Exposing Olo Part 1: Introduction

Olo has been an industry leader insofar as they are one of the very, very few companies to cross $100M in revenues. Because despite representing over a $T in US spend, restaurants spend mere basis points on technology, yielding few companies of scale to influence the market.

Note: if restaurants spent even 1% of their revenues on technology that would be $10B in annual revenues, or enough for 100 companies to make $100M in revenue, but of course there are only 5-8 companies in the US restaurant market that collect > $100M in sales (the variance depends how you define delivery companies like Doordash or Uber Eats).

After going public in 2021, Olo opened itself to public market investors. This brought in new lines of discourse and examination.

And this is precisely how we became involved.

While we generally stay away from following the public markets with any concerted effort, several of Olo’s investors were dogged in their requests that we look more closely at the company.

Our expertise and background were called into demand as sufficiently specific to help these investors sort out what was really happening with Olo.

And as we dug we found a consistent and troubling pattern of behavior.

Some of the behavior is actively under litigation, whether it’s the class action securities claim, or the three derivative cases (Floyd v. Glass, et al., Case No. 1:23-cv-03770 (S.D.N.Y.), Floyd v. Glass, et al., C.A. No. 2023-0560 (Del. Ch.), Balleh v. Glass, et al., C.A. No. 2023-1165 (Del. Ch.), and Giuda v. Glass, et al., C.A. No. 2024-0025 (Del. Ch.)).

But our research has led to a different, upstream culprit that we think all of Olo’s current plaintiffs have entirely missed.

This upcoming series represents the culmination of hundreds of hours of investigative journalism.

We spent time with current and former Olo executives, Olo investors, global private equity practices, potential acquirers of Olo, litigators, and experts on case law.

Our findings point to clear breaches of fiduciary, self-dealing, and alarming behavior from Raine Capital, one of Olo’s early financial backers, that would make any reasonable party wonder how there have been no criminal convictions.

Olo is on the record with the following:

The factual statements and legal conclusions in [Reformingretail’s] post are baseless and misleading. As we have previously disclosed, we have settled the securities class action lawsuit on favorable terms. Your unsupported assertion that there has been criminal activity has no basis in fact and is wrongful.

Olo

We’ll let the evidence speak for itself.