YouSaid · the spoken record

Aman Narang

lines on the record: 82
first: 2024-08-21
most recent: 2024-08-21
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Like a big area where we have a lot of potential over time that's underappreciated. You think of like McDonald's, right? And what they do for their franchisees is not just about providing tech. It's about helping them think through what to put on menus. It's about helping them think through how to get the best pricing on their delivery. It's about helping them get marketing and brand. And so we think in some ways I like that bottle about how do we provide our small business restaurants the ability to leverage the data and the expertise to run a better business. And so that's an area that I think we're also thinking about over the next decade.”
2024-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Five Lessons Scaling Toast to $14BN Market Cap | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make in Fundraising, Hiring and Selling with Aman Narang, CEO @ Toast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not as much because if you think about it, we went and studied some previous recessions, and what you see is restaurants are largely very resilient. People love to go out to eat. And so, yes, there may be some shifting in terms of shifting from FSRs to QSRs, or they might be a little bit of shifting, but it's not dramatic. One of the things that's great about Toast is the value proposition is about efficiency. It's about how do you do more with less. It's how do you turn the tables faster? How do you drive incremental demand through online ordering channels? That's cheaper. The value proposition in some ways is actually stronger when things are more challenging. In fact, one of the things the longer term that we don't talk enough about is the data is you get to, you know, today we've got 100 million plus guests that dina toast restaurants. We've got millions of employees working at Toast Restaurants. You've got hundreds and thousands of suppliers in the Toast platform that interact through our supplier and accounting product. And so the ability to leverage that data to create value for restaurants, I think, is”
2024-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Five Lessons Scaling Toast to $14BN Market Cap | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make in Fundraising, Hiring and Selling with Aman Narang, CEO @ Toast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Complexity, they have lots of employees, they have lots of revenue. And so the sales model, the service model, and the complexity and depth of product really applies. And so that's a growth opportunity for us. And then I think over time, you think about upmarket enterprise international, we've got to just be thoughtful about how many markets we can do without falling over. So I think it's all about how do you do it thoughtfully across all of these growth vectors and how do you sequence it over the next decade versus the next year or two?”
2024-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Five Lessons Scaling Toast to $14BN Market Cap | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make in Fundraising, Hiring and Selling with Aman Narang, CEO @ Toast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think I talk about a few things when I talk about the longer-term strategy of Toast. One, we've got 13 or 14% share in the U.S. and restaurants. We've got a scale and be one of the leading providers in this space. That's priority number one as we've built out this anchor solution to power restaurants, we have the ability to create a lot of value by having a broader platform. And so doing more for restaurants over time to support the broader ecosystem, more of the stakeholders is an opportunity where we believe we have a right to win and create value for restaurants. Then the platform we've built, you think about all the complexity of hardware and software and network applies to a lot of brick and mortar verticals, not just restaurants. And so the same deep approach that we took to say we're going to solve for the needs of restaurants, we've got to do it gradually one by one in other subvertical stores. So we started with food and beverage retail with grocery, convenience stores and gas stations. And what you see is in bottle shops, what you see in these subcategories is these are also businesses that have”
2024-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Five Lessons Scaling Toast to $14BN Market Cap | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make in Fundraising, Hiring and Selling with Aman Narang, CEO @ Toast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the biggest thing that we're going to see is helping restaurants leverage data to be smarter. Like you think of restaurants today, most restaurants do not have any data or perspective on how to do some very basic things. Like how do you price a menu? What do you put on a menu? What's inflation doing? How am I doing relative to my competitors? And so one of the most fundamental things that AI can do is helping the average restaurant tour be smarter about some very basic things in their business. You know, most restaurants don't optimize yield. They don't know how do you maximize the right guests in the tables. You think an airline or you think a hotel, they're optimizing yield all the time. Restaurants don't have no ability to do that. That's one opportunity. I think the other opportunity is invoice. Imagine like on a drive-thru or you go order the table. Imagine the advice and we're not there yet is listening to what's going on and just knows what to do.”
2024-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Five Lessons Scaling Toast to $14BN Market Cap | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make in Fundraising, Hiring and Selling with Aman Narang, CEO @ Toast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's coming that can actually, like, you think of the internet. What's been amazing is you can do so much, but you have to learn all these interfaces and it's complex. And I would love to just talk to someone and say, hey, can you get me a table tonight?”
