The Modern Hotelier#144: Lessons from Starting & Growing Slice | with Ilir Sela
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Steve Carran: Welcome to another episode of the Modern Hotelier. This episode, we are excited to bring you our conversation with Ilir Sela, the CEO and founder of Slice. David, what were some of your favorite takeaways from this episode?
David Millili: I think in general, it's just great, you know, that there's somebody there and, you know, someone whose family immigrated to this country, still believing in the American dream, was a great guy, was a great guest. And unfortunately now I'm starving for a slice of pizza.
Steve Carran: I agree. Like he literally is living the American dream. Like it's, it's absolutely incredible. And hearing his story and kind of his route, how he got there from, computer software to now being the owner and CEO of Slice. I've been a big fan of his since around the COVID time when I discovered the company, but it was such a cool, cool backstory.
And then hearing how he's growing Slice to, you know, a pretty big company now. So, very cool episode. We hope you enjoy the conversation and let us know what you think.
David Millili: Enjoy it.

Steve Carran: I'm Steve Carran.
Jon Bumhoffer: And I'm Jon Bumhoffer.
David Millili: Steve, who do we have on the program today?
Steve Carran: Yeah, David. Today we have on Ilir Sela. Ilir is the founder and CEO of Slice. Slice is a business platform empowering over 20, 000 pizza shops, generating nearly 2 billion in sales. Slice's mission is to bridge the digital divide for small pizzeria owners, enabling them to thrive in an increasingly digital marketplace. Welcome to the show, Ilir.
Ilir Sela: thank you so much for having me. I'm excited for today.
David Millili: All right. Thank you. So we're going to go through a couple of different sections. We're going to do a lightning round real quick. We're going to get to know your background, your career. Now we're going to jump into some industry topics. Sound good?
Ilir Sela: Sounds
David Millili: All right. What was your first job?
Ilir Sela: My first job was, a deli clerk when I was 13.
David Millili: Wow. What's something that you wish you were better at?
Ilir Sela: wish I was better at basketball.
David Millili: What's a luxury you can't live without?
Ilir Sela: Oh, that is all relative because so many things, you know, I grew up my first 10 years in Macedonia in a small, tiny town. Most of the things I live with today are, feel like luxuries. luxury, I can, uh, time.
David Millili: That's a good one. All right. So if you had a superpower, what would you want it to be?
Ilir Sela: These are good. Um, the ability, to better understand how my words and actions impact others.
David Millili: Good answer. What's a place you've never been to, but you'd most like to go to?
Ilir Sela: The Cayman Islands.
David Millili: So if you had your own late night talk show. Who would your first guest be?
Ilir Sela: My dad.
David Millili: All right. It's the final one. If you had a time machine, which way are you going into the future or into the past and what year would you go to?
Ilir Sela: That's a tough one. Because I'm a, you know, I'm an optimist. Like, I'm a, I'm, I'm excited about the future. But my, my dad always says, Hey, which is I think a common saying, if only I could be, you know, 20 again, but knowing what I know now. And so, for me, that would be, the year 2000.
Steve Carran: Beautiful. Beautiful. Well, that was great. Now we're going to learn, learn about your background a little bit, maybe what makes you tick a little bit. So like you said earlier, you were born in Macedonia and then you moved to Staten Island when you were 10 years old. How did growing up in Macedonia and then moving to Staten Island really shape who you are today?
Ilir Sela: it's a great question. I grew up in a tiny town called Diber. Back then, it was the Yugoslavia. Today, it's Macedonia. My family's Albanian by background. And, grew up in this really small town. There was no traffic lights. 000 people. And, you know, family was, uh, was a big part of growing up.
But not, uh, it's a place with not a lot of opportunity, I would say, which was pretty clear. And so moving to New York when I was 10, I remember flying into JFK airport. I didn't know it was JFK airport. I just knew it was New York. And so, you know, as a 10 year old, you're looking out the window and you're looking at all of the lights of New York.
it is a stark contrast relative to where I grew up. And, going back to my dad, which was one of the things that was very consistently instilled, but was really all about the opportunity that exists, America, specifically in New York compared to where we were. And so I think that has really shaped a lot of my life and, and especially my professional journey.
