Pod Insights The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch 20VC: Why "Hire Great People and Get Out of the Way" is Total BS, Why Your Upbringing Can Make You a Worse Leader & A Bentley, Two Nissan Cubes and Becoming One of Macedonia's Largest Employers; The Story of Slice with Ilir Sela About this episode Ilir Sela is the Founder and CEO of Slice, the all-in-one ordering and marketing tech platform for local pizzerias. Through its partnerships, Slice has driven over $1B in earnings for over 18,000 independent pizzerias nationwide. Fun fact, Slice is also one of the largest employers in Macedonia and at one point, employed so many people there, they had to start their own school to train more people. Before Slice, Ilir started Nerd Force and sold it in 2008. Huge thanks to Jeff Richards (GGV) and Ben Sun (Primary) for some amazing questions today. In Today's Discussion with Ilir Sela We Discuss: 1. From Macedonia to the Bright Lights of NYC and Bentley Buying: How Ilir made his way into the world of startups having grown up in Macedonia? How did his less affluent upbringing impact his approach to company building? How does Ilir think about the importance of money? How did he come to buy a Bentley? What does Ilir know now that he wishes he had known when he started? 2. Why Bootstrapped Was Best & The Decision to Fundraise: Why did Ilir scale the business to $4M in revenue without ever fundraising? What does Ilir believe are the benefits of scaling businesses with less money? What would Ilir have done differently had he raised money earlier? What advice does Ilir have for founders who see competitors raising more money than them? 3. Why Delegation is BS and Your Upbringing F***** You Up: Why does Ilir believe that much of our upbringing can instill principles which make us a worse leader? Why does Ilir believe it is BS to hire great people and get out of the way? What are the single biggest mistakes Ilir sees founders make in company scaling? What have been some of Ilir's biggest lessons in talent acquisition? 4. Decision-Making 101: How does Ilir analyze his decision-making framework today? Where does he need to improve as a leader today? What does he need to do to get there? What has been the single best decision he made with Slice? What did he learn from it? What has been the worst decision he has made in the scaling process? How did that change his mindset?
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 Things that we've been taught when we are young, actually, I believe, sometimes create a lot more damage than good. Okay, higher grade people get out of the way, and I've done that. It's complete bullshit. A company's growth trajectory is a collection of mini pivots. You don't have to make this huge company pivot, but every decision tree is a little pivot. I just don't believe in like, getting out of the way of anybody.
0:22 Harry Stebbings? This is 20 VC with me, Harry Stebbings. And what an incredible story we have for you today. A company that went from bootstrapped and profitable with the founder buying a Benly, to changing the way a generation of small businesses work, and being one of the largest employers in Macedonia. This is the story of Slice. And joining us is Slice's founder, Elia Sela. Through its partnerships, Slice has driven over a billion dollars in earnings for over 18,000 independent pizzerias nationwide. And before Slice, Elia started NerdForce and sold it in 2008. I want to say a huge thank you to Jeff Richards at GGV and Ben Son at Primary for some amazing question suggestions today. But before we dive into the show today, you know all those mind-numbing tedious tasks that seemingly
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3:45 Speaker 00 You have now arrived at your destination.
3:48 Harry Stebbings? Ela, I am so excited for this show. I heard so many good things from Ben Sun, from Wiley, from Jeff Richards. So thank you so much for joining me today.
3:56 Speaker 00 Thank you so much for hosting me. I'm looking forward to this one. Let's have some fun.
4:00 Harry Stebbings? It's gonna be great, but I wanna start, and you know, I'm secretly an armchair psychologist, so I like to dig into people's childhoods. But you know, you saw your parents running small businesses and your grandparents even. What is the single biggest takeaway for you from seeing your parents and grandparents build their small business in your more formative years?
4:18 Speaker 00 The biggest takeaway is that building a small business is an incredibly lonely journey. It's lonely because you kind of start off this business, try to solve one problem, and then you inherit an infinite amount of other problems that you suddenly have to be an expert in solving. And so that process can be lonely.
4:36 Harry Stebbings? It's a lonely process. Then you decide to be a sole founder. It is so lonely. Why did you decide to be a sole founder when you could have had a co-founder? And do you find it lonely today?
4:46 Speaker 00 Yeah, look, I'll be honest, I didn't really come through sort of the VC or Silicon Valley part of the business world. I was just raised to build businesses by creating something that the world needs. You know, if that costs me a dollar, charge $2 for it and do that as many times as possible. I'm much more of a small business owner at heart than I am this person who sought out to build a multi-billion dollar company.
5:13 Harry Stebbings? It's funny, we'll get into the kind of not coming from Silicon Valley central casting later, but I do just want to stay on this one element of kind of lessons from upbringing. I always think that we're kind of shaped by our past. How do you think about what you're running from?
