Aman Narang on Building Toast: Speed, Focus and Scaling a Restaurant Platform

Toast co-founder and CEO Aman Narang tells Harry Stebbings that speed matters enormously in business, especially once a company sees evidence of product-market fit. He also says founders need specialists without losing the entrepreneurial spirit that helped them get started.

Narang grew up in a close and supportive family, first in India and then in Nepal. His parents still live next door and look after him. In ninth grade, he went to boarding school, where he was bullied and stayed only a year; he says working through that experience taught him grit.

Before Toast, Narang spent six or seven years at e-commerce software company Endeca, where he met future co-founders Steve and Jon and founder Steve Papa. After Oracle bought Endeca, the founders felt compelled to make good on their long-standing talk of starting a company together.

Their early fundraising was humbling: Narang recalls eight or ten venture capital meetings and a string of rejections. Papa ultimately wrote a roughly $500,000 check at a valuation Narang remembers as around $2.5 million to $3 million pre-money. Papa said he did not understand restaurants but respected the founders and would bet on them.

Narang says he was fortunate to meet unusually strong, practical engineers who could build quickly. To him, speed means getting something into users' hands and learning from it rather than exhaustively analyzing every possible permutation of a problem in advance.

Fast iteration also makes it possible to pivot. In Toast's first six months, a series of ideas went nowhere, but moving quickly gave the team time to keep trying. Narang believes the company might not have survived had it taken two years to put its first idea in front of customers.

His own early mistake was treating management as something the founders could handle while hiring only people who directly coded or sold. He now sees experienced managers as a source of leverage: once market demand becomes visible, other people see it too, and building a team around the founders helps the company move faster.

Scaling requires a balance. Early employees are often generalists with context across the whole company; later, founders may resist handing over control even though domain specialists have valuable experience. Narang wants both specialists who scale established operations and entrepreneurial people who can create new ones.

He suggests bringing in specialists when the company has enough in place to put its foot on the accelerator. Toast had to slow or stop selling more than once because its product was not reliable enough. One investor compared it to a Tesla that was always in the shop: attractive features mattered little if the system did not work.

The initial idea came from watching a slow checkout at a Cambridge bar and learning about mobile ordering and payments in China. Toast tried QR-code ordering and payment, but could not scale it. The founders then pivoted to a restaurant point-of-sale system, despite questions about whether rebuilding one was wise.

The customer response changed. Restaurant owners had little interest in the original QR pitch, but were willing to spend hours discussing a better point of sale. Narang says that customer signal can matter more than whether an idea sounds like an obviously tenfold improvement on paper.

Switching point-of-sale systems is difficult, but the team learned that aging hardware creates a natural replacement cycle. Cloud software also made it easier to bundle services and offer a compelling price. Narang's qualification is that a startup's product must be better as well as cheaper.

He argues that startups can compete by focusing on what matters now rather than matching every feature of incumbents. Android, cloud software and embedded payments made Toast possible; restaurants needed digital orders to reach the kitchen smoothly, not the fax-based processes common at the time.

Early service required improvisation. A nightclub operator asked about support at two in the morning, and Narang promised 24-hour help. When the customer called the number on Toast's website, Narang's own phone rang; after a few rings he answered it in front of him. He says the business remains a customer.

The founders' early investor pitches did not adequately explain their plans, Narang says. He still puts customer success first, but says founders also need a plausible model showing how the business can work. Toast's early software revenue was only a few hundred dollars a month per customer, while sales and support were demanding.

Bessemer's Kent declined an early investment but later invested in the Series A. Narang recalls being told that the founders had argued about strategy during their pitch. In hindsight, he would have spent more time learning to fundraise and preparing a clear deck, even while remaining focused on customers.

After raising capital, Toast expanded sales before its infrastructure and leadership were ready. Some signed customers could not be onboarded efficiently; others felt abandoned after going live, and parts of the product were unfinished. Growth in one function had outpaced the other functions needed to support it.

