restaurant or a small business. The failure rate is super high. It's really competitive. It can be very confusing if you're a first time founder or first time owner, you may not know what you don't know. And things are constantly changing. And so to have a 20-year anniversary is no small feat in any capacity. So congratulations on that.
GUEST: NOAH GLASS
Thank you. Thank you.
HOST: ALICE CHENG
That is definitely something that–we're in our 13th year. So I'm a couple years behind you.
GUEST: NOAH GLASS
Okay, we're both still teens, you know? You won't be able to relate to me next week, I'm gonna be in my 20s. I'm gonna be a little bit older, but you know, this is our last podcast episode ever where we are both teens. I'm on the upper end, you’re on the lower end.
HOST: ALICE CHENG
I feel so honored. So you know, it's so significant what you're talking about here because you've really impacted and changed how things are business as usual these days, as far as, like, people don't even think about it, right? And I guess technology–that’s the great thing about technology, you don't want people to have to think about it, you want it just to work and do all the magic behind the scenes. But we'll give credit where credit's due. The efficiency, you getting your coffee or your hot dog or whatever in a more efficient way without having to disturb your commute, if you will. All great things. So you're in Olo, obviously, doing that for 20 years. So many different things happening throughout that, including an IPO somewhere along the lines. Can you share some of, you know… Let's take me back to the early days. Take me back to the early days and how you had the idea and you're like, “I'm going to do this.” But you're not actually working in the restaurant space, and you gotta figure out how to build this and then sell it to the industry. How was that like?
GUEST: NOAH GLASS
Yeah. Yeah, well, so the idea was originally 2003, and I said it sort of sat in my head for a bit of time. I was working at Endeavor. I got sort of stationed in Johannesburg, South Africa to go and launch our office there. And that turned out to be a really, really important part of the Olo story for multiple reasons. The first of which was I had this idea, it was kicking around in the back of my head, and I met engineers that actually knew how to take that idea and build it into an MVP, a minimum viable product version of the idea that people could actually play with and see.
At the time–2004 is when this was happening–smart phones were not smart, and the smartest phones at the time were sort of like Windows Mobile or Nokia Symbian devices. But in Johannesburg, like in a lot of emerging markets, people got those devices before there was kind of widespread dial up internet access. So we all got AOL–America Online–there, the first sort of internet was really the mobile internet. So it was a little bit of glimpsing the future of what the technology was going to look like.
And we built this very rudimentary–I mean by today's standards, pathetic–demo, but being able to build a coffee and specify what kind of milk you wanted, how much sugar you wanted, etc., etc., and then hit submit. And then we had a little application running on a laptop that would poll every 15 seconds asking if there were new orders for it. And if you just placed an order in that 15 second interval, it would pull your order in, and it would display that on the screen. That's all. That's all it was.
HOST: ALICE CHENG
Wow.
GUEST: NOAH GLASS
But it was enough to show this idea to investors or to ask people's advice. And oftentimes in the early days of pitching, that's kind of what it is. You're asking for advice and hoping they say, “I like this so much. I like you so much. I want to put money into it.” I happened to work with an incredible entrepreneur-turned-seed-investor right around the time that this was happening, 2004. A guy named David Frankel, who started Internet Solutions, the largest ISP in South Africa who really championed Endeavor coming to South Africa. He'd heard about Endeavor as a business school student at Harvard Business School, heard about its success in Latin America, and really championed this model could work in Johannesburg. So a founding board member of Endeavor in South Africa, I got to be very close with him through that. And he was one of the first people that I said, “Hey, look at this prototype I'm kind of thinking about. Maybe I'll pursue this instead of heading off to Harvard Business School.”
And took a little bit of conversation, but at some point David said, “Look, if you're willing to quit your job at Endeavor, and if you're willing to tell Harvard Business School you are not coming–I'm not talking about a deferral, I'm talking about a withdrawal. If you're willing to do that, I will give you half a million dollars to get this thing started. I believe in you. I believe that if you make this the only path forward, if you burn the boats, you're going to make it work. You seem like a gritty person based on everything I've seen over this past year at Endeavor South Africa. And making it work, I will back you.”