5:27 Speaker 00 That's a really good question. I was born in this town of, called Dibor in what was then former Yugoslavia. It's like on the border today of Macedonia and Albania. This is a town of like 5,000 people and there are no traffic lights. It's a tiny little town. Growing up, the understanding, the common knowledge or what we were taught was to simply do your best to get a really good job, hopefully save enough money, maybe buy a house, have a car. That was the North Star. That's like the most ambitious plan that anyone from that town could have. When I was 10 years old, my family moved back to New York. It was my first time immigrating to the US, but my family used to live in New York in the 70s before I was born. Anyway, we're flying back to JFK Airport. As a 10-year-old, you're looking out the window, you see all these lights.
6:12 Speaker 00 It's like, imagine the stark difference between a town of 5,000 people with no traffic lights and then approaching the landing at JFK Airport in New York City and looking out the window as a 10-year-old. And I remember one of the things my dad said was, "Think about what's possible here. One of the things I don't want you," and he said this to my brothers as well, "was to not squander as the opportunity," because they made an ultimate sacrifice to leave their family to come to the US. For more opportunity for their kids. And so coming back to New York, growing up where I did, very important for me to prove to the world, I think that anything's possible, but you just have to work really, really hard.
6:52 Harry Stebbings? I spoke to Ben Sun before the show and the joy of the way we do this is like, we just have a great chat. So fuck the schedule. He told me about you having a Bentley, but then also kind of being in like Staten Island. My question to you is, and something I think about a lot, having come from nothing is financial security. How much were you chasing financial security in the early days, do you think? And was that important to you?
7:14 Speaker 00 Yeah, I think, look, financial security is important and I will tell you the Bentley story in a moment. However, growing up, when we moved to New York, we moved in with my uncle. And so my uncle and his family, my dad and our family, we all lived together, my grandparents, we all lived together in a single apartment in Staten Island, two bedrooms. All of the kids slept on these sort of mattresses on the floor at night and then we had to pick them up and shove them under the couch during the day. I can imagine it was a struggle for my parents, my uncle and his wife, but for me, it was some of the best times of my life. I remember those days vividly. We didn't have a lot, but life was awesome.
7:52 Speaker 00 And so for that reason, I'm actually not afraid to land or to end up in a situation where I don't have enough or a lot. Or to a simple way to say, financial outcomes is not what motivates me. I enjoy the process of hard work. I think I'm enjoying the process of going through a lot of pain. And sometimes business feels a bit like a game. It gives you purpose. It's all of that. Now, one of the things I do love are, I love cars. When I was bootstrapping the company in 2015, I want to say February of 2015. Look at my spreadsheet one day. I was tracking my company on an Excel sheet, not even on QuickBooks.
8:29 Speaker 00 And in one month, we profited $250,000 and it was a tiny team. I was a sole owner, small business, not that small at that point. And my twin brother, who's much more of a free spirit than I am, he's like, hey, you know, let's have some fun with it. And so went to this really expensive car dealership in Manhattan and. Bought a Bentley on the spot, but I would say immediately after I was like, what am I doing? I need to figure out how to reinvest this money back in the business. And that is truly what led to me reaching out to Wiley, for example, on Twitter, which is, I think, a magical platform, by the way, we can talk about that separately.
9:05 Harry Stebbings? Fuck it, why not just go there? I love a natural conversation. Talk to me about that reach out to Wiley, because literally he told me that you reached out to him on Twitter, and that was the catalyst to them, you know, getting to know you and ultimately leading you around. Can you tell me the story?
9:19 Speaker 00 Yeah, so that same month, February of 2015, I realized that there was an opportunity for me to really restart what was then called My Pizza, ultimately became Slice. And two reasons, one, we were performing really well as a business. Two, I had just gotten my first acquisition offer. You know, the offer to sell the company for $18 million would have been awesome. Sole owner, no debt, $18 million would have been great. I turned it down, I turned it down because I thought, what would I do if I sold the company? Well, I would probably go and try and open up or launch a very similar business, work really hard again for another five years and maybe have some similar outcome, we'll see. But that wasn't really that exciting for me.
10:02 Speaker 00 What I wanted to know is what happens if I approach this business as that new company that I may launch post-sale? What would that look like? What would that journey look like? I would learn a lot more, I'd scale to a point that I hadn't scaled before, but hopefully I can surround myself with people who can really help me get there. And so I went on Twitter, like I said, can be a magical platform, and I went and followed a number of really great founders and entrepreneurs in the food tech ecosystem. I tweeted within minutes Wiley, who was, who I thought at the time was still leading a company called Single Platform. I tweeted the founder of Delivery Hero. I tweeted the founder of Zomato and a couple of other people. And Wiley is the only one who replied. So Wiley replied to my tweet and he's like, sure, you know, send me a message.
10:47 Speaker 00 And I couldn't message him because he wasn't following me back, so I couldn't DM him. Anyway, we got on a call and he was like, what's going on? Like, who are you? Like, why are you reaching out? How can I help? And I told him that I am getting some traction with this really great merchant-centric online ordering and commerce enablement for small businesses company. And he's like, look, when you're working with about 100 or 200 locations, give me a call back. I said, well, we're working with about 3,000 locations. And he's like, come to my office tomorrow. And so I go to his office at the time, it was at First Round Capital, which by the way, I had no idea what First Round Capital was. But when I met with him, that led to a number of other introductions.
