Toast co-founder Aman Narang explains the strategic decision to focus exclusively on restaurants rather than building horizontal small-business retail software.
0:00 / 0:20exact quote · 21.0s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“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 of the complexity of restaurants we're dealing with, was to go all in and build a purpose-built platform for restaurants.”
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
AssertionPartly supported
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…”
Aman NarangJul 20, 2026▶ 40:46Toast: Aman Narang. How a Long Wait for the Dinner Check Launched a $2 Billion Business.
Insight
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…”
Aman NarangJul 20, 2026▶ 16:36Toast: Aman Narang. How a Long Wait for the Dinner Check Launched a $2 Billion Business.
AssertionPartly supported
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%.”
Aman NarangJul 20, 2026▶ 40:33Toast: Aman Narang. How a Long Wait for the Dinner Check Launched a $2 Billion Business.
AssertionContradicted
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”
Aman NarangJul 20, 2026▶ 44:32Toast: Aman Narang. How a Long Wait for the Dinner Check Launched a $2 Billion Business.
AssertionSupported
Endeca founder Steve Papa invested $500,000 to seed Toast
“Steve Papa, who was the founder of Indeca, invested I think it was 500 K to get started.”
Aman NarangJul 20, 2026▶ 24:24Toast: Aman Narang. How a Long Wait for the Dinner Check Launched a $2 Billion Business.
AssertionSupported
Toast disrupted legacy POS systems costing $50,000 to $100,000 upfront
“Instead of spending, like for a restaurant like Finale, for them to go buy a legacy on-prem system, you know, you might spend 50 to a hundred K up front. And so our pitch was very little up front and sometimes nothing up front. Then we had a SAS fee.”
Aman NarangJul 20, 2026▶ 30:28Toast: Aman Narang. How a Long Wait for the Dinner Check Launched a $2 Billion Business.
Made with StarZero
Turn any episode into a week of clips.
This entire site, over 800 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.
We use essential cookies to make the site work. With your permission we
also use analytics cookies (Google Analytics and Mixpanel) to understand
usage and improve StarZero. See our Cookie Policy.