2024-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Five Lessons Scaling Toast to $14BN Market Cap | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make in Fundraising, Hiring and Selling with Aman Narang, CEO @ Toast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's interesting. Like, you know, I think we're a little bit skeptical by nature. So I always am trying to figure out why something might not work. I think that's a healthy way to look at things also. And so the metaverse or with crypto, I always struggled with first principles on how this was going to scale in by the way. In many ways, I've been wrong. AI, it's interesting. It felt different because you were seeing like real applications. Can you go to the doctor? I went to the doctor recently and like, AI listened to our conversation, figured out what to do. It worked. I was pretty impressed. And so you're starting to see these early signals. I don't know how scalable, but AI might be where the, you know, internet was pre-bubbled, like where like things have to which applications take out. We're still trying to figure out. But the fundamental technology of being able to, especially in things like voice AI, is so powerful. You can listen to a conversation, have a conversation. I think another thing I think about is like, you know, I want an AI personal assistant.”
2024-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Five Lessons Scaling Toast to $14BN Market Cap | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make in Fundraising, Hiring and Selling with Aman Narang, CEO @ Toast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Culture values really do matter. It really do matter. They really do matter. And like spending the time, hiring the right people really does matter, especially at the leadership levels. If you get caught up in like the here and now and what happens the next deal or, you know, it's like someone's once told me, like, if you're going to prioritize an interview versus a deal versus, let's say, internal meeting, you really want to make sure there's one thing you prioritize. It's like the interview. Because especially early on when you're founding the culture, if you get it wrong, it's hard to change afterwards. It's like not easy.”
2024-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Five Lessons Scaling Toast to $14BN Market Cap | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make in Fundraising, Hiring and Selling with Aman Narang, CEO @ Toast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Us, like, we didn't have the money to try to do a lot of marketing and get the brand out there, and the creativity we had was to go find all these trade shows and go make sure Toast was right next to the biggest provider in this space.”
2024-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Five Lessons Scaling Toast to $14BN Market Cap | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make in Fundraising, Hiring and Selling with Aman Narang, CEO @ Toast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This may sound odd, but don't raise too much capital. I think there's all this perspective of plenty of runway that's healthy, that's good. On the one hand, VCs aren't stupid. So if you're going to raise too much capital, get diluted early on. Secondly, I think there's a lot to be said about doing more with less.”
2024-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Five Lessons Scaling Toast to $14BN Market Cap | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make in Fundraising, Hiring and Selling with Aman Narang, CEO @ Toast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, interesting you brought up leading with humility. I think one of the pieces I've gotten advice is like trust your instincts more. Because I think sometimes you can end up in a world where if you don't trust your instincts, you can move too slowly.”
2024-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Five Lessons Scaling Toast to $14BN Market Cap | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make in Fundraising, Hiring and Selling with Aman Narang, CEO @ Toast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, it's interesting. We've been really fortunate. Like, once we got that series B, we grew up in a world of low interest rates and there was a lot of capital in the business, had really good fundamentals. Not to say it was perfect, but had good fundamentals. We hired some great people to surround us that were really good at it, if I'm honest. So it never felt like we were constrained by capital.”
2024-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Five Lessons Scaling Toast to $14BN Market Cap | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make in Fundraising, Hiring and Selling with Aman Narang, CEO @ Toast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no. We had a couple meetings. I think at one point I had to tell him, I was like, look, we've done good work for you at a minimum, someone will aqua hire us even if it doesn't work.”
2024-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Five Lessons Scaling Toast to $14BN Market Cap | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make in Fundraising, Hiring and Selling with Aman Narang, CEO @ Toast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I remember we going to Steve Papa's house. This is like New Hampshire. We're driving from Boston, New Hampshire. We put together some slides and sitting down meeting him. And he looked at us. I remember one of the things he noticed was our spreadsheet had zero off by a factor of 10 in the meeting. At the end of the meeting, I think he said something like, yeah, I don't really understand restaurants. And that's all he said. I think at the end of a presentation.”
2024-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Five Lessons Scaling Toast to $14BN Market Cap | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make in Fundraising, Hiring and Selling with Aman Narang, CEO @ Toast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I've heard just like great things about Satya about how he's transformed Microsoft in terms of building an amazing culture and learning mindset and growth mindset. That's somebody that comes to mind.”
