Global Talent & Community - Nicolas & Alina Vandenberghe - Chili Piper - Episode #45

When people get together and there's no camera on and there's no posture that we have to be these robots at work, they become a lot more open to sharing their challenges, their real challenges.

Welcome to Not Another CEO Podcast. I'm your host David Politis. Every week we talk to inspiring leaders and get the true stories, ups and downs, the lessons learned and come away with actionable advice for our own journeys. Today's guests are remarkable husband, wife, duo. They've built a company trusted by thousands of go to market teams around the world to drive more revenue and better customer experiences. Nicholas and Alina Vandenberg are the co founders and co CEOs of Chili Piper. Nicholas is a five time founder who has an impressive and diverse background. His experience spans every stage of a company and he's worked in everything from telecom, e commerce, venture capital and of course SaaS. Alina comes from a deep product background and spent her career building and managing technology products used by millions of people around the world. She is also passionate about empowering the next generation of women in technology. They started chili Piper in 2016, bootstrapped it past 2 million in ARR before raising external funding. Now they've gone on to raise over $50 million while scaling into a global business with more than 140 employees across 32 countries. Today their platform helps B2B revenue teams improve conversions throughout the entire funnel and they serve customers like Verizon, Monday Gong and Intuit. Please welcome Nicholas and Alina Vandenberg.

Thank you for having us.

Thank you, thank you.

I'm excited to do this. All right, first question, we're going to go to Alina first. This is going to be a hard interview for me because I don't usually interview two people, but we're going to try. First question, what is the one thing you've done at Chili Piper, big or small, that's had the biggest impact? And you do again if you're CEO of another company in the future.

Because I was a first time founder, something that instilled discipline in me was getting our first customers to pay before we had anything built. Because you have these ideas in your mind and you get people to say, yeah, that's amazing, I would buy it. But if they don't sign the Panda dog, the contract to show that they're real about, about getting on board with you, then I think it's a lot.

Harder to, to succeed when you do that. Those early customers, how did you get those? How did you even find those customers? Were they people you knew already or.

We Would go to a lot of events in person in New York and in Los Angeles, and it was mostly revenue teams that would go. And we tried to figure out what was on their mind, what was their current problem, what they were dealing with. And eventually we found someone that was struggling with round robin distribution from sales teams to the onboarding team, and they were ready to pay 20k to get us started ahead of time. And then we found five more. That was all. They were all ready to get us started also with this distribution of leads.

And the rest is history with no product. Just to be clear. No product.

No product, no.

So this is, I think, a big topic for me. When I started BetterCloud, we did it all free product, we gave it away. We did all of that and then we went to convert. We had 10,000, I don't know, 20,000 customers and only like a thousand converted or less than that. Very low aspect. But now when I talk to founders, especially founders who have not been successful, every person says, I wish I actually got them to pay up front, because I got almost false positives of whether they were actually interested. How did you. I mean, what was that conversation like with them when you said, hey, pay me $20,000 for a product that doesn't exist? They all said, okay, here, I signed it.

In our case, it was really. It was a bit different because they were getting ready to build it internally themselves, and it would have costed them more. So it was a real problem that they were getting ready to solve one way or another. Whether it was an agency build or it was an internal build, they were ready to solve for it. So the fact that we would come in and would build it for cheaper, it was like a good alternative for them. They put some milestones in the contract to make sure that we would deliver, and we delivered.

How many of those first customers did you have, let's say today, people would say design partners. How many of those?

So we had the first contract from this company in San Francisco and we had four others that were that said, yes, we didn't sign the contract yet with them, but as we were building and we were showing the first milestone for the company in San Francisco, we were showing to these other four companies that were ready to also buy.

And how much time did you spend with those customers as you were building? Like, did you show them every step of the way?

We had the product ready in three months and I would keep them updated. This is what we've done, this is what we have ready. And the reason why I would keep Them updated is because I was curious if I'm doing something that might not accommodate their needs. So I would ask, this is what I'm thinking about it. Would that work also for you? It was like from a curiosity standpoint of you, not from a sales standpoint of view. I wanted to make sure that we're building something that would work for them also.

Yeah, there was quite a lot of back and forth actually. We showed some ideas and then we had better ideas to do it and went back to them. And in that process, we did weekly check in with them.

Are those customers still customers? Yes, today. Wow.

It's ironic actually, because second customer was Greenhouse and I have a call with them immediately after this renewal number. I don't know, nine.

I had Daniel on the podcast, actually. As you started to bring on more customers, did you take a similar kind of approach in terms of working with them and showing them the wireframes and kind of doing that as you were building?

Very much so. In the early days, I was also the customer success on board. I was onboarding them and I would ask a million questions, but how did you think about that? But what about this other flow? Did you optimize for that? So it was. I was asking more questions of them about the future process than it was needed in an onboarding call. But that's how I got all my intelligence early on to make sure that we build the right things. Yeah.

One of the things I find with a lot of the founders that I talk to, early stage founders, I tell them that first, first set of customers that you're talking to this way, they are having an experience with a software company that not that many people actually get to have. I mean, how many software companies ask you, what should I build? How should I build it? And I, I always tell people, if you do it the right way, those people will be your references at every financing round at everything you ever. Those people are kind of like your champions because they feel like they were there, you know, and ownership into your. They have ownership of the thing. And especially if you do it. I mean, how long you guys have been now? Almost 10 years.

Almost 10 years.

Almost 10 years. So those people now look back, they're probably VPs or C level. I don't, you know, and now they're like, I, I was there when Chili Piper was just them, you know, And I, I tell early stage founders, like, spend the time with those customers because they could be your customers for life. But more than that, they're like, they feel ownership advocates.

The remain Advocates.

Yeah. Okay. How about you, Nicholas? What's the one thing you would do?

So when we started, as you mentioned, Alina is Romanian, I'm French, we were in New York. We hired a guy in Bucharest, another guy in Montenegro, another guy in Kiev, in Ukraine. And the idea was that we found these smart guys and we decide to work with them. And we've grown that way, hiring people anywhere in the world. So the way we did it is that we said, we're not going to restrict ourselves to New York or San Francisco. We're going to hire everywhere in the world. And that's how we've grown. And for sure, if I. If I do another company, I'll do the same. I think it's. It's the best way to get the best talent. And we finding that if you put the right processes in place, you can work remotely very effectively, at least as my assessment. So I think that it gives us secret powers.

