Among them was Blerim Marku, the manager of Pizza Club in Edgewater, New Jersey, and a third cousin of Sela's who grew up with him in the New York City area. At the time, Pizza Club was doing its takeout and delivery business by phone, the old-fashioned way, despite knowing that "Papa John's and Domino's were making a killing with ordering online," Marku says. The problem was that small pizza shops weren't tech-savvy enough to build custom online ordering systems, and digital aggregators like Grubhub and Seamless were far too expensive.

When Sela offered his cousin an inexpensive way to take orders digitally — a service he called MyPizza — Marku enlisted. The result: Pizza Club sales, which had been lukewarm, heated up, and Slice is now helping the shop do around $1m a year, in line with a typical Domino's location. "We needed it," Marku says.

Today Pizza Club is one of more than 8,200 pizzerias in 2,200 cities and towns in every state across the country employing Sela's pizza-ordering platform, now rebranded as Slice. Backed by $20m in financing, New York City-based Slice is growing fast. It processed about $100m worth of deliveries last year. Forbes estimates that with expected orders of $250m this year, Slice should produce $25m in revenue.

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