David Millili: So you went to City University, City University of New York, College of Staten Island, and you studied computer science. What kind of led you to that university and what led you to computer science?
Ilir Sela: I will tell you school for whatever reason, once we moved to, uh, to New York, school was just felt easy. you know, some of the math, lessons we learned in fifth grade in Macedonia or then Yugoslavia, I didn't come across again here until high school, which was fascinating. and so I think the difficulty level was. Very different. And for, for that reason, probably,
I was always just really good at school. I didn't really study that much, but things were just felt easy. and so I was, uh, I was pretty successful in high school. I was one of the top five students in, uh, in our, in our class. And I had all these scholarships, but.
As a family, we all believed, uh, in staying close to each other. And so the closest place, to our home was the College of Staten Island. And that's how we ended up there. So it was myself, my twin brother, and for a year it was my older brother as well.
Steve Carran: You've mentioned your father a couple of times already on the podcast. he is obviously a pretty big inspiration for you. What really, I guess, makes you inspired about your father and kind of how did he play a role in, in the slice?
Ilir Sela: Yeah, it's, it's my dad, my grandfather. Again, we all grew up very close together for a period of our life. We all lived together. At one point we lived with my uncle as well. Who's, uh, has been in many ways a father figure as well. And, you know, I think the thing that was just always. spoken about or, or just communicated was the importance of hard work.
There's a story I tell, which is when my grandfather got a little bit older, uh, and he, he was not really that, physically that capable anymore. He asked my brother and I to, to do some like manual labor work in the backyard. I think it was to like clean up leaves or rocks or something like that.
And we were pretty annoyed by it. And so you stopped us for a second and he said, Hey, I don't know if you, if you guys know how lucky you are. That you get to work really hard. and so whether it was my grandfather or my dad, who for a long period of time held two jobs in order to support his family, but also even through that, just continued to, to really push us to think about entrepreneurship, you know, he would say very often that.
The rules of this country of America are designed, the system is designed to reward business ownership and entrepreneurship. and so I think it was the combination of like hard work and entrepreneurship that, made a really big impact, not only for myself, but my, brothers as well.
Steve Carran: Love that. Love that.
David Millili: That's great. All right. So I have to apologize for one part of this next question. So I have to ask you if you're a bigger fan of the New York Giants, thank you for Barkley because I'm a Philadelphia Eagles fan or Albania's football team. So you're a bigger fan of the Giants or Albania's football team.
Ilir Sela: I'm a bigger fan of the New York Giants.
David Millili: Okay. All right. That's good to know.
Steve Carran: There we go. Well, good luck this season. Good luck.
Ilir Sela: Thank you. 
Steve Carran: that's great. Now we're going to learn a little bit more about. Bye. Your career, how you, uh, got to be the CEO and founder of Slice. So after college, you started Nerdforce. Was this your first startup? And what lessons did you learn from Nerdforce that help you in Slice today?
Ilir Sela: yeah, Nerdforce was my, my first startup. So, you know, while in school and just coming out of school, it was around the same time as the emergence of broadband internet and generally just personal computing and all that good stuff. And with that came a real need for, computer repair, networking, specifically focused on small businesses and, and some, you know, at home office sort of operators.
And a lot of my friends were doing a similar job as, as was I, you know, in our spare time, we were fixing computers and setting up wireless networks and things like that. And so I realized that we were all kind of doing the same thing, and we're all facing similar challenges. So I thought that. We could benefit if we just sort of united into one, one brand, one entity that we can probably hire some shared resources.
One of our biggest pain points was the fact that while we were fixing computers, we were getting phone calls for new appointments and it was just very disruptive. And so something as simple as that, which was, Hey, what if we hired handful of people to answer the phone? If we all had a shared number and then based on our location, each person gets the appointments scheduled.
So we all kind of got these blackberries at that time, which allowed us to like get emails with appointments. and that was, uh, really the start of the first business, which was how do we enable small businesses with an IT department because they didn't have the resources to have a full time employee.
And we scaled pretty quickly, but that was the business model. And it was a collection of independent contractors choosing to operate under a consistent brand and sharing resources.
Steve Carran: That's awesome. Those blackberries were game changers back in the day. They had email on them and the full keyboard.
