Business
Nicolas Vandenberghe began his career selling newspapers in the streets of Paris in high school, studied Maths at Ecole Polytechnique and then received his MBA from Stanford GSB. He started and sold 3 tech companies with up to 65 employees and $11M in revenues, and also ran sales for a $2B telecom firm negotiating billion-dollar deals with companies like Google. Most recently in 2016, he co-founded his 4 th startup and presently is the CEO of the SaaS firm Chili Piper – a pioneer in Buyer Enablement. The company is fully distributed – leveraging global talent with employees in 28 cities in 14 countries. Its scheduling platform is used by Intuit, Square, Twilio and more than 300+ companies worldwide for multiple use cases, from connecting prospects to sales reps instantly upon submitting a form to automating their on-boarding process. Nicolas bootstrapped Chili Piper past $2M ARR before attracting $3M in seed funding in 2019. On this episode we cover: How and why Chili Piper is working 100% remote, the culture they are building, and a new competition they are hosting. We also discuss the signs he looks for in knowing when to raise a seed round of funding, when to start looking for a Series A investment, and some strategic takeaways for his years of experience building successful companies.