11:29 Harry Stebbings? I have so many questions to ask here. I think the first thing that I do just have to ask is, it's quite striking that 3,000 locations, and he was saying come back with 100 or 200. Why did you not go to investors before?
11:41 Speaker 00 I didn't go to Wiley as an investor. I went to Wiley as a leader in the food tech ecosystem, hoping that he can connect me to some people who can join my company to help me scale. I didn't need money at the time. We were very profitable. The last thing I needed was money, or what I needed was people and leadership. And like I said, I went to the First Round office, and one of the people he connected me with was Josh Kobelmann. Josh and I spoke for about 90 minutes. We had a great conversation and I leave that meeting and Wiley calls me. He's like, Josh loved you. And I was like, why does that matter? I really didn't know Josh's background and probably why I was maybe so loose and the conversation went so well. One of the reasons why I ended up raising money
12:25 Speaker 00 was because that was the way to get them involved in the business. And so that's really how my bootstrap company became venture backed. It was almost like not for that purpose as a primary reason. It was to get the right people on board and then capital was the way to get them on.
12:40 Harry Stebbings? What did you do due to not having money that would have been different had you had money?
12:46 Speaker 00 Not having money forces entrepreneurs to become incredibly creative in order to solve problems. Capital constraints create incredible solutions that are very hard to replicate by other companies who may not have the same constraints. One of the examples is I started investing in building a team in Macedonia, which is again where I'm from. So in that small town of 5,000 people, I started hiring people there for two reasons. One, unemployment rate in that country is like 50%. No one's really working. Average wage for those who do work was about $200 per month, average wage. Very, very limited opportunities. However, in terms of culturally, education is in instilled in every human.
13:29 Speaker 00 Hard work is instilled in every person. And I felt like there was an opportunity for me to onboard some really great team members. Early days, paid them really well, double the national average. But that would cost me a lot less than having to hire people in the New York or anywhere in the US, really. So we very quickly started building out that team. Today, we have about six hundred and fifty people in Macedonia. We're one of the largest employers in the country. That would not have happened if capital wasn't constrained. I mean, we, we went as far as like creating schools, like English courses, because we ran out of people who spoke English. We couldn't hire people who spoke English because, you know, we hired them all. So we started creating English courses.
14:11 Speaker 00 If someone passed the course and they got a certificate, they would then be qualified to work at Slice.
14:17 Harry Stebbings? How do you create an English course? You go online and record videos teaching English? Like, just take me to that, Eli.
14:23 Speaker 00 Like, physical schools, like, so went to the city, like, there's English teachers at the actual schools in Macedonia who teach the English language. I hired them to become teachers. At the time, it was called mypizza.com, but to, to become teachers at our company. And they were holding courses, it was like a classroom. And so people had to show up every day. It was free, anyone can join, anyone can go and learn English. You didn't have to work at my pizza after. But if you learned and you were proficient and you were excelling in that course, then you would immediately graduate to a job at my pizza.
14:57 Harry Stebbings? Where did you not spend money because you didn't have it? But with the benefit of hindsight, you wish you had have done?
15:04 Speaker 00 It was really mostly probably in the go-to-market side of things, one. I was limited by the number of salespeople I can get based on the profits or the amount of money that we were making at the time. And it took a long time to ramp up. Like, it took five years to get to a point where we had real scale. You know, one salesperson led to two, two led to four, four led to six. But it was like a very slow ramp. I couldn't hire like sales classes to go and introduce this product to as many locations as possible. That created a very slower ramp time. The other part was product. I had one engineer, his name is Sam Kennedy. He's the only engineer and product person. He's the only tech person we had in the company for five years. One person.
15:48 Speaker 00 So we had one person doing product and engineering. This person became a bit of a hero to our team in Macedonia because I would say no to a lot of stuff. And he would stay up late at night, building things and tools for the team to be able to work better. They had this like behind the scenes roadmap that he would work on after hours. While he would build sort of the consumer facing or shop facing product during the day.
16:12 Harry Stebbings? I also am terrified that he's gonna get sick. Cause then you're fucked. And speaking of like that one person dependency, often it's said that you should hire great people. And then the best CEOs get out of the way. You've disagreed with that before when we've chatted. Why do you think that's bullshit?
16:29 Speaker 00 It's complete bullshit. I mean, I used to feel like, okay, hire great people, get out of the way. And I've done that. I've done that many times. And every time I've done that, things have failed. I have failed the person and the person typically fails at Slice. And the reason why I think that is, is because every situation is incredibly unique. Even if it's the similar role in a similar company, in a similar industry. There are details in every business that really, really matter. That I think are very important for leaders to align on. It's my job to make sure that leaders are successful at the company. It's my job to make sure that we talk about the details and really understand the decisions that are made on a weekly or monthly basis.
17:12 Speaker 00 A company's growth trajectory is a collection of mini pivots. You don't have to make this huge company pivot, but every decision tree is a little pivot, right? You're kind of going down a path and those decisions are so important. And alignment around those decisions is incredibly important. And how can you align on those things if you're just kind of zooming out and saying, hey, I've got this leader running go to market. And like, I'm sure what they're doing is great, the numbers are great. But three months or six months later, you get into the details and you realize that things have deviated significantly. I just don't believe in like getting out of the way of anybody. I think it's teammates and going along the journey together.
17:51 Harry Stebbings? Are you decisive? You mentioned that mini pivots. Are you decisive in your thought process?
17:57 Speaker 00 Not as decisive as I would like to be. I feel like I'm progressing. I'm getting better at it. I used to be really bad. I used to really try to run companies with consensus, right? It was like going to these exec meetings and say, okay, what do you think? And what do you think? And everyone had a say. And we had to like all get on the same page eventually. And it would be this really slow process because it's hard to get consensus when you have five, six, seven, strong minded, experienced people around the table. And I think that that was a terrible way to run a business. People want someone to make decisions. They want someone to carve out a vision for where we're headed. I feel like I've become better, but I'm still not as good as I think I need to be.
18:38 Harry Stebbings? Why not?
18:39 Speaker 00 If I'm honest, it's because when I was growing up, the culture that's instilled in me, it's like hospitality first culture, which is you kind of want to take a little bit of a backseat. You definitely want to get people along. You don't want to like piss anybody off. I come from a culture where telling people what to do is a bit of a disrespectful element, right? Like it's not respectful to go to people and say, this is what I want you to do. It's more like, how do you get them there? Things that we've been taught when we are young, actually, I believe, sometimes create a lot more damage than good. Now, I'm not saying things like, hey, be kind or be nice or be good to people. I'm saying, don't speak when you're not called upon, that kind of stuff.
19:23 Speaker 00 I think can be very, very dangerous, but it's probably because of my upbringing.
19:27 Harry Stebbings? My therapist once told me, parents, they fuck you up, Harry. And I thought that was a wonderfully concise.
19:33 Speaker 00 That's right.
19:34 Harry Stebbings? Way to put it. That's a decision making in many ways. The other thing that's fascinating is you mentioned the mini pivots. With mini pivots, you need good communication and the thought process around it. What have been your biggest lessons in effective communication in management, given the many, many pivots?
19:50 Speaker 00 I think the number one thing is really just the frequency of communication. So the same thing really needs to be communicated incredibly frequently, especially as the company scales. There's no communication debt in the early days. It's a small team. Everyone kind of is in the same place. Nothing's lost in translation. As the company scales. The first thing you want to do is obviously communicate these things multiple times. A mentor of mine once said, if you're not feeling nauseous because you're communicating the same thing over and over, that you just feel like, why am I saying this again? Do it one more time. That's how you know that you've communicated enough. I think the other part is, I think it's very rare that people clearly communicate the why. Because the why is very, very important. Not just the decision we're making, but why are we making that decision?
20:33 Speaker 00 How can we articulate that not just a step ahead, but like five steps ahead? How can we connect the current why with some future decisions? I think it's a really important part of clear communication. Because then you want people, the team members, to be able to make their own little mini decisions. And if they don't understand the why, then how can they make the right decisions? I mean, you can't be present for every single one of them. So communication frequency and then being incredibly clear with the why, not just like one step ahead, but many steps ahead. One of the lessons I've learned.
21:07 Harry Stebbings? That's all good and well, and I totally agree with you. You decided to go from hard mode to extra hard mode, though, and have teams in Macedonia with those communication pathways. How do you prevent a team of like two islands? One in the US and one in Macedonia, Macedonia team? How do you prevent those kind of silos between the two, in communication especially?
21:29 Speaker 00 Yeah, and by the way, to make things more complicated, we also have an incredible team in Belfast. That team is about, I want to say 100, 150 people now. And so you've got this company that is part US, part UK, part Macedonia. You know, the question is how to prevent those silos. What I've learned is, I think it's probably more important to just embrace the silos. I don't think you can prevent them. Because every single geography, every single region has its own cultural dynamics. What we've done is we've actually created geographic Communication frameworks and platforms. So actually today I've got an all hands meeting with everybody in the US. Next week it'll be everyone in Macedonia and then Belfast.
22:11 Speaker 00 The reality is that what motivates people in Macedonia and the cultural differences there are incredibly unique. If I communicated to the company more broadly and tried to like make sure that all these people behaved identically or as similar as possible, it would be a total failure in my opinion. Who made the rule that everyone has to be like all on one cultural norm? It doesn't have to be that way.
22:34 Harry Stebbings? Were you good at fundraising? You mentioned communicating to different parts of the organization there. Fundraising is communicating and storytelling to investors. Were you good at it, given you had no idea respectfully, you know, who first round were and really weren't from Silicon Valley casting at all?