Narang describes the tension between deploying capital quickly and making sure the business does not break. Leaders eventually have to move from doing everything themselves to hiring, onboarding, coaching and explaining the company's culture. He says he had greatly underestimated those responsibilities.

Asked why he did not become CEO sooner, Narang answers candidly that he was not offered the role. As Toast entered its scaling phase, the founders recognized their inexperience and brought in Chris, a former colleague at Endeca, as CEO. Narang says his ability to coach people and create space for the founders made it one of their best decisions.

Toast's strategy was to build a platform purpose-built for restaurants. Selling the system was a highly considered purchase, so the company also needed enough revenue per customer to support the sales effort. That created a recurring question: how many products and customer segments could it serve well at once?

One early customer, Urban Outfitters, wanted Toast to serve its retail stores as well as its restaurants. Narang is glad the company declined and kept its focus. Yet he also believes Toast sometimes tried to scale too quickly after funding became available, without investing enough in its foundations and culture.

Hardware returns showed the cost of moving faster than the product was ready. Narang recalls many devices coming back within 90 days while the company continued selling. Toast had chosen Android because it was easier to build on, but struggled to find hardware configured for restaurant components such as card readers; it eventually found a device with a partner it trusted more.

Stebbings notes that Toast Capital had reached more than $1 billion in annualized loan originations. Narang calls Toast both a software and a financial technology business: customers choose it for the software, he says, while the fintech component makes the business attractive. The two reinforce one another.

The wider product suite developed over time. Early restaurant customers described a patchwork of payments, loans, online ordering, scheduling, inventory, loyalty and websites, all of which needed to connect to the point of sale. Toast sometimes built these services itself when potential partners were unwilling to work with a tiny company.

Bundling is not always enough to beat a specialist, Narang says. Requirements vary by segment: pizza restaurants, for example, can have complex combinations of modifiers and delivery needs. When Toast could not support those requirements, it needed a partner.

Toast Capital grew from a broader investigation into embedded finance. Restaurants often already had loans or needed financing for hardware. As their payments provider, Toast could use sales data to assess risk, make offers visible in its software and collect repayment through the payments flow. Determining the probability a restaurant will survive remained a difficult data-science problem.

Toast organizes some teams around scaling existing products and others around new opportunities. It also has a ventures program for people who might otherwise start companies themselves. Narang says those teams need enough independence that the benefits of belonging to Toast outweigh the overhead of a larger organization.

A product does not become compelling merely because it integrates with the point of sale. Narang gives a phone system as an example: integration alone is insufficient reason to switch. Toast also knows restaurant owners and operators better than other stakeholders such as employees, guests and suppliers, making products aimed directly at those groups a learning process with starts and stops.

On market segments, Narang says Toast has customers with hundreds of locations, even if it does not yet serve many of the very largest enterprise chains. Those chains often depend on custom or legacy systems deeply integrated into their operations. He expects cloud providers to gain ground as restaurant software becomes more complex, though that is a prediction.

There is substantial overlap in what restaurants of different sizes need: operational speed, kitchen efficiency, controls and the ability to serve customers. Sales and service models still differ by segment, however, and a franchise can sometimes resemble a small business in its needs.

Toast observed a local growth effect as it built density. Selling one restaurant on a street could lead to referrals and more customers nearby. More local adoption brought word of mouth, improved conversion and faster growth, according to Narang, although the company still had to invest in new markets as well as its strongest ones.

The sales organization has to balance short-term productivity in established territories against building a presence elsewhere. Narang says its more fundamental challenge is hiring and onboarding good people. New managers, as well as sales staff, spend time selling Toast themselves so they understand the product, customers and industry.

Toast reached its IPO about nine years after founding, with a market capitalization Stebbings and Narang recall at roughly $20 billion at the time. Early on, Narang says, the founders concentrated on serving customers and building a good business rather than treating a theoretical share of the restaurant market as a reliable forecast.

For international expansion and acquisitions, Toast's working rule has been to keep its own point-of-sale platform as the central system. Acquisitions have worked when a strong product and entrepreneurial team can plug into Toast's sales engine. Narang calls the approach a strong opinion loosely held, acknowledging it could change as the company grows.

