Chili Piper’s Alina Vandenberghe on Generating 50% Pipeline Through Personal Branding, Building a Remote-First Culture, and More

Alina Vandenberghe stands out in the startup world for her radical authenticity and transparency. As co-founder and co-CEO of Chili Piper, she’s built a thriving go-to-market software company while working alongside her husband as co-CEO.

In this conversation, Alina reveals how her personal social media presence drives 50% of their pipeline, shares insights on building a remote-first culture across 38 countries, and discusses the unique challenges and benefits of running a company with your spouse.

From her background growing up in communist Romania to building a values-driven organization of 150 employees, Alina offers candid insights on authentic leadership, decision-making transparency, and turning personal branding into business growth.

Let’s get right into it.

Mark MacLeod:

In this episode, I sit down with Alina Vandenberghe, co-founder and co-CEO of Chili Piper. First of all, I love that company name, Chili Piper. Alina and I met when we were both in Scotland in May at Turing Fest, and we had a great discussion. I thought it’d be great to have her on the show.

Alina stands out among many founders because there’s just one Alina. She’s completely open and authentic. She shares everything, all the ups and downs about her company and her life, and in an era of personal branding, I thought it was fascinating that she takes that to another level, and a really interesting stat that she brought up on the show, 50% of their leads come from her social media and speaking work.

So, it’s a big investment on her part, but it’s paying big dividends for the company. So we talk about that. We talk about being remote. Her other co-CEO is her husband. So we talk about that, the importance of values.

When I went onto the company website to research for this episode, the about section of their website is their values. So they’re really important to them. We talk about a whole bunch of other topics. It was a really fascinating conversation.

Alina, welcome to The Startup CEO Show. It’s a true pleasure to have you here. How are you doing today?

Alina Vandenberghe:

I’m very happy to be talking to you today. Even if my body is a little bit jittery today.

Mark MacLeod:

It’s all good. So Alina and I met because we were both speakers at Turing Fest in Scotland recently. I’m actually Scottish, so it’s always a true pleasure to go back there. And I was waiting to go into the speaker’s dinner, and I turned around and there were these really loud pair of cowboy boots. I was like, who’s that? And then we ended up sitting beside each other. So, first of all, kudos on the cowboy boots. Those are particularly impressive.

Alina Vandenberghe:

Thank you. That was a very fun dinner. Very fun dinner.

Mark MacLeod:

It sure was. Which is funny because I can tell you from deep personal experience that Scotland is not known for its cuisine, but that food was really good. You know, we chatted about potential topics beforehand. And I would love to just jump right into the personal side because you stand out. And first of all, maybe before we go there, let me take a step back and let’s just tell folks what Chili Piper does and set the context. But then, yeah, I want to dive right into this first topic.

Alina Vandenberghe:

So Chili Piper is into the GTM space. So go-to-market. We sell software to mostly marketing and sales, but our main user is Ops. In the ops space, we have a product that we’re most well known for is when somebody comes on your website and fills out the form, they usually get to thank you, somebody will contact you soon. That’s because the organization wants to see if they’re qualified, etc.

And that’s how they lose a big chunk of their pipeline, because then people forget that they fill out the form, and they go to a competitor, or they get distracted with other things. So what we have is a very simple solution to immediately qualify and get to the right sales rep, either via a call or conversation.

But we have evolved a lot from that first product. And now we have in the market an AI bot as well. We have all sorts of workflows, orchestration in this space.

Mark MacLeod:

I’m sure you’ve answered this question literally a thousand times, but I assume there’s a really interesting story behind the name Chili Piper. So, I’m very curious how you arrived at that company name.

Alina Vandenberghe:

Yes. So it’s actually my husband, the one you’re hearing that he’s making coffee right now. I don’t know if you hear him in the background noise. He said that he really loved this brand of champagne called Piper, and he saw an ad with it, and he saw it was chili, which is hot, and Piper, which is Pipeline, feels like perfect, but it actually comes from the Piper champagne.

Mark MacLeod:

Got it. Okay. Perfect. Our default drink at home, by the way, is champagne. So when I kind of reinvented my life in 2019, my first marriage ended. It was kind of a big deal. It’s like a 16-year marriage, 18-year relationship. And I resolved to redesign my life so that every day was great.

And one of the parts of that resolution was like, champagne. I’m like, why is it just for special occasions? Every day is worth celebrating. I’m going to drink it every day. And so when I met my now wife, I looped her into this plan and said, hey, if we’re going to be spending time together, FYI, you need to drink champagne. Anyway, she’s taken the mantle to a whole other level. So, kudos for naming your company after champagne.