22:50 Speaker 00 I was really good at it when our numbers were great and I was very bad at it when our numbers were bad.
22:56 Harry Stebbings? When were the numbers bad?
22:57 Speaker 00 I want to say in 2019, I could not fundraise for the life of me. I learned for the first time that when you raise capital, so we raised a round of $15 million in 2017. And I was led by GGV Capital by Jeff Richards. And that was an amazing moment for Slice. What I didn't realize is that that raises the stakes. I'm not coming from the world of like, let's go raise all this money. It was just like a moment in time where I felt like capital will be able to really help us scale faster. But it set expectations that were even further beyond my own realization of what the company needed to accomplish in order to then raise more money in the future. I would also say I got out of the way too much. We hired a lot of people.
23:40 Speaker 00 Our team went from like 30 people to 100 and that creates demand for more capital. Some of these people are still learning the business. So the performance was great, like we were growing, I want to say 60, 70, 80%. But at that early stage, in order to do that next round, we needed to grow by 150. Because of our very clear focus on one segment, pizza shops. Any moment where Slice's performance hasn't been best in class, immediately the assumption is you're TAM constrained. Immediately it's like, okay, you ran out of TAM, which is completely false, but that's the natural reaction. And so our numbers weren't like fascinating or really exciting in 2019 and I was terrible at fundraising.
24:23 Speaker 00 Our numbers were incredibly great in 2021 and we raised. In like two days.
24:29 Harry Stebbings? What did you change when the numbers were shit in 2019, or not great in 2019 and it was hard? What did your mind say to yourself and what did you change?
24:37 Speaker 00 I needed to stop getting out of the way. I basically outsourced a lot of the decisions internally to other leaders. And so I got involved again. I think one of the realizations is companies can actually accomplish a lot with much less. So one of the things that I did was just put a lot of constraint on why we're hiring people. You know, I realized we had a lot of people who were hired to do a specific role, but very few founders ask, is that a full-time role? So someone will hire position A and yes, that's needed for the company to continue to grow. But how many hours a week does position A require? Is it 10? Is it five? What are they doing with the other 35 hours? And so what they're doing is creating more jobs and then that creates more of a downstream,
25:21 Speaker 00 I want to say, impact on the org to go and do more and it gets very noisy and then expensive. And it's a snowball effect. And so putting constraints was probably the best thing I did after 2019.
25:34 Harry Stebbings? Do you think it's a failing of you as a manager that when you stepped back, it didn't go as well?
25:39 Speaker 00 Of course.
25:39 Harry Stebbings? But then my question to you is like, is it right for you to step back in? Or should you just implement new guardrails and new structures to allow yourself to remain out of it? You know, I often am told that the best CEOs are ones which go on holiday for a week and they come back and their business is better than it was when they left.
25:55 Speaker 00 I disagree with that. Don't get me wrong. I think once you have known motions and you're a growth company, certainly the company is better every single day than the day prior. And much of that is the result of not founder or the CEO. It's the result of the processes and systems you've put in place in order to drive growth. I completely agree with that. For me though, in 2018, 2019, we were not yet a growth stage company. This is a series B company that's still figuring out what are the go-to-market motions? What is the product? We are hiring people like crazy, like I don't think you can get out of the way at that point.
26:30 Harry Stebbings? How do you think about when's the right time to add that second product? To start moving on from the initial Trojan horse to add your first ancillary? When did you do it and when's the right time?
26:42 Speaker 00 It's a great question. I think this is one where, once you get enough scale with your first product, and you have a cohort of customers who are adopters of that first product, that have realized success with that first product, it's probably time to introduce the next product. But you don't want to introduce it to everyone, because the reality is regardless of whether you're a horizontal or a vertical, every one of your customers is at a different point in the life cycle. Some opened a month ago, and some have been around for 10 years or 30 years. The person who opened up a month ago has a very different need than the person who opened up 30 years ago. There's a merchant or shop today that needs a lot more customers, and there's a shop who, if you call and said, "I'm gonna bring you more customers", they're gonna say, "What are you talking about? Like, that's the last thing that I need."
27:27 Speaker 00 That's sort of the external life cycle of a merchant. Two, it's the adoption curve internally. In a geography like New York where we started, we have a lot of merchants who are completely integrated with our commerce products. It is time for us to introduce more products in that stack in order to continue to help increase the success rate of their business and lower their costs. But if I go to a merchant in a geography where we're probably pretty much absent today, let's say Seattle, Washington, and I go with this like multi-product thing, that's too intimidating. Now, what I do like about multiple products is that each one independently can become the wedge. So now, a lot of people call it a Trojan horse, but a wedge can become any one of those products. So the TAM basically becomes a little bit bigger in that market.
28:12 Speaker 00 But I've found it very challenging to have small business owners, especially these like micro-business owners, to adopt more than one product at a time. It's too much change. They're busy running their shop. Like, they're not gonna sit there and make all these changes so that you can, you know, get your sales. What's the average revenue per this area for you today? I don't like measuring averages, Harry. Averages hide the truth. I wanna know how many merchants are beyond a certain threshold of revenue. All in all, Slice's products cost about 7% or 8% of the revenue that we create for the merchant. If we create more revenue, we'll earn more revenue.
28:52 Speaker 00 Revenue. What I love is, for example, there's a shop in New Jersey managing over a million and a half dollars a year through the Slice platform. For that merchant, our revenue is about a hundred thousand dollars a year, net to Slice. And then there are merchants that are maybe just joining or joined a month ago that are still on their sort of ramp up time or were maybe earning a thousand dollars a year. The goal, though, is to continue to move merchants from one bucket to the next, to the next, and continue to graduate them in that wave, like, basically.
29:23 Harry Stebbings? Really easy one, given the fact that you just said you don't like averages, but I'm going to go for it anyway. When you think about percent of revenue that's driven through Slice versus alternative channels, where are you today with the majority of pizzerias? Is it 10%? Is it 50%? Is it 75%? Just help me understand the revenue makeup there for the pizzeria.
29:44 Speaker 00 So there are pizzerias where, on average, we're probably now about 10% of their revenue. But there are pizzerias where we represent more than half of their revenue. Let me give you a quick framework. The average independent pizza shop in the US has total sales of about 550,000 per year. And most of that is phone-based. Most of that is either phone or walk-in. It's offline. The average Domino's location does about 1.2 million in revenue and sales per year in the US. The delta of 700,000 is primarily online digital volume. Their phone volume is actually identical. It's when Domino's invested in mobile ordering online and they stopped advertising telephone numbers. That's when the performance of Domino's locations went through the roof.
30:28 Speaker 00 And in fact, their stock, if you look at their performance in the last 12 years, it's been incredible. I wish I invested in Domino's at the same time that I launched that I launched Slice. So when you look at that gap, it's all digital. The first question that we want to answer is, are we increasing same-store sales? Are we increasing the total sales of the shop? And if we are, then we earn the right to capture a portion of that value in the form of our take rate.
30:54 Harry Stebbings? The question I have for you is, so many investors would have said to you, as you mentioned, the TAM of pizzas and really, like, is that exciting for us? What would you advise founders who are consistently told by investors, this TAM is not exciting?
31:08 Speaker 00 Well, first, the reality is you want to take a step back and look at what exactly are you solving for? And what is your real TAM, not like what you make up? Like, I can say pizza is like a trillion dollar TAM if you include frozen pizza and global and this and that. The reality for me is I spent significant time studying the industry because the last thing I want to be wrong about is our TAM. Because that is probably one of the deciding factors whether you can build a multi-billion dollar company or not. And there's two parts to TAM. One is what is the current TAM? And then two, will that TAM expand due to the products and solution that you bring to the market? At the time that I launched, the pizza industry in the US was a $35 billion industry.
31:51 Speaker 00 That was the revenue that was passing through at the time about 60,000 pizza shops. And two thirds of that was independent. The Domino's and Pizza Hut's and Papa John's of the world started to expand the TAM because they introduced digital. They introduced mobile ordering, you know, all these digital aspects. And so when I look at independence, I looked at the failure rate and I looked at same-store sales. And I realized that I can expand the TAM in two ways. One, I could increase sales per store. Two, I think we can increase the number of stores that exist in the world that are pizza shops. And so when you fast forward today, $47 billion of revenue passes through about 80,000 pizza shops. The fastest growing segment are independents.
32:33 Speaker 00 4,800 new locations opened up, net new locations opened up last year in the US.
32:38 Harry Stebbings? How does a recession impact independent pizzerias?
32:42 Speaker 00 It's interesting, I've been telling people forever, because I always used to get this question, that pizza in the US at least is a staple. It is a product that is low cost, travels well, social, it feeds an entire family or group of friends. For that reason, Americans have this sort of weekly habit with pizza. In recessions, in fact, consumers will tend to turn their nights out in. And instead of going out to a restaurant, they'll order pizza at home and they'll have a family pizza night or friends pizza night. And so we are seeing a bit of an acceleration as the economic environment gets a little bit more challenging. But pizzerias thrive, especially in the most challenging times. And this was also true in the middle of COVID.
33:23 Speaker 00 It became probably the last option standing in many suburbs and small towns across the country.
33:28 Harry Stebbings? Are there any questions? You've done interviews before, I listened to them before the show. Are there any questions which you're not asked that you wish you were asked?
33:38 Speaker 00 I'm not going to answer the question, but one of the questions very few people ask is if I wanted to compete with Slice, where would I start? That's a question that I think very few people ask. I mean, you have an opportunity to really find out about the true weakness of a company, the blind spot.
33:51 Harry Stebbings? Why would you not answer it? I'm not asking for the answer, but it's like, I'm proposing an idea here and maybe being arrogant, but I would tell you the weakness of my business because even though you know it, you would have to go through eight years of media company build to get to it. So like the moat to get there is too big.
