YouSaid · the spoken record

Ilir Sela

lines on the record: 49
first: 2023-08-04
most recent: 2023-08-04
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“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 slices of brand to really be more mainstream.”
2023-08-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 WICS, Shutterstock, amongst others, most recently Kat Cole, who's the president at Athletic Greens. Before that, she was president of Focus Brands, which is Carvell, 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.”
2023-08-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. 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”
2023-08-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Follow me for a moment here, Harry. There's a pizza shop called LMB Spamoni Gardens in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. You can go there and they make this what's called an upside-down pizza, which is predominantly soft as 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 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.”
2023-08-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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”
2023-08-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 owners 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. 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 in timing really exists. It's really mostly hard work.”
2023-08-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, Nissan cubes are like these boxy cars, like they look like pizza boxes, tiny little pizza boxes. And I was going to pause and I was like, hey, I'm here from my pizza.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 hyperlocal 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. That's one of the ways that I had to figure out how to legitimize a brand that just didn't exist.”
2023-08-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2023-08-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 say, 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 you are? And I would say, why am I lucky? 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.”
2023-08-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 $1 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 it 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.”
2023-08-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would always in the early days, especially assume that things would get easier, that when I hired 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.”
2023-08-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 meet”
2023-08-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2023-08-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 friend's 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. It became probably the last option standing in many suburbs and small towns across the country.”
2023-08-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Digital, they introduce 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, 4,800 new locations opened up, net new locations opened up last year in the US.”
2023-08-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. That was the revenue that was passing throughout the time about 60,000 pizza shops. And two-thirds of that was independent. The dominoes and pizza huts in Papa John's of the world started to expand the TAM because they introduced”
2023-08-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's all digital. 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.”
2023-08-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 dominoes 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 dominoes invested in mobile, ordering online and they stopped advertising telephone numbers. That's when the performance of dominoes locations went through the roof. 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 dominoes. At the same time that I launched Slice. So when you look at that gap,”
2023-08-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't like measuring averages, Harry. Averages hide the truth. I want to know how many merchants are beyond a certain threshold of revenue. All in all, slices products cost about 7 or 8 percent of the revenue that we create for the merchant. If we create more revenue, we'll earn more 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 $100,000 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 $1,000 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 wavelength basically.”
2023-08-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 cost. 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. But I 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 going to sit there and make all these changes so that you can, you know, get your sales.”
2023-08-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 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 going to bring you more customers, they're going to say, what are you talking about? Like that's the last thing that I need. 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.”
2023-08-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Disagree with that. Don't get me wrong. I think once you have known motions and you're a growth company, certainly the company's 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.”
2023-08-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. 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.”
2023-08-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 slices 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. Our numbers were incredibly great in 2021. And we raised in like two days.”
2023-08-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 around a $15 million in 2017. And that 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 would be able to really help us scale faster. 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. 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%.”
2023-08-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2023-08-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. The reality is that what motivates people in Macedonia and the cultural differences there are incredibly unique. If I communicate it to the company more broadly and try to like make sure that all these people behaved identically or”
2023-08-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2023-08-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 a 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 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”
2023-08-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 back seat. 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. I think can be very, very dangerous, but it's probably because of my upbringing.”
2023-08-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 at it. 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 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.”
2023-08-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Important in 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.”
2023-08-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 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. 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.”
2023-08-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. 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.”
2023-08-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. 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 sales classes to go.”
2023-08-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like physical schools, so went to the city, like there was 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 mypiza.com. But 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.”
2023-08-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thou wouldn't 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 650 people in Macedonia. We're one of the largest employers in the country. That would not have happened if capital was in a constraint. I mean, 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. If someone passed a course and they got a certificate, they would then be qualified to work at SLIS.”
2023-08-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 instilled in every human. 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, paint them really well, double the national average.”
2023-08-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 could connected me with was Josh Kobelman. Josh and I spoke for about 90 minutes. We had a great conversation and I leave that meeting and why they 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 in the conversation went so well. 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.”
2023-08-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 Capitol, which, by the way, I had no idea what first round capital was. But went and met with him, that led to a number of other introductions.”
2023-08-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 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”
2023-08-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so that's a month February of 2015. I realized that there was an opportunity for me to really restart what was then called my pizza ultimately became sliced. 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. It 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. 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 at scale to a point that I hadn't scale.”
2023-08-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. 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. 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”
2023-08-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. 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 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.”
2023-08-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 is 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 the world, I think that anything's possible, but you just have to work really, really hard.”
2023-08-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really good question. I was born in this town called Diebur 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. 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”
2023-08-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 cost 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.”
2023-08-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 an expert in solving. And so that process can be lonely.”
2023-08-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2023-08-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source