Aug 4, 2023 · 1h 8m · news
Ilir Sela: How I Founded Slice Pizza & Became One of Macedonia’s Largest Employers | E1044 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
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In this episode of 20VC, Harry Stebbings interviews Ilir Sela, the founder and CEO of Slice, to explore his journey from a Macedonian immigrant to building a major tech platform for independent pizzerias. Sela shares hard-earned leadership lessons on vertical software models, the realities of bootstrapping, his contrarian views on hands-on founder involvement, and the relentless work ethic required to scale.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Harry holds 17.7% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Harry as informed peer 2.2 Guest teaching 2.5 Guest disagreement 2.2 Harry pushing back 1.9
speaking balance: gold is Harry, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 18:09 Calling conventional management wisdom bullshit
Ilir directly rejects standard tech startup advice about hiring great people and getting out of their way, forcefully calling the concept complete bullshit based on his own experience.
Hardest push from Harry ▶ 55:46 Pressing for competitive weaknessesHarry refuses to accept Ilir's deflection when discussing unasked interview questions, actively challenging Ilir to reveal Slice's main vulnerabilities by arguing that sharing weakness displays strength.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 45:05 Dismantling average metricsWhen Harry asks for average revenue figures, Ilir immediately shuts down the prompt by telling Harry that averages hide the truth, reframing the conversation around threshold-based distribution metrics.
Harry holds his own ▶ 36:44 Conceptualizing start-of-chain insertion pointsHarry showcases his own strategic expertise by articulating a clear framework on initial product placement at the start of a value chain and comparing vertical vs horizontal models.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Harry as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Harry pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Loneliness of a Sole Founder | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | Harry opens with armchair psychology about childhood and upbringing, asking what Ilir learned from watching his family build small businesses. Ilir collaboratively shares insights about the loneliness of entrepreneurship. | |
| From Yugoslavia to New York: The Mindset of Opportunity | 1 | 2 | 2 | 1 | When Harry asks what Ilir is running from, Ilir gently reframes the premise by clarifying that he runs towards opportunities rather than away from fear, sharing his story of immigrating from Yugoslavia. | |
| Financial Security and the Bentley Story | 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 | Harry brings up a story from primary investor Ben Sun about Ilir buying a Bentley. Ilir grounds the anecdote in his background of sleeping on floor mattresses, explaining how profitability triggered an impulse buy that he quickly pivoted back into business reinvestment. | |
| Turning Down an Acquisition and Pitching Wiley on Twitter | 2 | 3 | 1 | 2 | Harry asks about reaching out to Wiley Cerilli on Twitter. Ilir recounts turning down an $18M acquisition offer and surprising Wiley by revealing Slice already served 3,000 pizzerias rather than the 100-200 Wiley assumed. | |
| Bootstrapping Creativity: Macedonia and Single-Engineer Constraints | 2 | 2 | 1 | 1 | Harry asks about operational creativity under capital constraints. Ilir details setting up English-teaching schools in Macedonia to recruit local talent and operating with a single engineer for five years. | |
| Leadership Philosophy: Why "Getting Out of the Way" is Bullshit | 2 | 4 | 5 | 2 | Harry cites the management adage of hiring great people and getting out of the way, which Ilir explicitly rejects as bullshit. Ilir argues that founders must remain in the operational details because alignment relies on constant mini-pivots. | |
| The Art of Repetitive Communication: Explaining the "Why" | 2 | 3 | 4 | 2 | Harry asks how Ilir prevents communication silos between regional teams in the US, Belfast, and Macedonia. Ilir rejects the goal of eliminating silos, arguing that leaders should embrace distinct geographic cultural norms. | |
| Leadership Struggles, the 2019 Plateau, and Reintroducing Constraints | 3 | 3 | 3 | 4 | Harry pushes back on Ilir stepping back into granular operations after 2019, arguing that top CEOs build systems that run while on vacation. Ilir holds his ground, arguing Series B companies cannot afford founder detachment. | |