34:11 Speaker 00 I agree because there are no benefits to me sharing it. I like.
34:16 Harry Stebbings? Do you have people to talk to? Do you have like a founder community?
34:19 Speaker 00 I do. I will say both Ben at Primary. By the way, Ben, I don't know if you've ever spoken to Ben here, but you should. His story is incredible, incredible. This is a very smart, poised, great person who you can have the best night out with, but he will challenge the fuck out of you the next day at the board meeting.
34:39 Harry Stebbings? The final one for me I do have to ask is like, if you were to cool yourself up the night before starting my pizza and say, before you go on this journey, you should know, dot, dot, dot, what would you say you wish you had known?
34:52 Speaker 00 I would always, in the early days especially, assume that things would get easier, that when I hire this person, it'll get easier. When we get to this level, it'll get easier. And the reality is it actually just gets more and more challenging, more and more difficult. I actually enjoy that now that that expectation has been set for myself in terms of my own experience.
35:12 Harry Stebbings? What do you think gets more difficult? Cause I argue it gets easier. Like I have teams now, I have EAs, I have videographers, editors, associates, so much nicer.
35:22 Speaker 00 It's nicer, but it's more difficult. It's more challenging. It's a good question. It gets more challenging because I think the stakes are just much higher. Like there's so many customers we can disappoint suddenly through one release. There's so many people who, even a person who has invested one dollar in my company, that's the last person I would want to let down. It's a combination of customers, investors, team members who have joined SLICE because they believe in our mission. As that denominator scales, the pressure to make sure that you're working more and making sure that you're limiting mistakes becomes greater and greater. At least that's my approach.
35:58 Harry Stebbings? Do you feel the pressure?
35:59 Speaker 00 Yes, but I like it. I thrive with pressure. I think a lack of pressure creates complacency.
36:05 Harry Stebbings? Listen, I want to do a quick fire. So I'm going to say a short statement. You give me your immediate thoughts. Does that sound okay?
36:09 Speaker 00 Yes.
36:10 Harry Stebbings? Okay, so you can have dinner with one person, dead or alive. Who would it be and why them?
36:15 Speaker 00 It would probably be my grandfather, Adam. My grandfather went back to Macedonia about 10 years ago and ended up facing a health challenge and then passed away. And I didn't get to be there for that. I didn't get to be there for his funeral. But my grandfather instilled just these incredible, I want to say, values, not only with me, but my brothers, my cousins. And I'd love to just have one more dinner with him because I don't think I've ever really sat down with him and just said, thank you. I'll tell you one story about him. When he was at his older age, he loved to work. And there was suddenly one day, he just couldn't work anymore. And he would ask myself, my brothers, to go and do something, perform some job. And I remember him pausing one day and saying, do you know how lucky
37:00 Speaker 00 you are? And I would say, why am I lucky? He said, because you are capable of working, because you get to work. And I want to work, but I can't work anymore. It was a really good reflection of who he was.
37:10 Harry Stebbings? I love that. And that's probably one of the nicest answers I've had to that question, to be honest. My answer is Bernard Arnault, but it's not quite so sentimental. Tell me, what was the first luxury you spent money on when you made your first bit of money?
37:23 Speaker 00 It was probably the Bentley that I went and bought. I love cars. And that Bentley GT, the coupe, is still one of my favorite. I mean, it's probably my favorite car ever made.
37:31 Harry Stebbings? Do you still have the car?
37:33 Speaker 00 I don't. I sold it.
37:34 Harry Stebbings? Tell me, Nissan Cubes, there were two of them?
37:37 Speaker 00 So Nissan Cubes are like these boxy cars, like they look like pizza boxes, tiny little pizza boxes. And I was going to pizza shops and I was like, hey, I'm here from mypizza.com. They're like, what the hell is that? I've never heard of that. And so I had to figure out how to create a sense of scale and legitimize the brand. And the best way to do that in a very hyper local way was to buy cars, put my brand on these cars. But I can send you the picture if you want to tweet it when the episode comes out. But put the brand on these cars. And then I would park them in front of pizza shops with my twin brother. And I would leave them there. And then when I would go there the following week, they would say, oh yeah, I've seen my pizza. I see the cars all over. Meanwhile, there was only two.
38:17 Speaker 00 That's one of the ways that I had to figure out how to legitimize a brand that just didn't exist.
38:23 Harry Stebbings? What do you know to be true that others do not agree with? So mine would be you cannot build a great, great business, which I would define as five billion dollar plus with work-life balance. It is not possible.
38:36 Speaker 00 Oh, I mean, can I use that? What I believe to be true, yeah, look, while I think luck plays a role, you have luck, timing, and then hard work as the three elements of success. And I think it's really just mostly hard work because if you work hard enough, you will understand what tailwinds are being created or where the world is moving because you're studying, you're understanding the customer. So that helps you create timing. When I launched Slice, I knew all orders would move to mobile. It was just, you know, a matter of time. It could have been in 10 years, 20 years, but eventually it would happen. And I knew that. I studied that. That wasn't like I was just lucky to choose what we did in a moment in time.
