How do you build a global tech company from scratch—and stay married while doing it? Nicolas and Alina Vandenberghe, Co-Founders and Co-CEOs of Chili Piper, join David Politis for an in-depth conversation on bootstrapping, hiring globally, handling layoffs, and building community with intention.
From convincing early customers to prepay for a non-existent product to implementing a decision-making framework that replaces most meetings, they reveal what it really takes to grow a successful, remote-first company together.
Takeaways:
Buy-In Without a Product: By focusing on real, unsolved pain points and validating ideas through milestone-based contracts, they built confidence and traction before writing a single line of code.
Hiring Across Borders for Talent, Not Cost: Nicolas explains how they built Chili Piper by hiring globally from day one, prioritizing talent regardless of geography. They developed a compensation framework by region and job level to ensure fairness while scaling a fully remote team.
Building Culture Through Annual Global Gatherings: The company brings its global team together once a year for a shared in-person experience—despite the cost. The cultural exchange deepens trust and unity across a fully distributed team, making it one of the most valuable investments they make each year.
Scaling with Asynchronous Decision Memos: To cut down on meetings, Chili Piper developed a company-wide decision memo process. Each decision includes context, options, and a designated “consensus caller.” This system supports clarity, inclusion, and transparency without constant live discussions.
Overcoming Financial Stress in a Bootstrapped Journey: Nicolas recounts moments when they had no cash in the bank—offering equity in lieu of salaries to early employees. Those shares later became life-changing, and the experience shaped their resilient, scrappy mindset.
Community as a Founder Superpower: Alina reflects on how building community—without tracking pipeline or ROI—has been vital to learning and joy. By showing up with genuine curiosity, she’s gained clarity on what customers really care about and how to serve them authentically.
Leading with Empathy, Curiosity, and Drive: In describing each other’s superpowers, Alina credits Nicolas for his deep empathy and organizational clarity, while Nicolas points to Alina’s intense curiosity and willingness to experiment. Together, they’ve created a leadership model rooted in trust and transparency
Quote of the Show:
" If you go with selfish reasons… people read that. Even if you don’t say it, they can feel it." - Alina Vandenberghe
Links:
Alina’ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alinav/
Nicolas’ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nvandenberghe/
Website: https://www.chilipiper.com/
Ways to Tune In:
Substack:
Spotify:
Apple Podcasts:
Transistor: https://podcast.notanotherceo.com/
#NotAnotherCEO #BusinessSuccess #ChiliPiper
Chapters:
00:00 Intro
01:59 Early Challenges and First Customers
07:28 Building and Scaling the Team
12:59 Remote Work and Company Culture
17:55 Decision Making and Documentation
34:23 Alina's Superpower: Curiosity and Community Building
35:59 The Value of Community in Business
40:03 Nicholas's Superpower: Empathy and Human Insight
44:34 Challenges and Triumphs in Entrepreneurship
51:25 The Future of Chili Piper
54:25 Personal Backgrounds and Entrepreneurial Journeys
01:02:28 Balancing Family and Business
01:06:18 Advice for Aspiring Entrepreneurs
01:08:49 Outro
Transcript:
Alina: [00:00:00] 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.
David: 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.
Nicolas and Alina Vandenberghe are the co-founders and co-CEOs of Chili. Piper Nicolas is a five-time founder who has an [00:01:00] impressive and diverse background. He's experienced 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's also passionate about empowering the next generation of women in technology. They started Chili Piper in 2016, bootstrapped it past 2 million in a RR 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 Nicolas and Alina Vandenberghe.
Alina: Thank you for
having us.
David: Thank
Nicolas: you. I'm
David: I'm excited to do this. Alright, first question, we're gonna go to Alina first. This is gonna be a hard interview for me 'cause I don't usually interview two people, but we're gonna try.
First question, what is [00:02:00] 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?
Alina: Because I was a first time founder. Some, 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, the contract to show that they're real about about getting in on board with you, then I think it's a lot harder to to succeed
David: When you do that, those early customers, how did you get those? How did you even find those customer? Were they you knew already or?
Alina: we would go to a lot of events in person in New York and in Los Angeles, and it was mostly revenue teams at we'd 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 [00:03:00] found someone that was struggling with round robin distribution from sales teams to the onboarding team.
And they were ready to pay 20 K 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
David: With no, with no product. Just to be
Alina: No, no product. No product. No product, no.
David: 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 cust, I don't know, 20,000 customers, and only like a thousand converted or less than that.
Very low ASP 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 upfront, because I got almost false positives of whether they were actually interested.
Alina: Hmm.
David: How did you, I mean, what was that conversation like with them when you said, Hey, pay me $20,000 for a [00:04:00] product that doesn't exist?
Alina: Hmm.
David: They all said, okay, here, I, I signed it.
