Purpose

• The purpose of this How I Work document is to help you. I want to help you succeed by giving you a head start on the experience of working with me.
• The goal is to build a working relationship where we align very closely, and trust each other so that the work falls into a smooth groove or flow.
• Be warned that this document is long! Ordinarily, I like brief and efficient documents, but in this situation, I think the positives of a lengthy, detailed document outweigh the negatives.
  • If this document works as intended, it can shave weeks if not monhfkfths off of the process of learning how to operate with one another.
  • While it may take you an hour or more to read through and digest this document, I feel that is a worthwhile investment if it allows you to skip weeks and weeks of the “getting to know you” phase of our working relationship.
• I hope you will think of this document like the legend on a map, as a way to understand me on a level deeper than I would ever have time to share with you in a face to face meeting.
  • To create this document, I put in hours of effort to lay out information on my habits, preferences and motivations that someone who will engage with me on a professional level needs to understand.
  • You could watch hours of me being interviewed on these topics, and you still would never glean 5% of the insight that you can learn from this document, because I’ve worked hard to boil everything down to the essential information.
  • As Rod told Jerry in Jerry Maguire, “these are the ABCs of Me.” There is information here about my family and upbringing that I might share with someone after working together for three years, but you get it right up front in these pages.
• Like the legend on a map, this is a guide - it is not meant to be prescriptive.
  • I certainly don’t expect you to mimic my behaviors, or to take on my likes and dislikes.
  • The purpose of this information is to give you as much information as possible on how we can have the best working relationship, and how we can accomplish the most together.
  • I believe in transparency and vulnerability, and I hope you see in this document that I’m trying to be open, and talk about my weaknesses, along with some past experiences that didn’t go so well.

My Values

• My Values Align Strongly with Olo's Values
  • If you understand and live by Olo's Values, then working with me will be more productive and more enjoyable for both of us.
  • We are a value-driven organization. We have put great focus into defining our values.
    • Of course everyone here doesn't do everything 100% in line with our values - it is a constant effort, and it falls to me and my executive team to consistently fortify those efforts throughout the organization.
    • One of the most important jobs that leaders at Olo have is to help make these values come alive and be lived throughout the entire organization. I hope you'll be excited to help me in this effort.
  • I believe that values describe both who we are and who we want to be, and that values are meaningless unless they inform all of our actions and decision making.
    • Before you read further in this document, read Olo's Values Document , because I align very strongly with the company values.
  • In addition, I give you permission to hold me accountable for aligning my behavior with these values and ask you to bring it to my attention if I fail to do so, as soon as you realize that I am not following our shared values.
    • If you notify me immediately, that gives me the best chance to modify my behavior to align with our values.
    • I may agree or disagree with you on my alignment with our values, but I pledge that I will not hold it against you if you bring these matters to my attention.
• Core Company Value - Our Families Come First (and Olo is our Extended Family)

  • There is one thing that matters more to me than Olo, and that is my family.

    • If there is ever a conflict between Olo and Family, Family is going to win out.
    • Our policies on parental leave and bereavement leave are based on this idea.

  • I want that for everybody at the company - to have the time, space and permission to make that choice if it resonates with them.

    • If you have a situation involving your family, I want you to be able to carve out space to deal with it.

      <aside> <img src="https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/42a67bc6-09dd-495b-b372-592e00c59c61/Olo_logo.jpeg" alt="https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/42a67bc6-09dd-495b-b372-592e00c59c61/Olo_logo.jpeg" width="40px" /> For example, from 5 pm until 7:30 pm, I take time to cook dinner with my son and want that time to be untouched by other worldly considerations - I don't want to receive text messages during that time unless there is something truly urgent that must be addressed immediately. I invite you to do something similar - figure out what you need to give your family the attention it needs, so that Olo doesn't get in the way, and we will respect and support that decision.

      </aside>

  • I also want the team to feel that Olo is like a second family - that Olo comes second to our own family in our stack of priorities. This is not just something we say - I want to work hard to make it come true.

    • Work is more enjoyable when you have deeper connections with your team members - it introduces a lightness that makes work more fun and more meaningful.
    • I believe that a team working together as a "family" enjoys their work more, and performs better.
    • I want OIo to be a long term career option, and the more everyone feels connected to one another, and supported by their work "family," the more likely team members are to stay for the long haul.
• Core Company Value - Drive

  • We have a ground ball mentality.

    • In Lacrosse, drive is exemplified by the ground ball - two players with equal access to the ball strive to scoop up the ball for their team. Unlike a jump ball in basketball, the taller person or the person with the better vertical leap has no additional advantage. Instead, the ground ball is won by the player who is the most creative while exerting themselves fully to snag the ball for their team.
    • The team that gains possession of the most ground balls nearly always wins the game.
    • A ground ball mentality means having the will to do whatever it takes to gain the advantage in a competitive situation where you're matched up against a very close competitor.
      • Sometimes, "doing whatever it takes" is intimidating, or even painful, but we step up and do it when it means getting the right results for our team.

  • Drive is not just about maximum effort, it's about smart, creative, thoughtful maximum effort.

  • I appreciate the people at Olo with the ground ball mentality to put in the hard work necessary to win, but also the drive to pause and look for creative ways to focus that hard work to maximize the odds of winning.

