The Ledger
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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 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.”
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: 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…”
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.”
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.”
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: 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: 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.”
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: Slice is deliberately constraining focus to pizzerias before category expansion
“I think that 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.”
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…”
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.”
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 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: 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 …”