Max Brun shut down his bootstrapped company and relaunched as Slice in 2017. He brought on investors, hired experienced operators from Seamless, and burned roughly $1 million a month while scaling. The shift required learning to spend aggressively and planning around specific milestones to manage cash.
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And what was that kind of like a shift like, right? So you had bootstrapped it for so long, kind of doing all the manual that doesn't scale, but, you know, yet you're able to scale up to that point, which is quite impressive. But, you know, then in taking capital and kind of going down the venture track route, right, how was that different for you as a founder?
Oh, very, very different. So one was getting more comfortable with spending money. We were so thoughtful about every penny we spent. Look, I think it was a deliberate choice because I had a number of conversations with folks who were like, hey, are you sure you want to go down that path? These are people who wanted to also get involved. And I think the reality is we— I really needed to take the approach of, okay, this is a whole new company. It's like almost launching a new business and you're taking over this company that's doing X amount of volume and it's your first day on the job. We in fact wound down the bootstrap company completely, including, you know, legal docs, including brand. We relaunched the business totally as Slice going into 2017. And so yeah, it was absolutely sort of a fresh perspective, totally new approach. Sat down and really thought about what milestones we wanted to accomplish, what it'll take to get there. But I would say the number one reason why I was able to make that transition was the people that were around me, whether it was investors that had just come in or, you know, hired quickly, hired a COO president, brought on board an interim president initially who was one of the co-founders of Seamless. Um, brought on another co-founder of Seamless who led all of the restaurant network there, Wiley. So collectively, we kind of would sit down and really go through sort of what does it mean to, to kind of start scaling, what does it mean to raise money, what does it mean in terms of setting expectations. Um, and so yeah, that was, that was a very deliberate choice. And then, I mean, I will argue there was an adjustment period when you start seeing, okay, you're hiring 30 people a week, you go from profitable to burning, you know, $1 million a month. That's definitely an adjustment, but one that you've got to, I think, start with where do you want to be in 5 years? Put together sort of a plan, both vision strategy, but also financial plan. Yeah. and say, okay, you're okay burning $1 million, for example, as long as you're hitting some milestones that you've set. So as long as it's like deliberate and planned, it makes you a lot more comfortable. But if it's not, then, you know, I would argue that would have been a much different journey.