2024-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Five Lessons Scaling Toast to $14BN Market Cap | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make in Fundraising, Hiring and Selling with Aman Narang, CEO @ Toast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was actually pretty early when we were building these QR codes. I said we were trying to get, we spent a year working on this and we were ready to give up. And that pivot to point of sale, like that was the closest we came to shutting it down.”
2024-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Five Lessons Scaling Toast to $14BN Market Cap | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make in Fundraising, Hiring and Selling with Aman Narang, CEO @ Toast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, your question is what is that a good value? I mean, I think you can take it to an extreme where you also have to have some level of self-confidence because you want to go in and say, hey, I've done it. And confidence instills confidence in others. And so I think it's a balance there of anything. But I think overall it is a good value. I do think most people as individuals, most companies, they can get in trouble if they think they know that they're the shit. Like I think there's a lot of value to just always being balanced and always being grounded. But I thought it's interesting you said Steve said that I have no tolerance for BS.”
2024-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Five Lessons Scaling Toast to $14BN Market Cap | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make in Fundraising, Hiring and Selling with Aman Narang, CEO @ Toast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think for us leading with humility is about recognizing that as a leader, you've got to be close to the front lines. Like that's one way to interpret that value. Back to build a great business, you have to stay close to customers, close to the people that are actually doing the work because things change. Even if you had some perspective from 10 years ago how things happened, things change. And so not being close to the front lines, you're making important decisions about the future of the business. If you don't have tech context and perspective and texture and what's going on, you can make really bad decisions.”
2024-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Five Lessons Scaling Toast to $14BN Market Cap | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make in Fundraising, Hiring and Selling with Aman Narang, CEO @ Toast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I always say businesses, one thing I learned from Chris business is about people. At the end of the day, fundamentally back to, you know, it's not of a business strategy. Any strategy you want, put a PowerPoint together and Excel spreadsheet together, as it says, here's a business model. It's about the people. And so 100%, it's about bringing great people, great values, complementary skills, and then being aligned on what matters, having the right tension in the organization where you can work together, but also push each other like, yeah, those things are that sort of magic happens.”
2024-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Five Lessons Scaling Toast to $14BN Market Cap | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make in Fundraising, Hiring and Selling with Aman Narang, CEO @ Toast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think communication and recognizing how important it is to align and inspire a big group is really, really important. I've always underappreciated that. Where I get the most energy is like solving the problems in the details or coming up with like the strategy, the business and thinking about the competitive landscape and the chessboard. And those things matter. But actually if you're managing a team at scale, it's really, really important to make sure everybody understands where you're going and why and why we're making certain decisions. And you got to overcommunicate a lot of that. And I think that's an area where I absolutely want to get better.”
2024-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Five Lessons Scaling Toast to $14BN Market Cap | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make in Fundraising, Hiring and Selling with Aman Narang, CEO @ Toast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it depends on the situation. I'm sure there are people who would tell you that I'm not a great manager or that I am a micromanager. I had to learn along the way. Learning. I mean, look, I think a lot of this goes back to we're all on a learning journey. And as long as we, as all of us are trying to get better every day, that's the most important thing, more than whether or not I'm good or great or bad. I think that's what matters.”
2024-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Five Lessons Scaling Toast to $14BN Market Cap | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make in Fundraising, Hiring and Selling with Aman Narang, CEO @ Toast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or I can be, you know, passionate in the details and care deeply. So I think there's a fine line often there where you, it's great to be in the details and care and go deep.”
2024-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Five Lessons Scaling Toast to $14BN Market Cap | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make in Fundraising, Hiring and Selling with Aman Narang, CEO @ Toast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Differs per function, yes, it does, but I think fundamentally doing the hard work to say what are you looking for upfront the process, writing it down, right? Being clear about it. Sometimes the basics are elastic. What are you hiring this person for? What are they going to do? And being clear about it as a group in the interview process, like having, I think Amazon does as well, like writing down your notes, like literally the transcript of what happened in the interview. And I think in the interview itself, you have to be able to go deep because you only have so much time. It's hard to go deep and ask hard questions someone you don't know. One of the things I've learned is you have to do it, even if it's uncomfortable or hard because you have to understand where has this person really dealt with challenges and had to be resilient? What have they done that it's been impactful where they were the driver on the bus and not just the passenger? That's what's like really important in the process.”