Ilir Sela: It was awesome. And we all had to like, we, we had to have an AT& T, uh, you know, line because AT& T was the only carrier that allowed you to be online and on the phone at the same time, little nuances that not a lot of people may know about, and yeah, we ended up scaling pretty quickly and, started to get some phone calls from people who wanted to own a Nerdforce franchise.
Which I had no idea what that even meant. I was, uh, by then I was maybe 24, had no idea what a franchise was, but if we're getting so much demand for people who want to own a Nerdforce franchise, I decided to just immerse myself in that studying the business model, but also, pretty quickly converting the business from a tech support company to a franchise company that enables and supports tech support companies.
David Millili: So next, it looks like your new life in pizza started. So you started MyPizza Technologies. What led you to start that company?
Ilir Sela: So, it was really the evolution from Nerd Force to my pizza, nerd force. We, we ended up franchising in, uh, 2005 and over the next three years we scaled to 124 franchisees, and that was my MBA in franchising. I mean, I attended franchise expos and learned everything about franchise disclosure documents, you name it, the whole thing. And franchising is probably.
If not the largest and most successful business innovations of our lifetime. It really creates opportunity for so many people. But I, I learned it has one potentially fatal flaw, which is it takes away the creative freedom from the operator. And so one of the challenges we had was that all of our franchisees had to be uniform, but the reality is they all wanted to operate in the gray and they wanted to adjust to the local needs of their geographies and customer base and so on and so forth.
And so, I ended up selling Nerdforce in 2008, sold it to a public company. it was a good outcome, life changing at that time. but immediately it started to, to really, better form an opinion about, what is the right business model to enable, other small businesses. And I grew up in the pizza industry and a lot of pizzeria owners were asking me for help with technology.
And it was sort of combining that. Those lessons from the franchise model with the technology background and, but also the, the pizza community that I grew up around and that's really what led to, to my pizza. And the idea was to, build a business model that I've called the reverse franchise, which is how do you create the franchise stack?
The components, the aspects, all the, positive things about the franchise model while championing the authenticity and creativity of local brands and local operators. and so that's how MyPizza was born.
Steve Carran: It's very cool. Very cool. And then in 2016, you rebranded to Slice. What was the reason for the rebrand? And did your mentality change at all with the rebrand?
Ilir Sela: So for the first six years of the business, I bootstrapped. so we bootstrapped under MyPizza. com and to be honest, like the idea was to try to get Pizza. com.
but, it was too expensive. The, the, the price was right around 5 million. I didn't have the money. And so I decided to acquire mypizza. com and, you know, in 2009 or so, mobile was, was still not a big thing.
And so web was, was so important. And so we scaled as mypizza. com leading with our first product, which was online ordering and websites and sort of online presence for, for pizza shops. that was the most important. products because I learned pretty quickly that by moving customer behavior from, from phone to digital, it enabled pizza shops to be more successful. Their revenue went up, their efficiency went up.
And so we did, we just did that for about six years. Around, 2015, we had scaled to 44 million in, in GOV and total sales on the platform with about 4 million in revenue and. Maybe 3 million of that was profit per year. It was super efficient, like bootstrap company.
And so, through that experience, I decided to reach out to one of the founders of Seamless, uh, which had eventually became GrubHub that sold a company, And the idea was to surround myself with people who can help me expand my network and help us really scale the business. And so that led to the second phase of the company, which was more or less winding down mypizza.
com, but taking all of the assets and relaunching in 2016. And part of that relaunch was also, me hiring leaders that, were able to help me scale. One of those leaders. was a gentleman named Nick Karrat Today he's actually the CMO at StockX. Nick joined and one of the first things he asked me is, Hey, let's really refresh this brand.
You know, are you open to exploring all options? And, for me, I am, I try to be as objective as possible. And so my feedback to him was, look, let's, um, let's explore whatever is best for the business and. One of the options that came forward was the, the name brand Slice. I got a lot of feedback from all these experts basically that said, Hey, That's a, such a generic name.
It's very likely it's not ownable. Uh, you won't be able to really own it. The The only way you'll really own it is if you're like crazy successful. and I thought that was like, I mean, yeah, why, why else would we, would we be doing it? And so, I just decided to make the call and go after it. And, so that's how Slice was born.