Alina: In, in our case it was really, it was a bit different 'cause they were getting ready to build it internally themselves and would've 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.
David: How many of those first customers did you have? Let's say today people would say design partners. How many of those,
Alina: 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
David: and how much time did you spend with those customers as you were building? Like did you show them every step of the way?
Alina: we had the product ready in three months and [00:05:00] 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 view, not from a sales standpoint of view. It was, I wanted to make sure that we're building something that would work for them also.
Nicolas: Yeah, there was quite a lot of back and forth actually. We showed some ideas and there were better ideas to do it and went back to them and, and in that process, we, we did weekly. Quickly check in with them
David: are those customers still
customers? Yes.
Alina: Today. Wow.
Nicolas: actually, because a second customer was Greenhouse and I have a call with them immediately after this. This call, renewal number
know nine, you know.
David: I had Daniel on, on the
Nicolas: Oh, did you?
David: Yeah. Yeah. As you started to bring on more customers, did you take a similar kind of approach in terms of like working with them and showing them the, you know, the wire frames and, and kind of doing [00:06:00] that as you were building?
Alina: very much so. In the early days I was also the customer success on onboard. 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 a. 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.
David: One of the things I find with a lot of the founders that I talk to early stage founders, I, I tell them that 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 'cause they feel like they were there, you know, and, and
Nicolas: Yeah, because they have an [00:07:00] ownership
David: 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. 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 so I, 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.
Alina: Hmm? Advocates. The Remain advocates, yes. Yeah. Mm.
David: okay. How about you Nicholas? What's the one thing you would do?
Nicolas: So when we started as uh mentioned, Alina is Romanian, I'm French, we're in New York. We hired a guy in Bucharest, another guy in Montenegro, another guy in he in Ukraine. And the idea was that we found his smart guys and we had 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 ourself [00:08:00] 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 do, 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 are 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, if you, it gives us secret powers.
David: Were your previous companies remote or in person?
Nicolas: in the middle. So my first company I had some engineers in France and I was in San Francisco, so, but there was an office that we had there, so I, I started getting used to working remotely then. Then we did another one where they were in Romania and, and then some of them went a different town.
So I started gradually getting comfortable with the idea of working remotely. But Chili Pepper is the only one where we are [00:09:00] like completely 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 pipes are together.
Yeah.
David: and, and is it, did you do it in the beginning for cost or did you do it for the talent?
Nicolas: For talent, obviously. When we started 2016, there was a cost difference with Covid. That has 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 job in the last two months. They were filled up in no time.
Right? One, one. Uh. In Germany, one guy I don't even remember the other One in Poland. I think you know, we have the, the, the world is our target. It's amazing,
David: One question on that very tactical question, [00:10:00] but when I think about recruiting, I think, you know, I have a recruiter and I tell them, Hey, go after salespeople in New York City who are gonna 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, I mean,
you
Nicolas: don't have No, no, it's the, no, no, it's the same target, except that you don't have a Geographic constraint. Right.
You say, get me a SC developer with five years of experience who has done real time you know, market and, and, and you target that, except that you post and you go all over the world.
David: Wow.
So comp is comp. Basically this is the comp. And if we hire the person in Poland or we hire the
Nicolas: That is a super interesting question because when we
David: because this was for me, I always had in person. And then when in Covid we had people all over and I didn't know what to do
Nicolas: you didn't know what to do. And So we, we
went through that stage of not knowing what to do. ' cause when we started you know, Alina and I, we just find [00:11:00] somebody and say how about give you X? Right? X is good, is good, is good, knew y. Why is Good. Why? is good? And then we of course ended up with a bit of a mess, right?
So, 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 Suggestion, to pay every, everybody the same. Like whether, if you're a SC engineer, you pay the same wherever you are. Uh. And we had people, I remember one guy in Egypt who say I want a hundred thousand dollars say in Egypt.
He say, well, because that's what you pay you engineer and say, yes, but not in Egypt. And so then we.
realized that that would actually be completely unfair to those were in New York, for example, Right
Because like they pay the same except that they're around is about 10 times the others. So we decided on a very strict policy where we pay market rates
and [00:12:00] per market.
per job, we have a super long grid. Our ahead of people did that 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 markets, this is where you are. We've had to do something that, that, 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 the school, but if you're in Portugal for good, then there's a problem that 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 market. Wow.
And we did it. So now, now we really have science and it's working.
David: Wow. [00:13:00] Alina, how do you feel about the remote first? Like, would you do that also again?
Alina: 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 I really love that part.
I am observing that these days and maybe it's like a 10 year fat, fatigue, fatigue of zoom. I feel a lot more joyful when I work with people in person and I miss that. So what we're trying right now to figure out how to solve for, for certain people that, that have more joy and they feel more productive when they're around others.
So we're getting people together more often than normal.
