Toast CFO on competing with Square: We’ll continue to ‘out-innovate’

Yahoo Finance’s Brian Sozzi and Emily McCormick speak with Toast CFO Elena Gomez about the company's path to its public debut, outlook, and more.

Video transcript

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EMILY MCCORMICK: Welcome back. Restaurant payments and technology company Toast is one of the latest firms to hit the public markets. It priced its IPO yesterday at $40 a share, coming in above the expected range. And shares began trading publicly on the New York Stock Exchange today. And for more on this offering, we have Toast's chief financial officer Elena Gomez with us now.

And Elena, congratulations, and thank you so much for joining us today. First, I want to kick things off and ask, why was right now the best time to bring Toast to the public market?

ELENA GOMEZ: Yeah, no, we're really excited to be here. Thank you for having me. And we believe this is a great opportunity for us to continue to invest in our platform to help restaurants be successful. So this was the perfect time for us to really come out to the markets and really show that we will invest in our platform for restaurants of all sizes.

BRIAN SOZZI: Elena, you just started at Toast. You took over the CFO role in May of this year. What have been some of your priorities besides leading up to the IPO?

ELENA GOMEZ: Yeah, we're excited to get back to execution. We've got a long journey ahead of us. And we really view the IPO as a stop on our journey. But we're really focused-- if you know anything about Toasters, our focus is restaurant success. And so we're going to get back to business tomorrow and help our customers continue to grow and continue to innovate so that we can see them have success over the next several decades.

EMILY MCCORMICK: Elena, as we think about the restaurant industry throughout the course of the pandemic, of course, challenges with closures early on in 2020 and now reopenings and having to really transition to these different sorts of models, with delivery and really accommodating this new flow of customers, as we have vaccinations and mobility picking back up. I'm wondering, what are your restaurant customers telling Toast right now about what their main concerns are? And how are you addressing that?

ELENA GOMEZ: Yeah, no, our customers, you're exactly right. It was a challenging time. But Toast was well-positioned with the platform. And really, what we've seen is the pandemic was a catalyst. We're seeing restaurants adopt so much technology now and really viewing that as a key differentiator in their business success. And so we're excited about them adopting our guest products, which are all of the online delivery and takeout that all of us are probably using in our homes today. And we believe some of those trends are really durable over time.

BRIAN SOZZI: Elena, Toast had to lay off about half of its workforce at the height of the pandemic. Have you been able to get those workers back?

ELENA GOMEZ: Sorry. Say that one more time.

BRIAN SOZZI: Toast had to lay off, I believe, close to half its workers, really at the height of the pandemic last year.

ELENA GOMEZ: Oh, right.

BRIAN SOZZI: Yeah. Have you been able to get those workers back?

ELENA GOMEZ: Yeah, no, what's really great is we've been able to continue to grow. And our restaurants have needed us. And so we've been leaning into investing because we believe that restaurants really need a platform to be successful. And so that was a really important time for us to get back to business.

We're battlefield-tested during the pandemic. And we're ready to continue to help our restaurants over time continue to grow. And in order for them to grow, we need to continue to invest in our platform.

EMILY MCCORMICK: What do you think about competitors in this space? Who would you consider the biggest competition here? Because of course, we have Square really working with small businesses, restaurants with point of sale systems. We have, of course, delivery companies that have direct relationships with these restaurants. So how do you think about that ecosystem around the restaurant industry right now and where Toast fits into that?

ELENA GOMEZ: Yeah, no, I'm excited to share that. When we are in a deal with restaurants, we win the majority of the time. So it speaks to what differentiates Toast. And when you think about what differentiates Toast, it's we're purpose-built for restaurants. We're very focused on being deep in the communities where we all go to restaurants.

And we're going to continue to out-innovate. That is our goal. We want to continue to make our platform better. And we're really pleased that more than 50% of our customers use more than four products on Toast already. And that's with the products we have today. And we're going to continue to innovate and hope to continue to grow our customers. We're serving close to 50,000 customers today.

BRIAN SOZZI: Yeah, the S-1, Elena, talks a lot about other initiatives beyond what you're doing now. Where else do you think Toast can play in the restaurant space?

ELENA GOMEZ: We continue to believe that we're going to focus on all the stakeholders in and around the restaurant, whether that's the restaurant owner, the employee, the guest. And so you'll continue to see innovation around those key stakeholders. We believe all of them could benefit from better technology solutions.

And now restaurants are really well-positioned to understand the value of technology. And Toast, as a platform, is well-positioned to support restaurants of all sizes and all verticals.

EMILY MCCORMICK: All right. Thank you so much, Elena Gomez, Toast's chief financial officer.