Steve Carran: It almost like challenged you to to be ultra successful to make it a brand, right?
Ilir Sela: Yeah. I mean, you know, if you're not going to go for it, like what are we doing? Right. And so, it was a risk for sure because there was other brands named slice is like a soda company named slice. And there's all these kinds of obviously generic terms. I'm really happy it worked out.
David Millili: so, you know, obviously a lot of businesses, companies struggled during COVID. How did COVID affect Slice?
Ilir Sela: Yeah. COVID was a wild time. Um, this goes, this goes back to, I think just being surrounded by great experienced leaders, both on the management team and the board, You know, in the, in the first few days of stay at home orders, as we can all remember, you know, everything shut down because we were under the impression that for two weeks, we'll just sort of bite the bullet, stay in for two weeks.
And after two weeks, things will go back to normal. And one of our investors at the time, GGV Capital, which today is known as Notable Capital, at the time they had three partners in Asia and three partners in the U. S. And in Asia, especially in China, they were kind of ahead of us on the calendar. And they knew very quickly, or at least they understood from there that it would actually just not be a two week thing.
And then after the first couple of weeks, what they saw in companies similar to Spice in Asia was this incredible acceleration of demand. And so instead of playing defense, what we chose to do was, pretty quickly within a matter of days, we raised 43 million
And decided to play offense. And so our business almost overnight, you know, after the first few days of just everything going to zero and while everything's zero, we're raising 43 million in anticipation of big spike. And within, I would say seven days, things just started to really accelerate. And, it was a wild year where we are at the same time trying to help our team members. Move to remote positions, especially customer service and restaurant support. While at the same time, we're trying to be available for the shop owners who are risking their life and their, and their families and their staff risking their life to stay open and support their community, support their families. And then, be able to scale with the demand on the consumer side that just spiked like, like I've never seen before. And so I think it was a moment in time that helped the company grow up really quickly in a good way. and so fortunate to have gone through that experience. It was unlike anything I've ever been through. I learned a lot. I don't want to go through it again, but.
David Millili: Right.
Ilir Sela: I'm grateful that we came out of it as a much better company.
Steve Carran: That's actually where I first heard about Slice. To be honest with you, I used to follow Dave Portnoy's Pizza reviews religiously, and I think you guys did, you guys were sponsors and he promoted you guys a lot by helping out these local pizza shops, you know, still stay in business during COVID. And that's, that's the first time I ever heard about Slice.
Ilir Sela: Yeah, we, uh, we did a lot of cool things with Dave. Uh, he's a champion of small business and we align on those principles and, uh, really grateful for him. And, uh, The ability for him to be able to talk about slice and our common shared values was, um, was a cool time. Yeah. 
Steve Carran: Well, that was great to get to know your background a little bit more. So now we're going to get into some industry thoughts. so like you mentioned earlier, you bootstrapped 40 million. why did you choose to bootstrap and what were some of the advantages you saw come out of that?
Ilir Sela: Yeah. I didn't think that there were other options. I honestly didn't know about the VC world much. Uh, I grew up around small businesses. I grew up with the idea that. You can create a product, for a dollar, uh, and then you can sell it for two. And then you just do that as many times as possible. Like that's, that's the business sort of mentality I grew up with.
And so, it wasn't until I started to meet more folks and expanded my network that I, was introduced to investors and venture capitalists. And even then it wasn't so much about us needing the money. As much as I wanted to just expand our ability to, to grow our network and experience and, and invite awesome people on to, uh, to slice, but, you know, I think the benefits of bootstrapping, which I think are, are still sort of embedded in our DNA today is that a, Resource constraints breed so much creativity.
Like it, it forces you to become a much stronger problem solver. it's really easy to throw money at a problem, but it's, uh, it's really challenging and likely more rewarding if you find creative, creative solutions. And so that's one, I would say the other is, you know, just, operating with discipline.
You know, I'm pretty proud of the fact that Slice has been profitable the last three years in a row. but that, that choice, when we decided to just be profitable again, wasn't a difficult one. It was like pretty clear what we had to do. And so, yeah, bootstrapping is, um, you know, if I were to launch another company in the future, I would bootstrap it for sure.