David: Hmm. Is there some kind of way to get everyone to get, do you do that where you take the whole company
Alina: What, what we normally do is we have a [00:14:00] one year event that still be crazy where we bring everybody together and once a year, once a year, and everyone from all, from all over the world. And you imagine that it's very different cultures, right? You can have like Russian with Ukrainians and you get Algerians with, with Israelis.
It's beautiful. It is beautiful because you, we think that we are different, but really we are, we are all the same. And I love, love those yearly events. And now we are 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 are together.
So I hope that brings back that sparkle and that joy
David: So every year,
Nicolas: every year, and every year
at the end of the year, it's a usually three or four days trip. We all get together and sing the song. Imagine from John Lennon. Imagine there's no border,
David: you have videos of all,
Nicolas: Yeah. We'll
send 'em to you. Yeah, they're beautiful.
David: 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 [00:15:00] the first year of the company, 2011, take a photo, and then all the people from 2012 take a photo.
Around the 2011, and we just kept doing it. So you have this photo of, you know,
Nicolas: Of the growth of the company. That's very
Alina: cool. And
David: 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 the thing.
But I mean those, so I want to talk again, I want to talk about these. The, the bringing everyone together is extremely expensive. I mean, it doesn't matter for that for a hundred 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,
Alina: whatever
We don't have office costs, so the offset of the, of having an office for a company like ours, the [00:16:00] 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.
Nicolas: 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. I. 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 a party.
And it was like nuts, right. Money was, was easy and it was crazy. Unfortunately shortly after that, Marcus tanked and we, We had to do the only time we did layoffs, so [00:17:00] to let go some people. So we felt, okay, we're not going to a trip this year, 2023, is that right? We, we've learned our lessons. This was extravagant.
And so we stopped the year with the understanding that there's no company trip this year. We saving money, we are 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, and so here we are in October and we say, where do we go?
And, uh. And we all say Iceland and say, Iceland is super cold. It's winter. I say, 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 improvise. And people loved it, and I, we loved it. You know, it.
was such a great especially when you don't have expectation.
You think it's, there's gonna be no trip, and all of a sudden you find all, all of us together. It was amazing.
David: I want to talk about, you know, you being [00:18:00] co-CEOs, forget being married. Just the co CEO part to me is kind of complicated. How do you divide the responsibilities between you?
Alina: I am, 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 the, we also have the luxury of splitting the responsibilities depending on where we are in our growth and where we are in our strength. 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, is 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, 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 CEOI was in charge of product and customer support and some other stuff, and he was our GTM president [00:19:00] and all the GTM functions under him. And now to make things very complicated, we swapped.
David: how, how do you, like for me, the, 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 do? Like what is the, how do you
Nicolas: So we, so we have responsibilities, right? She, so these, when she started, the story she told is, is true that?
I, I begged her to come and start a company with me and say, you'll be CEO. One of the reasons is, is because she was super successful building products. So she did the, the iPad app. When Apple launched the iPad, she was at Reuters and Steve Jobs chose this app to show on stage the, the iPad, right?
So, so she was really doing brilliant things, and I say, look, when you have this challenge, you do it for yourself. Like, yeah, you build amazing products for you that you, you. get the benefits for it. So they was clear that she was going to be head of [00:20:00] product and, and that you manager also the engineers and, and me, I love sales, so I would do sales.
And we grew that way. So for people in product, it was clear that we would go to Arena and people in sales, they come to me. So there was no, no question. We may occasionally. People team say, Hey, this policy, but they ask both of us. And it is 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 c 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, and light bulb say, we swap, you.
are gonna be the face of the company. Trust me, people were like it a lot better. And I had to a hard time convincing her at the beginning she said, nah, that's not my thing. I, I do. But now [00:21:00] she's taking on strength and, and and so we swapped.
I, I wanted take product that?
was three 18 months,
Alina: years ago. I do want to have an asterisk. You're very beautiful too.
Nicolas: Thank you.
David: I mean, one of the things I see to your point, I mean, you're Alina, you're very, on LinkedIn, you're pretty
Alina: open, I'm very active.
David: you're
very active and, and I, at least for me when I read it, I, I, I appreciate it. 'cause it's very transparent. It feels like it's very real and authentic. Is that natural to you? Like, is 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
Alina: No, no, no, no, no, no. It was terrifying. Terrifying. So when he said, you know, it's a good idea for, to, to, to take the acting CMO role for, for various reason I think you'd be great at it. I was shaking. I was shaking. The thought of being public was completely [00:22:00] terrifying because not only you get picked apart from a, a larger 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 year, 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, the spotlight. That's not for me.
David: Wow. But now I feel like a lot of the stuff that you
Alina: No, I love it.
David: like, you
Alina: I love it.
David: amazing and 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, told me when we were doing our prep call was just how you document decisions.
