Toast

“And these companies are worth an impressive two hundred and sixty seven billion dollars and include some companies that Bessemer is really proud to work with, such as Procore, Toast, HashiCorp, and Canva.”

“The only time they had churn was March of 2020 because of that craziness. And ever since then, and every time before then, they had no churn because of that hybrid hardware-software combination.”

“A majority of our funnel is driven by our marketing team, you know, despite having folks on the ground.”

“Toast was a series B company with twenty million in ARR”

“The TAM that we're servicing is one of the largest vertical TAMs in the world with Phil, you know, 85% of the market left to conquer or to tackle, and those opportunities are really, really unique.”

“We've got, I think we said today, we've got 80, 85,000 customers across the U.S. And Canada and the U.K. And I, and we're still in our early days, right?”

“We know definitively, and we've got a ton of data to prove this. When we reach a certain density level within a market our win rates on our top of all actually begin to increase and our reps become more productive.”

“One out of five deals, and we've said this publicly, one out of five deals is referring, right?”

“I think we had a stat recently here, where like, 25% of our sales organization, which is large, right? It's a big number, had been promoted in the last 12 months.”

“The quotas are no different, by the way, like that, that inside rep is still going to produce the requisite amount of ARR. As a field rep, they're just going to do it across a different geography.”

“What we know is the territory size you give the rep will dictate your growth rate, right? And so while we could have given our first rep the entire city of Seattle, We knew that'd be counterproductive going back to the density, right? And so the key is to, and…”

“There are other businesses that, or other verticals that don't have the density and that also don't have the unit economics. To get the payback that you need on a distributed workforce, right? We do because of the software plus embedded payments model, right? …”

“There is no other vertical that's, that has that many rooftops. In the U S or across the globe, right? So if you think about any city block, right in San Francisco or Miami or wherever it might be, you may have a pet store, you may have a drug store, right? Yo…”

“Ask them if they know of someone that might be in the market, eight times out of 10, they do. Bottom line, eight times out of 10, they do.”

“Some of our best sales reps were school teachers. Or have come out of the military or have come out of the restaurant industry, not folks who have had many years selling, you know, for other businesses.”

“With our sales organization, I, I'd call it, you know, 80, 75 to 80% are field-based sales reps where they are in the market, they own a geography, and they are the trusted advisor to the restaurant space In, in their patch, like, as we like to call it.”

“We didn't actually have a rep in California for many years after we started, right? Cause it was just better for us to put another rep in Boston”

“I invested in a company that's adjacent to Toast called Owner, which is like marketing for restaurants. They're, they've crossed twenty million. They're growing almost 10% a month every month.”

“I think they are a software company. I think they, again, they earned the right to do essentially clear all the restaurant's revenues because they have great software.”

“It took forever, but as a result, you've got, you have, like, 80% gross margins. Shopify is like 50, toast is 30.”

“Interview 30 kids of any age and be religious about this. Just only hire one you would buy your own product from. Don't give on this. I don't care whether they worked at Toast. I don't care if they worked at Owner. I don't care if they were the first person in…”

“Toast and Shopify is, if they were just software, they're pretty mediocre businesses, but they figured out how to add merchant services and payments and payrolls, and all the vertical SaaS companies are doing that.”