From a simple frustration in a Cambridge restaurant, Toast’s story blazes through tech skepticism, the restaurant apocalypse, and reinvention—emerging as a $15 billion powerhouse that’s revolutionized how America’s kitchens operate. Three engineers with no industry experience turned a failed app into a cloud-based restaurant OS, enduring brutal VC rejection, pandemic layoffs, and fierce competition to build a platform now powering over 120,000 restaurants and processing $100 billion annually. This is a tale of daring pivots, founder grit, and a relentless focus on serving real restaurant needs—read on and discover how contrarian thinking, stakeholder capitalism, and substance over hype created one of the most unlikely and enduring business successes in modern technology.
Covering:
