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Kelly Esten

Kelly Esten

Sep 17, 2026

8:27
What does combining those roles allow you to see that perhaps a traditional org chart might miss?
8:33
Totally.
8:33
You know, maybe if I can take a step back, I grew up really on the marketing side of the business.
8:39
And I took a step out of marketing for a few years to help kickstart our enterprise business.
8:44
So we've always had mid-market customers, multi-unit customers on toast since before I joined nine years ago.
8:51
But as we came out of COVID and we went public, we decided to put explicit investment into growing our enterprise business.
8:57
And so I stepped away to do that full time for a few years.

6 MINS LATER

14:47
In restaurants where margins are thin, labor is expensive and human intensive, what do you think AI will create the most leverage without diminishing the hospitality experience and certainly the human experience that is still needed?
1:53
I appreciate it being in the loop.
1:55
Thank you for contributing.
1:57
And really our goal was to say, who are we as Toast? And how do we communicate how we want to show up for restaurants, for them as a community? And we established three pillars of our brand.
2:10
One of them is community, which is probably no surprise to anyone who spends time with you or with the Toast brand, which is all about how restaurateurs are pillars of their community.
2:18
Restaurateurs want to be in community with each other.
2:20
We want to help foster that community and be a part of it and serve it.
2:23
and make sure that we all can have these incredible institutions in our communities that make them what they are.

8 MINS LATER

10:33
And by that time, you're on to the next problem.

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