Um, at least in the beginning. it's definitely a much lonelier journey, but something that it's an experience that I think forces entrepreneurs to really figure out problems sooner and also become really focused. That's the other thing bootstrapping does. It, it forces focus. You have no resources to do anything more than one thing really, really well.
Uh, and that was my pizza. It was basically turnkey sort of, um, you know, almost templated websites for pizza shops with an online ordering, component, and we just plug those into as many shops as possible over five years.
David Millili: All right. Well, you keep hitting the number 40 because in 2021, you raised a series D of 40 million at Slice. What was the most, or what has been the most challenging part of scaling after raising around like that?
Ilir Sela: Yeah, the, the 40 million round, fortunate to, to have the opportunity to work with O 1 advisors, Adam Bain, Dick Costello, just awesome operators and entrepreneurs. And, uh, the goal was to bring them on board. And with that, our existing investors also wanted to participate. And, and we ended up just pretty 40 million round, which I think we still have on our balance sheet.  
whether you raise money or not, I think as the company scales. You know, there are absolutely, um, lessons and, and, and adjustments that leaders should be making, especially founders and CEOs should be making, which is your role is almost reinvented every six to 12 months. And, you know, you go from a company that is relatively small and scrappy to, having to focus more on building an engine, and making sure that you're really paying attention to the components of that engine and.
Empowering people to, execute. And so I think that was one of the biggest lessons for me. And it wasn't an easy transition, but I think once you kind of establish that trust, and once again, it goes back to having the right leaders and experienced people on the management team, then things can become, pretty exciting, pretty quickly.
Steve Carran: One thing we talk about on this podcast a lot. It's culture. mostly in hospitality. And I love following you on LinkedIn because you talk about the culture of your company a lot. One thing I saw was that you actually created an English course for your team in Macedonia. What advice do you have for companies or folks out there that are looking to build a positive and successful culture?
Ilir Sela: Yeah, I would say it all, first off, it all starts with, being
really disciplined with inviting people to, to your company, to, to, to be members of your team that align with some of the common values that are very important to not only. me as a founder, but, our management team and our leadership team.
And for us, it, everything starts with our mission. And so I think one thing I'm really proud about with Slice is whenever I meet anyone who's heard of our company, they can almost repeat our mission, you know, in verbatim. And, and so I think culture starts with a common belief. Everyone's there and everyone's at Slice for the purpose of empowering small business.
in our case, small business pizza shops. I would say that's really important. And it's really easy for CEOs, and founders or any leader to, make sacrifices there, especially when you meet really talented people. You want to find a way to bring them onto your company. And sometimes you will overlook some of these components, some of these gaps in common values.
And I think that's where culture starts to deteriorate. And so the first lesson or the first sort of piece of advice I would give is have a really high bar, have very clear values that are important and then hold the bar really high on those values and make sure that whoever joins is very much aligned with, you on those. I'd say the second part that's more broad, that's kind of simple, to be honest, is culture is what companies tolerate. and so really is as simple as that. and I'm not suggesting, when I say tolerate, I'm not suggesting if something happens, like you come down with like, you know, an iron fist, but, but being incredibly clear about, what success is and, and making sure that Whenever somebody isn't pulling their own weight, or whenever something is, uh, you know, in our case, if you tolerate missed timelines, consistently, then you have no timelines.
that's a very, I think, more of a pragmatic example. And so culture legit is, is what you tolerate. And then the last part is, In order for teams to care about what you're trying to accomplish, you, you have to care, care about them. And this is not something that's like, I think we're all on this journey to figure out how to make sure that we, can show and display care for people.
But just doing the right thing is, um, is a big part of culture, doing the right thing for the customer, doing the right thing for your, for your team members. you know, when faced with, uh, with a decision tree. You know, I like to believe that we're always trying to do the right thing. And sometimes that may be counter to the near term goals of the business, but doing the right thing, I think is the best long term approach you can have to culture.
David Millili: can you tell us, was there one failure that you had in business that you learned the most from and how did you rebound from that? And what advice would you give to people that are starting off founders who are, you know, go through that, that failure and have to kind of get back up?