Were your previous companies remote or in person?

In the middle. So my first company, I had some engineers in France, and I was in San Francisco, but there was an office that we had there. So I started getting used to working remotely. Then we did another one where they were in Romania, and then some of them were in a different town. So I started gradually getting comfortable with the idea of working remotely. But Chili Pepper is the only one where we were completely remote. I was saying the largest office of Chili Pepper is Brooklyn, where the two of us are. So there's no place in the world where two pipers are together. Yeah.

And is it. Did you do it in the beginning for cost, or did you do it for the talent?

For example, obviously, when we started 2016, there was a cost difference with COVID that shrunk. Right. The salaries for engineers in other countries have gone way up. But it's unique for us to be able to find talent as soon. We just opened two engineering jobs in the last two months. They were filled up in no time. Right. One guy in Germany, one guy, I don't even remember the other one in Poland. I think the world is targets. It's amazing.

One question on that, very tactical question. But when I think about recruiting, I think I have a recruiter, and I tell them, hey, go after salespeople in New York City who are going to come to the office every day, just for example, and you can get super targeted. In this case, you just say, get me a developer. I mean, you know what I'm saying?

No, it's the same. No, no, it's the same. It was Targeted, except that you don't have a geographic constraint, right? You say, get me a Scala Developer with 5 years of experience who has done real time sockets. And you target that, except that you post and you go all over the world.

Wow. So comp is comp. Basically this is the comp. And if we hire the person in Poland or we hire the person.

That is a super interesting question. Because when we started, this was for.

Me, I always had in person and then in Covid, we had people all over and I didn't know what to do.

You didn't know what to do. And so we went through that stage of not knowing what to do. Because when we started, you know, Zelina and I, we just find somebody and say, how about we gave you X? All right, X. It's good, it's good, it's good. Y. Y is good. Y is good. And then we of course ended up with a bit of a mess, right? And we thought long and hard about how to go about it. There was some in the yaya years, so 21, you know, when there was a lot of money, there were a lot of suggestions to pay everybody the same, like whether if you're a Scala engineer, you pay the same wherever you are. And we had people, I remember one guy in Egypt who say, I want $100,000. Say in Egypt. You say, well, because that's what you pay your engineers. Yes, but not in Egypt. And so then we realized that that would actually be completely unfair to those who are in New York, for example, right? Because like they pay the same, except that their rent is about ten times the others. So we decided on a very strict policy where we pay market rates per market, per market, per job. We have a super long grid, our head of people did that, a super long grid with every job, every region. We categorize in six regions, so it's not per country, but it's in six regions in the world. And every region has its price. And we, we buy data and we collaborate with other companies to make sure we have the price accurate. We update the price every year and people come to us and, and, and say, why am I pay less? And such and such, and says, easy. Why? This is your market, this is where you are. We've had to do something that was actually very challenging. We had some US people who got hired in the US and then moved to another country. So in this case Portugal. And you know, so if you travel, it's cool, but if you're in Portugal for good, then there's a problem that The Portuguese are pay way less. So we went to them and said, listen, if you're long term here, you're going to be paid on local markets.

Wow.

And we did it. So now we really have science and it's working.

Wow. Alina, how do you feel about the remote first? Like, would you do that also? Again?

I'm a little bit more torn on the subject. At the beginning when we decided, I thought it was the best decision. I love traveling. I love traveling and the freedom that it gives me to do the work wherever I am and the freedom that it gives our employees to travel and to be with their babies and to be close to their families. I really love that part. I am observing that these days and maybe it's like a 10 year fatigue of zoom. I feel a lot more joyful when I work with people in person and I miss that. So we're trying right now to figure out how to solve for certain people that have more joy and they feel more productive when they're around others. So we're getting people together more often than normal.

Is there some kind of way to get everyone to get. Do you do that where you take the whole company and bring together?

What we normally do is we have a one year event that's still be crazy where we bring everybody together once a year. Once a year.

And everyone from all over the world.

From all over the world. And you imagine that there's very different cultures, right? You can have like Russian with Ukrainians and you get Algerians with Israelis. It's beautiful. It is beautiful because we think that we are different, but really we are all the same. And I love, love those yearly events. And now we're trying to do something where we bring pods like teams together separate from that as well. I mean we do a lot of training when we're together. So I hope that brings back that sparkle and that joy.

So every year, Every year, every year.

And every year at the end of the year, usually three or four days trip, we all get together and sing the song Imagine from John Lennon. Imagine there's no border.

You have videos of all.

Yeah, we'll send them to you. Yeah, they're beautiful.

That must be amazing. We, we used to do something, we would get everyone together. We didn't do it every year, but when we get everyone together, we would call everyone up from like the first year of the company 2011, take a photo and then call the people from 2012 take a photo around the 2011. And we just kept doing it. So you have this photo of you.

Know, the growth of the company. That's very cool.

And it was really. Someone, some. Someone suggested to me, and we did it, and then we did it every time we were together. And it was, you know, by the last time, it took an hour just to organize, you know, the thing. But I mean, those. So I want to talk again. I want to talk about these. Bringing everyone together is extremely expensive. I mean, it doesn't matter for that. For 100 something people, it's, you know, a million dollars, let's call it maybe less, whatever, but it's something a lot. Is that something worth, you know, when you look at that, obviously you think it's worth it, but I mean, how do you manage that? Because that's a huge number, whatever the number is.

We don't have office costs. So the offset of the. Of having an office for a company like ours, the cost of the trip is actually a lot less than if we had office. So it's easy to justify from a financial perspective, but it also has some brand component to it. So it's not only like a cost to it. We also do crazy things. And it creates a certain. It has certain ripple effects in the ecosystem also.

