Ilir Sela on Building Slice and Serving Independent Pizzerias

Ilir Sela tells Harry Stebbings that watching his parents and grandparents run small businesses taught him how lonely the work can be. A shop owner starts by solving one problem and inherits many others. As Slice’s sole founder, he says, access to a team and resources makes his experience different from that of an independent shopkeeper.

Sela did not come through Silicon Valley’s venture-backed startup culture. He grew up with a simpler commercial instinct: create something people need, charge more than it costs and repeat. He says he is motivated less by escaping his past than by building useful products and teams.

Born in a small town near the present-day border of North Macedonia and Albania, Sela moved to New York at age ten. He recalls the contrast between a town without traffic lights and the lights around JFK airport, and his father’s reminder that the family had sacrificed to give its children opportunity.

Several generations initially shared a two-bedroom Staten Island apartment, with children sleeping on mattresses that were stored away during the day. Sela remembers it fondly. Financial security matters, he says, but those memories make him less afraid of having little and help explain why the work itself motivates him.

In February 2015, while bootstrapping what was then MyPizza, he says the business made about $250,000 profit in a month. He bought a Bentley with encouragement from his twin brother, then questioned the purchase and considered how to reinvest in the company. The financial figure is his account of that month.

That month he says he turned down an $18 million acquisition offer. As sole owner, he could have sold, but he realized he might simply start a similar business again. Instead he decided to treat the existing company like a new venture and learn how far it could scale.

He reached out on Twitter to food-tech leaders, including Wiley Cerilli, seeking people and advice rather than money. Cerilli initially suggested reconnecting after Sela had 100 or 200 locations; Sela says he already had about 3,000. A meeting led to further introductions, including at First Round Capital.

Sela says the business was profitable and he did not initially need capital. Ultimately, he raised venture funding partly as a way to bring experienced people into the company. His account illustrates his own decision, not a general rule that fundraising is unnecessary.

Capital constraints forced creative solutions, he says. He began hiring in the Macedonian town where he grew up, citing limited employment opportunities and lower costs than in the US. He says Slice had around 650 people in Macedonia at the time; his wage, unemployment and employer-ranking claims are not independently verified in the interview.

As the team exhausted the local supply of English speakers, Sela says the company hired teachers to run free in-person English classes. Graduates who became proficient could qualify for jobs, though participants did not have to join the company. He regards the program as a solution born from the constraints of bootstrapping.

The constraints also had costs. Sela says he expanded sales slowly because hiring depended on profits, and had only one person responsible for product and engineering for the first five years. More capital could have accelerated distribution and product development, even as scarcity encouraged discipline.

Sela rejects the idea that founders can simply hire talented executives and get out of the way. Even a leader from a similar company must understand the details unique to a new business. He sees his job as helping leaders succeed and staying aligned on consequential decisions.

He calls a company’s growth trajectory a series of small pivots: each decision moves the organization down a path. A leader who waits months to inspect the details may discover that teams have drifted. For him, management is a shared journey rather than a choice between delegation and involvement.

Sela says he once sought consensus from every executive, slowing decisions among strong-minded people. He believes leaders also need someone to set a direction and decide, though he still wants to improve his own decisiveness. He reflects that cultural habits of deference and hospitality made direct instruction uncomfortable for him.

For communication, repetition and the reason behind a decision matter. As a company grows, a message that feels obvious to its founder may not reach every team. Explaining the “why” and how it connects to later decisions helps colleagues make smaller choices without the founder present.

Slice had teams in the US, Macedonia and Belfast. Instead of assuming that geographic silos can be eliminated, Sela describes adapting communication to each region’s culture and holding separate all-hands meetings. He says the Belfast team had around 150 people at the time.

The collaboration stack he describes is deliberately simple: Slack, Google documents and spreadsheets, calls and video meetings. He prefers removing tools when too many channels fragment communication. He also admits that at scale his own direct messages can be misread because colleagues do not necessarily know his intentions.

Sela says fundraising felt easy when numbers were strong and difficult when they were not. After a $15 million round led by GGV in 2017, he says he underestimated the expectations that came with more capital. By 2019, growth of roughly 60% to 80% was, in his account, below what some investors wanted for the next round.

He believes he delegated too much before the company had worked out its operating motions. As headcount grew from about 30 to 100, more capital was needed and new leaders were still learning the business. He re-engaged with decisions and constrained hiring, asking whether each necessary task actually required a full-time role.

Stebbings asks whether that was a management failure and whether guardrails would have been better than stepping back in. Sela accepts responsibility. He says mature, repeatable processes can let a company improve without its founder in every decision, but Slice had not yet reached that stage in 2018–2019.