Alina Vandenberghe:

I love champagne too.

Mark MacLeod:

Yeah, it’s good stuff. You can’t be unhappy with bubbles. Unless you have too much, obviously.

Alina Vandenberghe:

Unless you have too much, yeah.

Mark MacLeod:

Yeah. So I want to talk about the personal side. You know, you stand out among many CEOs and founders generally because you put all of yourself out there. It just feels like I haven’t been following you for that long, but there’s just one raw, authentic Alina, and the good, the bad, and the ugly is out there.

You know, there’s so much bravado in our industry. You meet CEOs and you ask how they’re doing, you’re like, yeah, we’re crushing it. You meet VCs, how are we doing? We’re crushing it. Which is impossible because most startups fail.

And I feel like you put out the good, the bad, and the ugly. And I wonder if you could just talk about that and how you arrived at that, and is it therapy for you to just kind of release that? I don’t know, just open mic for you to talk about that philosophy and that approach.

Alina Vandenberghe:

So I do have a therapist, in case it was not clear. But I do write about anything, and there’s nothing that scares me from approaching online. And I’ve had that kind of approach to open sourcing of my thoughts ever since I can remember, because I figured that I always wanted to have a mind that, if somebody would access with a microchip or whichever format, now we can have these tools that start to do that. I would feel comfortable with having that done to me.

And I would be in a room, and I would be comfortable to just propagate all my thoughts. And I know it’s a little bit crazy, but when I was very, very young, I think that I would have probably been labeled as autistic because I was very sensitive to very loud noises, to lights, to special kind of fabrics. And I would be very comfortable being in deep thought for a very long period of time and analyzing a lot of things all at once.

I was curious to see why we might like something, we might not like something, why we get angry, why we get upset. And I would always be hyper-aware of my thoughts and how they get formed, and the same for others.

So, as it became a curiosity to try to understand myself better, I also wondered if it’s possible to just open-source our thoughts in a way that makes us feel comfortable. And that’s how I’ve become more okay with publishing whatever comes through my mind as well online.

Mark MacLeod:

Amazing. And have you always done that? Like, would you write a personal blog before the company, or you’ve done more in the context of running this company?

Alina Vandenberghe:

No, I was terrified of getting attention. I would feel comfortable talking about on a smaller scale with things that are happening to me, but not on social media. I only became comfortable with it in 2022, at the beginning of the year, when the war started in Ukraine. And I just wanted to do more to help. And I noticed that me speaking up did help.

We managed to help a lot of refugees by just me showing up and making sure that people are aware of what’s happening in there, and raising money, creating all sorts of documents that were helpful at that time to get to the right place at the border, get to shelter, and get blankets and all those things.

So, I felt that I could just be quiet, or I could have a positive impact. So I picked the second path, but only because of that trigger. I don’t think I would have otherwise felt comfortable with it.

Mark MacLeod:

I’m curious, you’re in the go-to-market space and kind of in marketing, attribution is the holy grail. It can connect a customer to an activity. And I’m curious, are you able to connect positive benefits in your company to putting yourself out there, either in terms of attracting customers, employees, investors, or whatever the case may be?

Alina Vandenberghe:

We actually do measure, and right now, my social posts influence about 50% of open pipeline. So it’s a pretty big Chunk, yeah.

Mark MacLeod:

Wow, that’s really impressive. I’ve seen a trend; you’ve probably seen the same thing. I think more and more CEOs are investing in this thing called personal branding. And I guess it makes sense in a way, we follow humans more than we follow companies.

So, I’m guessing probably you and the company could post on the same thing, but your posts are going to get way more engagement because you’re a human being and you’re more interesting than a company. Is that true? And if so, do you recommend generally, like, hey, CEOs should probably do more of this.

Alina Vandenberghe:

Very much so. So, our company account has double my followers, and it gets less than a quarter of my reach. And for sure, my social engagement is deeper with the right ICP, and we have the right conversations and I form the right kind of relationships on LinkedIn, which is the only platform where I’m active these days.

Well, I’m actually experimenting a little bit with TikTok as well, but mostly LinkedIn. I don’t think that all founders should do it. I don’t think that all CEOs should do it unless it brings them joy, because if they do it in a forced way, it comes across as forced, and it doesn’t work.

