Steve Fredette

President, Co-Founder and Director Toast, Inc.

Last Reviewed: September 18, 2026

Executive Summary

Steve Fredette co-founded Toast and has held nearly every senior seat in it — first chief executive from 2011 to 2015, co-president from 2015, president since January 2024, and a director across three separate stints since the company’s earliest days. Toast builds the point-of-sale, payments and management platform that runs a large share of American restaurants, a market that had been served for decades by legacy terminal vendors selling closed hardware on long contracts. The founders’ bet was that restaurants would take cloud software on commodity tablets if someone built it specifically for them rather than adapting retail systems. Fredette is a chemist by training who became a software builder, was among the first wave of iPhone developers, and spent his pre-Toast career inside Endeca and then Oracle running the kind of internal new-venture work that most large companies talk about and few actually do.

Career Highlights

• Co-founded Toast with Aman Narang and Jonathan Grimm, and has been its President since January 2024.
• Chief Executive Officer of Toast from December 2011 to February 2015, and Co-President from December 2015 to January 2024.
• Director of Toast since August 2021, previously from December 2011 to June 2017 and from February 2020 to January 2021; a Class III director with a term expiring in 2027.
• Helped build Toast into a leading restaurant technology platform ahead of its 2021 initial public offering.
• Among the first developers building applications for the iPhone in the platform’s earliest days.
• At Endeca, led the Special Operations team as an internal entrepreneur, launching the company’s business intelligence platform and establishing its mobile commerce division.
• Built an early social networking project from a college dorm room that competed with the first version of Facebook.

Professional Journey

Fredette read chemistry at MIT, taking a B.S. in the subject, and was building software long before he was doing it professionally — including a dorm-room social network that went up against the earliest version of Facebook. That instinct for building ahead of a market recurred when the iPhone opened to third-party developers: he was among the first to ship applications for it, at a point when nobody knew whether mobile applications would be a business or a novelty.

His professional grounding came at Endeca, the Cambridge search and data discovery company, where he worked as what Toast’s own materials call an intrapreneur, leading the Special Operations team. That group’s output was substantial: it launched Endeca’s business intelligence platform and stood up its mobile commerce division — two new lines of business inside an established software company. Oracle acquired Endeca in late 2011, and Toast’s proxy records him as having served in various roles at Oracle, which is the corporate continuation of the same period.

Toast began in that same window. Fredette became the company’s chief executive in December 2011 and held the role until February 2015, the years in which the founders were proving that restaurants would adopt an Android-based cloud point-of-sale system at all. He then handed the chief executive seat on and returned in December 2015 as Co-President, a structure that let the founders split executive responsibility while a professional chief executive ran the company through its scaling and its 2021 IPO. His board service has mirrored that flexibility, running from December 2011 to June 2017, again from February 2020 to January 2021, and continuously since August 2021.

In January 2024, when co-founder Aman Narang became chief executive, Fredette’s title became President. He remains an executive officer and a director of the company, and continues to concentrate on product and innovation — the same territory he has occupied since the dorm room.

Education

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

B.S., Chemistry