Noah Glass: Second Party Ordering and the Fight to Get Profit Back to Restaurants

In this episode of the Restaurant AI Podcast, host Matt Wampler, Co-Founder and CEO of ClearCOGS, sits down with Noah Glass, Founder and CEO of Olo. Noah invented restaurant online ordering in 2005, before the iPhone existed, survived eight wilderness years at twelve employees, scaled revenue 50x after product market fit, took Olo public in 2021, and took it private again in 2025 in a two billion dollar deal. Now he's picking a fight with the economics that drain restaurant profits. Matt and Noah get into why marketplace customers are rented transactions, the daily deals lesson the industry keeps forgetting, the second party ordering model launching later this year with zero commission and full guest data for restaurants, what agentic ordering actually looks like, and the one thing Noah says you can never outsource: the human touch. Whether you're an operator wrestling with third party economics, a founder in your own wilderness years, or a technology leader watching AI reshape ordering, this one delivers the long view from the person who started it all. Connect with Noah Glass on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nhglass Learn more about Olo: https://www.olo.com Connect with Matt Wampler on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewjwampler Learn more about ClearCOGS: https://www.clearcogs.com