They can always find an evangelist in the company or someone who likes it, and just let that person kind of do the evangelism. I think that in my case, it only works because I still enjoy it. If I didn’t, I don’t think I would have success with it.

Mark MacLeod:

And are you on the speaking circuit as well?

Alina Vandenberghe:

I am, I am. I do want to add that at the beginning, it was really rough for me to show up. So it was a period of time where I would feel a lot more pain than I felt the joy of posting for a period of time. I think it was like eight months or so because I just didn’t have the muscle to press publish.

And I didn’t feel at the beginning, of course, like everybody else, I would not get any engagement. And it was really crude, and it was a mechanical process just to get me to press the post button. But after eight months or so, I started learning a lot more. I started learning with my audience, and that’s where I became a lot more excited about it.

But for the first eight months, what kept motivating me was this idea that I can have a positive impact and I can help people. That’s what kept me going. But afterwards it actually became a nice fun game.

And I pair the events with my social media profile as well. So every event that I speak at, there’s a QR code. Hey, connect with me on LinkedIn, and we can continue this conversation. So I do both, yes.

Mark MacLeod:

Okay. So that’s a big investment on your part. Does it take up a big chunk of your time?

Alina Vandenberghe:

Yes, it does. I would say about 40% of my time is spent on both social media and speaking, which is a big chunk.

Mark MacLeod:

Wow. Yeah, it is. But like you say, you can see the results are there. I mean, if half of your pipeline is coming from this, that’s a big deal.

Alina Vandenberghe:

It’s not only the pipeline, but for me, when I go to these events, I learn a lot more about the market than I can in any other format. Because, yes, there are people that are posting on Reddit, there are people that are posting on LinkedIn, but not everybody feels comfortable just writing what’s happening in the market.

So I get a much more real take of the realities when I’m in person, especially in the evening at happy hours where people feel less guarded. And I know a lot more about my competitors. I know a lot more about how a product is perceived, about the buying process than in this kind of real time setting than I can ever in any virtual form.

Even if people show up on Zoom, they will not tell you the truth as much as they would in real life because the cameras are on, and they’re much more self-aware. So for me, the market intelligence and the pulse on the customer is very much worth for me to do these trips and to speak to customers in real life.

Mark MacLeod:

Got it. I love it. This brings up another topic I wanted to discuss, which is the co-CEO thing, and I guess how you divide the world between the two of you, the Chili Piper world. And separately, I’d love to just explore that. You don’t just have a key co-CEO; your co-CEO is your husband. So I’d love to learn more about how that works as well.

Alina Vandenberghe:

I feel extremely grateful that I have a co-CEO. I think that those who don’t is really, really difficult because you go through different stages and you enjoy different things. And having someone who you can just balance the things that you enjoy and not, it gives me the kind of ability to pause that many CEOs don’t have.

And I think that leads to burnout as well, which is less spoken about in a public setting because they have to show that they’re the leaders, they’re there to support their team, and they can’t show any cracks about themselves. But I do know for a fact that many CEOs do experience burnout, and they experience a lot of difficulties as well.

Mark MacLeod:

They sure do.

Alina Vandenberghe:

So, for me to have someone whom I can share my burden and all the challenges makes a huge difference. And it also helps that we are quite different from one another, so we can really trust and look up to one another for certain things. So there’s no tension in core responsibilities, but there’s a lot of relief in the difficulty of it.

Mark MacLeod:

Yeah. How do you divide up the CEO tasks between the two of you? Who does what?

Alina Vandenberghe:

At the beginning, he was handling all the GTM stuff, so sales and marketing, and I was doing the product, engineering, customer success, and support. And afterwards, when I was a CEO and he was the president, I gave birth to two babies, and I stepped down, and I was just the chief product officer. I was just managing the product and the tech.

When I came back, we decided to split and do a co-CEO. And as of June right now, I spent about two years as the acting CMO, just doing the marketing piece, and he was doing everything else. And now we’re really distributing our tasks, but it changes every year or so on what we take on to have most leverage.

Mark MacLeod:

Got it, okay. Interesting. So it’s a fluid collaboration. I’m curious how that works, then. I don’t know if you have a full-blown leadership team, but if so, how do the two of you morph your roles over time, and then, of course, the two of you are married, so you’re kind of like this unit in some way.

This is probably a question I should be asking your management team leaders, not you. But does that create a sort of two-class leadership? There’s like this founding duo and then everyone else, or do you work to kind of make sure that doesn’t happen?

