Toast

“We've got 13 or 14% share in the U.S. In restaurants.”

“And so there's this balance, I always say, like, you want to have a company that's got a balance of, like, specialists and entrepreneurs, and so one of the things I love is this, and actually Chris, our old CEO, brought this to us, this is the Zones to Win boo…”

“Ah, for toast, we made a bunch of starts and stops there. In fact, there were these times where I remember, and you can imagine, right, you're like trying to raise capital and grow, and having a meeting, we're like, well, we need to stop selling. It's like, wh…”

“As you get more restaurants you get better word of mouth, and you get more referrals, and you get more top of funnel, you convert better, you grow faster.”

“No, it's not just cheaper. It's gotta be cheaper and better.”

“And like one of the learnings for me and for the team was, you know, oftentimes you think of like startups and it's like, well, what's the Tenex idea? And like rebuilding POS does not sound like a Tenex idea. But getting signal from customers is like a good si…”

“Everyone that joins the company, whether you're an IC, a BDR you know, outbound prospecting, or a 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 in running sales team, but you go…”

“We were making two, 300 bucks a month on the software at most”

“Like I remember one of our early customers was this I think it was Urban Outfitters. They had other restaurants in their retail stores. And they wanted us to do that. You're doing such a great job, do all our retail. And I'm glad we said no, right? And really …”

“So we started with these QR codes you see today at restaurants. That's before we had this platform, and it didn't go anywhere. We couldn't scale it, and so we pivoted”

“I remember we did, like, eight or 10 VC meetings, and maybe we just were naive, and, like, everybody said no, and so one of the big yeses was the founder of Ndeca, right, who wrote the whole check. He wrote, like, a half a million dollar check, and At what pri…”

“If we had taken two years to get the first thing, you know, into the hands of customers, we wouldn't exist.”

“Yes, for sure. I mean, I think, There's always new challenges, but it does, I think, fundamentally, you know, get easier.”

“Today we've got a hundred million plus Guests that dine at Toast restaurants. We've got millions of employees working at Toast restaurants. You've got, you know, 100,000 of suppliers on the Toast platform that interact through our supplier and accounting produ…”

“In fact, we have more market penetration within mid-market than we even do in SMB today.”

“Customers care deeply about our software. That's why they picked Toast. Found it fundamentally. So maybe, maybe that's what I'll say.”

“So I had zero value for management early on. I just wanted to hire people that could sell, that could code, that could, and that's it. And I was like, I'll do all the management. Steve will do all the management. We don't need any other managers.”

“I mean, I remember there was one time when we were shipping out hardware to restaurants, every piece of hardware, like close to, it felt like every piece of hardware that we shipped came back in 90 days, and we're still selling it because we're like, we need t…”

“That's the one rule that we've kind of stuck to, which is the central nervous system has to be toast.”

“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 platfo…”

“The fintech business, for example, we've processed like a hundred sixty billion in volume every year”

“Toast wouldn't exist without Android and cloud and, you know, and embedded payments. Like those were the three trends that really drove the beginnings of Toast.”

“No, it was like two million ARR, pretty early. Yeah, two years in.”

“When we invested in I think it was in seven, no, 1615, 16 time-ish, 17 time frame. It was like 25 of revenue, growing 250% a year. Like, what would that, that would be a billion dollar plus exit, that would be a 1,000,000,001, billion and a half dollar multipl…”

“I have a lot of respect for Toast. Good product craft. Their GTM execution is really good. They operate in a pretty, like, respectful way, too. Like, we don't find Toast doing shenanigans to their customers.”

“Toast, awesome business. It's like, three X net, and started in 2018.”

“And as I think back on our vertical SaaS investments, you know, like a Shopify or a Service Titan or a Toast, when they added payments, it became that big Next Horizon unlock for them and really doubled the TAM and the market caps for these businesses.”

“I mean, I was looking, thinking about companies like Toast. I was thinking about one of our own DocuSign. At eight or seven or eight times revenues, these things are absurdly cheap.”

“We're big investors in Toast, which we've been buying back. We were early investors in it, and sold, and are rebuying.”

“But what surprises me is that more funds, like, you know, if you were an early investor in Toast, and you're fully out of it, and you love the company, and the stock's down, like, 60%, like, why not go buy it again? Like, it surprises me more people don't do t…”