2024-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Five Lessons Scaling Toast to $14BN Market Cap | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make in Fundraising, Hiring and Selling with Aman Narang, CEO @ Toast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hiring is hard, and so just building a rigorous process actually is really important, and we're still not great at it in transport because it's hard because it takes time, right? Like you're busy, but like.”
2024-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Five Lessons Scaling Toast to $14BN Market Cap | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make in Fundraising, Hiring and Selling with Aman Narang, CEO @ Toast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Question is how do you sequence all this in ways that is thoughtful? And so one line I like is like, you know, you underestimate what you can do over a decade, but overestimate what you can do in a year. So it's a long game. Like, it's not about doing all this in one year. It's about a longer-term strategy of like, we look at how much we did in the first 10 years. Well, how much can you do in the next 10 years? And that's the mindset you've got to have.”
2024-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Five Lessons Scaling Toast to $14BN Market Cap | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make in Fundraising, Hiring and Selling with Aman Narang, CEO @ Toast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First of all, I think it's about value creation. I think the modernization follows. It always starts value creation. This is one piece of advice. It's like everyone should focus on what is the value you're creating. I think often companies get in trouble when they're looking around to say, how do we drive our metrics versus the customer's metrics? And then back to like the strategy of like, how much can you do? It's really hard. But the fundamental question is, how much can you do well? Which actually goes back to people, always goes back to people. If you've got average talent, you get in the details of why it's not working. There's a million reasons why the things don't work and you get into this mode of like you're micromanaging versus like you bring in great talent and actually like they go and figure it out a lot of like how much can you do and how much can you do well always goes back to people on talent you know when we think about all the different variables and all the different ways in which you can grow as we looked at like and maybe you could argue we're doing too much but we see opportunity where the platform we serve the strategy can work in other segments in other geos up market enterprise and we can expand the platform and”
2024-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Five Lessons Scaling Toast to $14BN Market Cap | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make in Fundraising, Hiring and Selling with Aman Narang, CEO @ Toast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're like, more expressions that I like is like restaurant tours are like in the here and now. They're dealing with right now. And so it's like one of the learnings has been as you add more of the product portfolio, you got to think through like, can your buyer actually absorb it versus if you buy from a solution that serves a different segment of the market, maybe they serve a different segment of the market for a reason, if that makes sense.”
2024-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Five Lessons Scaling Toast to $14BN Market Cap | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make in Fundraising, Hiring and Selling with Aman Narang, CEO @ Toast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Back to the thesis on the MNA has been you take great products with great entrepreneurs and you plug it into our go to market engine and they can scale faster back to like one of the benefits we've got is we've got this on the ground sales model in these markets restaurants like to buy from people in person and we've got enough ARPU that you can actually scale it that way and so if there are point solutions of products where you're trying to sell let's say through e-com or through you know inside those don't scale as quickly and that's worked quite well the the challenge that i think you have to be careful about is to say let's say there's a product that's having a lot of success in a segment of the market like let's say you have a product that's having a lot of success either down market or with larger groups and you say well bring a down market into the smaller restaurants and plug into a market engine that's going to work and what you don't realize is like well those restaurant tours don't have the people to do all these specialized things that may help them because you can imagine a restaurant tour is just trying to make sure you get through the day often”
2024-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Five Lessons Scaling Toast to $14BN Market Cap | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make in Fundraising, Hiring and Selling with Aman Narang, CEO @ Toast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, look, our beliefs are that if we go into these markets and offer the best solution, I know it's hard to switch and all that, but there's plenty of opportunity. I always like this expression of like, you know, you've got strong opinions loosely held. I think as we grow in skill, that might change. So far, that's just been the thesis.”
2024-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Five Lessons Scaling Toast to $14BN Market Cap | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make in Fundraising, Hiring and Selling with Aman Narang, CEO @ Toast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the decisions we made was this point of sale platform is like the central nervous system of the restaurant and there's a lot to it. There's a lot of surface area to our product. Where we think about like M&A and where it's worked is often products that are great products with great founders earlier where they can plug it into our go-to-market engine and we drive better sales efficiency for them. Like that's where we've seen success. And so when we think about expansion into segments or geos or products, it's been often about that's the one rule that we've kind of stuck to, which is the central nervous system has to be toast.”