I will tell you what happened to us in 23. So in 2022, we did a completely extravagant company trip. We actually flew everybody to Casablanca in Morocco. We chartered two Boeings just for us, and we flew everybody to the desert of Morocco, where we had a village built for us and a giant scene with the party. And it was like nuts, right? Money was easy and it was crazy. Unfortunately, shortly after that, the markets tanked and we had to do the only time we did layoffs. So we had to let go some people. So we felt, okay, we're not going to do a trip this year, 2023, it felt right. We've learned our lessons. This was extravagant. And so we start the year with the understanding that there's no company trip this year. We're saving money, we're being cautious. And by October, one day, Alina and I looked at each other. It was crazy. And I say, we need a trip. Yes, we need a trip. We felt it. We felt that there was a lack of cohesion. And so here we are, we're in October, and we say, where do we go? And you all say, iceland. And say, iceland. It's super cold. It's winter. But we had no time. It was the one place we could go to. And so we flew to Iceland in November of 2023, like, improvised. And people loved it. And we Loved it. It was such a great. Especially when you have this expectation, you think there's going to be no trip and all of a sudden you find all of us together.

Wow.

It was amazing.

I want to talk about, you know, you being co CEOs. Forget being married, just the co CEO part and to me is kind of complicated. How do you divide the responsibilities between you?

I'm. I feel extremely fortunate that I get to work with, with Nicola because I no longer feel guilty about not being with my family, you know, so we also have the luxury of splitting the responsibilities depending on where we are in our growth and where we are in our strengths. And when we got, when we started, the only way for him to convince me to come on board to start a company with him. So he's a serial entrepreneur for me. He's the first time around. And I was convinced that I wanted to climb the corporate ladder of America and just become like the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. So it took him a while to bring me on board and I said, fine, I come, but only if I'm the CEO. And that's how we started. I was the CEO. I was in charge of product and customer support and some other stuff. And he was our GTM president and all the GTM functions under him. And now to make things very complicated, we swapped.

How do you like? For me, the part that always makes me concerned about the co CEO structure is how does the team know who's making the decisions? Do they have to go to both of you? Like what is the. How do you do?

So we have responsibilities, right? So these. When she started, the story she told is true, that I begged her to come and start a company with me and say, you'll be CEO. One of the reason is because she was super successful building products. So she did the, the iPad app. When Apple launched the iPad, she was at Thomson Reuters and Steve Jobs chose this app to show on stage the iPad, right? So she was really doing brilliant things. And I said, look, when you have this talent, you do it for yourself. You build amazing products for you that you get the benefits for it. So it was clear that she was going to be head of product and that she was going to manage also the engineers and me. I love sales, so I would do sales. And we grew that way. So for people in product it was clear they would go to Alina and people in sales, they come to me. So there was no question. We may occasionally our people team say, hey, this policy. But they ask both of us and it's not really an issue now, in a funny way, as we grew bigger and I realized that marketing is more and more personal, but being in community, being present, I thought something wrong where the face of the company is this gray hair man, you know, like white male, gray hair. When we have this beautiful woman sitting in the back doing product. So, light bulb, I say we swap. You're going to be the face of the company. Trust me, people will like it a lot better. And I had a hard time convincing her at the beginning. She said, that's not my thing about the. But now she's taking on full strength. And so we swapped.

How long ago is that?

That was 18 months ago.

I do want to have an asterisk. You're very beautiful too.

I mean, one of the things I see to your point, I mean, you're Alina. You're very on LinkedIn. You're pretty open.

I'm very active.

Yeah, you're very active. And I, at least for me when I read it, I. I appreciate it because it's very transparent. It feels like it's very real and authentic. Is that natural to you? Like, is that like, was that like something you're just like, oh, I want to tell the world my, like how I, how I operate and my thoughts and.

No, no, no. It was terrifying. Terrifying. So when he said, you know, it's a good idea to take the acting CMO role for various reasons, I think you'd be great at it. I was shaking. I was shaking. The thought of being public was completely terrifying because not only you get picked apart from a large audience and everybody has an opinion about the words that you're using, every word triggers someone. It's terrifying to be out in the open with the flaws that you have. And in addition, I did not enjoy at all the spotlight. I did not want any spotlight for myself. Quite the opposite. I would remember, like a year before that I would tell my team, never have me speak to journalists, never have me on podcasts, never put me on stage. I don't want to have anything to do with it. I do not enjoy the spotlight. That's not for me.

Wow. But now I feel like a lot of the stuff that you share.

No, I love it. No, I love it.

Amazing people. Other founders love that. Like, let. Let me. I want to come back to that in a second, but I want to still stay on the decision making. One of the things you, you told me when we were doing our prep call was just how you document decisions. Can you talk about that? Because that, to Me sound. I. I love that actually. I think tactically this is something people can take from this, from this episode.

Yeah, yeah. So we stumbled upon it, let me tell you. So we were having meetings and I read about Jeff Bezos with his six page memo in the meeting. So instead of doing PowerPoint, somebody has to write. So he said, we're going to do that because it sounds like a good idea and obviously it seems to work for Bezos. Right. So we started writing this doc. And because we were remote, the doc was online, right. In Google Doc. And so we said, look, if it's ready before the meeting, share it before the meeting. Oh, let's chat before the meeting. Yeah. And people would comment on Google Doc because you can't comment. And by the time we'd get into the meeting, everything was there. Like people had already commented, give their IDs and all that. So that's how we stumbled upon that concept of a decision memo that's actually online and asynchronous. So because in the meeting there was nothing left to decide, it was clear what had come out. Right. So we made it a process. We put a template. We said, okay, problem data, evidencing the problem, consensus caller and I'll talk in a minute what we mean by consensus caller and then options and then recommendations, and then decision. And every decision memo follows this format. We stumbled upon something very critical in the process. The Internet Task Force had the problem of decision making where there's no central authority. Exactly. And somebody came up with this idea of a rough consensus. It means that you don't vote. It's not an election, it's not authority. It's those who have more knowledge of the matter, make a decision and try to build a consensus. But accept that some people may disagree as long as the concerns have been addressed. It's called a rough consensus. And so we go with that. We go with decision and we say, is a rough consensus emerging. And sometimes it happens that is diverging. There are five options and there's as many people as different of views on that. And in that case we say, okay, it means that we haven't analyzed the problem enough. So we go back. Sometimes we just shut down the decision memory, do split it in parts, do another one and go back.

So you use this decision memo for everything.

This one decision. People say, I think we should like right now we're thinking of planning our next event. Right. So we did our first annual conference. We want to do it next year. The location of the decision is which.

Location we could Go that micro like.

The just the location even smaller like drop down in the product.

