TouchBistro sold. Toast is worth 180x more.

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TouchBistro sold to Harris Computer last week for a reported $100M. Official terms were not disclosed.

Rewind a few years and that sentence would have been hard to imagine. TouchBistro was a homegrown, restaurant-first POS company going head to head with Toast and Lightspeed for the same tables, the same terminals, the same market. Three companies, one bet: own the restaurant.

Look at where that bet landed.

Toast is worth about $18.3B USD today. Lightspeed is worth about $1.4B USD. TouchBistro just sold for roughly $100M USD. Same starting line. Toast ended up worth about 13x Lightspeed and more than 180x what TouchBistro sold for.

Second (LightSpeed) and third (TouchBistro) place in the market and built real companies. TouchBistro employed hundreds of people and served 16,000 restaurants. Lightspeed is a public company doing $1.2B in revenue. Neither is a failure. But almost all of the value went to Toast, the company that won the market. If you are building in a winner-take-most category, finishing second or third is not a smaller version of first. It is a different outcome entirely.

Here is what the three companies actually look like, and the five things worth taking from it.

Three companies, one market, three outcomes

All figures USD. Toast and Lightspeed from public filings. TouchBistro from reported figures.

Start with the number that should stop you mid-scroll: Toast has only about 14% more locations than Lightspeed, and it is worth about 13x more. That is the entire argument. It is not about how many customers you have. It is about how much each one is worth to you, and whether you are the company everyone else gets measured against.

Two things explain most of the gap.

Toast runs about $1.2M of payment volume through each location every year and earns $36,000 per customer. Lightspeed runs about $273,000 and earns about $8,200 per customer. Toast monetizes the transaction, not just the software subscription, and 82% of its revenue is now payments rather than SaaS.

Toast also stayed in one vertical and one country until it dominated. Lightspeed spread across retail, restaurants, hotels, and golf, across two continents, much of it bought through acquisitions. Breadth widened the market on a slide and thinned the company in practice.

TouchBistro sat in between. A good, restaurant-specific product for independent operators that never built Toast's distribution or Lightspeed's reach. Its restaurant count reportedly fell from about 23,000 to 16,000 before the sale, and a shrinking base sells for a low multiple. Roughly 1.4x sales, by the reported numbers.

Want to hear how the CEO was thinking about all of this before the exit? Samir Zabaneh laid it out on our stage in 2023.

Five things founders should take from this

1. Choose an ICP with economic density, not just urgent pain. Your customer segment sets your ceiling before your product does. TouchBistro picked independent restaurants: real pain, but small budgets, thin expansion, and high failure rates, so even a good product capped out. Toast picked independents and small chains big enough to carry serious volume but standard enough to serve with one repeatable product, then grew revenue per account for years. The proof: Toast's customers had the size to value items beyond payments like, payroll, online ordering and marketing onto every location. Pick the segment where urgency, repeatability, expansion, and market size are all true at once.

2. Win distribution, not the product bake-off. In SMB, the better product usually loses to the better distribution. TouchBistro may have built the nicer tool for independents. Toast built the bigger sales and install machine, reached operators first, installed faster, and showed up when the system went down on a Saturday night. The proof: TouchBistro reached about 16,000 restaurants; Toast scaled to 171,000 locations. Same category, same window, opposite trajectories. Fund the distribution engine as seriously as you fund the product.

3. Become essential to your customers. In the restaurant industry, software gets you in the door. Payments is where the money is, and it is far harder to rip out. Toast makes about 82% of its revenue from payments and moves roughly $195B in annual volume, about $1.2M per location. Lightspeed still runs only about 42% of its volume through its own payments product, which is a big reason it monetizes so much less per customer. Being central to your customers allows you to cross-sell.

4. Focus and win your market then expand. Toast concentrated on restaurants in the US, until it was the clear leader. Lightspeed expanded across four verticals and two continents, much of it via acquisition, before it dominated any single one. Each new segment added different customers, competitors, and sales motions. It read well on a market-size slide and got harder to run in reality. Focus compounded for one and fragmented the other. Expand only into products that make the core business stronger, not just bigger

5. Play to be first, because leadership pays nonlinearly. The market does not reward you in proportion to your size. It rewards the perceived winner, and it rewards them enormously. The leader gets a lower cost of capital, easier hiring, more integrations, better data, and the cash to buy its smaller competitors. If your market shows winner-take-most signs, play to win it, not to survive in it.

If you are building something you intend to win, the next Together Toronto is August 10. The founders one step ahead of you are in the room every month.

Next up it's Jeff Shiner, the person who scaled 1Password into a Toronto giant, live and unscripted. If you have been meaning to come to a TechTO, this is your time.

Opportunities to Watch

Three ways to get more out of the next Together, depending on where you are:

• Early-stage and want feedback? Pitch in front of our VCs from 5 to 6 pm on August 10, right before the event kicks off. Apply to pitch (choose “Founder Pitch Session” ticket type).

• Want customer feedback before you build more? Join our Founder Feedback Booth during the networking hour from 6–7 PM. TechTO brings together ~400+ founders, operators and builders every month, giving you the chance to talk directly with people who may experience the problem you’re solving. It’s designed for customer discovery, not pitching, so you can leave with honest insights and clearer direction. Apply here.

• Building a food or beverage brand, or know someone who is? Email [email protected] as we we continue expanding opportunities for local F&B providers to showcase their products at our events.

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