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

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Nicolas Vandenberghe of Chili Piper on the future SaaS and being the CRM underdog