20VC: Five Lessons Scaling Toast to $14BN Market Cap | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make in Fundraising, Hiring and Selling with Aman Narang, CEO @ Toast

**Aman Narang** (0:00)
If there's one thing to do over, it's very much recognizing that once you see signal that you've got product market feed, you gotta move fast. Speed matters a lot in business, a lot. I actually think personally, there's so much value in just getting stuff out, iterating, learning, and recognizing that when you move fast, you can also pivot fast if something doesn't work. I always tell people Toast wouldn't exist without Android and cloud and embedded payments. Those are the three trends that really drove the beginnings of Toast. One of the mistakes most founders make is you don't wanna give up any control because you're like, well, I need to know what the heck's going on. The reality is you can benefit from people that are domain experts and specialists in specific areas, but you also don't want to lose your entrepreneurial spirit.

**Harry Stebbings** (0:39)
So I am one of the biggest vertical SaaS nerds. And with that being the case, Toast is one of the best in class vertical SaaS companies of our time. Today, with a market cap of $13.5 billion. I'm so excited to sit down with Aman Narang, CEO and co-founder of Toast today, and five astonishing facts. They have $1.2 billion in ARR. Toast Capital has reached $1 billion in annualized loans. They have 875 restaurants in the US. 75% of locations are coming from inbound channels. And finally, and this is incredible, the first investor in the company invested $500K at a $3 million price. Is that the best ever angel investment? But before we dive in today, all of you listening use tons of software every day. Sometimes it fills us with rage. You can't figure something out. The chatbot in the bottom right is useless. You keep getting bombarded with these useless pop-ups. And for those of you who build products, no one wants their product to feel like this. Thankfully, a company exists to help users without annoying them. Command Bar. It does a couple of very helpful things. First, it's a chatbot that uses AI to give users extremely personalized responses and deflect tickets. But it can be beyond just text. It can also co-browse with the user and show them how to do things inside the UI. Magic! But it can also detect when users would benefit from a proactive nudge, like a helpful hint or an invitation to start a free trial. Command Bar is already used by world-class companies like Gusto, Hashicorp, Yotpo and Angelist. If you're a product CX or marketing leader, check them out at commandbar.com/harry. And talking about incredible companies with Command Bar, I want to talk to you about a new venture fund, Making Waves, by taking a very different approach. It's a public venture fund anyone can invest in, not just institutions and accredited investors. The Fundrise Innovation Fund is democratizing venture capital, which could have big consequences for the industry. The fund is already off to a good start with $100 million into some of the largest, most in-demand AI and data infrastructure companies. Companies like OpenAI, Anthropic and Databricks. Check out the Innovation Fund's impressive list of investments for yourself by visiting fundrise.com/20vc.
Carefully consider the investment material before investing, including objectives, risks, charges and expenses. This and other information can be found in the Innovation Fund's prospectus at fundrise.com/innovation.
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**Harry Stebbings** (4:07)
Aman, listen, I have heard so many great things from so much of your cap table. So thank you so much for joining me today, my friend.

**Aman Narang** (4:14)
I'm excited to be here, Harry.

**Harry Stebbings** (4:15)
Now, I always want to go back to a little bit of the childhood, actually. I was shaped by actually my mother getting MS It was a very hard moment in my childhood. When you think back to the most shaping moments of your upbringing, what are one or two that really stand out?