PAR Technologies

Sab's journey to PAR Technologies began years earlier through Coventure, a fintech lending firm he co-founded that eventually managed $2 billion in assets. Coventure identified underserved lending markets—from Uber drivers to YouTube creators—by using data to open loan products that traditional banks wouldn't touch. This experience in niche capital markets and understanding credit deeply would later inform his approach to operational transformation.

In 2019, Sab joined the PAR board thinking he'd help teach SaaS best practices to a struggling hardware company. Within weeks, activist hedge funds demanded a sale, the SEC and DOJ launched investigations, and the situation spiraled. When two CEOs turned down the job, Sab—then running Coventure and living in New York—reluctantly took over as CEO. On day one, the CFO revealed they had only 10 weeks of cash left. Rather than execute a fire sale at depressed valuations (the stock was in the teens, roughly a couple hundred million valuation), Sab triggered survival mode.

Sab's first move was brutal: lay off 25% of the company (~200 people) to preserve cash. He immediately engaged with the SEC and DOJ directly—his naïveté as a first-time public company CEO actually helped, asking regulators to "just penalize us so we can move forward." Simultaneously, he discovered PAR's embedded SaaS product (Brink) had achieved something rare: product-market fit in enterprise despite negative 60 NPS among customers and negative 50 among employees. The product was broken—40 different versions deployed across customers, gross margins crushed to 40% by DevOps overhead—but it was mission-critical to restaurants, making switching costs impossibly high.

Sab articulated a vision: "software is eating the restaurant." He believed every restaurant workflow—loyalty, online ordering, inventory, staff management—would eventually be software products. PAR could become the ERP platform for restaurants, similar to how SAP dominated enterprise. To fund this transformation, Sab leveraged public markets advantages: an $80 million convertible offering (nearly 40% of company market cap at the time), refinancing debt from 4% to 1.5% over six years, and using stock for M&A. Shareholders screamed about dilution when the stock was trading at 25-30x revenue; Sab held firm, betting that aggressive capital deployment would pay off when SaaS multiples normalized.

Sab replaced almost the entire management team and rebuilt the product from scratch. But the critical move was cultural. He established four explicit, demanding values: **Speed** ("we don't wait for elevators"), **Ownership** ("own cars, not rentals"), **Focus** ("nail the 80-20, not 50 priorities"), and **Winning Together**. Unlike generic corporate values, these were specific enough that people self-selected out if they didn't fit. This clarity turned the company's employee NPS into some of the highest in enterprise software, despite—or because of—the intensity.

By 2022, PAR had grown total revenue to $350-400M, with SaaS revenue jumping from $5M (2019) to $115M+. The company executed multiple acquisitions, integrated them rapidly, and became one of the fastest-growing SaaS businesses embedded in a public company. Sab's contrarian bets—sell stock at peak multiples, refinance aggressively, invest heavily in M&A and product—positioned PAR with significant liquidity when SaaS multiples compressed. The transformation proved that being public, while distracting, offered capital markets tools (convertibles, M&A currency, talent incentives) that private competitors couldn't match.