Mike Gutner

Chief People Officer Toast, Inc.

Last Reviewed: September 18, 2026

Executive Summary

Mike Gutner is Chief People Officer at Toast, the restaurant technology company, where he leads the people and workplace organisation globally. He did not arrive by the usual route. He studied geophysics, taught skiing, spent nearly a decade at Google in customer support and related leadership roles, ran operations for a five-person hardware startup where he personally handled sales, supply chain and HR, and joined Toast in 2018 to lead the team responsible for whether restaurants actually succeeded on the platform. Only in 2019 did he move into the people function, and in 2024 he took the top job. That sequence shows in how he describes the work: he treats the employee experience the way a customer success leader treats a customer journey, looking for the small number of moments that disproportionately shape whether someone stays and does their best work.

Career Highlights

• Chief People Officer of Toast since 2024, responsible for the company’s people and workplace teams and practices worldwide.
• Vice President of People and Organizational Success from 2019 to 2024, with responsibility spanning people business partners, learning and development, employee relations, internal communications and people analytics.
• Joined Toast in 2018 to lead the Restaurant Success team, the organisation accountable for restaurant onboarding and customer outcomes.
• Chief Operating Officer of Rest Devices, a five-person connected-devices startup, covering sales, customer support, supply chain, business development and HR himself.
• Nearly ten years at Google in customer support and related leadership roles.

Professional Journey

Gutner grew up in a small town north of Boston and took a bachelor’s degree in geophysics — a scientist’s training he did not end up practising. After college he taught skiing, where he won a customer service award, and he points to that job as the first sign of where his aptitude actually lay. He has described his career since as a deliberate tour through unrelated roles: scientist, customer support specialist, salesperson, operator, before recognising people leadership as the thing he was consistently good at.

The long formative stretch was at Google, where he spent close to ten years in customer support and related leadership roles. Supporting users at Google’s scale is an exercise in systems thinking about human problems, and it gave him both operational range and exposure to how a large technology company manages and develops people. He left to become Chief Operating Officer of Rest Devices, a connected-devices startup with five employees. At that size the COO title is literal about everything: sales, customer support, supply chain, business development and HR all sat with him. It is the sort of job that teaches an operator exactly how much of company performance runs through hiring and team design.

He joined Toast in 2018, initially on the customer side, leading the Restaurant Success team responsible for getting restaurants live and keeping them successful on the platform. A year later he crossed into the People and Places organisation as Vice President of People and Organizational Success — an unusual internal move, and one that gave the people function a leader who had carried a customer-facing number in the same company. He built out that function across people business partnering, learning and development, employee relations, internal communications and people analytics, through a period in which Toast grew rapidly, went public, and had to manage the extreme volatility that the restaurant industry experienced in the early 2020s.

In 2024 he was promoted to Chief People Officer, taking responsibility for people and workplace strategy across the whole company. His stated approach is to connect people strategy to business objectives and to concentrate effort on the highest-impact moments in an employee’s experience rather than spreading it evenly. His advice to managers is blunt and consistent with his own history: everyone has a story, and trust is built by actually asking about it.

Education

Institution not publicly identified

Bachelor’s degree, Geophysics