He cautions against assuming a product successful in one segment will immediately work in another. Small restaurant owners may lack the specialized staff needed to use tools designed for larger groups. Before adding a product, Toast has to ask whether the buyer can actually absorb and use it.

Narang frames expansion around value created for customers, not simply revenue extracted from them. How much a company can do well depends on the people it hires and how it sequences opportunities. He urges a longer horizon: companies often overestimate what can be done in a year and underestimate what can be done in a decade.

Hiring deserves a rigorous process, he says. Teams should write down what a role requires, agree on what they are assessing, take interview notes and ask difficult questions. He wants evidence that a candidate personally drove meaningful work and showed resilience, rather than merely having been present.

Narang's intensity can be either a strength or a weakness. He enjoys getting into details and admits some colleagues might consider him a micromanager. As CEO, he says he is still learning, especially how to communicate and align a large organization around its direction and decisions.

A strategy in a presentation or spreadsheet is not enough, he adds: execution depends on people with complementary skills and values who can challenge one another while remaining aligned. Stebbings argues that authenticity helps leaders earn followership; Narang agrees that business is fundamentally about people.

Stebbings challenges Toast's value of leading with humility, asking whether a value is useful if nobody would argue for its opposite. Narang interprets humility partly as staying close to frontline employees and customers, because decisions made without current context can be poor. He also acknowledges that leaders need confidence and that balance matters.

In the quick-fire round, Narang identifies the unsuccessful QR-code business as Toast's closest brush with shutting down. The founders had worked on it for about a year and were funding the effort from their own savings before the pivot to point of sale.

He names Microsoft's Satya Nadella as someone whose culture and learning mindset he admires. Recalling the first meetings with Papa, Narang says their spreadsheet was off by a factor of ten and that Papa initially thought they were opening a restaurant. The investor did not commit immediately.

Narang says capital became easier to find after the Series B, helped by low interest rates, business fundamentals and capable hires. He has also learned to trust his instincts more, especially on difficult people decisions, while retaining a willingness to learn.

His unconventional advice to founders is not to raise too much money: excess capital can mean early dilution and weaken the discipline of doing more with less. Without a large marketing budget, Toast found trade shows and positioned itself next to the industry's biggest provider.

Looking back, he wishes he had understood earlier how much culture and leadership hiring matter. When an interview competes with a deal or an internal meeting, he suggests prioritizing the interview, particularly in the early stages when a company's culture is being formed.

Asked about AI, Narang says he has been skeptical of some technology trends but sees early useful applications in AI, including a doctor's tool that listened to a consultation. He compares the uncertainty over which applications will succeed to the early internet and is particularly interested in voice and a conversational personal assistant.

For restaurants, he sees potential in helping owners use data to make better decisions about menus, prices and how to fill tables. Voice systems might eventually support drive-through or table ordering, though he explicitly says the imagined experience is not there yet.

On family life, Narang says he prioritizes Toast and home while accepting that exercise, friends and former hobbies can receive less time. His advice for marriage is to work at understanding the other person's perspective. He credits his wife with supporting him.

Asked about Toast's longer-term growth, Narang says its first priority is to build on its roughly 13–14% share of US restaurants at the time of the interview. He sees opportunities to broaden the platform for restaurants and, gradually, apply its technology to other complex brick-and-mortar businesses, beginning with food and beverage retail such as groceries and convenience stores.

Enterprise and international growth must be sequenced thoughtfully over a decade, he says. On recession risk, Narang argues that restaurants have historically been resilient, though customers may shift between formats, and that Toast's efficiency tools can be valuable in harder periods. These are his business assessments, not guarantees.

He also sees long-term potential in data from guests, employees and suppliers across Toast's network. Narang imagines helping independent restaurants make better decisions on menus, delivery costs and marketing, drawing an analogy to support that large chains provide franchisees. He presents this as an opportunity the company is exploring, not an achieved outcome.