That's exactly right. What we're going to call we're launching an AI product and we are going to call it I can tell you we're going to Insight and the product manager said I don't like insight but two of us did and she said I'm going to write a decision memo. And she did. It happened yesterday. The decision memo is this morning. She put the other options people contributed and we're going to change the name.

Of it and you don't need to have a meeting for this.

That's right, no meetings. We barely have any meetings.

It's a beautiful thing. We have an automation where when the decision memo is we put it in a Google sheet, it posts to Slack there's a new decision memo and every decision memo well we have two types. Most of them are company wide so it posts into everybody can see decide put put their view and some of them we call them a micro decision memo. It's not that we hide anything it's.

Just that it's not important enough.

That's right. We don't want the engineers think on what you know what tool they use company so it post people contribute Sometimes it's very important. I ask in the company at the company meeting we, we have a call every week. I ask say that it's very important. Decision pricing is a great one decision remember for pricing. So there's a lot of research ahead of time but when the research is done we put it in the description.

And literally the whole company goes.

Entire company goes and comments and yeah.

And is there a person's name there as the owner?

The consensus caller? If there's no consensus that's the person. The person has to decide whether they can push the decision or not. It's fascinating because you assume that there's too much red tape to write all these micro decisions et cetera but it's super fast. Like I can write a decision memo myself in like 15 minutes because I got experience with it and most people got experience with it. So we're fast at it and everything. Historically you understand like why, why did we decide on this?

That's the cool. That's the cool that the history because.

When we say why did we do that? Let's go back. It's amazing. We like were there a decision member on that and most of the time there was and so we find it, we say this is why we did it and then say is it still applicable? What has changed that will make us change our mind.

I want to have an asterisk that it's amazing. So I feel a lot less stressful as a CEO because I'm not part of. It's an organism that evolves and I'm not part of every decision like normally a CEO would be in these kind of things. But there's still an imperfect system in that it's hard to contribute as a person to so many things because you're going to see so many decisions around you and then you realize that there was a decision that was made that you weren't part of it. So that happens. And sometimes we have very strong voices, pro and con a specific subject. And for the consensus scholar, it's very important to make sure that all the voices are heard, that everybody understands what's weighing for different people. And sometimes there's an emotional resonance to it that's not visible in the documents. And that's when I think we still can still improve on the. The physical presence of debating and making sure that everybody's heard around their emotional resonance and around the decision.

There's another aspect to the decision memo. It's a funny aspect, is that Elena and I are both rubble. Like I was expelled from school and you know, and. And so I didn't want a boss. Maybe you ask us why. We're entrepreneurs. I didn't want a boss. And then I assumed that people also don't want a boss. And so the worst part of the two part that problematic with bosses is decisions. Like the boss says, I don't want to call it that, I call it something else. And he's your boss, so there's nothing you can do. And assessments like evaluation. So I do your evaluation. And because I'm your boss, I don't like you, I like him better. And so we really try hard to make the things as objective as possible and remove the power of the boss, basically. And the decision memo does exactly that. So it has a decision memo that. Where there's a consensus and I don't agree, I'll still get out the rule. Right. Except if I feel so strongly that I say I'm not going to let that go. It has happened like maybe twice.

Wow.

Yeah, we get that rule a lot.

Yeah, that's right. We removed our own power.

The interesting thing is so many companies have the problem of too many meetings. Actually, I'd say if I think about the top five problems that are common, too many meetings is one of the top common problems that most companies have. But actually, in Most cases you probably don't need to have the meeting, which actually this is a good representation. This is the drop down. Cool. You need to have a meeting about it.

Yeah. We're a remote company with no meetings.

With meetings because our core business used to book meetings with the meetings. We have a few meetings. We don't do this. I had the developers, they had a daily standup and I said, guys, do you really like that? Daily standup? Do you really like that? And there is different teams and one team snow, I hate it. So that team stopped and the other team said, yeah, I like it. And one team said, well, let's do less frequently. So now there's only one team that they no longer do daily. They do like twice a week. They decide what they do. Yeah, you're right. It's not helpful. You're right. It's like the cancer company teachings and decisions that go around at the academics.

People want to hear themselves speak.

So they're meeting just like telling one from the table.

Alina, you had mentioned that some of this stuff you've actually documented, like how this works. Have you shared that? Like I know internally you have, but have you shared that with other founders?

And in the past two years, when I started taking this acting CMO role and I became from an introvert to an extrovert, I also discovered a passion for community, like a very strong passion for it. And I organized a lot of CEO events, a lot of CMOs, CRO CEO. And in the process of creating these networks, I get asked a lot of questions and I created also notion docs for all the questions that I get asked more frequently, like how do we make decisions at Chilly Piper, how do we create different levels for seniority? Or how do we go about our social media strategy, how do we build AI agents, what the internal process is, what kind of agents we built. So I started documenting all of these things in notion docs and I just have like shortcuts to them to share with the CEOs that I meet.

People probably love that. I mean, I know, right? Because everyone wants just is why I'm doing this podcast. It's basically just how do you shorten the learning curve? They can hear you say decision memo on stage or something, but then they don't really know how to go and make it work. They need the details.

Yeah, that's when we actually published a while back. Oh, we do decision memos. We.

Oh, you did?

We did. We produced a blog post, but to my knowledge, nobody adopted it. It's. It's you know, is something so different than what people are used to?

No, it's. It's becoming. It's becoming more and more popular. Because people adapting it. Yes, yes. Because some of our employees are leaving and they're going to other companies and they say, why don't you have a decision? Why do you make decisions around here? So it's becoming a pressure that they have. And the article that we published a long time ago was not very precise. So in the notion doc, I went into the details. The beauty of it is that I started writing much, much faster because of this decision memo. So for me, creating these notion docs doesn't take much mind space. It's interesting what happened to my thumbs and my brain now that I became in that habit of documenting things.

I really want to publish these. I think that, like, this is. This is what I think is missing actually, from there, there's. I was having a conversation with the founder the other day, and he's trying to figure out how to do his first board deck for his venture investors. This guy probably spent five hours trying to figure out how to do a board, you know, for his first Series A. There's 100 temp. You know, if you just gave the person that template.

Yeah, we struggle to add.

