Building the Future: Aman Narang of Toast

**Josh Kopel** (0:00)
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Now, here we go.

**Aman Narang** (0:57)
I don't think there's any concern. I think it's really about recognizing, right, this progression is gradual and also recognizing that a lot of technology is evolving and getting better. It's really about listening to your customers to understand, right, what is useful about it and what's not, what features would make it better. It's so important to really listen keenly to understand, like, what about the experience doesn't work.

**Josh Kopel** (1:19)
Welcome to FULL COMP, a show offering insight into the hospitality industry, featuring restaurateurs, thought leaders and innovators.
Served up on the house.
The founders of Toast must have had a crystal ball. It feels like they anticipated our needs, providing solutions to problems we didn't know we had. And obviously, it paid off. But, like most Cinderella stories, the path to success wasn't a straight line. And today we sit down with co-founder Aman Narang to discuss the ups and downs of servicing the service industry. Because if they were able to predict the future before, are they able to do it again?

**Aman Narang** (2:07)
Starting Toast was really about starting a company with my co-founders, Steve and John.
We had worked together at a company called Endecca. Endecca was my first job, Steve's first job, John's first job at a school.
Spent six or seven years there. Endecca was a fast-growing startup and kind of saw what it's like to be part of one of these rocket ships that's scaling. And six or seven years in, I had built lots of great relationships right throughout the organizations, especially with Steve and John. And so when finally Oracle bought Endecca in 2012, it felt like a good time to go explore what's next.
And so really starting Toast was really about starting a business with Steve and John, more than about being a restaurant-first company or restaurant tech company. In fact, none of us had any experience in restaurants.
This is in 2012, and now we're sitting there figuring out what we could work on. And we had ideated lots of different things in many different industries.
And frankly, I landed in restaurants mostly by chance. We had seen what Groupon had done. This is, think about 2012 We had seen the little dongle that were offered to payments on a mobile device through the audio jack reader.
And there was a restaurant downstairs from where we were working at the time called Firebrand Saints. It was a very popular spot, especially next to MIT Sloan School, the business school there. We'd go there once or twice a month to catch up and talk about progress we had made and different ideas we were exploring. And one evening, we were talking about the success of Groupon, maybe, and we looked at each other and said, you know, we've heard of this thing called Alipay and WeChat in China that allows you to use your phone to basically become this interface where you can order and pay and do all sorts of things. So I asked the question, like, why doesn't that exist in the US? Is that something that would help make the experience more efficient, maybe make the staff more efficient, help the restaurant maybe turn more tables? And so almost as a fun project, this is not one where, to be honest with you, it wasn't clear this is going to be what this company would look like at this stage, because it wasn't like we'd come up with a business case and put together a deck. It was just like, hey, fun project.
Let's go work on making this problem that we all faced easier. And so we built an app to make it easy to essentially initially just pay. It wasn't even an order. It was just pay. So scan a QR code, check comes up, pay and leave. And second order features were things like giving feedback or splitting checks and such. But the primary use case was just pay. And the value prop at the restaurant was, hey, you can operate more efficiently when you get really busy. We launched this thing at this one restaurant, and it frankly got very little interest. It was partially because I think the technology wasn't quite where it needed to be.