2024-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Five Lessons Scaling Toast to $14BN Market Cap | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make in Fundraising, Hiring and Selling with Aman Narang, CEO @ Toast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, early on, we were like, oh, we get this to 10 million ARR or 100 million ARR. That would be amazing. We weren't worried about what it could be or couldn't be. We just focused on the customers and building a good business.”
2024-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Five Lessons Scaling Toast to $14BN Market Cap | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make in Fundraising, Hiring and Selling with Aman Narang, CEO @ Toast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It helps you have context when you show up. And then you've got to get out there too. So it's both combination of like you got to get out there with prospects and with customers. And you've got to learn some of the basics that don't show up and look foolish because you just don't have any expertise or an industry perspective, which is how I felt, honestly. I remember the first year I was just learning so much about this business because we had never worked in restaurants.”
2024-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Five Lessons Scaling Toast to $14BN Market Cap | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make in Fundraising, Hiring and Selling with Aman Narang, CEO @ Toast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the challenges is how do you play the long game and the short game? Because if you play a short game, you just hire more and more sales density in the most successful markets to grow even faster because the productivity was some of the best. We were cutting territories and growing faster. And our reps were more productive. And so, but they also have to put the foundational teams in all these markets around the country. It's always easier, actually, that what we noticed was to actually add maybe more in these markets we were seeing more success in. And so you balance the two. But at the end of the day, the more important thing was actually, can you hire great people? This goes back to scaling companies. And so this goes back to you have the processes to actually assess what you're looking for. And we have these big three on how you hire now. How do you onboard? Onboarding program, one of the rules, one of the things we do is everyone that joins the company, whether you're an IC, a BDR, rep, closing deals, or a manager, you have to go sell. If you're a district manager, it's great that you've managed people before during the running sales team, but you got to go sell toast for a quarter and learn it.”
2024-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Five Lessons Scaling Toast to $14BN Market Cap | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make in Fundraising, Hiring and Selling with Aman Narang, CEO @ Toast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The flywheel is, I mean, look, so we've got going early on, we were getting feet on the ground, getting these partnerships. We were lucky that we found some of these key partners to get us going. And then we started to do some performance marketing. We built inbound marketing. And all those things started to help us. Then we saw this effect, actually this was Jonathan Vassler, head of revenue, who noticed this, which is as you get density, and it's kind of obvious, I guess, in hindsight, but as you get density, because restaurants have a unique business where every street corner, you got like five of them, right? And so we were starting to see this pattern where like you go sell one restaurant on the street and you get all of them. But there's so many that it's like there's like micro flywheels that you see. Like in Cambridge, Massachusetts, you think Tosa's maybe the only point of sale. The pattern was actually at a very micro level and a local level. And so we started to look at this data to say, what are we seeing in terms of these different markets? And we saw this pattern that as you get more restaurants,”
2024-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Five Lessons Scaling Toast to $14BN Market Cap | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make in Fundraising, Hiring and Selling with Aman Narang, CEO @ Toast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, the sales model is definitely different for sure. The service model, I think, is somewhat different, but there's also often franchise, which I can feel a bit like SMB. But at the end of the day,”
2024-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Five Lessons Scaling Toast to $14BN Market Cap | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make in Fundraising, Hiring and Selling with Aman Narang, CEO @ Toast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so the software is often about how do you turn the tables faster? How do you move the line faster? How do you make the kitchen more efficient? Or are you making sure there's good governance that people aren't stealing from you? Like those are the things that the point of sale does within the restaurant. That doesn't change. And so there's a lot overlap back to like segment strategy. There's a lot of overlap, whether it's a restaurant here in London or there's a restaurant in SMBR restaurant.”