    <aside> <img src="https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/e10abb7b-e3f8-497f-9c85-c5d89bc48a55/Olo_logo.jpeg" alt="https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/e10abb7b-e3f8-497f-9c85-c5d89bc48a55/Olo_logo.jpeg" width="40px" /> For example, as a Lacrosse player, I developed a strategy to tie up the other person as we're both reaching for the ball with our sticks, then kick the ball with my foot so that it moved somewhere I could predict and they couldn't - this was an uncommon strategy in lacrosse, but it allowed me to win ground balls even against a player with the same skill and physical strength as me. At Olo, we've done the same thing - Andrew, our founding CTO, developed a thesis that we could create an executable app that we could connect to customer's point of sale systems to enable internet orders. This approach required painstaking, difficult work to architect, and more effort to convince anyone that it was secure, but our team "embraced the suck" and performed this work over and over until we were able to reliably plug all of the legacy point of sale systems into Olo. By working with drive, we were able to knock down the walls maintained by the existing point of sale players, and establish Olo as the largest enterprise platform in the industry.

    </aside>

  • I value drive and judgment as much or perhaps even more than experience.

    • Experience is a fantastic teacher, and I absolutely value experience; however, Olo was built by drive.
    • I believe in empowering people with drive and judgment over those with direct experience.

Core Company Value - Excelsior

• Excelsior is the New York state motto, meaning “ever upward” in Latin.
• We are constantly striving for self and company improvement at all levels. We do not get comfortable. We do not stop.
• This manifests in a greater desire to improve our community and our world, not just our financials.
• The spirit of continuous improvement is present in everything we do.
  • We want to get a little bit better every day.
  • We refine our processes to make them better.
  • We reevaluate old assumptions to take new information into consideration.
  • We obsess over good design - we want everything we build to not only be beautiful on the surface, but beautiful behind the surface, put together carefully and elegantly.
• This value of moving ever upward has been a part of my life as long as I can remember.

  • I am the youngest of three children, with brilliant siblings five and nine years older than me. In our family, we had a dinner ritual where we would watch the evening news as my mom prepared dinner, and then sit around the table talking about our day and having discussions about what we saw on the news.

  • In these discussions, I had to play up to the level of my much older siblings. One way I learned to "punch above my weight" was to emulate the way my sister spoke and constructed narratives and arguments.

  • By adapting her style to the points I wanted to make, I was able to participate as an equal in the "adult" discussions even though I was very young. Since that time, I have looked for ways to better myself on a daily basis, and continue to look for ways to punch above my weight.

    <aside> <img src="https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/dae13da4-8849-474b-8e9a-88bed379b647/Olo_logo.jpeg" alt="https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/dae13da4-8849-474b-8e9a-88bed379b647/Olo_logo.jpeg" width="40px" /> For example, our team has compiled all of the information we need to present for our earnings calls, but I don't just want to get through the calls, I want to knock them out of the park.

    • In the weeks leading up to the earnings calls, I changed my routine so that instead of listening to audio books while exercising, I listened to recordings of some of the best CEOs in business telling their stories and answering questions from research analysts.
    • As I listen, I analyze everything about their presentation.
      • Do they sound defensive when answering certain questions?
      • How could they have framed their answer in a better way?
    • By taking extra time to learn from the very best, I make steady progress towards my goal of performing on a level with the best in the business in our earnings calls.
    • To me, this is the meaning of Excelsior. </aside>

  • Another approach I take to ensure that I am constantly improving is to track my performance across a wide swath of activities.

    • I currently use Noom to track my health metrics.
    • I collect data about my performance is numerous activities related to my work as CEO.
    • The data helps keep me accountable to my goal of constant improvement.
    • This data also provides insights and opportunities to incrementally improve my performance in all of these areas.
    • I believe that performance data is an important tool to drive improvement.
• Excelsior isn't just about making improvements to existing processes - the concept has a fundamental impact on developing our operating principles.
  • Our operating principles need to fit together logically, and the structure that we build impacts our performance.
  • For example, at one point we had sold our product to several restaurant brands, but struggled to get them live.
    • We went into excelsior mode, and analyzed the problem.
      • What we learned is that we had built a system that contained conflicting incentives - our customer success team was charged with both launching new customers and serving existing customers.
      • By structuring the customer success team to serve two agendas, we had created a situation where their incentive to keep existing customers happy was stronger than their incentive to effectively launch new customers.
      • As a result, 95% of the resources were going towards serving existing customers, and our new customers were not being served at the level we expect.
    • To correct these competing incentives, we split the team into two sections: deployment, who effectively formed the last stage of the sales funnel by launching new customers, and the customer service team, who exist only to serve existing customers.
    • By reevaluating old assumptions, and focusing on providing the best experience at every stage of the process, we were able to restructure our approach to result in smoother launches and more effective customer service. ****
• Core Company Principle - Working Backwards
• Core Company Principle - Enlightened Hospitality

My Style

• Humility
• Servant leadership
• Thoughtful, Unrushed Decision Making
• Analogical Reasoning
• Customer Feedback for Problems, not Solutions
• Magic Thesis Statements