Assertion Supported AI assessment confidence: 95% certainty 5/5 debate potential 2/5

Narang: Toast had to halt sales early on due to product stability

Aman Narang · Aman Narang: 5 Lessons Scaling Toast to $14BN Market Cap | E1192 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Aug 21, 2024 · at 10:02

Aman Narang is the co-founder and CEO of Toast. He describes early operational struggles and stopping sales while attempting to raise capital.

0:00 / 0:31exact quote · 31.0s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“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, what are we talking about? Stop selling. Because we had, and we fought through it, but we had issues. I remember one discussion I had was restaurant owners, like, it's great that you've got the Tesla, but it's not helpful when it's always in the shop, right? And the point they were trying to make was the product did not work well enough. And so we have to slow down and stop many times.”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

More from Aman Narang

Insight
Narang: POS integration alone cannot sell commodity add-on products
“It's not good enough to just build commodity products because it's integrated on the point of sale.”
Aman Narang Aug 21, 2024 ▶ 36:31 Aman Narang: 5 Lessons Scaling Toast to $14BN Market Cap | E1192 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Narang: Managing and running a startup fundamentally gets easier over time
“Yes, for sure. I mean, I think, There's always new challenges, but it does, I think, fundamentally, you know, get easier.”
Aman Narang Aug 21, 2024 ▶ 8:09 Aman Narang: 5 Lessons Scaling Toast to $14BN Market Cap | E1192 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Disclosure
Narang: Nearly all early Toast hardware was returned within 90 days
“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…”
Aman Narang Aug 21, 2024 ▶ 29:07 Aman Narang: 5 Lessons Scaling Toast to $14BN Market Cap | E1192 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Narang: Processing payments enables superior small business credit risk assessment
“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, you know, really simple.”
Aman Narang Aug 21, 2024 ▶ 34:17 Aman Narang: 5 Lessons Scaling Toast to $14BN Market Cap | E1192 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Partly supported
Narang: Toast mandates all new sales hires sell directly for one quarter
“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…”
Aman Narang Aug 21, 2024 ▶ 43:08 Aman Narang: 5 Lessons Scaling Toast to $14BN Market Cap | E1192 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Narang: Founders should refrain from raising too much capital
“Don't raise too much capital. I think there's all this perspective where we've got plenty of runway that's healthy, that's good. On the other, on the one hand, like, you know, VCs aren't stupid. So if you're gonna raise too much capital, you get diluted early …”
Aman Narang Aug 21, 2024 ▶ 58:49 Aman Narang: 5 Lessons Scaling Toast to $14BN Market Cap | E1192 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 1,200 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.