When Aman, Steve, and Jon first launched Toast as a consumer payments app for restaurants, they quickly found that they were blocked at every turn by tired, dated, legacy point of sale systems and that restaurants of all sizes were in search of a better solution. One that was easy to deploy could be accessed from anywhere, and intuitive to use.

In July of 2013, they launched Toast Point of Sale. Built on Android and based in the cloud, Toast was quickly embraced by the restaurant community in our hometown of Boston and grew quickly from there. Through word of mouth the growth of our community continued to accelerate.

In fact, to this day, 1 out of every 5 new restaurants on Toast comes as a referral from an existing customer. Today they remain passionately focused on serving our community of restaurateurs. I wanted to learn more about the story behind Toast and the evolution of restaurant tech as consumer preferences develop.

Steve Fredette is President and co-founder of Toast, where he leads product and innovation initiatives. Prior to Toast, he worked on mobile app development before the iPhone came out, creating the first Flickr and Shoebuy.com apps.

At Endeca, now Oracle, he co-founded their mobile commerce business, building the product team and driving sales, marketing, and services to over $10 million in revenue in two years. Today, we talk about the growth of voice ordering will impact restaurants in 2020. We also explore how technology up levels the customer experience in a restaurant setting.