Alina Vandenberghe:

We have a very unique culture in that all the decisions are transparent and documented, and anybody can make a decision to change anything about Chili Piper, including pricing, strategy, and roadmap, through this decision-making process.

We’ve been using it for eight years now, and it helps a lot with rationalizing when we go in one direction or another and not rely on, oh, because Alina said so or because Nicola said so. Nicola is my co-founder. Which creates a very different hierarchy as well.

So our company is quite flat. Even though we have 150 employees, we don’t have middle managers. It’s quite flat. But it’s because of this decision-making process, and it forces both me and my co-founder to be very intentional about how we change things and why we change things. And it’s very different than in most companies.

Mark MacLeod:

That’s fascinating. And my understanding is that you were remote by day one. You weren’t remote because of COVID. Tell me about that decision.

Alina Vandenberghe:

The fact that we are remote forces us to have this kind of document for any decision that we make as well. Because we can’t make decisions in one country and forget about this other country, because we’re in 38 countries. And the reason why we are remote is that I love traveling. That’s the simple answer.

Mark MacLeod:

Okay. Perfect. It’s my company, I want to travel, we’re remote. I love it.

I mean, many of my CEOs have a love-hate relationship with remote. It obviously works. Companies continued to grow during this forced remote period, but I think they get a lot of energy from being in a room with people.

Are you completely asynchronous, or is there some kind of time zone overlap, and there’s some kind of synchronous aspect to how you work together as well?

Alina Vandenberghe:

So all decisions happen async in documents, and the reporting of things also happens async. We have four sorts of systems in place for that, so we don’t really need to get together, but we do just for checking in on each other, making sure that we are live.

And we encourage people, when they go to work, to go into a remote office with other remote workers so that they don’t feel isolated. And we do pay for fancy dinners if they get together with other people in our team.

We used to pay for their Airbnb. We stopped since SaaS cost structure has changed. We stopped that perk, but we used to have that as well. And we meet once a year with everybody and quarterly we meet with certain teams just for training. So we are together but less often than other teams.

Mark MacLeod:

That’s fascinating. I’ve never worked at a remote company myself, but I really see the benefits. First of all, just commute time seems like a complete and utter waste of time. But now I live in the country, so the commute is zero.

I’m curious, just going back to you and your husband co-running this company, have you explicitly established boundaries like, hey, there’s a period of time where we’re not CEOs, we’re just husband and wife. We’re not going to talk about work, or does everything just sort of intermingle?

Alina Vandenberghe:

In our case, because we really love what we do, it doesn’t need isolation, it doesn’t need boundaries. If we hated it, then it would need it, but we don’t. So now it’s all intertwined. And my kids come to my work, and they participate in it as well. So it’s very fluid.

Mark MacLeod:

Amazing. Wow, that’s really cool. I’d love to talk about values. You know, I think most companies do a poor job of living values. You know, back when all companies were in offices, you’d have these posters with a value and kind of just rang hollow, meaning it wasn’t really lived. It was just like this cheesy poster on a wall.

And I actually think the root of any disagreement, lack of alignment in a company, is a value that isn’t being lived or a value that is in somebody’s head that hasn’t been articulated yet. And something that stood out for me when I was just doing a little prep for this is I was on your website, I go to the about section, and your about section is your company values. So I thought that was really cool.

So I’d love to just open the floor to you to talk about the role that values play in how you built this company and offer up maybe some suggestions to others about how they should be thinking about values in their own company.

Alina Vandenberghe:

I think it’s really difficult to thrive in a company if there’s no true alignment, for sure, because those values are going to be ingrained in the culture, and then the culture is going to drive the brand of the company as well. Because how employees show up with your customers and with your prospects is how people perceive you as a brand.

In our case, we have been recognizing the space for building a very strong brand, and it’s all tied to those values. The way I see it is that the words are kind of useless if the actions are not there. If you don’t, as founders, especially, or the CEOs at the top, don’t embrace them and leave them and take the actions to show that they’re real, then it’s kind of just as you say, like a poster.

So, for instance, I’ll give you an example. A big thing for us is celebration and having fun. Like the way you decided that you want to drink champagne every day. We also think that life is short. And yes, we can come to work, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t celebrate all the moments that can be celebrated.

