There's never an off season in our neighborhoood. Tune into #TheFenway.
Recently moving its headquarters from Cambridge to the eighth floor of Landmark Center, Toast has become the first official tenants of Hatch Fenway, the neighborhood’s new, cutting-edge workspace for scaling businesses. Toast’s new location utilizes its sizable square footage into loosely divided offices, comfortable conference rooms (named after breads - “Naan,” “Pita,” etc), a kitchen, lounge areas (named after spreads - “Hummus,” “Jelly”) and communal open spaces.
Toast is a multifunctional, integrated restaurant point-of-sale platform with off-site access, real-time statistics, easy updates and a more modern, tablet-based way of selling. The result is a system that is more effective for employee, customer, and business owner alike.
The company was founded by three bright, young engineers and MIT graduates with entrepreneurial spirits. Steve Fredette, Aman Narang, and Jonathan Grimm worked together on the Special Operations Team at e-commerce enterprise company Endeca before setting out on their own to create Toast. Soon after its inception, the three founders hired mentor, consultant, and former Endeca (and Acquia) SVP Chris Comparato as their CEO. We caught up with Chris at the new Toast HQ in Hatch Fenway to talk about the company’s roots, aspirations, and new digs.
The Fenway: Why did Toast decide to take on restaurants? What was lacking in the companies that were out there that could be improved upon?
Chris Comparato: Steve, Aman, and Jonathan (the founders) started the company looking at the mobile payments space. They have their roots in mobile experience, user experience, consumer apps, and e-commerce. They started looking around Boston looking at the mobile payments space, interfacing with retail shops and restaurants.
The guys happened to be passionate about food and restaurants and there was a group of restaurants within Kendall Square that asked them to interface their mobile payments app with the restaurants’ technology platforms. As they started, they realized that the heart of these restaurants—the pulsing beat of the restaurant—was the point-of-sale system.
There are many different versions of these point-of-sale systems that were built back in the 80s and 90s. Not cloud-based, not mobile, and not enabled for consumers who are used to tablets. The whole experience was very poor and they had an epiphany that that problem was more interesting than just the payments piece.
That’s when they really pivoted. In their first year, they did more and more pilots. When they did more pilots, restaurants would ask if they could take on various other tasks like online ordering or gift cards, because they didn’t want to pay other providers. Restaurants were essentially picking six or seven different companies rather than one platform that should be able to be flexible and powerful enough to handle it all. That was the spark. When they would talk to local businesses about payments, the discussion would last two minutes. But when they talked to businesses about their POS system, they would talk for hours. So they knew they were onto something.
The Fenway: So, it began with local businesses. How many signed on at the start and how much it has grown since then?
Chris: They landed their first customer, Dwelltime, in 2013. They were up to 10 employees at the end of the year. The first enterprise account was in 2014—we call an enterprise account a restaurant chain that’s north of 15 units. Then they scaled it up from there. By the end of 2014, they had 450 locations. Today we’re over 1,000 locations, nearly a dozen enterprise customers, and 120+ employees. Now we are in more than 35 states and projected by year’s end to be in every state.
The Fenway: There are a lot of “think tank” and startup workspaces around town, why did you decide to relocate your business in The Fenway of all places?
Chris: We looked in a ton of locations. We really blanketed Boston. Where can you find the space and value necessary to run the business, but in a location that has an energy and vibrancy to it? I would say that was one key factor.
I’d say the second key factor was talent. Where do people live and where do they spend time? We recognized that this location is wedged between many great universities. We have employees out of MIT, Harvard, BU, Northeastern, and we wanted to continue to recruit from local schools. At Fenway, we are smack in the middle of all of them. On a chart you really can’t draw it any better. This location is untapped and that got us really excited. This building was built in 1929 and has so much history. It’s really intriguing to be in an area that has so much but is also a late bloomer in the tech field.
Plus, as a business focused on the restaurant industry, it’s great to be surrounded by restaurants here. We want to be able to bring customers downstairs and into a restaurant or bar and have lunch or dinner while sharing our technology. It really became a “no brainer” as we started to think about it.
The Fenway: Why Hatch?
Chris: Hatch has a vision to bring in other entrepreneurs and other early- and later-stage startups into a community where we can have community events and collaborate with like-minded neighbors. That is really exciting to us. There’s a lot of value that comes out of that, both directly and indirectly.
We think there is an interesting value in being part of that culture. A lot of startup hubs are really targeted toward the young startups that need a co-working space and a couple of desks. We’re clearly not in that category with 120+ employees and adding 15+ each month. To have a startup center where we can have some of the same amenities and same culture is fantastic and to be able to do that at our size is great. This type of startup launchpad didn’t really exist so we’re happy to be the first anchor tenant and we look forward to meeting our future neighbors.
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If you want to learn more, check out Toast’s excellent blog, which explores many fun and informative restaurant-related topics.