You know what I mean? Like, that's just. How much time would that save? How much time? If they can read the decision memo thing. Oh, wow, this is like, much better than what I do and just take it and implement it, you know. But other. Otherwise people have to go look and find and recreate the wheel. And so anyway, I will follow up on that because I would like to. To publish that. So you both have served basically pretty much every executive, you know, kind of all the different functions, you know. What do you think is Alina's superpower as you've seen kind of almost a decade now, of all the. Basically every job. What do you think her superpower is?

It's funny because you had asked me and I said that the ability to connect, especially with our target Personas and build a community of followers. But that's her superpower in our current position. But then I remember in the early days when she was in a different position building products, I would say that her superpower is her curiosity. So she would always look, like she said earlier, like she would ask people, but why do you do it this way and why don't you do it that way? Right. And she's very creative also. So that curiosity. She's always looking for better ways to do Things like when AI started, she immediately adopted it because she was curious what it does. She we have a graveyard of devices in our house because she keeps buying the new device, like with the goggles from Meta, from Google, the glasses, you name it. We have the Ray Ban from Facebook, we have the one from before where you say hello Google or whatever. She's always curious to find out what. And it works in tech. It works. You want to be curious, you want to explore and that's very important, especially when you of products to drive things. So I think that was a superpower that was critical at the beginning.

So Lena, you mentioned the community piece before and you mentioned CEOs but also sales leaders, CMOs, all of these different functions. Where do you see the value from this community? Because it's a lot of work, having done it before. Like community is I think amazing, but a huge amount of effort. Like where does, where do you, how do you leverage that, that community, especially customers. I'm talking now not like the CEO community, but it does take a lot.

Of time and I get personally involved so I send directly the messages, I pick the places. So I'm very involved in it. I get a lot of joy personally out of it. And that's the main reason why I do it. I don't measure a pipeline impact from it. And the joy comes from the ability to fully. Because as Nicola said, I'm super curious to fully understand what people are going through, what's really going on in their lives. And you could do that on a zoom. Maybe you could do that in a slack community. Maybe. What I'm finding is that when people get together and there's no camera on and there's no posture that we have to be these robots at work, they become a lot more open to sharing their challenges, their real challenges. And that's how I understand what would resonate what the things that I'm building, why they would matter to them. So I get to be a better founder because I get to know the truth.

I love one of the things you said is you don't measure the pipeline. I think that One message, the CEOs I've interviewed so far who are the best at building community, they've all said actually that same thing where it's not a pipeline driving activity, of course it will in some way it's going to give you a halo effect. People are going to come to. But every CEO that I've talked to that's built the community, you know, thousands and thousands of people and the people who are like, it's like a religion. They never, they never have said. I've asked them, and no one has ever said, oh, it drove this much of my pipeline. But what I find is a lot of venture investors ask, wait, that's expensive, or what? You know, when, when. When comes time to really look at the data, and they're like, what's happening with that? What's happening? That's for community. How much revenue did you drive from that? That. And, And I think that that's actually. I don't know what you feel. I. I assume you feel the same way. I think in today's world or going forward, I think community is the moat that cannot be AI.

It's in your middle funnel. It's in the middle of the funnel and you can't measure it.

I like that. I like that. Yeah, you can't. AI is not. I could. I could raise $500 million tomorrow, go start a company, and I couldn't create the community that you have of revenue leaders. It would be impossible. Even with unlimited money, it would be impossible. I could vibe code a copycat product. That's not going to build community. So I feel like that's a big thing that's going to come up in the next decade as people are building these tools so quickly and everything. Cool. But who's going to actually, how are you going to differentiate from the other tool?

It's really hard to do it well, because if you go with selfish reasons, whether it's pipeline or something different, people read that even if you don't say it, they can feel it, they can sense it. We have a third sense. I don't know. And if it's not a genuine community building in the sense of you wanting to give back to the people around you, you can feel it. So it has to be a genuine curiosity and a genuine desire to help and a genuine presence there for the community as opposed to for yourself. And I think that's what makes the organic nature of it work better.

I like that. So now let's transition, since we want to do both directions here. Alina, what do you think? Nicholas's superpower?

Hopefully she finds something.

I'm super grateful that I have him by my side because I don't think we'd have managed to do anything without him. And one of the main reasons for that is that he has this intelligence around human driver, so he has this empathy to understand what would drive someone to do something, why we should hire a certain profile over the other one, and being able to create the Right Kind of culture system and decision systems and hiring systems, operation systems to make sure that we get to the right results. And it's like he's like a human glue with empathy. I don't know how to explain it differently.

Well, it's funny because I was talking to a founder and CEO who now has 1200 employees, and we're having a drink this week at the Sohouse and he's like, I'm exhausted. Say, why are you exhausted? All these people. And I think he said, what about you? I say, me, I love it. I love it. I love people. I love developing people. It doesn't drain me. It's the opposite. It energizes me. So seeing them grow, helping them, coaching them, promoting them, I just love it. So I think we tend to be good at what we love. Right. Or maybe the other way around. So.

So in terms of the internal team, if I read that correctly, the internal team and the culture that's coming from.

It's coming from both in that we. Both visible, but for sure, I pay a lot of attention and spend more time on it. Yeah.

What is the. If you could just choose one attribute of people you joined who join Chili Piper. What is the one attribute that you care about the most that they have?

For sure? Resourcefulness. And there's a selection bias because people want to work remotely, tend to be more resourceful. They're okay working from home, working alone, working. It tends to be the people who are more resourceful who say, I'm not going to go to an office. I'm cool on my own. And so that.

How do you.

As I said, there's a selection bias because they come to us. But it's been. I can't think of anybody who would let go because they were not doing enough work, like not driven enough. We've had to let go people for different reasons, but they were always resourceful. We also have a radar, right. We sense that people are doers and we want the doers. So that's for sure the number one thing we're looking for. And then our number one value at the company is helping. So help the customer, help one another.

Community.

Help the community. So it's not a trait we're looking for, but it's a trait we try to develop in everybody. Say, if you're here, actually now we've got this great thing that's a good one for you. It's called the owner, the network activator, something like that. Organization, organizational network activators. You know, impact assessment. I was Saying earlier, we want to make it more objective. So people team that came up with that. I think it's brilliant. You ask everybody, is there somebody you go to for advice? Right. Somebody who helps you more than the others? And then you find that some people, like, at the core, like a lot of people come to them for advice.