Sela frames the mission as helping local businesses thrive, starting with pizzerias. He argues that a narrowly targeted product can eventually solve several connected problems for one type of customer, whereas a single tool sold widely may leave the underlying disadvantages of small independents untouched. This is Slice’s strategy and its CEO’s assessment.

Choosing an entry product requires immersion in the customer’s daily life, he argues. Asking whether payroll is a problem may yield a yes without revealing that it ranks eighth among an owner’s priorities. Instead, he wants to learn what keeps the owner awake, then design a solution rather than simply asking the customer to specify it.

Pizzeria owners often asked for new customers, but Sela concluded they were also losing contact with existing ones. Phone orders did not create an easy way to reach those customers again. Moving orders to digital channels, in his view, could improve repeat relationships and customer lifetime value.

A horizontal restaurant tool can serve many types of business, Sela says, but their needs diverge as the product expands: a table-service restaurant, coffee shop and pizzeria have different operations. He sees vertical focus as a way to build a deeper integrated offering, while acknowledging horizontal approaches can have benefits.

He suggests adding a second product once a cohort has succeeded with the first, but not presenting every product to every merchant at once. A new shop and a 30-year-old shop may have different needs, as may an established New York customer and a business in a new market. Each product can also become an entry point.

Sela describes an inbound restaurant-support team and partner-success staff who build relationships with individual shop owners. He says those relationships help Slice judge when a merchant is ready for another product. His praise for the service is a company executive’s account, not an independent customer survey.

He avoids relying on average merchant revenue, saying it can hide differences. He estimates that Slice’s products cost about 7% to 8% of the revenue it creates for merchants, and gives examples ranging from roughly $1,000 a year in Slice revenue from a newer shop to about $100,000 from one processing over $1.5 million through the platform. These are his examples and stated economics.

The speed of adoption varies with a shop’s existing customer base, he says. Slice tries to move those customers from phone orders to digital ordering, offering features such as mobile payments. He believes digital ordering can be more convenient and efficient for consumers and merchants; the interview does not independently measure those benefits.

Sela estimates Slice accounts for about 10% of revenue at some shops on average and over half at others. He compares an estimated $550,000 in annual sales for an average independent shop with $1.2 million for an average US Domino’s location, attributing much of the gap to digital orders. Those comparisons and causal claims are his, and the interview does not verify them.

Asked about ownership of customer data, Sela says merchants can see customer information through an owner app, including repeat and first-time customers. He describes Slice’s aim as strengthening the direct relationship while making its own role unobtrusive. This describes his company’s stated approach at the time.

When investors question whether a market is large enough, Sela advises founders to take the question seriously and answer it independently. He distinguishes the existing addressable market from potential expansion caused by a product. He cautions against inflating the figure by including categories the company does not actually serve.

He recalls a US pizza market of roughly $35 billion across about 60,000 shops when he started, and cites about $47 billion and 80,000 shops at the interview. He says independent shops were growing and hopes Slice contributed. The interview does not establish its causal contribution or independently verify the figures.

Sela believes pizza can be resilient in recessions because it is affordable, travels well and serves a group at home. He cites the pandemic and says he saw some acceleration as economic conditions became harder. This is his interpretation as the CEO of a pizza-industry platform, not proof that every pizzeria thrives in downturns.

Asked what he wishes he had known at the start, he says the work does not necessarily become easier as a company grows. Larger teams make some tasks more manageable, but more customers, employees and investors can increase the stakes of mistakes. He says pressure motivates him rather than deterring him.

Sela would choose another dinner with his late grandfather, who taught him to value the ability to work. His grandfather had wanted to continue working after his health no longer allowed it. Sela remembers that exchange as an expression of his grandfather’s values.

He describes an early marketing tactic: he and his twin brother used two branded Nissan Cubes, parked near pizza shops, to create local visibility for MyPizza. Shop owners later said they had seen the cars everywhere. The example shows how he tried to make a small brand feel familiar in a tightly defined market.

Sela emphasizes hard work over luck and timing, arguing that studying customers helps founders recognize a market shift. That is his personal view; hard work does not establish control over every external outcome. He has also changed his mind about delegation and now sees completely getting out of the way as a mistake.

A Knicks fan, he says he would like to run Madison Square Garden for a day. His favorite pizza memory is a slice at L&B Spumoni Gardens in Brooklyn, eaten outside on a summer evening with a cold soda. The pleasure, he says, is as much about the setting as the food.

On boards, Sela warns that a founder focused only on raising money can end up accepting a board by accident. He recommends considering who will govern the company as part of the financing decision, and adding operators alongside investors so the conversation remains grounded in customers and operations.

Looking five years ahead from 2023, he hopes to complete the platform for independent shops, potentially repeat the model in other categories, and eventually operate as a public company. He stresses that Slice is deliberately keeping its focus on pizzerias for now. These are aspirations, not completed expansions or a promised IPO.