Travis Hoium

But the pessimism that I see around Toast has entirely to do with the macro environment they're operating in and very little to do with the business operations of the business itself, which is, in my opinion, rare when I think about these SaaS or subscription stocks that are down pretty massively from their previous highs.

A lot of them are facing severe operational issues.

The Trade Desk, which is

Weirdly, my first draft pick, because I was afraid Lou was going to snap it away from me, is obviously facing operational issues.

Toast is an incredible one, because when I think about the business performance, I genuinely can't ask more from this management team.

But there is genuine, real fear and concern around consumer spending and restaurant spending in general.

which is totally fair.

We could see a contraction in Toast's valuation, certainly over the next couple of, I would say, quarters or years, potentially, depending on what that looks like.

But longer term, I think Toast does something that is not replicated now by other software giants.

They have a decent mode that they're building, and their software, in comparison to their alternatives, from everything that I understand, is pretty far superior.

And they're only expanding that as the days and quarters have passed.

So I really like this company.

Conceptually, yes.

The fear that lives in the back of my head with Toast is what we saw happen with Square, renamed Block.

I feel like Dorsey maybe lost vision with that company because we could have argued the same thing with Square, which is, we own the payment platform, the terminal, we're going to own all of these little avenues.

They just weren't really able to scale that as effectively as I think they maybe could have.

Now, Toast, I see a little bit more promise in that management team and how they're already scaling their company.

Lots of opportunity for international growth too, which is barely tapped for them.

I don't see them buying a bunch of cryptocurrencies.

So again, all moving in the right direction there for me.