And everyone always says the same.

Yeah, the same people.

Right.

And you realize how much value these people are bringing and how critical that to the organization. It's a fascinating. We just started that. It's a fascinating experiment.

We did that one time. We went around to the company and we said. We asked people who is like the person we. Our question was, who is the person that embodies our values the most at this company? And we asked every person in the entire company. We literally went to. I went to every departmental meeting and had them put it, write it down. And it was like the company was 300 people and it was the same 11. Not. Not the same, but basically the same 11 people every time. And it was. So, you know, There was maybe 20 total, but there was this set that just every person.

Yeah.

Even if it was in a different department, you know, and you realize there are these. These nodes.

Yeah.

You know. Okay, let me. Let's. A couple more questions. I want to transition to your backgrounds, but a couple more very important questions. So what is the biggest challenge? We can start with Alina. And maybe this is the same for both of you.

What is.

What is the biggest challenge that you've ever faced at Chili Piper, and how have you overcome that?

For me, it's very specific to my personality and how I was brought up. My mom made me believe. Thank. I thank her for that. That I can do anything. The way she raised me is that if I want to be president, I'll be president. If I want to save world hunger, I can solve world hunger. So I have this delusion in my head that I can build a company that keeps everybody employed, everybody happy for the rest of their lives, and everybody has a job that they thrive and that they love. And in my delusion, I can build a company that has 8 billion people in it. So when we had to do layoffs, for me, it was unconceivable that that would happen because I just tried to find ways in which that I would, I don't know, sell my house and not have to fire anyone. I was crushed. When we had to do layoffs, I was crushed. And for like two months or so, I was in a state where I couldn't eat. I Couldn't sleep, I had to hospitalize myself. I just could not comprehend that what my mom said, that I'm capable of everything was not true. I was not capable of keeping these people employed. With a lot of therapy, a lot of support from him, he said, look, you're limited. You're only human. You have a brain that has a certain capacity and you're here for the others, the ones that are not getting let go. And if you abandon them, then we have nothing. Because I was ready to quit. I was ready to quit. So I'm still working in therapy on it, but on my delusion, thinking that I can keep 8 billion people happy. And it's a work in progress. But I feel that I'm starting to understand my limitations a lot better and understand that when you're building these companies, you have a lot of constraints, a lot of constraints. And whatever you think going in that you can be everything to everyone and you can make all your customers happy and all your ecosystem and all your community and understand that I will never be perfect.

Yeah, I think, I think that having done too many layoffs in my career, starting the first one, I was probably 25 or something, you know, I think it's like, probably the worst date. You know, it's like they stick with you. Like you, you, I mean, they're the worst. Especially if you care about the people and you care about, you know, and you know everyone so well and it, it's, it's soul crushing. It's, it's terrible, you know, and I think that the, the, to the point of the people who are left, you know, in some cases you have no, you literally have no choice, you know, and that's the part that is, that's the part that is hard because even if you say I have no choice, people don't really care, you know, that you have no choice. But in reality, the company may not exist, the customers may not get serviced anymore, the, you know, unless you do it. And so I, I, yeah, that, that is, that's a painful one. Is it the same for you or.

No, no. But that's when I experienced it a lot more in a more level headed way. You know, we, at the, in these company meetings, I always said we're not a family, we are a sports team. Right. We don't, in a family you can't fire your uncle. Like look through it. So we are, you know, getting together with a goal and that's a contract. So I felt that there was clear there was a contract with some constraint and we tried to help people as much as possible. And it's true what you said, that people don't care. Right. They should take care of themselves, and they don't care that you want to save money or something. But we did our best to help people. I think we did it well. The feedback we received was that. And our example is very, very thankful and kept a good relationship with us.

Yeah.

So now for me, the challenge with the early days is when we were bootstrapped. And it's all, like, all cool to say, oh, we bootstrap. We bootstrap. But at the time, it wasn't cool. Every morning I'd wake up and check my phone, the Chase bank account to see if somebody had paid, if somebody. The money was there. It was very stressful. That hard.

Did you bootstrap because you wanted to bootstrap or because you had to bootstrap?

It's a good question. At the beginning, we wanted. Because what Alina said, we wanted to make sure we focused. And then we said, okay, now we should raise money because we should scale. And at that time, VCS would not give us money. So. So at that time, we no longer wanted to do bootstrap. And yet we had to. So there was a time, a month, something like 11 months after we started, where literally we had no money. And we were. I can even say the accounts were square. Square had agreed to buy money. Alina closed the deal to buy their solution.

Yeah.

And we were waiting for the check, but they had no money in the bank. So at the time, we had three employees. And I went to them and I said, listen. And we already sold our house, our car, you name it. So I went to them, I said, listen, we have no money. It's the end of October. How do you feel if we gave you equity? And one of the guys says, that's okay. Yeah, you guys are so crazy, it may even work. So we gave them 50,000 shares because, you know, we couldn't that point. Right. We felt so bad. Here's 50,000 shares. And then we did a secondary a few years later at $12.60 a share. They had a $600,000 a month. Can you believe it? They had a $600 month. And.

And, and they deserved it.

They thought we were crazy.

They believed in the crazy.

They believed in the crazy.

So there's a happy ending to that story. But the stress of checking the bank account in the morning, that's something I would not do again.

Yeah. Where is Chili Piper in three years from today?

That's the part where excites me the most. I finally found someone to replace me on my marketing.

I saw that, I saw that post.

So I get back to the building where I thrive and on the building front it's because I felt the pain of marketing myself. And marketing is so freaking complicated. We are building everything that I've learned in the past two years back into the product and making the platform the best there is for B2B marketing teams.

So we see ourselves at the leading edge of using AI for go to market. We think we're in the right position. We have the brand, we have the connection, we have the understanding of the market. We, we had to finish. I think we haven't mentioned that but we had a complete rewrite of our platform.

You and I talked about.

Yeah, it was a near death experience because for the longest time nothing was coming out and competition was coming after us. But now we finish, we have all things well structured in microservices in the right place and so we can plug this particular feature with an LLM to that job and then you know, integrated our workflow. So we really think we have a foundation. So in three years we see ourselves as leading that movement and we're going.

