Jon Quast
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Appearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
And you would think, logically, that's going to translate into
not as many vacations on cruise ships, or not as many premium purchases for these discretionary brands such as Yeti coolers or something like that.
What we saw was, the consumer was absolutely fine.
The consumer continued to spend money.
In fact, they spent more money than what we were expecting.
I think that banks paint a logical picture, but the consumer is not always logical.
We are emotional people, and that's just how it is.
This week, I'm looking at Toast.
This is ticker symbol T-O-S-T.
This is a restaurant technology stock and its products are used by over 156,000 restaurant locations.
Think of ordering at the table, payment processing, they can schedule employees, the programs integrate with delivery partners such as Uber.
I was really doubtful about this business when it went public initially because it was used by a lot of small restaurants, and that seemed like a very inefficient go-to-market strategy to me.
I thought they were going to have to spend a lot on sales and marketing in order to get into one little tiny restaurant here and there.
But it's been surprisingly efficient.
It gets a lot of word-of-mouth advertising from its customers, so it's growing fast and not spending a ton.
What's really cool is, this gets better just like an aging wine.
As it goes, the hardware is negative gross margin upfront, but the recurring revenue is high margin over time.
Just past $2 billion in annual recurring revenue, growing at 30%.
It hopes to get to $10 billion in annual recurring revenue within a decade.
Stock down 30% from its all-time high, trading at 3.5X sales.