Alina Vandenberghe is the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Chili Piper, a demand conversion platform used by companies like ClickUp, Gong, Cursor, Verizon, and Upside that turns inbound leads into booked meetings via agentic workflows. She founded the company in 2016 with her husband Nicolas and bootstrapped past $3M ARR before raising funding. With a background in computer science, she previously built mobile products used by millions at Thomson Reuters, Bloomberg, and Pearson, some featured on stage by Steve Jobs. Alina grew up in Romania, started working at age eight, held three jobs to pay for school, and moved to the US in 2007. She took over as acting CMO at Chili Piper in 2023 and led the company’s shift toward agentic marketing operations.

We discuss:

* How Alina built a 65-task automation backlog scored by revenue impact and engineering effort

* Why almost 80% of routine marketing work at Chili Piper was automatable through internal agents

* How invisible operational fixes like a spam email checker prevented 195,000 junk meetings from cluttering sales calendars

* Why Qualified Held Meetings, not opportunities, became the intermediary metric for measuring automation outcomes

* How chaining agents together enables full-funnel measurement from pipeline to NRR

* Why qualified booked meetings alone can hide churn risk and a leaky bucket

* How analyzing 3,000 account characteristics rebuilt ICP and dropped CAC dramatically

* Why Chili Piper documents every major decision asynchronously and uses the log as a proprietary LLM input

* Why LLMs average creative output and where sharp opinions and storytelling still win

* How a return-to-office parody campaign drove 800,000 impressions for the corporate account

* Why 50% of Chili Piper’s open pipeline overlapped with engagement on Alina’s LinkedIn posts

* How Alina spends only three hours a week on LinkedIn, posts three times a week, and writes everything on her phone

* What a lean marketing team actually requires: one deeply technical operator and one creative generalist

* Why the durable advantage in an AI-first world is human taste and contrarian creative judgment

* Advice on co-founding and co-leading a company with a spouse

Where to find Alina Vandenberghe:

* LinkedIn

Future of Marketing is brought to you by the Upside AI Revenue Intelligence and Attribution platform, Graphite Growth Research-Driven SEO & AEO Agency and XYZ Venture Capital and is handcrafted by our friends over at: fame.so

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thefutureofmarketing.substack.com