To be focused on what I told you, the middle of the funnel. The type of things that cannot be done, cannot be recreated by any other company. So we're going to focus on partners, ecosystem, community. All the hard things that are done are hard to do with the tools that are in existence right now. And I have a lot of excitement because with AI agents there's so much that took me so much time to figure out and now with a agents you can do right away. So all my knowledge is going to go into the platform. It's going to be, I'm very excited about it.

So when you talk about that, the partners and the community, you're saying to enable your customers to do that. Cool. So that's a pretty big expansion. I mean that's a big.

Yeah, it's a big project ahead of me.

Wow.

Ahead of us.

Yeah, yeah.

I think we've never been as excited.

About what we're building ever.

Yeah, yeah, I would say it's running on the 10 year anniversary. People get tired I think and we're like wow, let's go going. This whole thing with AI is so fascinating. Yesterday I was on a call with my team. We were, we were the call where we decided what to call the is it an intent or a strategy or that and it came out of my mouth I said, guys, you realize how lucky we are. There is a big thing happening called commercial conversational AI. And we get to build it, we get to integrate in your products and be part of it, be part of that movement.

And you have the customer. I mean, that's the thing. You have the customers. That's the part. Again, I think there's a lot of cool AI stuff. It's just they don't have anyone to use it.

That's right.

So that's the benefit.

And we have the trust from our customers because we.

Over a decade, basically. A decade, yeah.

Serving them.

Okay. I want to transition to. To your backgrounds quickly, so maybe Alina will start with you. What, where are you from originally?

I was born in Romania and I started working ever since I can remember. So my first job was when I was 8. I didn't know that I had the entrepreneur spirit in me. I just figured that I'm in charge of supporting everybody around me ever since I can remember.

What was that job?

My first job was helping all my neighbors pay their bills in the flat. We had, I don't know, like 16 apartments. And I would pay their electricity, their water consumption, their gas consumption. I would just take care of all of that for our building and any repairs that we had, like, kind of like a concierge of the building at eight years old.

Okay.

Then I did the odd sales job. I also did. I doubled in modeling, math, tutoring, IT repairs, software, debugging, all sorts of odd jobs. Eventually I noticed that computer stuff would make me more money and I got into computer science.

But where did the entrepreneurial spirit come just from inside of you? What did your parents?

My parents are factory workers. I did not have. I was the first in my family to go to college. I didn't have any entrepreneurs around me. I've never seen any. And I did not have only agriculture. Like, you know, my grandparents had a little farm with chickens. And so I did not see that in real life. And it was early days where Internet was not available to me, so I wouldn't get this thrill of excitement, of opportunity. But I always dreamed of coming to us. I felt that there were more things happening. And when I came here in 2007, I decided to focus on building stuff, specifically mobile apps, because I was just curious. It was like the new thing, and I was curious about the new things and the rest is history.

Wow.

Your parents, they must be very proud. Very.

I mean, that's a euphemism. Yeah, they're extremely proud, I'm sure. Yeah, yeah. It should be.

Wow. And do you go back to Romania a lot and you have team members there, right?

Or we have four.

Okay. Wow. Okay, that's an. That's a. I hope my kids start paying people's bills and doing that stuff. So, Nicholas, what about you?

So me, I grew up in Marseille in the south of France. My parents, family of five kids put a lot of emphasis on education. So I really was driven to go to the right schools. But I can, looking back at the cdc, entrepreneurship, because otherwise, go on adventures. Like when I was 14, I got on a moped and we took the boat and went to the Corsica to tour around the island. You know, like, I do this crazy thing. I went hitchhiking and one day I took 11 different cars to go to Brittany and other places. I just was driven to do things differently than the others. But I never thought I could do that for work. I had no example around me. I went to Col Polytechnique, where everybody was meant to become an engineer or a civil servant. And so I just thought I'd continue working and travel. That was my adventure and to travel. I applied to business school. So I applied one time, they all rejected me. I applied the second time, they all rejected me. The third time, Stanford took me. So I showed up there and had this weird plan that I wanted to go next to Asia, Hong Kong, which made no sense. But then something happened. My classmate Steve Joberson, who is now a famous vc, invited Steve Jobs to come to talk to us in a beer and pizza session. And Steve Jobs was at the time running next. And the joke was that he was going next to nowhere and he sat on the floor and he's starting telling the story of how he was going to change the world of computing. And I looked at him, it looked like real. And I thought, that's what I want to be when I grew up. I want to be an entrepreneur. So I just focused on that. I did my summer job in a startup and then, as fate would have it, I met John Scully, the very person who had fired Steve Jobs and started a company with John. So we found some imaging technology and did at the time, I called it Photoshop for Dummies. So it was a consumer version of Photoshop, like easy to use and stuff. No, it would be cooler to call it Instagram on PC, but it was successful. I did that thing. I did 6 million in revenues the first year, 12 million in the second year. So we worked really well. Yeah, back then, real money. It was a crazy experience, actually, because John was Close to hero status in Japan because Apple was so big. So when you run Apple. So when we finished our product, he said, let's do bundling, deal with the big hardware manufacturers in Japan. So I went on a trip with him, and we were received by every CEO of every top company. Canon, Fujitsu, they would sit down. He was my little entrepreneur, having these big CEOs taking meetings with me. So then I realized that just to continue the background, I realized that San Francisco, I was the only one not doing Internet because now we're talking about 1998 and the Internet started. Have a million story about the Internet and me, but. But skip them. So I sold my shares and I started an Internet company and I did an E commerce platform to animal technology. I went from zero to 65 employees in 11 months. I got an offer from CNET to buy me for $60 million. I had 72% of the company, so I was going to clear 42 million in 2000. The offer collapsed, the Internet collapsed, the funding dried up. I went bankrupt. So that was startup number two. Yes, I know. I'm a farmer. That close to that money. So then I moved to New York and I continued doing other companies. And that's where we're here now.

And. And where did you meet?

In one of the companies that you started.