39:16 Speaker 00 And then I worked really hard at it. It was kind of the other way around. So I would say I don't know that luck and timing really exist. It's really mostly hard work.
39:24 Harry Stebbings? What have you changed your mind on in the last 12 months?
39:27 Speaker 00 Creating a very autonomous organization while it's helpful. Getting out of the way is a huge mistake in my opinion.
39:34 Harry Stebbings? If you could be CEO of another company for a day, what company would it be?
39:38 Speaker 00 Probably Madison Square Garden is a publicly traded company that is the owner of the New York Knicks and New York Rangers. These are sports teams. But I am a diehard Knicks fan. I would love to one day be in charge of that team.
39:52 Harry Stebbings? What's the single best pizza you've ever eaten? I'm asking the grandmaster here.
39:57 Speaker 00 Follow me for a moment here, Harry. There's a pizza shop called L and B Spamoni Gardens in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. You can go there and they make this, what's called an upside down pizza, which is predominantly soft. There's cheese underneath the sauce and it's like a little bit thick. This thing is so good, but what makes it really good is if you go there in the summer and you order this slice and you get a can of Coca-Cola or a Pepsi and you sit outside on these metal benches in Brooklyn, sun is setting and you're just biting into this slice and you've got this cold can of soda of pop, it's probably the best pizza moment anyone can have.
40:35 Harry Stebbings? Penultimate one, what's your biggest advice to founders on creating a board? I've heard you've done it incredibly well.
40:41 Speaker 00 Yeah, I think sometimes boards are an accident for a lot of founders, meaning as you fundraise, you kind of end up choosing people because you need capital and sometimes you don't have your choice, you only, you know, the choice is made for you because that's the only option. And so what happens is a board is created accidentally, right? You end up inheriting all these investors as board members because you were solving for capital, not for board members. That's a very dangerous game to play. So when raising capital, you've got to be really thoughtful about the fact that not only are you taking capital, but now you're constructing a board. And then pretty early on, you've got to also go and balance the board of investors with operators because sometimes the conversation can become really very financial.
41:22 Speaker 00 It becomes very investor centric as a board conversation versus company centric. And a board is really, these are the stewards of a business. And so the earlier you can bring on people who are operators and aren't necessarily investors and they can really contribute to the conversation, the better it is. For me, that person was Deirdre Bigley. She was the chief marketing officer at Bloomberg, on the board of Wix, Shutterstock amongst others. Most recently, Kat Cole, who's the president at Athletic Greens. Before that, she was president of Focus Brands, which is Carvel, Jamba Juice amongst others. These are people who are like, I mean, the last thing they want to talk about is what an investor thinks about, you know, their returns. Like, we're all talking about the company and the customer.
42:06 Harry Stebbings? Final one for you. What do the next five years hold for you? Where do you want Slice to be at 2028? What does it look like then?
42:13 Speaker 00 I would hope that we continue to accelerate the success for small businesses. Our model has the right to win in many categories, but we are deliberately continuing to constrain our focus so that we can be the best-in-class partner for these independents. When we earn the right to go to more categories and as we continue to scale, I would hope that we're operating as a public company because that gives me the opportunity to restart again. It's kind of like 2015 all over again, right? It gives the people who helped us get here an opportunity to realize some financial success due to their hard work. And I think it'll be a really powerful moment for Slice as a brand to really be more mainstream.
42:51 Harry Stebbings? I cannot thank you enough for this. I absolutely love this. I love the free-flowing discussion. It's so much better than a structured schedule. So thank you so much for putting up with me, and this was a lot of fun.
43:01 Speaker 00 It was great. Thank you so much, Eric.
43:04 Harry Stebbings? I mean, what an absolutely incredible story. If you want to see the full conversation, you can find it on YouTube by searching for 20VC, that's 20VC. But before we leave each day, you know all those mind-numbing tedious tasks that seemingly take up half your day. Well, Coda is here with their new AI-powered work assistant that helps you and your team not just finish tasks, but make progress. So your product team can bring a feature to market faster by using Coda AI to tag customer feedback, draft PRDs, suggest target audiences, summarizing product discussions and more. Your sales team can engage more customers by bringing in data from sources like Salesforce and then use Coda AI to suggest action items, meeting agendas or lead scores. And your marketing team can drive an impactful launch
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46:01 Harry Stebbings? set of episodes coming next week with our episode with Vin or Coastler coming on Monday.
Previous 20Sales: Why The Founder Has To Be The One To Create The Sales Playbook, When To Hire Your First Rep, Why Junior is Better Than Senior, How to Manage Sales Rep Compensation, How To Onboard New Sales Reps and more with Lori Jimenez, CRO @ WorkRamp Next 20VC: Vinod Khosla on How AI Impacts The Future of Healthcare, Education, Income Equality, Geo-Politics, Music and Climate Change Page updated October 26, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