| Recruiting on Mission and the Power of Vertical Focus | 4 | 2 | 1 | 2 | Harry demonstrates domain knowledge by offering a framework on starting insertion points and contrasting Slice's vertical model with Owner.com's horizontal focus. Ilir details customer research strategies to identify true customer priorities. | |
| Multi-Product Lifecycle and Relationship Management | 2 | 4 | 4 | 2 | When Harry asks for average revenue metrics across locations, Ilir cuts across the question to state that averages hide the truth. He explains why distribution thresholds provide a much clearer picture of merchant growth. | |
| The Domino's Delta and Customer Data Transparency | 3 | 4 | 3 | 2 | Harry asks whether independent pizzerias push back against Slice controlling customer data. Ilir corrects the premise, clarifying that all customer data is fully accessible and transparent to pizzeria owners. | |
| Expanding the Pizza TAM and Thriving in Recessions | 2 | 3 | 1 | 1 | Harry asks how founders should handle investor skepticism around TAM limitations. Ilir explains how digital ordering expands total market volume, citing same-store growth and recession resilience in the pizza sector. | |
| Identifying Blind Spots: The Unasked Question About Slice's Weaknesses | 3 | 2 | 4 | 5 | After Ilir states that interviewers rarely ask about Slice's competitive weaknesses, Harry presses him to answer it himself. Ilir firmly refuses, stating there is no strategic benefit in revealing internal vulnerabilities. | |
| Quick Fire: A Sentimental Tribute to Grandfather Adam | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | Harry transitions into a quickfire round. Ilir shares a sentimental story about his grandfather Adam's work ethic and explains his early growth hack using branded Nissan Cubes. | |
| Quick Fire: The Fallacy of Luck and the Power of Hard Work | 3 | 2 | 2 | 2 | Harry asserts his opinion that massive companies cannot be built with work-life balance. Ilir agrees on the necessity of extreme hard work, arguing that luck and timing are largely downstream effects of effort. | |
| Reconstructing the Boardroom: Balancing Investors with Operators | 2 | 3 | 1 | 1 | Harry asks for advice on building effective boards. Ilir warns against creating 'accidental boards' comprised solely of investors, advocating for operational board members to balance investor returns with company building. |
Statements from this episode (36)
Ilir Sela: Pizzerias thrive during recessions as consumers trade down
“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. Pizzerias thrive, especially in the most challenging times, and this was also…”
Ilir Sela: Small business ownership is lonely due to endless unexpected problems
“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 trying to solve one problem, and then you inherit an infinite amount of other problems that you suddenly have to be …”
Slice reached $250,000 in monthly profit during its 2015 bootstrapping phase
“When I was bootstrapping the company in 2015, I want to say February of 2015. I look at my spreadsheet. One day I was tracking my company on an Excel sheet, not even on QuickBooks. And in one month we profited about 250,000 dollars.”
Ilir Sela turned down an $18 million acquisition offer for MyPizza
“I had just gotten my first acquisition offer. You know, the offer to sell the company for eighteen million dollars would have been awesome. Sole owner. No debt. Eighteen million dollars would have been great. And I turned it down.”
Slice had 3,000 restaurant partner locations when bootstrapped in 2015
“We're working with about 3000 locations.”
Sela: Slice raised venture capital to recruit talent, not for money
“One of the reasons why I ended up raising money 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 t…”
Sela: Capital constraints yield hard-to-replicate operational advantages
“Capital constraints create some Incredible solutions that are very hard to replicate by other companies who may not have the same constraints.”
Slice employs roughly 650 people in Macedonia
“Today we have about 650 people in Macedonia. We're one of the largest employers in the country.”
Slice operated with only one engineer for five years
“I mean, I had one engineer his name is Sam Kennedy. He's incredible. He's the only engineer and product person and tech person. He's the only tech person we had in the company for five years.”
Ilir Sela: 'Hire great people and get out of the way' is bullshit advice
“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.”
Ilir Sela: Company growth is a collection of mini pivots, not one major shift
“A company's growth trajectory Is a collection of mini pivots. I call them like you don't have to make this huge company pivot, but every decision tree is a little pivot, right?”
Sela: Running a company by consensus is a terrible management strategy
“I used to really try to run companies the company with consensus, right? It was like, go into 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 wo…”
Sela: Executives have only communicated enough when nauseous from repeating themselves
“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, you know, why am I saying this again? Do it one more time. That's how you know that you've communicated enough.”
Sela: Leaders must explain decisions five steps ahead to enable autonomous choices
“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? And how can we articulate that? Not just a step ahead, but like five steps ahead. …”
Sela: Global companies should embrace geographic silos rather than prevent them
“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.”
Sela: Eliminating software tools prevents internal communication fragmentation
“I'm a big fan of like eliminating tools versus introducing more and more tools. Cause then what happens is things become fragmented that no one knows what should I slack versus what should I email, but what should I present via video?”
Sela: Single-niche software startups face instant TAM skepticism during growth slowdowns
“And so 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.”
Sela: Series B founders cannot step back while still figuring out product and GTM
“This is a series B company that's still figuring out what exactly is the go to, 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.”
Sela: Small business failure rates will stay high without end-to-end ecosystems
“Until someone figures out how to build an end-to-end sort of ecosystem that changes the disadvantage that an independent has by being independent, I think small businesses, the failure rate will continue to remain high.”
Sela: Driving local business growth requires moving phone buyers to digital
“And so to me, more sales for SMBs meant how do I increase the customer lifetime value of the existing customers? And the way to do that is to move them from the phone channel to the digital channel.”
Sela: Horizontal software like Owner.com cannot successfully vertically integrate across restaurant types
“A restaurant that sells a different product and maybe has table service is a very different business than a pizza shop, which is a very different business than a coffee shop. Now, They may all have the similar need of commerce, which is what a company like own…”
Micro business owners struggle to adopt multiple software products simultaneously
“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.”
Slice charges pizzerias seven to eight percent of generated revenue
“You know, all in all, Slices products cost about seven or eight percent of the revenue that we create for the merchant.”
Slice earns $100,000 net revenue from a $1.5M GMV New Jersey pizzeria
“There's a shop in New Jersey that is managing over a million and a half dollars a year through the Slice platform. For that merchant, our revenue is about a 100,000 dollars a year, net to Slice.”
Sela: US independent pizzerias average $550,000 in annual offline sales
“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.”
Sela: Domino's averages $1.2M annually per store, driven by digital volume
“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.”
Sela: Slice gives partner pizzerias full transparency into customer data
“While slice has access to the customer data, all the customer data is completely transparent to every merchant. We're not an intermediary. We're not a third party. So all the customer data, we have an owner's app. Every pizza shop knows exactly who the custome…”
Ilir Sela: US pizza market was $35B across 60k shops at Slice's launch
“At the time that I launched the pizza industry in the US was a thirty five billion dollar industry. That was the revenue that was passing through at the time about 60,000 pizza shops. And two thirds of that was independent.”
Sela: US pizza industry grew to $47B with 4,800 net new independent shops in 2022
“Forty seven billion dollars of revenue passed us through about 80,000 pizza shops. The fastest growing segment are independents. 4800 new locations opened up, net new locations opened up last year in the US.”
Sela: Ben Sun of Primary will rigorously challenge founders in board meetings
“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.”
Sela: Slice created illusion of scale using only two leased cars
“And the best way to do that in a very hyper local way was to buy cars. I leased them, 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 …”
Sela: Hyper-local business owners care only about their three-mile radius
“And when the customer is hyper local, you know, this pizzeria owner doesn't know what's going on in San Francisco. They just know what's going on in their three mile radius.”
Sela: Luck and timing do not exist, success is mostly hard work
“I don't know that luck and timing really exist. It's really mostly hard work.”
Ilir Sela: L&B Spumoni Gardens offers the best pizza moment
“There's a pizza shop called L&B Spumoni Gardens in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. And you can go there, and they make this what's what's called an upside-down pizza, which is predominantly sauce. There's cheese underneath the sauce, and it's like a little bit thick. T…”
Ilir Sela: Founders should balance investor boards with operators early
“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. It becomes very investor centric as a board conversation versus company centric. And a board is reall…”