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"To me it sounded like a suicide mission," said Bennett, recalling that he told the founders it would take them five years to build something viable. Still, Bennett was terrified of putting money into a company that was trying to take on incumbent point-of-sale (POS) vendors like Micros, which Oracle bought in 2014 for $5.3 billion, and NCR. That's where Bennett got to demo the product. "We used to go there a lot after work to get a burger and a beer," Fredette said.Īs they slowly expanded in the region, they signed up Dwelltime, a cafe in Cambridge. The app gave customers a way to start a tab at the restaurant and link a credit card. They developed an app and launched it in 2012 with Firebrand Saints, a bar they frequented in Cambridge. After experiencing a particularly long wait time for the check one day, they thought they'd found a problem that could be fixed by paying the check from their smartphone - if only the technology existed. The original idea for Toast came from all the hours Fredette, Narang and Grimm spent hanging out in Boston bars, cafes and restaurants trying to figure out what to build. Fredette said they were so inexperienced with fundraising and business in general that he and Narang, the chief operating officer, would often debate each other during investor meetings. The founders sprinkled in a healthy dose of naivete.
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"East Coast would be substance first and not enough hype." "We used to talk about West Coast offense, which was hype over substance," Fredette said in an interview from the NYSE on Wednesday. Papa said one Bay Area VC indicated interest in the pitch for Toast, but said he didn't want to get on a plane.įredette, Toast's president, said the company's East Coast roots ultimately became an advantage because it could be "a little unconstrained by the traditional wisdom of grow, grow, grow." Boston had been a venture hub in an earlier era, but the momentum had shifted to Silicon Valley, where all the big exits were taking place. The founders lived in the Boston area and had no plans to leave. Toast was born on the other side of the country and a world away. The start-up incubator has helped spawn Dropbox, Airbnb, Stripe, DoorDash, Coinbase and Instacart, and serves as a direct path to meetings with the top venture capitalist firms. Increasingly, Silicon Valley stories have become more formulaic, thanks to programs such as Y Combinator, which has turned into a Unicorn factory over the past decade. Apple and Google famously started in Silicon Valley garages, Facebook was built by a boy-wonder Harvard dropout, and PayPal came together through an awkward collaboration between Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and included an exhaustive list of engineers who would go on to build other billion-dollar companies. Start-up origin stories are part of the fabric of the tech industry.