Tank Talks By Ripple Ventures Nicolas Vandenberghe of Chili Piper on the future SaaS and being the CRM underdog
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.
Support for this podcast comes from Silicon Valley Bank
“What’s next?”
“What if?”
“Now what?”
Silicon Valley Bank understands these questions can keep founders up at night.
For over thirty-five years, Silicon Valley Bank has helped high growth companies through scalable financial solutions, plus insights and expertise that many other banks just can’t.
In 2019 we opened an office in Toronto dedicated to lending to Canadian businesses and their investors.
Find out more at svb.com/Canada
Silicon Valley Bank – Built for What’s Next.
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
Follow Matt Cohen and Tank Talks here!
Podcast production support provided by Agentbee.Agency
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit tanktalks.substack.com