And I just knew it was the right time in my life, and it was the right time in the technology adoption curve. Right before people I thought were about to adopt smartphones en masse that we could get in at the ground floor, develop this technology and start to really build a valuable company. So that was the very beginning.
But to your point, when I moved back to New York to pursue this, only 5% of mobile phone users had smartphones. And so at the time, we had to figure out how can we make this usable by every mobile phone user. And that led us to kind of move backwards with the technology to do text message-based ordering. So that was a very clunky and labor-intensive way of creating an account and placing an order. But it seemed to work, and people seemed to really like it and use it on a repeat basis. And we thought, we've got something here. And sure enough, that early connection with guests and with some restaurants around New York City led to great things. It led to the most memorable thing a year later from our launch, being on Good Morning America and demonstrating the ability to text message your order and get your coffee faster or your sandwich faster. And that piece was viewed by six million people and was a really exciting moment in the company because we were only six people at the time.
HOST: ALICE CHENG
Yeah, wow. I hope you have that clip and it's going to be released somewhere.
GUEST: NOAH GLASS
I do, I do. Yeah.
HOST: ALICE CHENG
20th anniversary, release the clips. That is incredible. And I think the other piece, which I can relate to, because that was about the time–like early 2000s is when I transferred out to Silicon Valley with IBM with my previous life. And I remember all the technological changes at the time. And it was so interesting because countries, other countries–China, in Africa, etc.–they weren't held back by the land, the infrastructure of telecommunications. So they could just start building from basically the future, like you said. So that was so interesting to see, like you basically went back to the future kind of like…
GUEST: NOAH GLASS
Yeah, that's right. The leapfrog effect is what I've heard it called, but it was very real. And like I got to glimpse smartphones before we really had smartphones. We had that PalmPilot-like device and maybe some Blackberry-like devices, but most people at the time had the Motorola Razr flip phone. That was the banger of a phone at the time.
HOST: ALICE CHENG
Incredible. Well, thank you for sharing this. I always think those stories are so inspirational because it's wonderful to celebrate when you IPO and 20 years and all this stuff. But you think back of how things started, the thought process behind it, and then all the grind and the grit that had to go into building it early days…
GUEST: NOAH GLASS
Yes. Yep.
HOST: ALICE CHENG
…adjusting, sometimes taking three steps back, you know, to leap forward or whatever. I don't have better technical terms than that. But as you're building this company, can you share some of the… I would say what were some of your earlier challenges when you're going from six people to 20– I mean, you have hundreds of people. I'm sure there's a lot. You’re laughing. I'm sure there's many stories. Let's pick one.
GUEST: NOAH GLASS
Yeah, we could do a whole episode on just ridiculous stories of things that actually happened that we lived through. I mean, the biggest thing, Alice, is like no restaurants really had internet then. So it was like, I talk all the time about the consumer smartphone adoption curve, but we were also running Cat 5 cables up from the basement of a subway location to get to a laptop. And then we were making that laptop magically work with a receipt printer and all sorts of nonsense like that just to have basically a place to send orders to that would pull our servers every 15 seconds and say, “Is there a new order for me?” So it was like very primitive times. I mean, now we take that for granted. Restaurants, of course, they have internet, and it's high speed, and it doesn't go down.
This was very, very primitive on the restaurant technology side and on the consumer technology side. And it took, I mean, to your point, it took us from really launching in 2005 until 2013 to really get to that mythical product-market fit moment. And I remember we stayed so lean and so scrappy. We were a 12-person company for those first eight years, just managing our burn, like we were never going to raise another funding round, and getting to profitability. And we were so, so proud of that at the end of 2012. And then realizing, “Oh my God, the market has arrived.”
In that time, iPhone has been announced and become commercially available, and people are adopting it. And Android has followed suit, and that's catching fire. Services like Uber have come around, and now consumers understand this isn't just a communications device. This is this commerce device that's like a remote control for buying things around me. And as part of that, restaurants came to see that, okay if Uber's a thing, maybe something Uber-like will be a thing inside of my restaurant. And that crazy kid who called me years ago and was talking about mobile ordering wasn't so crazy after all. I better call him back.