And sometimes, having fun means you add humor in your work, even though it’s not expected. So, for instance, I was just working on a landing page, and I was thinking of maybe it’s a very bad idea, but that’s one of the ideas that came to me is to say that the agents in your workflows always have a human in the loop. And the human in the loop decides if the agent should go in that route or not, unless you pay for God mode, where the agents take over. And that God mode is $10 million bucks.

Mark MacLeod:

That might scare your prospects just a little bit.

Alina Vandenberghe:

Maybe, but it’s part of the value. So that’s like the trade-off that you have to make that sometimes, yes, you might scare some customers away because you’re a bit quirky, but at the same time, that braveness, the ability to be brave enough to show up who you are, is what drives a strong brand. So it’s a matter of trade-offs.

Mark MacLeod:

To be honest, when I see a company name like Chili Piper, I expect quirkiness. Like if you were, I don’t know, like IBM and very straight laced, I think I’d be disappointed. So, yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

My last operating role was a CFO of FreshBooks. And that was another kind of values-driven company. And our annual performance reviews were two pages. One was about our goals, OKRs, and whether we hit them. And then the other was literally each value and the extent to which we did or did not live them.

And then, every time in a management team, if there was a gap, an issue, we would bring it back to a value that’s not being lived. So I’m curious, do you have tools or just different ways in which you make the values come to life in your company?

Alina Vandenberghe:

So we do something similar in that all our assessments for career progression or for salary increases are also done based on a 360-degree evaluation of your peers on those values as well. So that’s part of the process as well, yeah.

Mark MacLeod:

And how do you hire for values?

Alina Vandenberghe:

Well, for each role that we open up, we have a list of skills that are required to do the role, and we have certain assessments on the skills. And when we’re assessing the skills, we also have things that measure against those values. So I’ll give you an example. I might ask a question around how they work with other team members when they have a problem, which is like, that’s their conflict resolution capacities.

But when I ask that question, I would also ask things like, what actions did you take? And if I observe that when they’re listing actions, they’re talking about things that bring them joy around helping others, I notice that they have some sparkle in their eyes around those particular areas, and that’s how I know that they’re actually passionate about it. And that’s the kind of thing that’s much harder to fake in a live interview.

It’s hard to fake their enthusiasm. So I do look at their body language around their answers to make sure that it’s actually true and not just robotic.

Mark MacLeod:

I love that. That’s really great. Since you’re remote, you’re not in a room, you need a big screen so you can really see every detail of the person.

Alina Vandenberghe:

Yeah. And I asked them to, like, we’re gonna have a discussion without ChatGPT in it. We’re gonna be both available. Here’s my hands. I would love to see your hands as well. Because it’s very difficult if I’m just talking to someone who’s ChatGPT doing the answer. So I want to see the real person.

Mark MacLeod:

I haven’t hired anyone since ChatGPT came along. Is that a thing? Are people doing that?

Alina Vandenberghe:

Yeah, very much so. And it’s funny to listen how they respond with generic answers back because you know, if somebody knows their shit or not. But ChatGPT allows them to be better, and then I can understand why they’re using it. But it’s difficult for me to assess someone’s knowledge if they’re not just talking to me without aid.

Mark MacLeod:

Maybe let’s switch gears. I was about to go down this whole rat race of AI, and are we losing our ability to think independently, but let’s park that for now. Let’s talk about go-to-market. If I had a pie chart of all the different elements of value creation over the life cycle of a company, by far, the biggest single slice of the pie is go-to-market.

And your company helps companies with go-to-market, and you bootstrapped to $3 million in revenue. So clearly you’ve figured some things out along the way. And I realize there isn’t one go-to-market recipe, or someone would have written the book, and everyone would just implement the book.

Are there things that you do differently at Chili Piper as an example that defy conventional wisdom, or are there just best practices that you’ve seen over time that other folks could benefit from hearing about?

Alina Vandenberghe:

So I definitely counted 34 growth plays, potential ways to go to market. So, as you say, there are different tactics and we employ maybe 14 out of the 34 ourselves. Because I don’t believe it’s a good idea to put your eggs in one basket. For instance, for founders who bet everything on SEO these days, their traffic is being wiped out by Gemini and all of that.

So we do a lot of tactics. The most important piece is getting attention. No matter what tactic and what growth play you pick, it’s getting attention. And getting attention is really difficult. And especially if you don’t already have the audience built in. For any entrepreneur who starts from the beginning and they don’t have that kind of leverage to already own an audience and get attention, the easiest is to get an influencer in your space.

