Toast: Aman Narang. How a Long Wait for the Dinner Check Launched a $2 Billion Business.
About this episode
Aman Narang shares how a frustrating restaurant experience led to the creation of Toast, a billion-dollar POS system for restaurants.
After waiting too long to pay his restaurant bill, Aman Narang thought there had to be a better way. His first idea—a mobile payment app—flopped. But that failure revealed a much bigger opportunity. Restaurants were struggling with outdated software that many owners hated. Payment systems were expensive, unreliable, and trapped on servers hidden in back offices. Replacing them cost time and money. But that’s exactly what Aman and his co-founders set out to do: create an entirely new POS system for restaurants—from scratch. They worked from an unfinished basement, answered customer calls on their own phones, crashed their first restaurant on day one, survived years of rejection from investors—and eventually grew Toast into a business that generates more than $2 billion in annual revenue. In this episode, Aman shares how a failed product became a billion-dollar company. What you'll learn: How to know when it's time to pivot Why investors rejected Toast again and again How to convince customers to replace mission-critical software Why Toast intentionally stayed small before scaling The leadership lesson Aman learned after almost breaking the company How Toast survived COVID…
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