Can you talk about that? [00:23:00] 'cause that to me sound, I, love that actually. I think tactically this is something people can take from this, episode
Nicolas: yeah, So we stumbled upon it. Let me tell you the story. So we were having meetings and I read about Jeff Bezos with this six page memo in the meeting. So instead of PowerPoint, somebody has to write a, so we 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. So we said, look, if it's ready, before the meeting share it before the meeting And it was shared before the meeting, and people would comment on Google Doc because you can comment. And by the time we'd get into the meeting, everything was there.
Like people had already commented, give their ideas and all that. So that's how we stumbled about that, concept of a decision made that's actually online and asynchronous. So, because in the meeting. there was nothing left to decide, it [00:24:00] was clear what, had come 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 decision. And, every decision memo is, for 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 central authority.
Exactly. and somebody came up with this idea of a rough, consensus. It means that you don't vote, not action. It is 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 their concerns have been addressed, so a rough consensus.
And so we go with that. we, go with [00:25:00] the decision and always say it is a rough consensus emerging. And sometimes it happens that diverging like the, like there are five options there's many people has different views on that. And in that case, we say, okay, that means that we haven't analyzed the problem enough. Go back sometimes we just shut down the, memo we Split it in parts, do another one and, go back.
David: So you use this decision memo for
Nicolas: everything,
even if a small decision.
people say, I think we should, like right now.
we are thinking about planning on next event, Right.
So we did our first annual conference. We want to the location of the decision, it's location.
We could
go,
That
David: micro, like the,
Nicolas: Yes.
Alina: Ev even smaller like a drop down in the product,
Nicolas: That's exactly right. What we gonna call, we're
announcing an
AI
product product and we, were going to call it, I can tell you we're going to call it Insight. And, the [00:26:00] product manager said, I don't like Insight, but two of us did. And she said, I'm gonna write a decision memo. and she, did. it happened yesterday.
and The decision memo was this morning, she put the, other options, people contributed and we are going to change the name of it because
David: And you don't need to have a meeting
Alina: for this
David: That's
Alina: right No, meetings. We barely have any meetings.
Nicolas: It's a Beautiful thing. We have an automation where when the, decision memo is, we put it in a Google sheet. It, goes to Slack as a new decision memo and every decision memo, well, we have two types. Most of them are company wide So we post into the Slack channel. Everybody can go, see. decide, put their view, and some of them, we call them a micro decision memo.
Not that we hide anything,
It's
just that,
David: it's not important
enough
Nicolas: that's right. We don't want, the engineers have a thing on what tool they're the whole company. With post people contribute. Sometimes it's very important I ask at the company meeting, [00:27:00] we, have a call every week I ask, say, this is very important decision memo pricing is a great one.
Decision memo for pricing. So there's a lot of research ahead of time but, when the research is done, we put in a decision memo,
And literally the whole company
goes there, entire company
goes
And,
David: comments and whatever. And is there a person's name there as
the
owner?
Alina: The, consensus caller if there's no consensus,
David: That's the person.
That person.
Alina: 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, did we decide on this thing,
David: that's
the cool
that the history
Nicolas: yeah. cause when we say why did we do that? Say, well, let's go back to
decision memo And it's amazing. we're like was there a decision member on that. And most of the time there was. And [00:28:00] so we find it, we say, this is why we did it. And then see this is still applicable. what has changed That will make us change our mind
Alina: I'd 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 are some, they are still an imperfect system in that.
it's hard to contribute as a person to so many things. 'cause you're going to see so many decisions around you and then you, realize that there was a decision that was made and 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 caller, 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 can still improve on [00:29:00] the, physical presence of, debating and then making sure that everybody's heard around their emotional resonance and around the decision.
Nicolas: Another aspect to the decision memo. A funny aspect is that he, Elena and I are both robot, like I was expelled from school and that kind shit. And so I didn't want a boss. Maybe you ask us why we want entrepreneurs because I didn't want a boss. And then I assumed that people also don't want a boss.
And so the, the, the worst part of the two part that are problematic with bosses is decisions. Like the bosses is, I don't want to call it that. I call it something else. And he's your boss. So you, there's nothing you can do and, and assess like evaluation. So I do your evaluation and because I'm your boss, I don't like you, I like him better, you know?
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 [00:30:00] decision memo that has, where it's a consensus, and I don't agree, I'll still let that roll Except if I feel so strongly that I say I'm not gonna let that go, it has happened like maybe twice.
It, it, it, it happens very frequently. That Yeah.
that's right. we, removed our own power.
David: The interesting thing is so many companies have the problem of too many meeting. Actually, I'd say it's by 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 dropdown. Oh, do we need to have a meeting about it? Like,
Alina: Yeah, we're a remote company with no
Nicolas: With the meetings, because our core business used to book meetings and with the meetings company we have, we have a few meetings. We don't do this.