But I think the biggest things were: 2013, there were a couple of industry data points. Domino's, Pizza Hut, Papa John's all surpassed 50% of their orders coming through digital channels. That was a major thing where digital became the majority at those early pizza brands. Of course, mainly for online ordering for pizza delivery, less the mobile ordering for takeout use case. But still, digital ordering became the majority of pizza. And then Starbucks launched the Starbucks mobile app. And I think those two things in tandem meant this isn't just for pizza, it's for everybody. And it's ultimately going to get to be the majority of your business running through digital channels.
And most brands of course don't have the resources that Pizza Hut, Domino's, Papa John's or Starbucks have. And they need a software as a service provider, which is the model that Olo was in at that point. But with the 12-person company. And I remember saying to David, who is my initial seed investor, had since moved to the US. We fought so hard to get to profitability and we're here and it's great, but we have reached this product-market fit moment, and if we don't scale up now, it will all be for nothing. The demand is here, and we cannot supply it as a 12-person company.
So that led to the next big chapter, hiring number 13, Matt Tucker, our first COO in the company.
HOST: ALICE CHENG
Matt!
GUEST: NOAH GLASS
Who I know through RRE, our common investor, and going over the next eight years from 2013 to when we IPO'd in 2021, from 12 people up to 600 people...
HOST: ALICE CHENG
That is wild.
GUEST: NOAH GLASS
… and just radical business as we went over those next eight years.
HOST: ALICE CHENG
That is wild. I mean, talk about having the early vision and having the conviction to stick with that. Right? I mean, how many opportunities did you have where you could have been like, “All right, this was a good run. It's time to do something else.” You know, I feel like I'm drawing some personal parallels here, but I feel like part of the challenge in the beginning–because you saw the future, right–you just have to survive long enough until everyone else caught up with you, right?
GUEST: NOAH GLASS
Yeah, yeah. You know, one of the early mentors to me who I talked to–by the way, I got to meet Jason Devitt, who is the founder of Vindigo, and that was a huge source of inspiration. He gave me great advice. It wasn't him, but another early mentor said, “Just don't die. Just find a way to survive, and then something will go right.”
I'd like to think that we did some more good things than just survival over that time, but certainly the survival over those eight years so that we had gained credibility and were a known entity and were there for when product-market fit happened for the industry and on-demand ordering. That was critical. Without that, we couldn't have done any of what we've done since.
HOST: ALICE CHENG
Yeah, I mean, timing is really a thing. It's really a thing. Well.
GUEST: NOAH GLASS
Yeah. Yeah, and you can argue like, were we eight years too early? I don't think so. If we'd started right when that product-market fit moment happened, we wouldn't have had the credibility that we gained over that time. It was at that point sort of an obvious idea, but it hadn't been an obvious idea. And the idea that I'd seen this so early, I think has given us some credibility in the industry where people think, “Okay, they can kind of see around corners and understand what's coming.” And now if there's some new product that Olo is talking about, I have a greater level of confidence that they're not crazy people.
HOST: ALICE CHENG
Right. Also when it's like finally they realize they need you and pick up the phone and call you, and your phone is disconnected, then you missed out.
GUEST: NOAH GLASS
Yeah, that's right.
HOST: ALICE CHENG
I love it. This pod is very relevant to not just hospitality folks, by the way. And I love that because you're in the industry, and we talk about adjacent industries all the time. We talk about different ways people can progress in their career inside and outside of restaurants, hotels, and foodservice. This is a great example. Now, the question is, does Pizza Man still exist, and did you ever tell them the story?