Ilir Sela: I mean, there are a lot of failures, there's failures every, every single day. That is, that is business actually. those failures are lessons that, trying to think of specific examples, there are. You know, with with slice as an example, there have been cases where, you know, we thought deploying a 30 or 40 million marketing campaign would, would change things, degree that, never happened.
And. know, I would say I just, I guess I don't think of those things as failures, though. I just think of those things as attempts, as, as, as tries, and not every attempt is going to, deliver the outcome you expect or hope for. and so I think maybe a lot of people may consider those things failures, but I actually just.
Consider that just another attempt. you know, I would say the, the thing, the things that I try to be really thoughtful about are making sure that if I am taking a shot at something, like if we're making an attempt at something that it's not going to be fatal, mean, unless it's super early days, day two of the company or something like that, like you don't want to make an attempt that is going to risk the entire company.
And so how do you, contain these, these attempts into, uh, a way that allows you to obviously take a big shot, but also if you miss, it's not going to, to be fatal. But aside from that, like, I'm not wired to think in mistakes. I'm just wired to think in like, what did we try when we tried it? What did we learn? I think too many people give up on ideas because the first attempt failed. Oftentimes it's very easy to then question the strategy.
But 99 percent of the time I find that it's actually an execution adjustment versus the wrong idea or the wrong strategy. anyway, I'm, I'm sort of deviating now into something more broader, but I would say, yeah, that, that's sort of how, how I think about mistakes.
Steve Carran: That's great. That's great. So I gotta ask this, and I'm sure you get this on most podcasts you go on since, you know, you found it in CEO, uh, pizza delivery, digital marketplace for pizza spots. What is your favorite pizza spot in New York City?
Ilir Sela: you're going to get me in trouble because there are, there are, you know, 4,000 customers in the New York area and they're all my favorite. But, there's two answers. When people ask me this question, uh, the first answer is the one closest to you. 
Steve Carran: Ah, good
Ilir Sela: that is usually, that is what we call the home slice.
That's what you grew up in. And so we actually try to take a position where we're not trying to build a platform that's more like Yelp or Google reviews and all these things, because. every shop has something unique and special about them. Every shop has customers around their neighborhood who think and believe and are probably right that that shop is their favorite. And so who are we to tell them that, you know, that shop isn't good enough and the next one's better. And so that would be my position, but my own personal favorite shop is the one close to me, which is called Pizzeria Giove. It's on Staten Island, New York. for anyone who's in the area or passes through, I would strongly recommend stopping by there, they have a great, great pie.
Steve Carran: Beautiful, beautiful. That's awesome. That's awesome. So this whole time, we have been asking you the questions. This is where we're going to turn the pizza table and let you ask us a question.
Ilir Sela: Um, with recent guests or to the extent you can remember, what was the answer you got from a guest that, taught you the biggest lesson?
Steve Carran: Ooh, that is a great question. I got to think about this one. David, I'll let you go first. If you, if you have it, have an idea for this one, uh, I got to think about this one. So the guest that gave us like the best advice or that we, that we learned the most from.
Ilir Sela: The thing that stands out, you're like, wow, I, I learned something really. Interesting.
Steve Carran: Okay.
David Millili: I'll tell you. So for me on again, because I'm old, so I'm going to go to the last one. So we interviewed a gentleman named Scott Eddie, and I didn't really think it was possible that you could not have a residence. So this gentleman travels around the world, only stays at hotels and cruise ships and doesn't have a residence.
An apartment or a house. He has a storage unit where he gets stuff. And you always kind of hear those stories, but you're always kind of like, yeah, bullshit. I'm sure you have a little apartment or a studio somewhere in Miami or New York or something. And
he didn't. So I just didn't think that was really possible and he proved me wrong.
Ilir Sela: That, that is very interesting. I'd love to, yeah. I mean, I would love to pick his brain on some things.
Steve Carran: I'm going to go back to actually one of like the first episodes we ever recorded and I'm going to stick in the hospitality space. I'm going to say Max Starkov. He is probably one of the smartest people that I think I've ever. Talk to in the hospitality industry and like somebody who has just extensive knowledge on everything hospitality.
