Nicolas Vandenberghe Has No Time for the Waiting Room

At seventeen, Nicolas Vandenberghe sold newspapers in Paris by going where the customers were: into the traffic. Other sellers waited at the corner. He carried his papers toward people who might buy them. Years later, he would describe the method with a salesman’s lack of ceremony. You had to put yourself in front of people. The pavement offered an early lesson in distribution.

Decades afterward, the co-founder and co-CEO of Chili Piper was still interested in the distance between a willing customer and an actual conversation. It had acquired software, job titles, and a budget. Somehow, it remained a distance. His career has taken him through photo software, the dot-com crash, facial recognition, and telecommunications. The recurring question is wonderfully ordinary: why are we making this so difficult?

A visitor to California changes his plans

Vandenberghe grew up in southern France and went to school in Paris. He arrived at Stanford Business School in 1993, expecting an American interlude before further travels. Asia was on the itinerary. California became a rather effective distraction.

A classmate, Steve Jurvetson, invited Steve Jobs to speak to students. Jobs was running NeXT, still years away from the later Apple comeback. Vandenberghe remembers an entrepreneur struggling with a company and remaining utterly committed to it. That combination made the possibility of building things feel accessible.

His travel plans lost their urgency. After Stanford, he wanted to create technology companies. In later years he returned to share his own experiences with students, remembering how much a visiting entrepreneur had changed his direction. There is something appealingly modest about that return: an attempt to pass along an encounter whose effect could hardly have been scheduled.

“I want to be a tech entrepreneur.”

Nicolas Vandenberghe, remembering his Stanford turning point

The deal that vanished after Davos

His early career supplies a useful antidote to the polished founder biography. In 1995, he started a consumer photo-software business, with a company in San Francisco and developers in France. By 1999, he had moved into an internet venture. Then came an apparently life-changing phone call.

In February 2000, a board member called from Davos: CNET wanted to buy the business, with negotiations opening at $60 million. Vandenberghe began calculating what his share might mean. A summer house entered the discussion. The deal did not survive the market’s turn. Within months, he was reducing the staff from sixty to thirty, then fifteen.

He recounted this in a French essay in 2006, including the premature property daydreams. The arithmetic is the point. An acquisition conversation can make wealth seem settled before anything has been settled at all. Vandenberghe’s version preserves the embarrassment alongside the ambition, which makes it considerably more useful than a tidy list of exits.

Steve Jobs’s inspiration, John Sculley’s partnership

Another early episode had an Apple-shaped twist. Having found inspiration in Jobs, Vandenberghe ended up doing business with John Sculley. The connection involved a French inventor and photo-editing technology that was supposed to challenge Photoshop. Vandenberghe can laugh about the premise: Photoshop remained very much alive.

His account includes an era when software distribution meant retail shelves and deals with computer and printer manufacturers. A product could impress someone and still need an elaborate route into a customer’s hands. The machinery around the invention mattered.

He later worked in facial recognition and then joined LightSquared, attracted by the chance to operate at a different scale. A startup backed by billions offered an education that smaller companies could not. He ran sales and also served as chief information officer. Buying enterprise software gave him another view of the transaction, from the chair where the invoice lands.

A large ambition meets a small appointment

By the time Nicolas and his wife, Alina, started Chili Piper in 2016, both had substantial objections to enterprise software. He had watched salespeople resist their CRM. She brought experience building consumer applications and products at large companies. They believed work software could become easier and more inviting to use.

The opening was almost insultingly small. Stephanie Ouadah at Fivestars needed help distributing meetings through round robin. The founders had ambitions for a much broader transformation. Appointment allocation did not immediately strike them as a fitting first act. They nearly passed.

They accepted. That decision gave their large thesis a specific customer and a task worth completing. It also required admitting that their first impression of a problem had been wrong. A calendar might look trivial from a distance; the team trying to assign the next meeting has a rather different view.

The seven-minute job

In his account of the early product, booking a meeting could take a prospecting team seven minutes. Someone had to identify the right representative, check availability, create an invitation, and confirm it. Chili Piper compressed the task to three clicks in twenty seconds.