GUEST: NOAH GLASS
Not only does Pizza Man still exist–that individual Pizza Man location does not exist, it's now a falafel shop. My parents still live in Newton, Massachusetts. I went and visited them. We drove by, down memory lane, literally, and it is now a falafel shop. But Pizza Man the franchise does still exist. And I learned this because one of my sales reps got really excited and said, “You know how you have that Pizza Man image on your Twitter profile and your LinkedIn profile? I think that's the people that I'm talking to right now about coming onto the Olo platform.” And sure enough, I sent a note to the now-CEO of Pizza Man, the franchise, and he was really excited and said, “That is our old branding. You used to work at Pizza Man?” So I believe that they still exist and that too is a full circle moment that they are on the Olo platform now.
HOST: ALICE CHENG
Awesome. I would expect so. I was gonna– that was my next question. Like, are they customers? I mean, please.
GUEST: NOAH GLASS
Yeah. As my mom taught me well, there's always a local angle, and that was an easy local angle for me because it was literally my first job in the industry at the age of 17. So it was just a layup, but I'm real thrilled they're coming on to the Olo platform.
HOST: ALICE CHENG
I love it, I love it. You know, I'd be remiss if I didn't touch upon all of the wonderful things that you personally and your company does to support a lot of different causes. Can you share a little bit about when you got to a point where you're like, “OK, let's set up structures to give back in a different way”? I love–I'm not going to rattle off all of them because there's so many, but I'll let you pick a couple to talk about.
GUEST: NOAH GLASS
Yeah, I mean, so we joined–in the run up to becoming a public company, we've always been a team that loves this industry and loves causes that are related to this industry. And there are a bunch, and I could go on and on about that, but we joined a movement called Pledge 1%. And really huge credit goes to Marc Benioff and the Salesforce team when they went public, and that's very much been an inspirational company for us to aspire to be like. They started this Pledge 1% movement. And what that means is as a company going public, you pledge 1% of your equity, 1% of your team's time, and 1% of your product for charitable causes.
And so it's enabled us, with the equity value that we have, to donate a lot of funds. It's enabled us to spend a lot of time with organizations that we care about. And it's also enabled us–and this is the thing that is actually I think the most exciting–to use our product in ways and spend time developing our product in ways that further the cause of a lot of the things that we care about.
And the best example of this is the work that we do with No Kid Hungry. And I've been proud to be a board member at No Kid Hungry, which the parent company is Share Our Strength, the mission that our industry knows is No Kid Hungry, and the name says it all. It's about ending childhood hunger in America. But we've been able to work with our restaurants to raise funds, and one of the most exciting things that we've recently done as part of our Olo For Good commitment, which is part of Pledge 1%, is to devote product resources to rounding up one's bill to the next dollar. And it sounds like a really small thing, but it actually has driven a huge impact.
So what we did was we did an A/B test, which is a typical thing, as you know well, in product. We had a round up feature that was just round up by a dollar or round up by five dollars. And then we had the B test [which] was, or round up to the nearest dollar. What we found was that the round up to the nearest dollar–obviously the dollar amounts were smaller because they're smaller than a dollar and they're obviously way smaller than $5–but we raised about 30% more overall, and we had four times the number of guests electing to round up and learn more about No Kid Hungry.
So if you think about it as sort of a foot in the door to activate that person in the fight against childhood hunger, that was super effective. Four times more so than the other version. And we've since really productized that and offered it up to all of our customers, our 750 brands. You can use it for No Kid Hungry. You can use it for another cause that you care about. But that round up feature comes out of that product work that our team devoted their time to because they care about the causes that Olo cares about and being part of the Olo For Good initiative.
HOST: ALICE CHENG
I love it. Perfect example of doing something with the right, you know, for good and then that being an obvious solution to other people wanting to do the same. So thanks. And of course, No Kid Hungry, there's so many chefs and restaurateurs that participate in that as well. And it's a very widely loved organization and participated heavily by the industry. So love connecting those dots as well. But I think we're ready for quick-fire.
GUEST: NOAH GLASS
Ready for it.
HOST: ALICE CHENG
What advice would you tell your younger self?
GUEST: NOAH GLASS
I have a great road sign. My wife bought it for me as a really sweet birthday gift, and it says, “Do not stop.” And that advice has served me well. It comes from, I think we were driving over the Henry Hudson Bridge coming back into New York City one day, right? When they had installed electronic tolls, they just had these signs that said “Do not stop.” She didn't steal one of those.
