Toast: Sticky SaaS - [Business Breakdowns, EP.247]

Description

Today, we are breaking down Toast, a name we have covered before but are revisiting because the story has changed enough to be worth telling again. Most listeners will have tapped a Toast terminal without thinking much about the business behind it. Our guest is Sean Barrett, founder, managing partner, and chief investment officer of Counter Global, who holds Toast as one of his largest positions and walks us through how a restaurant point of sale company became the operating system that runs the restaurant. He argues that Toast is best understood as the operating system for the restaurant rather than a payments terminal with software attached, and that the business grows as fast and as profitably as it does because the company spent years building purpose-built hardware, a multi-tenant software platform, and a sales force on the ground before it moved into new markets across grocery, enterprise, hospitality, and international. We also discuss why a business winning roughly half of new restaurant openings in the United States still trades at a multiple that looks closer to a mature company than a category killer. Please enjoy this Breakdown of Toast. For the full show notes, transcript, and links to the best content to learn more, check out the episode page⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ here.⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ----- Become a Colossus member to get our quarterly print magazine and private audio experience, including exclusive profiles and early access to select episodes. Subscribe at ⁠colossus.com/subscribe⁠. ----- This episode is brought to you by⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠Portrait Analytics⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ - your centralized resource for AI-powered idea generation, thesis monitoring, and personalized report building. Built by buy-side investors, for investment professionals. We work in the background, helping surface stock ideas and thesis signposts to help you monetize every insight. In short, we help you understand the story behind the stock chart, and get to "go, or no-go" 10x faster than before. Sign-up for a free trial today at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠portraitresearch.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ----- Stay up