I had the developers at that, a daily standup, and I said, guys, do you really like that daily standup? Do you really that? And there were different teams and, and one team [00:31:00] snow, I hate it.
So that team stopped. And other team say, yeah. I like it. And the one team say, well, let's do less frequently. So now there's only one team that they no longer do daily. They like twice A week they'll decide or they do it. Yeah, you're right. It is not helpful.
Right. you're right, it's like the cancer of
companies to have these, these meetings that are useless and decision that go around it.
Of
course. So that's right. Exactly, exactly. You just spot one around the table.
David: 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.
Alina: 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, right? And I organized a lot of CEO events, a lot of CMOs, CRO, CEO. And in the process of creating this networks, I get asked a [00:32:00] lot of questions.
And I created also notion docs for all the questions that I ask, get asked more frequently. Like how do we make decisions at Chili Piper? how do we create different levels for like seniority or how do we go about our social media strategy? How do we build AI agents, what the internal 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.
David: People probably love that. I mean, I know, right? Because everyone wants just, this is why I'm doing this podcast. It's basically just how do you shorten the learning curve? They, 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.
Nicolas: that's when we actually published a while back, how we do decision memos. We wrote. Wrote, Oh, you did? We did? We produced a blog post. But to my knowledge, nobody adopted it. You know, is something so different than what I used.
Alina: No, it's, it's [00:33:00] becoming it's becoming more and more popular because
Nicolas: Heard people adopting it.
Alina: 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?
How 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, I went to, into the details the. The beauty of it is that I started writing much, much faster because of this decision memo. So for me, like creating this notion docs is not, doesn't take much mind space. It's, it's interesting what happened to my thumbs and my brain. Now that I can, I it became in that habit of documenting things.
David: I really wanna publish these. I, 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 [00:34:00] a hundred temp.
You know, if you just gave the person that template and said, 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, think, 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 anyway, I, we'll 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, of all the, basically every job.
What, what do you think her superpower
Nicolas: Well, it's funny because you had asked me and I said that the ability to connect and with, especially with our target personas and build a community of followers, but then I, that's her superpower in her current position. Then I remember in, in the [00:35:00] early days when she was in a different position building products, I would say that that, uh. Her superpower is? 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 that curiosity is, is 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, she, we, we have a, a graveyard of devices in, in our house because she keeps buying the new device. Like we have the Googles from meta or from from Google the glasses, you name it. We have the, the ribbon from Facebook. We have the one from before where you say, hello Google or whatever. You know, like, she's always curious to find out way.
And this works in tech, it works. You, you wanna be curious, you want to explore. And, and that's very important too, especially when you head a product right. To, to drive the things. So, so that, I think that's was a superpower that was critical at the beginning
David: So, [00:36:00] Alina, you mentioned the community piece before and you mentioned CEOs, but also sales leaders, CMOs, all of these different functions. What where do you see the value from this community? Right, because it's a lot of work. I mean, having done it before, like community is, I think amazing, but a huge amount of effort.
Like where, where does, where do you, how do you leverage that, that community, especially customers? I'm talking now not like the CEO community, but.
Alina: 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, I'm, I'm, I'm very involved in it. I get a lot of joy personally out of it, and that's the main reason that why I do it. I don't measure 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 [00:37:00] 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.
David: I love, one of the things you said is you don't measure the pipeline. I, I think that one message, the, 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 gonna give you a halo effect people are gonna come [00:38:00] to.
But every CEO that I've talked to that's built a community, 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 it comes time to really look at the data, and they're like, what's happening with that?
What's hap that's for community? How much revenue did you drive from 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-ified
Alina: it's the new middle funnel. Yeah, it's the new middle of the funnel and you
David: 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. [00:39:00] I could vibe, code, a copycat product that's not gonna build community. So I feel like that's a big thing that's gonna come up in the next decade as people are building these tools so quickly and everything. Cool but who's gonna actually, how are you gonna differentiate from the other tool,
Alina: It's, 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, in the sense of you wanting to give, to give back to, to the people around you 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
David: I like [00:40:00] that. so now let's transition. So we wanna do both directions here. Alina. What do you think Nicholas's superpower is?
Nicolas: find something.
Alina: I am super grateful that I have him. By my side because I don't think I would've managed to do anything without him. And one of the main reason for that is that he has this intel 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 dunno how to explain the differently.
Nicolas: It's funny 'cause I was talking to a hundred CEOs now has 1200 employees [00:41:00] having. And I think I said, what about you? Me? I love it. I love it. I love having people. It doesn't drain me, energizes me. So helping them grow, helping them, coaching them, promoting them, I just love it. So think tend to do that what we love. Right. Or maybe it's the other way around. So
David: So in terms of the internal team, if I read that correctly, the internal team and the culture that's coming from
Nicolas: well, we, it is coming from both in that we both visible, but for sure I, I pay a lot of attention and, and spend more time.
