Toast — a provider of hardware and software to restaurants — went public a week and a half ago at a roughly $30 billion valuation.
But unlike most billion-dollar startups, Toast wasn’t on venture capitalists’ radar from the beginning. In fact, Toast didn’t receive any venture funding until four years after it was founded.
Toast’s success demonstrates a few important truths about startups. They don’t need venture capital backing in their early stages. Venture backing isn’t necessarily an indicator of success. And not all success stories are born in Silicon Valley.
In this episode of Startup Insider, Vin Narayanan and Andy Gordon discuss how Toast’s IPO caught the West Coast entirely by surprise… and why investors should always evaluate startups with an open mind.
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