Somebody whom people look up to to buy your product. And they are a lot better evangelists than you. So if you get lucky enough to get one of the evangelists in your space, then you just snowball because then you’re renting out their audience. They’re going to talk about you naturally if they really like your product.

And that’s how we actually did it at the beginning as well. When we started, we targeted the influencers in our space, and we still continue to do that. Like, the playbook is also to go towards brands and people that have an audience.

Mark MacLeod:

Can we talk about segmentation? You know, you may have a vision where ultimately a very large cross-section of the market can use your product. But I personally believe that companies are built sort of one segment at a time.

Like, you go super narrow, crush the needs, that also means you’re building less, you’re thinking about fewer ICPs, and then you slowly expand. Do you agree with that, or have you gone broader right from the get-go?

Alina Vandenberghe:

So the account makeup that we go after has evolved over time, for sure. We have about 3,000 data points in each one of our accounts. That gives us intelligence on whether to prioritize the account or not. A lot of people prioritize signals if somebody comes to our website, and that’s an interesting account, but we don’t do that.

We look at the characteristics of the company to make sure that if they buy Chili Piper, they stick with it, they don’t churn. So I look at the profiles of my accounts with high LTV and the common characteristics of those, and make sure that top of the funnel, I also acquire only the customer that sticks.

And I have quite complex tiering in place on how I do that. I have like six different tiers. And for my top target accounts, which are about 900 of them, both my marketing and my sales teams work on those particular accounts to make sure that we have better chances of succeeding. But we’re very intentional about everybody that we’re going after. Very intentional.

Mark MacLeod:

Is this dogfooding? Is this using your own platform?

Alina Vandenberghe:

Part of it, yes. Part of it, we’re using other tools, but yeah.

Mark MacLeod:

What are your thoughts on Salesforce? First of all, I hated using it. I feel like Marc Benioff talked about reinventing themselves as Agent Force or something. He hasn’t rebranded it, but like, it just seems to me like an ancient monolith. Like, is it a foundation as part of your go-to-market or not so much?

Alina Vandenberghe:

I think Benioff is brilliant. I think that his playbooks are creating a lot of value for the ecosystem, and we’re deeply integrated with Salesforce. I do think it’s a lot harder for them to move at a certain speed, to kind of catch up with the trends. And I feel guilty of the same thing right now, that we are 150, I can see that we would be a lot nimbler with just five people than we are with 150.

I have to convince people, I have to make sure that they were all on the same page, etc. And for him, it’s even more of a difficult challenge because he has so many employees, and then the public opinion is always on him, and their stock price depends on whether he executes well or not. So it’s just like more pressure for him.

And these days, because software is built so fast, like with vibe coding and with cursor and lovable and all replit and all these tools, everybody can build their own CRM pretty easily just on top of something like a Snowflake, Databricks, etc.

So it’s just like a very strange time for all the software founders in trying to activate themselves really fast to get the first-to-market. But it’s a very strange time in tech.

Mark MacLeod:

It sure is. You know, I was just down in the city for Toronto Tech Week and met with all kinds of CEOs, and it’s the very first time that I’ve seen founders being afraid of technology. Like I was around for the first Internet browser for the Internet, for mobile web 2.0. All these different kinds of developments. And AI is the first one where I’m seeing people excited, leveraging it, but also afraid.

So I’m curious, you mentioned you’re working on some bots. Tell me about how you’re approaching AI and leveraging it.

Alina Vandenberghe:

I used to be terrified for a while at the beginning when I would see that I’m completely behind all the advancements, and I would see all the robots doing things that I never thought would be possible, and LLMs the same way. I’ve changed my mind in the past six months or so because I’m realizing that it elevates the skills and capabilities of each one of us.

So, I think we will accelerate in solving big problems that were really hard to crack before. I do think that the tech ecosystem is going to change a lot. There will be a lot more companies, and they will be a lot smaller.

Eventually, it’s going to be a good thing because when you work in a smaller team, you’re generally happier because you contribute more and you learn more. But it’s just in the process of this shift in company size, and more companies and more mental load are going to be difficult for the next few years. But after that, it’s going to normalize, and overall, the space is going to look much healthier.

Mark MacLeod:

Do you watch the movie Terminator? Do you believe that AI could be fatal to humanity?

Alina Vandenberghe:

I don’t believe that it can just all of a sudden take over and decide that it has different things to do, and we’re just like a species that they want nothing to do with. But I think it’s a very unlikely scenario. More likely is that we will just work alongside to solve big problems and get ourselves to a better shape.