David: What, what is the, if you could just choose one attribute of people you join who join Chili Piper, what is the one attribute that you care about the [00:42:00] most have?
Nicolas: We as a selection bias, people want to work remotely. Tend to be more, say, okay, working from home tends to be the people who are gonna go to. And so that,
David: How do you, how do you,
Nicolas: as I said, there's, there's a
David: for.
Nicolas: bias 'cause they come to us. But it's, 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. Yeah. But they, they, they were always resourceful. We, we we sort of a radar, right? We sense that we, people are doers and we, we were so, so that, that, that is for.
sure. The, the more I think we would, and then our number one value are the companies help to help customer help one another.
Alina: Community.[00:43:00]
Nicolas: The C. So, so so it's not a trait we're looking for, but it's a trait we try to develop. Everybody say, if you are here, you try to help. Actually now, now we've got this great thing that's a good one for you. It's called the owner, the network, activators, something like that.
organization, that organizational network, activators, you know, impact assessment.
I was saying earlier, we want to make it more objective is 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 are like, at the core, like a lot of people come to them for advice and
David: Everyone always says the same PI mean, yeah, yeah,
Nicolas: right? And you realize how much values people are bringing and, and and are critical that to the organization. It's a fascinating, we just started that. It's a
David: that. 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 most at this company? [00:44:00] 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 the set that just every person. Even if it was in a different department, even, you know, and you realize there are these, these nodes, you know? Um okay. Let me, let's couple more questions. I wanna 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?
Alina: 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. [00:45:00] She, if 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 try to find ways in which that I would, I dunno, sell my house and not have to, 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 [00:46:00] 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, you look you're limited. You're, you are only human. You have a brain that has a certain capacity and you are here for the others, the ones that are not getting let go.
And if you abandon them, then we have nothing. 'Cause 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
Nicolas: Coffee.
Alina: And, 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, all 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 your community and understand that I will never be [00:47:00] perfect.
David: 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
Alina: It's so crushing.
David: 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, you know, unless you do it. And so I, I, yeah. That, that is, that's a painful one. Is it the [00:48:00] same for you or.
Nicolas: No. No. that's when I experienced a lot more level headed way. You know, we in these company meetings, I always said we are not a family. We are sports team. We don't, in a family you can't fire your on call. Right. You know, like, look, we, so we are getting together with a goal and that's a contract.
So I, Felt that it was clear there was a contract with some constraint. And we try to help people as much as possible and be it, it is, it is true what you said, that people don't care, right? they they, they correctly, they, they, they're right. They, we take care of themself 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 that for example is very very [00:49:00] thankful. And I've kept a good, good relationship with us.
David: Yeah.
Nicolas: So now the, 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. 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, it was very stressful that, that hard
David: Did you bootstrap because you wanted to bootstrap or because you had to boot?
Nicolas: It's a good question. At the beginning we wanted because what Anina said, we wanted to make sure we focused and then, then we said, okay, now we should raise money because we, we should scale. And at that time, business would not give us money. So, so at that time we no longer wanted to do bootstrap and yet and yet we had to. so there was a time a month, [00:50:00] like 11 months after we started where literally we had no money and we were, and even say the account was Square, square, I agreed to buy money. Alina closed the deal to buy your solution, and we were waiting for the check, but there 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, we had already sold our house, our car, you name it. Uh. So I went to them. I said, listen we have no money the end of October. How would you feel if we give 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. You know, we, because we right, we felt so bad that here's 50,000 shares. And then we did a secondary a few years later at $12 60 year share. They had a [00:51:00] $600,000 a month. Can you believe it? They had a $600
David: Wow.
Nicolas: a month and
David: And they deserved it,
you know?
Nicolas: deserved
it, that it's because They
thought we were crazy
enough.
David: Yeah. They believed
Nicolas: so, so there's a happy ending to, to that story, but, but the stress of checking the bank account that's something I will not do
David: Yeah. where is Chili Piper in three years
Alina: that's the part where excites me the most. I finally found someone to replace me on my marketing
David: I saw that. I saw, I saw that post.
Alina: 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, for B2B marketing teams.[00:52:00]
Nicolas: So we see ourselves at the leading edge of using AI for market 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 to, we had a complete rewrite of a, of a platform. Was,
Yeah, there 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 and the right place, and so we can plug you know, these particularly NM, that job and then integrate in the workflow.
So we really think we have a foundation. So in three years we see yourself as leading, leading that. movement.
Alina: And I we're gonna be focused on what I told you, the middle of the funnel, the type of things that cannot be done, cannot be recreated. Uh. By any other company. So we're gonna focus on partners, ecosystem, community. All the hard things that are done are hard to do with the tools that are in, [00:53:00] in, 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 the agents you can do right away. So all my knowledge is gonna go into the platform. It's gonna be, I'm very excited about
David: So when you talk about that, the partners and the community you're saying to enable your customers
Alina: is it the same?