That's right. Late 2005. I thought that it made absolute sense that software should have reviews. They were starting having Yelp reviews for us from that and said there should be reviews for software. So, like the G2 of today at Paris 2006. And I started recruiting in Romania and I started recruiting engineers. And then they said, I need product managers. So one of the engineers say, oh, I have these classmates, These classmates, maybe they'd be interested. I said, okay, send me a bunch of them. I'll interview them. And I'm sitting in a hotel at the table, and then interviewing one, they go, the next one, next one. And then the next one doesn't show up. And there's a hot chick in the room. And I'm thinking, you know, it's a shame that this interview. Because I will go talk to her. And next thing, she looks at me, I say, are you? My interviewees say, yes, it's me. And that was Alina. Wow, that's right. Exactly. So I interviewed her. I wrote on the resume, I was, yes, no, yes, no, for Alina. I wrote, maybe. And in the end, it happened. So that's how we met.

Wow.

That's right.

What an amazing story.

Yeah.

You now have a Family. So how is it to build a company and a family at the same time?

I feel so fortunate. I feel so fortunate every time I wake up. I can't believe my luck because most of the times when we go to work, we feel bad that we leave our family behind. And me, I don't have to do that. I bring my kids to work, my kids come to conferences, my kids are involved in what I do, he's involved in what I do. I just can't believe my luck.

And the kids, when you say you take them to conference, like you actually come with you and like walk around the.

Yeah, well, they're very little right now, so they're six and four. They don't really kind of comprehend what's going on. But they have a QR code.

Wearing a QR code.

Yeah, yeah. The QR code says, my mom pays me $10 if you book a meeting with Chili Piper.

Does it work? I assume it works.

Then they get $10 and I don't buy them any toys. So they have to figure it out how they can earn money. And that's a source of money for them. It's fun.

Wow.

I must say we've made it very. So Alina shares. She's as transparent with her kids as she's online. So they know what we do. Sunday afternoon, my four year old comes to me and say, okay, daddy, don't you have to go to work now you go. So, yeah, you're right that I went to work because he wanted to play another game. That's loud. And he wanted me out of the way. Right. So he sent me to work. It's like a natural thing to do. They don't complain, they don't think it's strange.

I explained to them that for me going to work is the same way as they play with Legos. For me, it's fun. So they get the same kind of joy from it watching me. And it's very different when you feel like you're working because you have to versus that you work because it's joyful and you see your parents. That is joyful. And you don't make it that you go to an office and thank God it's Friday or thank God it's the end of the day. For me, it's like so misery. I feel so fortunate. I wish like everyone could have the experience that I have.

You know, the, the thing with being remote is that our commute is 500ft apartment. We do have an office. It's like across the street. So we don't waste time. So we see them, we home on time, plus we decide our schedules mostly. Alina travels a lot and goes to a lot of conferences. But they say same thing, they got used to it. Say, where do you go when you come back?

Yeah, I think what you said there about I say the same thing to my kids when they say I'm doing emails, I'm doing whatever and they say wow, you know, you're working late or you do. And I say yeah, but I enjoy, I enjoy it, you know, and I think again if they see that then they see work in a different light, you know. And, you know, and, and as they get, I mean I, I, I tell everyone I take my kids to any company I work with. Any, you know, and recently my, my younger one who's nine years old, I told them, oh, I'm working with this new company. And he said how much equity? I started explaining it to him and he said do you think it's going to be successful? You know, like, you know, did they raise any money? He asked all, all these questions. My older 1, my 11 year old came here with me last time here to this, to the studio and watched, you know, as I was doing the recordings. And so I think if you can do that, you know, I grew up that way so I'm biased that, but I think that it's, it's also, you know, this stage of a company, it's a, it's a lot, you know, to be building the company and be building, you know, and growing that family and if you don't intertwine them, it would be impossible. I think it would be impossible. What last question for, for both of you. So Nicholas will start with you. What is the. Knowing everything you know today, all the experiences you've had. If you could go back to the very beginning of your career before you started your first job ever, first company ever, what would be the one piece of advice you would give yourself?

I would say to dare to explore. As I explained in the early days, I followed the path that was there for me. I went to a cold polytechnic, then I went to work for the company that was recommended. You know, I see, you see kids, they go to work for Goldman Sachs because Goldman Sachs and then, and it's a mistake I think they make. You have to explore and value experience over the brand or what people are telling you to do. If I'd explored, if I talked to entrepreneurs, I would have started much earlier, I would have been more bold, I would have believed more. Instead of staying in the past. So that's advice I'd give myself. Have more confidence in yourself. Go explore and do what you feel is right for you, not what other people tell you.

It's funny that he gives this advice, because me, I think that he's one of the bravest person I know. So I just can't imagine, like, going one level on my end. I think that I presented that on one side. I love and I feel extremely fortunate that I have this life where I can do what I love and with. With him by our side, and I can create my own adventure. And in addition, I don't want to do a poor job portraying what entrepreneurship really looks like, which is a long set of challenges. You always have things that push you to the limits, to the extremes, to what you think that you're capable of, like the layoffs. For me, it was extreme, a very extreme shock to my body. There are a lot of challenges. Every day is a challenge. Every day is a hustle. And when you make those kind of decisions that could make or break the company, where something that you might not see could get you bankrupt. I wish from the beginning that I would have a stronger trust in my intuition, because you're always going to have to make decisions with imperfect data constricted by time, constructed by. You're always constricted by time. You don't have enough time. And I wish I could form a better system to trust my intuition more, to be able to move faster and make decisions. Better decision just based on that.

I like that. Well, I want to say thank you to both of you for doing this with me. Thank you for coming here and doing it in person. And I love this conversation. I love your story. And we've known each other, actually, for quite a while.

I've got to tell you something in conclusion, because, you know, I've been in your office trying to sell to you.

I know.

And you always push back. As fate would have it, yesterday I got a slack message. Better cloud.

Wow.

Became a customer.

Became a customer.

That's crazy.

It was for floating apps. That was when we had our conversation.

That's right at the beginning.

Yeah.

The precursor. Yeah.

It's amazing to see what you built and what you've done together. And so I look forward to seeing what's the next. The next thing. We'll do another one of these, you know, in five years. So thank you both very much.

Thanks for having us.

Thank you.

I'm very grateful that you're doing this service to the community and to CEOs to sharing everyone's stories. I think it's beautiful to see how much the channel has grown. I'm very happy to see.

Thank you. Thank you. That's a wrap for this week's episode of Not Another CEO Podcast. Thanks for joining. For show notes and more, please Visit not another CEOPodcast.com we'll see you next week.