He's also owned a few businesses himself and, you know, just has this immense knowledge of hospitality. He's also somebody I follow on, on LinkedIn and engage with quite often just because he's just a vast knowledge of, of resource that I've, that I've been able to kind of follow along and, you know, continue my learning in hospitality.
Kind of learning through him and his, his advice and kind of advice on LinkedIn. 
David Millili: Well, I'll chime in real quick. The best thing about Max is he's not afraid to say what he thinks. That's why it's so, it's so raw that you're like, Ooh, I would've liked to said that, but I'm still, cause he's retired, so he can kind of do whatever he wants and you're like, I kind of wanted to type that too, but I still got a clients and things I got people I got to work with, but.
Steve Carran: he's very real, which I, I appreciate his, his genuineness and, you know, his kind of opinion on, on a lot of things. And most of the time I agree with him.
Ilir Sela: love that.
Steve Carran: That's great. So, that was great. Thank you. We've been asking questions this whole time. So our producer, John, he's been sitting in listening at this episode.
So we're going to bring him in for the final question and then we're going to get you out of here.
Jon Bumhoffer: So listening to you, it sounds like every business you've built has a major focus on enabling and empowering small businesses. One, I want to know why that's so important to you. And similar, you said the thing with culture, do the right thing is the, is one of the biggest pieces to building culture. How have you seen focusing on small businesses and maybe doing that right thing really pay dividends in building Slice and some of your other endeavors?
Ilir Sela: both great questions. the small business focus really probably comes from the fact that I grew up with small business owners. and. To be quite honest, I never, myself personally, never, you know, went on the journey to build a big company. The idea, I mean, my pizza was a small business. My, my first company was a small business.
I think every company starts as a small business and it's kind of going back to the same principles of like, what this country is sort of based on. It's the, It's that spirit of small business ownership and being able to, uh, have a purpose and have a, have a business that can support family and perhaps give people, uh, an opportunity to, to live out the American dream.
And so I think that is probably the. underlying reason for that. I think the other part of it is where I believe the most amount of opportunity exists, small businesses are constrained in so many ways, constrained in time, resources. and so, you know, I, I think there's just always a ton of opportunity, to provide real value, like real value, because I think the best companies.
Provide more value than they extract. if you can provide, you know, a hundred dollars of value, then you've earned the right to probably make about 30 of that in return. That's my usual sort of framework. you know, I think the, the other part of it is that it's just a notoriously difficult industry.
And like, I love hard problems. You know, I think if I was. Operating a company that was relatively easy. I don't know that it would be so, so fun. so it's like the difficult challenges become really, um, uh, exciting and then ultimately rewarding. in terms of doing the right thing, I think, I believe when it comes to customers and value and all that stuff, everything revolves around trust.
so for example. If I called every pizza shop in the world today. And I said, Hey, I can generate you an extra 100, 000 a year. And they trusted me 100%. Every single one would say yes. It's kind of simple, right? If I said you will make a hundred grand more and they trusted me, they would all say yes, but they don't say yes because they don't trust me.
And so doing the right thing is really about establishing trust in the industry long term. it's making sure that you're always prioritizing the right. outcome for the customer. And sometimes that is counter to what Slice can do. there's been examples. I'm very good friends with the CEO founder at Toast, which we don't compete with directly, but there are some competing aspects.
And if there's a shop that can benefit from Toast over Slice, I will absolutely point them to, to that platform. And that is about, you know, doing the right thing.
David Millili: Well, that does it for another episode of the Modern Hotelier. This is where you get to let people, tell people where they can find out more about Slice, if they can reach out to you. So plug away.
Ilir Sela: Yeah. You just go to slice.com. That's the best place. We actually just finally acquired that domain name. and so I'm really excited for people to just go there. Uh, so if you go to slice. com, you'll find everything about slice, but also I think you'll be able to, be able to reach me as well.
David Millili: Well, that does it for another episode of the Modern Hotelier Hospitality Most Engaged Podcast. So whether you're watching or listening, we appreciate you. And I'm sure at this time, you're about to get ready to go get a slice of pizza somewhere, and we will see you again soon. Thank you.
Ilir Sela: Sounds good. Thank you again.
Steve Carran: Thank you.