David: that.
Alina: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Cool.
David: a pretty big expand. I mean, that's
Alina: Yeah, it's a big, it's a big project ahead of me.
David: wow.
Alina: Yeah.
Nicolas: Yeah. we, we, I think we've never been,
Alina: As excited about what we're building
Nicolas: uh.
Alina: Yeah.
Nicolas: I would say it would ring on the 10 year anniversary. Think people get tired and a thing and we're like, whoa, let's going, going. And we, this whole thing with AI is so fascinating. Yesterday I was on a call with my team. We were, we were at the call where we decided what to call the, is it an intent or a strategy of that? And it came out of my mouth. I said, guys, you realize how lucky we are. There's this big thing happening called you know, commercial [00:54:00] conversational ai, and we get to build it. We get to integrate in our products and be part of it, be part of that movement. So, um
David: And you have the customer, I mean, that's the thing. You have the customers that, that's the part. Again, I think there's a lot of cool AI stuff. It's just don't have anyone to use it, you know? So that's the, that's the
Nicolas: Yeah, And we have the trust from our
David: Yeah, over a decade. I mean, basically a decade. Okay. I want to transition to to your backgrounds quickly.
So maybe Alina, we'll start with you. What, where are you from originally?
Alina: I was born in Romania and I started working ever since I can remember. So my first job was when I was eight. 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.
And I had, What was
that
job? my first job was helping all my neighbors pay, pay their bills in the, in the flat.
We, we had I dunno, like [00:55:00] 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 rep. Any repairs that we had, like a kind of like a concierge of the building. Uh.
David: old. Okay.
Alina: then I did the sale 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.
David: So where did the entrepreneurial spirit just from inside of you,
Alina: from inside of me. My, my, 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 [00:56:00] chickens.
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'm always curious about the new things.
yeah. And the rest is history
David: Wow. Your parents, they must be very proud. Very, I mean,
Nicolas: That's a euphemism. yeah.
extremely
proud, I'm sure.
Yeah,
Yeah,
David: be.
Nicolas: be.
David: Wow. And do you go back to Romania a
Alina: Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
David: and you have team members there, right? no.
Okay. Wow. Okay. That's an, that's a, I hope my kids start [00:57:00] people's bills and doing that stuff, you know, like that. That's So Nicholas, what about you?
Nicolas: So me, I grew up in Marsai in the south of France. My parents, It was family of five kids put a lot of emphasis on education. So I really was driven to go to the right schools. But again, looking back, I at the C Central entrepreneurship, because otherwise go on adventures I. When I was 14, I got in a moped.
We took the boat and went to the Corsica to tour around the island. You know like I, I do this crazy thing. I went hitchhiking I went there. I took 11 different cars to go to Britain and other places. I, I just was driven to do things differently than the others, but I never thought I could do that for work.
I, like, I had no example around me. I went to a technique where everybody was meant to be, become an engineer or a civil servant, and. So I just thought that continue working in travel. That was my [00:58:00] adventure and to travel. I applied to business school. 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 this real plan that I wanted to go next to Asia, Hong Kong, which made no sense. But then something happened. My classmate Steve Jefferson who's now 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 started 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 tech, in a startup. And then as Paige would have it, I met John Scully, the very person with Fire Chief Jobs and started a company with John. So [00:59:00] we found some imaging technology and did, uh. At the time I called it Photoshop for Dummies.
So it was a consumer version of Photoshop, like easy to use and stuff. Now it would be cooler to call it Instagram and pc,
David: Yeah,
Nicolas: but we were, but it was successful. I did that, that, that thing, I did 6 million in revenues the first year, 12 million in the second year. So we, we, we worked really well. Yeah, back then.
Yeah, real money. It was a crazy experience actually, because John was close to, Stages 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 to, uh. On a trip with him, and we were received by every CEO of every top company, Canon Fujitsu.
Like, they would sit down like, like, like there was like, he was little entrepreneur having [01:00:00] these big CEOs taking meetings with me. So then I realized that just to continue the background, I realized that in San Francisco, I was the only one not doing internet, because now we're talking about 1998 and the internet has started there. I have a million story about the, the internet and me, but, but I, I skipped 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 equal.
So I was gonna clear 42 million in 19. In 19 2000 the offer collapsed, the internet collapsed, the funding dried up. I went bankrupt. So that was startup number two. Yes, I know. From, from [01:01:00] that close to that money. Yeah. So then I moved to New York and I continued doing other companies and that's why we're here
David: Wow. And, and where did you meet?
Alina: In one of the companies that he started.
