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 is the Co-Founder and CEO of Toast, one of the best-in-class vertical SaaS companies of our time with a market cap today of $13.5BN. Five astonishing stats that show the quality of the Toast business today:

• $1.2bn in ARR with 48.4% from payments.

• Toast Capital has reached $1bn in annualised loans originated.

• 875k restaurants in the US (Toast has 112k: 13% market share)

• 75% of locations are coming from inbound channels

• The first investor in the company invested $500K at a $3M price

1. The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make:

• Why does Aman believe that founders should spend more time fundraising and with investors early?
• Why does Aman believe founders should hire managers before they think they need them?
• Why does Aman believe that founders do not give up control early enough?

2. Lessons Scaling to a $14BN Market Cap:

• What did Aman and Toast do so successfully that allowed them to scale to $14BN market cap in 12 years? What worked?
• What are the single biggest mistakes Toast made that hindered their growth most?
• What are the first things to break in hyperscaling companies?
• What opportunity did Aman and Toast not take that with the benefit of hindsight, he wishes they had taken?

3. Crucible Moment Decisions: Expansion:

• How did Aman and Toast know when was the right time to release a second product?
• What has enabled Toast Capital to scale to $1BN in loans so efficiently?
• How did Aman and Toast scale so successfully into both enterprise and SMB? What are the biggest lessons from doing so? What did not work?
• How do Aman and Toast approach geographic expansion? How do they choose which countries to expand into?