HOST: ALICE CHENG
I was gonna say, just got an image.
GUEST: NOAH GLASS
She had one made for me, but “do not stop.” Or in more familiar Olo parlance, there's a great song, I'm sure everybody's heard it, by Journey called Don't Stop Believing. And that has been in the darkest, hardest times when we've needed to pull on our resilience and grit and determination, the song that we all love to sing together to carry on the fight and don't stop believing.
HOST: ALICE CHENG
What's your advice for someone struggling in the industry?
GUEST: NOAH GLASS
You know, I read this awesome book recommended by a friend somewhat recently, and the book is called Solve for Happy, and it's written by a really smart Google employee. I want to say he runs Google X, which is, I think, their think tank-like entity. And he had this terrible tragedy in his life–and I won't go into it because it'll make people sad, and it's worth reading the book to hear all about it. But his challenge to himself was “how do I solve for happy despite this awful thing that's just happened?” And it's really sort of a study in equanimity, which is sort of keeping a level playing field, not letting the highs get too high, not letting the lows get too low, but just staying steady and staying curious.
And ultimately one of the exercises that he trains himself to do is… There's two parts. There's looking back, and there's looking down, and looking back is like looking at where you've come from and being kind of proud of the road that you've traveled. Looking down is just realizing, you know, instead we spend so much of our time looking up to other people and feeling like “I'm not there yet and I need to keep climbing.” But taking a moment to look down and to think of how lucky you are to be in the position that you're in is I think always the best solve for having a bad day or things could have gone better or I have this issue that's unresolved. Just kind of look down and realize what a privilege it is to be where you are. And looking back is similar, like a very humbling and grounding exercise.
HOST: ALICE CHENG
What's your advice for fellow hospitality leaders?
GUEST: NOAH GLASS
Fellow hospitality leaders, I mean, I could go on and on about how much I've come to love, love, love this industry and what it is that we do. I feel this these days every time I crack open the newspaper or, you know, on my phone, scroll through, doom scroll through the headlines. The world can be like a really dark and unfriendly and cruel place, but our industry is the light. Our industry is the place where millions of times, billions of times a day, we get to care for people and make them happy and do things for them that make them feel special and seen and part of a community. And I think, like all things, you can get habituated. Like our office is an awesome space. It's on the 82nd floor of One World Trade Center. And I was describing it to somebody this morning, and I said, “You know, we're up 1,100 feet and it's incredible.” But when you work there every day, it kind of becomes old hat. You forget how incredible it is until you bring somebody there for the first time and they're like, “Oh my God, look at this. I can see New Jersey. I can see Brooklyn.”
And I think just remembering that we get to work in this amazing industry that is the antidote for all of the bad things in the world and makes people feel cared for and shares a root in the word hospitality and the word hospital. Like that root of care is such an incredible thing to devote your time and your talent and your life to, and that makes me feel lucky every day. And I feel like you can get habituated to it, you can lose it working in the industry every day, but stopping and remembering it is always a special thing.
HOST: ALICE CHENG
I love it. I always say that the industry sometimes needs a PR agent or a boost because oftentimes the focus is on the negative, whether it's for clickbait or just whatever. And you can forget about it because you get consumed by all the negative everything. So I love it. I mean, that's like the PR clip right there. I agree 100 percent.
GUEST: NOAH GLASS
Nice.
HOST: ALICE CHENG
Well, on that note, thank you so much for taking time from your busy day. It's so nice to see you, and thank you for sharing your advice and your journey with us.
GUEST: NOAH GLASS
Alice, thank you for all that you and the Culinary Agents team do to drive our industry forward, and congratulations to you on 13 years. That is an awesome milestone.
HOST: ALICE CHENG
Thank you. Cheers to your 20.
GUEST: NOAH GLASS
Okay, thank you, thank you.
HOST: ALICE CHENG
Remember, success looks different for everyone in hospitality. No two paths are the same. If you have a leader or a topic you want to hear about, email [email protected].
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