Nicolas: That's right. late 2005, I, I thought that it made absolute sense that software should have reviews. They were starting having Yelp reviews for re I said there should be reviews for software. So like the G two of today at Paris 2006. And I started recruiting in Romania. And and I started recruiting engineers and then, and then I said, I need product managers.
So one of the engineers say, oh, these classmates, these classmates maybe they'd be interested. I say, okay, send me a bunch of them. I'll interview them. I. And I'm sitting at, in a hotel at the table and I'm interviewing one. They go the next one, the 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, so shame that this interview [01:02:00] because will go talk to her and next thing she looks at me, I say, are you my Is Say, yes it's me. And that was Alina.
David: Wow.
Nicolas: right. Exactly. So interviewer,
David: Oh.
Nicolas: 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.
Sorry.
David: Wow.
What amazing story.
Nicolas: Yeah.
Alina: Um,
David: You now have a family. So how is it to build a company and a family at the same time?
Alina: 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 is involved in what I do.
I, I just can't believe my luck.
David: And the kids, [01:03:00] when you say you take 'em to conference like you, they actually come with you and like walk around
Alina: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, they're, 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 they
David: Wearing a
Alina: Yeah. Yeah. The QR code says my mom pays me $10. If you book a meeting with Chili Piper,
David: Does it work? I assume it
Alina: yeah. yeah. And 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.
Nicolas: I, I say we've made it very so Alina shares, she's as transparent with our kids as she's online know, so they know what we do. Sunday afternoon my 4-year-old comes to me and say okay, daddy don't you have to go to work now? Time you? I said straight time. You go say, 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 and it's like a natural thing to do. [01:04:00] They don't complain. They don't think it's strange. They they
Alina: 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 'cause you have to, versus that you work because it's joyful and you see your parents that it's 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 much, I feel so fortunate. I wish like everyone could have the experience that I have. I.
Nicolas: You know, there the thing was being remote, that our commute is, uh. 500 feet.
We in an apartment to we, we do have an office. We, we, it's like across the street, so we don't waste time. So we see them we home on time to them, plus we decide our schedules mostly. I didn't travel a lot and go to a lot of conferences, but but they say same thing.
They got used to it. Say they go, where do you go when you come back? And, and, yeah.
David: Yeah, I, I think what you said there about, [01:05:00] I say the same thing to my kids when they say, you know, I'm doing emails, I'm doing whatever, and they say, wow, you know, you're working late or you're doing, and I say, yeah, but I enjoy, I enjoy it. You know? And I think, again, if they see that and they see work in a different light, you know, and,
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 him, oh, I'm working with this new company. And he said, how much equity did they give you? You know, he literally asked me that, you
know, and I started, 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. He, my older one, 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, I, I, I think if you can do that, you know I grew up that way, so I'm biased to that.
But I think that it's, [01:06:00] 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 then growing that family. And if you don't intertwine them,
Alina: it would be burnout.
David: it would be impossible. I think it would be impossible. What last question for, for both of you.
So Nicholas, we'll 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?
Nicolas: I would say to dare to explore. As I explained in the early days, I, I followed the path. I was there for me. I went to a corporate technique. Then I went to work for the company that was recommended. You know, I see you see kid that go to work for Goldman Sachs because it's Goldman Sachs and thing, and, uh.
It's a mistake I think they make. Exactly. You have to explore and value experience over the brand or what people are telling you to do. If I had explored, if I had to talk to [01:07:00] entrepreneurs, I would've started much earlier. I would've you know, been mobile. I would've believed more instead of staying in the past.
So that's the advice I'd give myself. Say have more confidence in yourself to explore and do what you feel is right for you. And that's what the other people tell you.
David: I like that.
Alina: 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, on my end. I think that I, I, 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, 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 ca capable of. [01:08:00] Like the, the layoffs from 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 will have a stronger trust in my intuition because you're always going to have to make decisions with imperfect data constricted by time.
You are 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, and, and make decisions, better decisions just based on that.
David: I like that. Well, I wanna 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 [01:09:00] known each other actually for quite a while.
Nicolas: I've gotta tell you something in conclusion. 'cause you know I've been in your office trying to sell to you. I know. And you always, I always push back as straight would have it. Yesterday I got a Slack message. Better Cloud
became a customer.
David: became a customer. That's right. That's
Nicolas: crazy.
David: It was for floating apps that that was when we had our
conversation. Yeah.
Nicolas: That, that the precursor. Yeah.
David: It's a, it's, it's amazing to see what you've built and what you've done together and so I look forward to seeing what's.
Store the next, the next thing we'll do another one of these, you know, in five years.
So thank you both
very much. Thank you.
Alina: I'm very grateful that you're doing this service to the community and to CEOs to sharing everyone's stories. I think, uh. It's beautiful to see how much the channel has grown. I'm very happy
David: Thank you, thank you.
[01:10:00]
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