Alina Vandenberghe

Who is Alina Vandenberghe?

Alina Vandenberghe is the co-founder and co-CEO of Chili Piper, the demand-conversion software company she runs alongside her spouse and co-CEO. A repeat SaaStock speaker, she has taken the stage in both Europe and the United States to share the operating playbook behind one of SaaS's most talked-about go-to-market stories, and she does it with a directness and warmth that set her apart from the typical keynote founder. When she opens a talk by acknowledging that the room is overwhelmed, that inboxes are pinging and Slack is full of notifications, it is not a throwaway line — it is the same empathy for the buyer's attention that shapes how Chili Piper thinks about converting inbound interest.

What makes Vandenberghe's perspective distinct is the dual lens she brings to the stage: she is both a product-and-go-to-market operator obsessed with efficiency, and a founder navigating the unusual reality of building a high-growth company with her husband. In her 2022 SaaStock Europe talk she leaned into that second identity directly, framing her session around the lessons of scaling a tech unicorn with a spouse — a partnership dynamic most founders never have to manage, and one she has turned into a teaching subject in its own right. By her 2025 SaaStock USA appearance, she was back with a sharply operational message: how Chili Piper drove 1,400 sales-qualified leads with just two marketers, a case study in doing more with a deliberately small team.

Across both appearances, Vandenberghe consistently grounds her advice in real numbers and real constraints rather than abstractions, and she treats the audience as peers rather than students. This page collects her recorded SaaStock talks, with transcripts, so founders and operators can study the lean go-to-market thinking and co-founder lessons she has shared on stage in her own words.

About Chili Piper

Chili Piper builds demand-conversion software that helps revenue teams turn inbound interest into booked meetings and qualified pipeline. Where most of the go-to-market stack is focused on generating demand, Chili Piper concentrates on the moment after demand arrives — making sure that a prospect who raises their hand is routed, qualified, and connected to the right person as fast as possible. That focus on conversion efficiency runs through everything Vandenberghe says on stage, from her empathy for buyers drowning in notifications to her insistence that small teams can outperform large ones.

The company has grown into what Vandenberghe describes in her 2022 SaaStock Europe talk as the next tech unicorn, scaled under a husband-and-wife co-CEO structure that is itself a defining feature of the business. In that session she opened by asking how many people in the room already used Chili Piper — and noted, half-joking, that the sales team was standing by to convert anyone who hadn't raised their hand. It is a telling detail: the founders practice the same aggressive, friendly conversion discipline they sell.

By the 2025 SaaStock USA stage, the headline proof point was operational leverage. Vandenberghe's talk centered on how Chili Piper generated 1,400 sales-qualified leads with a marketing team of just two people, a result she uses to argue that focus, tooling, and a tight conversion motion matter more than headcount. For founders trying to build efficient SaaS go-to-market engines, Chili Piper functions as both the product example and the living case study.

Key lessons from Alina Vandenberghe's talks

A tiny team can drive serious pipeline if the motion is tight. Vandenberghe's 2025 SaaStock USA talk is built around the claim that Chili Piper drove 1,400 sales-qualified leads with just two marketers. Her takeaway for founders is that go-to-market output is not a linear function of headcount — disciplined focus, the right tooling, and a clear conversion process can produce results that would normally demand a far larger team.

Conversion starts with respecting the buyer's attention. Vandenberghe opens her talks by naming the audience's overwhelm — the pinging email, the noisy Slack, the difficulty of paying attention in a crowded room. That same empathy is the philosophical core of Chili Piper: the goal is to make it effortless for an interested buyer to get to the right person, fast, rather than adding to the noise. Founders should treat a prospect's attention as the scarce resource it is.

Building with your spouse is a distinct discipline worth talking about openly. In her 2022 SaaStock Europe session, Vandenberghe made the husband-and-wife co-founder dynamic the explicit subject, framing it as six lessons learned. Rather than hiding the unusual structure, she argues founders in partnership — especially with a life partner — benefit from naming the dynamics directly and learning from others who have scaled the same way.

Founders should sell, even from the stage. Vandenberghe's instinct to point at the sales team and convert the non-customers in the room is a lesson in itself: at a high-growth company, every interaction is a go-to-market opportunity. The most efficient teams treat conversion as a continuous, founder-led habit rather than a function they delegate and forget.