Toast: Aman Narang. How a Long Wait for the Dinner Check Launched a $2 Billion Business.

**Guy Raz** (0:00)
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**Aman Narang** (4:02)
We were installing this restaurant, and they open, and within 20 minutes of taking the first few orders, it's like the system is down.
Now they've got a line, and they were physically writing down the order on a piece of paper, and dropping it off in the kitchen, and taking the credit card number down on paper, and trying to do this manually. And realized as part of the experience that these systems are mission critical and can't break.

**Guy Raz** (4:41)
Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.
I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how a frustrating way to pay a dinner bill led to the launch of Toast, one of the most popular point of sale services in the country.
There are about 700,000 restaurants in the United States. Big chains, tiny neighborhood cafes, family-owned diners, fancy tasting menu places. It's a huge market. And if you could build something that even a fraction of those restaurants needed every day, you'd have a pretty good business. But restaurants are tough customers. Margins are thin, they can't afford downtime, and once they install the software that runs their business, they almost never switch it. For years, that software was clunky, it was expensive and really hard to update, and it usually lived on a server somewhere inside the restaurant, totally disconnected from the cloud. Most owners hated these systems, but replacing them felt impossible, which is where today's guest, Aman Narang, saw an opportunity. The idea began with, what else, a frustration. A frustration I am sure you have experienced. You finish dinner, you're ready to leave, you're waiting for the check, you finally get the server's attention, and then you wait again for your credit card to come back. And that everyday annoyance inspired Aman and his co-founders to build an app that would let people pay for their meals from their phones. But it didn't work. This was back in 2012, so the technology was a bit clunkier. But that failure uncovered a much bigger opportunity. The real problem wasn't just paying the bill. It was the technology running the entire restaurant. Inventory, payroll, scheduling, kitchen operations, online ordering, loyalty programs. None of it worked very well.