2024-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Five Lessons Scaling Toast to $14BN Market Cap | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make in Fundraising, Hiring and Selling with Aman Narang, CEO @ Toast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I think so. I think look, it goes back to there was a time when a lot of this technology was simpler. Like if you had a simple point of sale system take orders and payments, that's very different than, I remember early on, I thought this was a glorified calculator. It's not because it's the operating system. It's the ERP of the restaurant. So as you build on top and you had online ordering and kiosks and employee scheduling and all sorts of capabilities to support all the stakeholders, there's a massive list. The tech gets more and more complex. And so if you're an enterprise chain, that is not your core competency to build more and more software. And so I think that's where I see cloud providers like Toast grow and take over over time. And especially because if you look in the four walls of restaurant, whether you're in a food truck or a cafe or a bakery or a full-serve restaurant or you're an enterprise change, often the needs are actually quite similar, which is how do you make this, like the restaurants are all about operations, workflows, speed, efficiency, you know, seconds matter.”
2024-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Five Lessons Scaling Toast to $14BN Market Cap | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make in Fundraising, Hiring and Selling with Aman Narang, CEO @ Toast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lot of it is still on either custom homegrown or legacy on prem solutions. These solutions are so wired into everything else these chains do.”
2024-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Five Lessons Scaling Toast to $14BN Market Cap | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make in Fundraising, Hiring and Selling with Aman Narang, CEO @ Toast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have been in the enterprise business actually for a while. In fact, we have more market penetration within mid-market than we even do in SMB today. Think of regional chains. So we don't have lots of enterprise businesses at massive scale, but we have lots of restaurants that have hundreds of locations and have some of the same complexity.”
2024-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Five Lessons Scaling Toast to $14BN Market Cap | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make in Fundraising, Hiring and Selling with Aman Narang, CEO @ Toast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It has to be better one big learning. I think the second big learning was within the solutions that the stakeholder we serve the best is the restaurant owner, the operator. We've been building technology to serve the stakeholder for a very long time. And the other stakeholders that exist, whether it's employees or guests or suppliers, we're starting to get there. We have now tons of rich data about other stakeholders, but it's not something that is like a superpower of ours internally. We're not a consumer company. We're not a company that knows how to support all these stakeholders as well as we know how to serve restaurant operators. And we've built these applications so far, like app products to serve the guests or the employees. It's not to say we won't get there and we're doing some really cool things to their credit, but it's something we're learning. So it's like there have been lots and starts and stops.”
2024-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Five Lessons Scaling Toast to $14BN Market Cap | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make in Fundraising, Hiring and Selling with Aman Narang, CEO @ Toast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Two learnings one is it's not good enough to just build commodity products because it's integrated on the point of sale. His thesis was, hey, if we just do more and more and more, if these products are integrated at the point of sale, people will buy. you know, you can't just build a phone system and say, oh, because it's integrated to the point of sale, that's good enough for someone to swap out their phone system.”
2024-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Five Lessons Scaling Toast to $14BN Market Cap | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make in Fundraising, Hiring and Selling with Aman Narang, CEO @ Toast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have both. There are certain teams within each lines of business. We've got teams focused on scaling our products, you can imagine the fintech business, for example, we've processed like 160 billion in volume every year. And so that's about scale and making sure that it works all the time. But then there are teams within the FinTech LOB that are thinking about what are the next adjacencies where we can create value. So it's within the LOBs, but we also have a new ventures program. We bring in folks that otherwise want to maybe go start companies and go raise capital through VCs and want to come work at Toast and want to go build something. And we try to make them as separate from the core business as we can. And so one of the things that we always talk about is the benefits of being part of Toast have to outweigh some of the challenges, right? In terms of the overhead of being part of a larger organization. And so we do both in terms of both models.”
2024-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Five Lessons Scaling Toast to $14BN Market Cap | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make in Fundraising, Hiring and Selling with Aman Narang, CEO @ Toast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've had many actually where we've tried. And one thing that's great about Toast, back to zones to win horizons, you know, we've got teams that are focused on scaling what we have and their teams that are tinkering. And this is across the business.”
2024-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Five Lessons Scaling Toast to $14BN Market Cap | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make in Fundraising, Hiring and Selling with Aman Narang, CEO @ Toast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not knowing how to assess risk. The biggest question we have to answer when we lend that money is what are the odds that the restaurant will survive over the next three, six, and 12 months?”