But there is the risk of bad actors utilizing it in strange ways. And that’s for sure going to happen. I don’t know to which extent, and I’m not that deep into that industry, but with any powerful tool comes danger. So I would hope that the right people are on top of it.

Mark MacLeod:

Yeah, I don’t know where I stand on this topic, to be honest. It’s probably above my pay grade. One of the guys, Jeffrey Hinton, was a Canadian who was very instrumental in developing the foundational technology for LLMs. He was speaking at the Toronto Tech Week, and he’s very concerned about the long-term impact on humanity.

But then there were other people on stage taking the exact opposite argument. So it’s hard to know. I mean, I know that people were concerned about cars and what it was going to do to the horse-drawn buggy market. So we’ve had lots of technology disruptions over our lifetime, and we’re still here. So hopefully this will all turn out well.

Alina Vandenberghe:

It’s funny because when I grew up, there were a lot of reasons to worry. So I grew up in a family where we would spend a lot of cycles around. There was communism, and there was a revolution. And then we were in a period of time where we were extremely poor and we had nothing to it.

And I realized that at any point in time, you can spend very long cycles worrying because there are a million things to worry about. And I found that I had started to train my brain to not spend any cycles on it because I was so tired of living in fear that I just don’t have the normal cycles that my mom, for instance, has to spend on worrying.

I just spend time on the positive things because I just feel like it drains me, just drains my energy. And as a result, I didn’t even spend mental cycles thinking about robots killing me at all. Like zero.

Mark MacLeod:

Okay, yeah, fair, that’s good.

Alina Vandenberghe:

Just hasn’t been in my mind.

Mark MacLeod:

Yeah, well, you’re wiser than I. Not that I ruminate on it a ton. It’s only because it came up in conversation this week that it was on my mind.

First of all, I’ll say the Dalai Lama has a really interesting take on worry, which is basically like, if you can do something about it, why worry? Just go and do something about it. And if you can’t do something about it, why worry? Because worrying will literally achieve nothing. So, easier said than done. But you know, wise words, and there’s wisdom in that simplicity.

I’m curious, if you think about the prototypical tech entrepreneur, they don’t come out of communism, they don’t come from your background. So, I’m curious how that background prepared you. Like what, in what ways did it shape you to be the entrepreneur that you are today?

Alina Vandenberghe:

I think the two things that came with it make me maybe a little bit different. One is that I’m a lot more aware of how people are willing to barter because in communist times, we were all kind of earning the same. That was the whole purpose.

And there was a lot of bartering because there couldn’t be an exchange of other things other than services and goods. And I can understand what takes someone to want to do something in a true sense of how they choose to part ways with their money. So I became a lot more aware of that.

And something else that also came with it is the ability to do a lot with very little, because everybody has very little resources. You have to do things that are probably a bit unusual to survive. So the creativity of it forces you to be more resilient and more resourceful. So in the early days, that’s probably one of the things that saved us?

Mark MacLeod:

Yeah. How old were you when you left Romania?

Alina Vandenberghe:

So I left in 2007. I was 23.

Mark MacLeod:

Oh, okay. So yeah. So you lived there for a long time. Okay, that’s a big move.

Going back to Salesforce, we like to bash incumbent companies and startup land and talk about how corporations are bad. You’ve actually worked at some incumbent companies, like Thomson Reuters. And I’m just curious, now that your company’s getting bigger, is there any goodness, is there good practices that you’ve taken from those more established companies and imported into your own company?

Alina Vandenberghe:

The company that I was impressed with the most that I’ve worked at was Bloomberg. And the reason why I was impressed the most is because everything was also very transparent there. Nothing was guarded. Everything would be documented, everything would be on our profiles. There will be a lot of documenting of processes.

And I really, really liked that because I was a lot more aware of what’s happening around me, and I was a lot better at making decisions. So I really loved that. There were a lot of smart people also everywhere working around me. So I felt a lot more motivated to do my work because I felt like we were all elevating one another. And that’s such a beautiful feeling.

Bloomberg is one of the most profitable private companies out there, and it’s very well-run. That’s why I really liked it, I really like that. Obviously, there were things that I also didn’t like at Bloomberg. For instance, there was a lot of peer pressure to stay in the office like 20 hours a day, and I would not see the sunlight for a long time. And I had to beg to just get married, to get outside of that office.

So I didn’t enjoy it all, but it was still a very well-run company. And I think that’s probably because they’re not IPO, that they managed to keep themselves still nimble.

