Building a remote culture at work is something that has been thrust upon many businesses in the last 18 months, no so for today’s guest Nicolas Vandenberghe, co-founder and CEO of Chili Piper. Nicolas and the team are making waves in the competitive scheduling marketplace and recently closed a $33M Series B Lead by Tiger Global.
About Nicolas:
Nicolas started selling newspapers in the streets of Paris in high school. After graduating from Stanford Graduate School of Business, he started and sold 3 tech companies and also ran Sales for a $2B telecom company, negotiating billion-dollar deals with companies like Google.
Presently I'm the CEO and Co-Founder of the tech firm - Chili Piper - a pioneer in Buyer Enablement. He co-founded Chili Piper in 2016 and successfully bootstrapped it past $2M ARR until receiving funding in 2019. Chili Piper is a forward-thinking company with a 100% remote work force. It's fully distributed leveraging global talent with employees in 28 cities in 21 countries.
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In this episode we discuss:
03:00 The origins of Chili Piper
05:38 How Oracle’s sales practices pushed Nicolas to start Chili Piper
08:31 The future of SaaS pricing and unbundling
10:36 The decision to bootstrap for the first two years
12:28 How long the initial MVP took to develop
14:15 The early sales process
15:45 Competing in a crowded market
20:10 Early A/B testing and how they succeed
23:01 Knowing when Chili Piper had product/market fit
24:42 Why integrations are so important
27:50 Why he started a second company, kosmotime.com, to help with scheduling
31:10 How Chili Piper built a remote-first company prior to the pandemic
37:04 Talking about Chili Piper’s series B Raise of $33M and what is smart money
The book Nicolas recommends:
Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on it by Chris Voss
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Nicolas Vandenberghe of Chili Piper on the future SaaS and being the CRM underdog