2024-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Five Lessons Scaling Toast to $14BN Market Cap | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make in Fundraising, Hiring and Selling with Aman Narang, CEO @ Toast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That come to be this was, I remember CFO at the time had done some research on fintech more broadly and all the things we could do. So we weren't just talking about loans, but we talked about embedded finance and banking and payments. And this thesis was once you're the payments provider, that's such an anchor product in terms of you've got all this data about the sales and about the success of the restaurant. And so what else could you do? And we'd seen some other examples where lending was a product that others had built. And for us, one of the challenges was often when we go sell these restaurants, they had an existing loan or they wanted to finance their hardware. And so we had all these partners. We said, well, what if we could do this on our own? And what we realized was because we're the payments partner, we could do a better job of assessing risk. We could make the process of getting the loan out, the payment back was really simple because it was just built into the payments flow. And so that's really what the beginning.”
2024-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Five Lessons Scaling Toast to $14BN Market Cap | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make in Fundraising, Hiring and Selling with Aman Narang, CEO @ Toast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It depends, it comes over time, like in any of these markets, the reality is it's very segmented, so in certain segments of the market, you may have something simple that can work. And then I remember notoriously pizza in restaurants is really complex. And when we got some pizza restaurants, like the ability to manage the complexity of the modifiers and how all the different ways you can order pizza and have pizza delivered, we couldn't support, so we had to partner. So I think it's earlier segment specific question where as you build out the platform in certain segments, you might see success in other segments you have to partner.”
2024-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Five Lessons Scaling Toast to $14BN Market Cap | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make in Fundraising, Hiring and Selling with Aman Narang, CEO @ Toast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Came over time. Initially, it was how do you solve the needs of the restaurant through the point of sale better? Because that's where we started. You can only do so much to begin with, anyways. And you can imagine when we started, you know, we were going after these slightly bigger restaurants because there were other providers that offered something very simple if you had two employees. And so for us, we had to, we realized like our niche had to be restaurants, even if they were S&B restaurants, these more complex operations that had more in revenue, more employees, more scale, more complexity. And so you'd go into these restaurants and, you know, we talk about pitching point of sale. And we got a few customers that way, but then I remember we had this meeting with this guy, Chris Kane and Finale. And it was like, I've got point of sale, I've got payments, I've got a loan, I've got online ordering, I've got scheduling.”
2024-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Five Lessons Scaling Toast to $14BN Market Cap | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make in Fundraising, Hiring and Selling with Aman Narang, CEO @ Toast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the things that was a crucial decision that we made was we built this platform on Android versus iOS. And it was not, in hindsight, it's like feels like a strategic decision, but in reality, it was simply because we thought Android was an easier platform to build on. But what happened was Android had this proliferation of hardware. I think one of the complexities was the hardware that we got didn't have the right configurations to support like card readers and all the componentry that you need in a restaurant. And so we were getting the hardware back. We were looking desperately to go find a device that would actually work in the restaurant great environment. And so we just always, I remember we'd have these conversations and say, we just need to find enough time, make it through the next quarter before we got this device we had found with a partner in China and Elo that we had more confidence in scaling.”
2024-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Five Lessons Scaling Toast to $14BN Market Cap | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make in Fundraising, Hiring and Selling with Aman Narang, CEO @ Toast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, once we raised our first round, it was really hard. We couldn't get any capital, but once we raised our first real round, we saw the numbers get better. It was all about how fast can you move? And so I think one of the learnings was, on the one hand, you've got to move fast, right? the gold rush and you got to move as fast as you can on the other hand it's very important to get your foundations and your culture right you know it's like the measure twice cut once there's some of that that i think we could have done a lot better early on and so for us had we slowed down to speed up there were there were a lot of opportunities where we could have slowed down to speed up that i think would have just made it a lot easier in the long run i mean i remember there was one time when we were shipping out hardware to restaurants and every piece of hardware like close to or felt like every piece of hardware that we shipped came back in 90 days and we were still selling it because we're like we need to get more customers on the platform”
2024-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Five Lessons Scaling Toast to $14BN Market Cap | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make in Fundraising, Hiring and Selling with Aman Narang, CEO @ Toast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think for us, one of the biggest things was we were trying to move very fast and trying to scale as fast as possible. Capital was cheap”
2024-08-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Five Lessons Scaling Toast to $14BN Market Cap | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make in Fundraising, Hiring and Selling with Aman Narang, CEO @ Toast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source