Mark MacLeod:

Fascinating. Yeah, I know they’re a giant company. I have no idea how much they make, but clearly getting you to work 20 hours a week means that they’re still interested in making more and more money.

Last topic, Alina, I’d love to talk about gender. You know, you were in a male-dominated industry. I was just like at all these tech events this week, and it’s just a bunch of dudes hanging about for the most part. And you really leaned into your identity as a woman. But you’re a mom entrepreneur. You’re not hiding it. You’re inspiring others to do the same. I really love that.

I’m a limited partner and an advisor to a fund called Stand Up Ventures, which only backs women-led companies. And interestingly, the stats on women-led companies, they actually have a higher success rate than male-only led companies.

I also note, for what it’s worth, that during COVID, the countries that got their shit together the most were women-led, like New Zealand and Germany. So I feel like there’s something there, and once again, I’m just going to turn the mic over to you, just talk about that experience and why you’re being so open and vocal about it.

Alina Vandenberghe:

First of all, Stand Up Ventures, I hope they’re not US-based because the government will shut them down.

Mark MacLeod:

Yeah, they’re not.

Alina Vandenberghe:

This is so I don’t know what’s happening right now. It’s bananas. So I think in my case, the reason why I feel a lot more comfortable than most people to just talk about it plainly and openly is because when I grew up, I never even knew that there were any differences between genders. I really didn’t think that there were any. And I think in Romania, so for instance, there’s no difference, like a super minimum difference between how much men earn versus how much women earn.

So the pay gap difference is almost insignificant in Romania, which is one of the top countries at that. So, because I was brought up in a country where there’s no difference in how much you can earn or what you can do, I didn’t feel that there was anything holding me back, and that’s how I didn’t even think that there was an issue with how I grew up.

The patriarchy is still very much alive in Romania. Like, if you work as a woman, you’re still seen as the caretaker as well for the house. You still take care of the children. So you do double the workload in general. But the identity of men or women, there’s no difference. Maybe, yes, the man can open more pickle jars than I can, but there’s no true difference.

So as a result, I didn’t even think that there was anything wrong with me showing up as I am. And I feel a lot more comfortable than most people talking about it.

Mark MacLeod:

I love that. I’m curious, do you hear from other women founders about the impact that you’re having on them by being so open?

Alina Vandenberghe:

Oh my gosh, very much so. I didn’t realize how different really US is with genders. Even in other cultures, like, for instance, in Muslim countries or in Indian countries, there’s still this very strong belief that women are secondary and they should be caring for the family and they should be at home.

Me, I would be like a terrible homemaker. I would be like the worst homemaker ever. I don’t know how to cook. I can barely cook an egg to save my life. And it’s such a. It’s so eye-opening to me that all these people, they come and they tell me about how their culture perceives them and how different I am and how brave I am to just show up and talk about all the things that I’m doing, because it’s unusual.

And for me, it’s a surprise. It’s always a surprise. Even though I’ve been told many, many times that they think it’s brave for me to show up the way I am. For me, it feels just normal. But it does give them more strength and it gives them more power to maybe try things that they would otherwise not have tried, so that makes me very happy.

Mark MacLeod:

Yeah, I love that so much. And like, the theme that’s shown up a few times here is like, it’s almost like beginner’s mind. You’re not held back by these preconceived notions that the world should be a certain way, and therefore, you just do what comes naturally. So I love that. That’s probably how many great startups get started. If you knew how hard it was, you wouldn’t do it. You need a certain amount of naivety.

Alina Vandenberghe:

Yeah, I think I’m naive every day, that’s how I show up.

Mark MacLeod:

May that continue for a very long time. Well, Alina, it’s been really great to reconnect again. I loved the dinner we had with everyone at Turing Fest. And, yeah, I’m going to be cheering you on from the sidelines. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Alina Vandenberghe:

I appreciate very much inviting me, and I think very much so that I’ll be doing this until I’m 150 years old. So I’d be happy to redo this in five years and see how the world looks.

Mark MacLeod:

Like we’ll have more to talk about. Yeah. Perfect. Awesome. Thanks, Alina.

Hey, thanks for listening to the Startup CEO Show. If you’d like to connect with me, be sure to visit my website at markmacLeod.me, or follow me on LinkedIn at The Mark MacLeod, or X account @markmacleod_, and if you want to tune in again next week, be sure to subscribe on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. We’ll see you next time!