Register and maybe even pitch at tomorrow's Extra Crunch Live with Bessemer and Toast

Bessemer’s Kent Bennett and Toast’s Aman Narang to discuss how to become a unicorn on ECL

Toast has a reported valuation over $5 billion and has raised more than $900 million since launch. The restaurant POS service has clearly been on a rapid growth trajectory, but how has the company navigated the market during the pandemic, which has pushed and pulled the restaurant industry unlike ever before?

On an upcoming episode of Extra Crunch Live (May 26 at 3pm ET), we’ll find out. We’re sitting down with president and co-founder of Toast, Aman Narang, and one of the company’s investors, Bessemer Venture Partners’ Kent Bennett.

Bennett is a partner out of the Cambridge office, focusing on consumer products and services as well as consumer-facing software. Before venture, Bennett was a creative executive for an entertainment production company called Licht Entertainment.

His portfolio includes Bevi, Blue Apron, Xtime and, of course, Toast.

Narang spent seven years at Oracle, then Endeca, working on the development of the company’s business intelligence platform and mobile commerce platform. He co-founded Toast in 2011 and has been growing the company ever since, adding new products and features to the restaurant POS system.

On Extra Crunch Live, we’ll sit down with Narang and Bennett to learn about how they came together for the company’s Series B deal, which Bessemer led. We’ll also talk about why Bennett wanted to bet on Toast, how they’ve worked together since and how they overcome challenges and disagreements. If we’re lucky, we may even get a peek at Toast’s original Series B pitch deck.

On the second half of the episode, Bennett and Narang will put on their feedback hats and listen to live elevator pitches from the audience as part of the ECL Pitch-off. Folks attending the event will be able to raise their hand and pitch their startup to the VC/founder duo, and then answer their questions and get their feedback.

Extra Crunch Live is free to everyone and focuses on the relationships between founders and investors that have led to successful business building. We talk about what made them choose each other, hear about the initial pitch meetings and learn about how they make decisions about the future together.

UPCOMING EXTRA CRUNCH LIVE EVENTS:

 June 2 — Madrona and Coda

 June 16 — MaC Venture Capital and Wonderschool

 June 23 — Emergence Capital and Retail Zipline

 June 30 — Maverick Ventures and Cityblock Health

Questions? Email extracrunch@techcrunch.com