The early company remained small. Nicolas and Alina funded the beginning, and the development team built the first product in four months. Vandenberghe personally sold the first $1 million in revenue. At events, he would take out his phone and book the next conversation while the person was standing there. His product demonstration doubled as his sales process.

Before taking institutional investment in 2019, the company had passed $2 million in annual recurring revenue. The phone-at-a-conference detail is more revealing than the milestone alone. He was selling a shorter route to a meeting by using that shorter route himself.

The customer who missed the call

Vandenberghe has also been the person on the wrong end of a sales process. Trying to upgrade a LinkedIn subscription, he discovered he had to speak with a salesperson. He submitted the form. Days passed without a conversation.

When he investigated, it turned out someone had called the next day. He had not answered the unfamiliar number. Both sides had taken a step, and the purchase still stalled. The system had recorded activity while leaving the human purpose unfulfilled.

That experience explains his interest in the buyer’s control over timing. A company can congratulate itself for making a call; a customer can remain unaware that anything useful happened. Chili Piper’s proposition gives the interested person a way to choose a meeting at the moment they are already paying attention. Administrative success and conversational success can be surprisingly far apart.

Do the homework before saying hello

His approach to outreach has a similarly practical bias. In discussing email, Vandenberghe describes examining a prospective customer’s form, sometimes submitting it, and showing what the resulting experience looks like. The next message can demonstrate how the same process would work differently.

The distinction matters to him. Mentioning a shared school supplies familiarity; understanding a company’s actual workflow supplies a reason to talk. His team’s demonstrations make the problem visible before asking anyone to believe a sales claim.

In a separate sales interview, he advised beginners to deepen their technology and market knowledge. He also described buyers increasingly consulting peers, communities, and review sites. The salesperson must arrive informed. His suggested cold-call opening begins by saying he has researched the company. That sentence creates an obligation. The research had better have happened.

A meetings company learns to cancel a meeting

Chili Piper operated remotely from its beginning. Its April 2021 financing announcement described 101 employees across 84 cities and 22 countries. The same announcement reported a $33 million round led by Tiger Global, bringing total financing at that point to $54 million. Those figures belong to that moment, rather than to today’s headcount or balance sheet.

As the company grew, Vandenberghe developed an affection for written decisions. The team borrowed the idea of decision memos, put them in shared documents, and circulated them before calls. People began commenting in advance. Sometimes, the discussion had effectively happened before the meeting began.

The founders describe using memos at home, too. A shared document is an unusual domestic accessory, but perhaps no more unusual than running a company with your spouse. Vandenberghe also describes writing an argument and discovering, through the writing and other people’s responses, that his preferred option is weaker than he thought.

“We book meetings, but we don’t like meetings.”

Nicolas Vandenberghe, on decision memos

A different kind of conversation

His interest in how people communicate extends beyond sales. Nicolas and Alina founded Citizens of Our Planet in 2021 with a pledge of $1 million. Its early giving supported organizations helping refugees and displaced people.

The foundation now describes a mission of promoting nonviolence in business and funding education projects informed by Nonviolent Communication. Nicolas serves as president and a director. The underlying practice asks people to distinguish observations, feelings, needs, and requests. It is a demanding ambition for any workplace where a spreadsheet can become a quarrel.

There are lighter clues to his temperament. He has named War and Peace among his favorite books and recommended The Mom Test to entrepreneurs. His public birthday tribute to Alina compared her to a complex software object essential to his operating system. Romance, apparently, can survive an engineering metaphor.

Still willing to question the machinery

In June 2026, Vandenberghe was publicly convening GTM Clawllective sessions about AI in sales and marketing. Topics included prospecting workflows and the uncomfortable question of whether software companies should replace subscriptions with tools they build themselves. He was asking it as someone who sells subscriptions.

In August, he described working from a beach with Wi-Fi, recalling the early warnings that remote work would not scale. The Paris newspaper seller had acquired a more agreeable place to work. The professional habit was recognizable: go where the activity is, examine what people actually do, and question the arrangement everyone else has learned to accept. Occasionally, that means building software. Occasionally, it means discovering that the meeting can be an email after all.