Aman Narang
Co-Founder and CEO, Toast. On 2 shows, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveengineerLinkedIn ↗toasttab.com ↗
Aman Narang co-founded Toast in 2012, helping scale the restaurant management and fintech platform into a publicly traded company. He holds computer science degrees from MIT, previously led the mobile commerce unit at Endeca, and became CEO of Toast in January 2024.
2shows
2appearances
48statements
12resolved
7supported
1contradicted
58%fully supported
Everything Aman Narang said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
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.”
Toast laid off 55 percent of its workforce during early pandemic
“Because restaurants weren't taking payments, and when restaurants aren't open, they can't really pay their software fees, and so we had to make the hard decision to cut, I think it was like, 55% of the team, and then also to like, get on a call with the team a…”
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.”
Narang: Toast had to halt sales early on due to product stability
“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…”
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…”
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.”
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…”
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 …”
Toast built custom hardware by leveraging Android's open ecosystem
“We could make these, this technology a lot better by moving it to the cloud and by taking advantage of Android hardware, because Android hardware actually is open, which allows for which allowed us to build our own hardware, which was critical to building some…”
Toast found an edge by building vertical software exclusively for restaurants
“Because there were a bunch of providers that were building something more horizontal, where you could be a restaurant, or a coffee shop, or a flower shop, or a picture of a small retail business, and we felt like our unique edge, because we had gotten a sense …”
Narang says Toast revenues plummeted over 90 percent in April 2020
“We had aggressive plans that year, and then I think early April of 2020, we had gone from this company that was growing like this to maybe revenues down over 90%.”
Toast's share of US restaurant sales volume exceeds its location share
“Even though we have 20 plus percent of the restaurants, we actually have more of the sales volume, because the average restaurant that's on toast has more sales than the average restaurant in America”
Narang: Refusing to delegate to domain experts is a major founder mistake
“And one of the mistakes most founders make is you don't want to give up any control because you're like, well, I need to know what the heck's going on. And the reality is you can benefit from people that are domain experts and specialists in specific areas, bu…”
Endeca founder Steve Papa wrote Toast's entire $500K angel round
“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…”
Narang: Founders underestimate practical engineers who build with high velocity
“At Indeca, I met Steve and John, and you know, these were these proverbial TEDx engineers, which I think people underestimate. You need people that can build with velocity and are practical.”
Narang: 80% of upfront product problem permutations are irrelevant
“In product management, one of the things I find is there's so much work that happens to describe all of the permutations of the problem when you realize, like, 80% of those are not relevant, or at least not relevant now.”
Narang: Early Toast refused to hire management to rely solely on founders
“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.”
Narang: Generational companies require both specialists and entrepreneurial generalists
“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…”
Narang: Hire specialists over generalists only when ready to scale
“Recognizing when you can put the pedal down is really important in companies. And so when you start to put the pedal down back to your question, that's when you, I think you can really benefit from the specialist because I've got muscle memory and I've seen gr…”
Narang: Direct customer signal matters more than a theoretically grand idea
“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…”
Narang: Startup products must be both cheaper and better than incumbents
“No, it's not just cheaper. It's gotta be cheaper and better.”
Narang: Functions moving too far ahead of infrastructure breaks scaling companies
“And so one of the expressions I've heard is like, you've got to make sure in an organization, everything's kind of in sync and something can be ahead of another thing, but it can't be so far ahead. That the whole thing starts to fall apart.”
Narang: Toast was at $2 million ARR when bringing in external CEO
“No, it was like two million ARR, pretty early. Yeah, two years in.”
Narang: Toast turned down Urban Outfitters' request to build retail software
“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 …”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Aman's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 20VCLEDGER | Co-Founder and CEO, Toast | 1 | 36 | 80% 4/5 | full record on 20VC → |
 HOW I BUILT THISLEDGER | Co-Founder and CEO, Toast | 1 | 12 | 43% 3/7 | full record on How I Built This → |