On April 30, Jonathan Anguelov, founder and ex-CEO of Aircall, the business telephony unicorn turned centaur, was a guest at the luncheons of the Chinese Business Club, France’s leading business club founded and directed by Harold Parisot. An interview between two leading figures in French entrepreneurship.
Since 2012, Harold Parisot, founder and president of the Chinese Business Club, has organized around 15 lunches a year for 130 member companies. A club which, as its name suggests, is now focused on the French ecosystem. Every month, France’s leading business club invites several types of guest of honor to lunches, including political figures (Emmanuel Macron, Nicolas Sarkozy, Albert of Monaco…), major CAC 40 bosses (Total, L’Oréal, Accor, Club Med, Pernod Ricard) as well as successful French Tech entrepreneurs such as Blablacar, Qonto, Backmarket, Doctolib and now Aircall.
Founded in 2014, Aircall is an enterprise telephony company that became a unicorn seven years later, after a valuation of over a billion euros. As a result, it passed the 100 million sales milestone in 2022, making it one of the first centaurs of French Tech. Invited to a Chinese Business Club luncheon, Aircall’s founder and former CEO, Jonathan Anguelov, wanted to build an internationalized company while remaining French at heart. Today, 85% of the company’s sales are generated outside France, particularly across the Atlantic.
LUXUS PLUS: Harold Parisot, you are behind this new luncheon organized by the Chinese Business Club at the Hôtel Intercontinental Paris Le Grand. Why did you choose Jonathan Angelov as guest of honor?
Harold Parisot: The Chinese Business Club network should be seen as a gas pedal of business opportunities. Your address book is extremely important for developing your business exponentially. My aim is to invite entrepreneurs with magnificent success stories as guests of honor. For me, Jonathan Angelov is the perfect example, in the sense that he’s “a former DDASS kid who managed to set up a unicorn, a start-up valued at over a billion euros. The wow effect is guaranteed. And club members and participants alike want to meet and chat with the guest of honor. As you know, the club is quite eclectic: there are senators, members of parliament, ambassadors, professional athletes and even comedians. And no one can remain indifferent to such wonderful achievements. I’m their greatest admirer.
L+: Jonathan Anguelov, could you tell us a little about Aircall? I understand that you’re not just in the cloud, but also in artificial intelligence, a technology in which you were among the pioneers…
Jonathan Anguelov: Our major innovation at Aircall was initially to enable corporate telephony to communicate with its information system (CRM and other customer service software). Ten years ago, such integration simply didn’t exist, to the extent that customer service was often unable to find out the telephone number of incoming calls. Right from the start, we wanted to simplify the whole process and create a telephony system where the only question was no longer what’s your number, but what’s your problem? Starting from this base enabled us to create more trust, while allowing our teams to concentrate solely on personalizing their sales pitch. As a result, Aircall has made business calls faster and more productive, while improving the overall customer experience. Because we wanted first and foremost to simplify the daily lives of sales teams and call centers, we bet on artificial intelligence from 2019 to enable the transcription and summarization of phone calls. Today, Aircall is always looking to simplify its customers’ lives, to make them more productive and better day after day, and analytical tools clearly enable teams to make progress along this path.
L+: What analytics can Aircall and its AI bring out of phone conversations?
JA: Some features have been done live and others through integrations, i.e. via other companies that integrate with us, such as Attention.tech. The idea behind this is to be able, at the end of the call, to answer questions such as “Was the person attentive? Did they ask the right questions? Did I personally answer them well? What was the tone of voice? It takes very high sound quality to accurately transcribe an emotion in the tone of voice, what the Americans call “sentiment analysis”.
L+: How did you manage this sudden hyper-growth?
JA: When Aircall was launched, the need was clearly identified and particularly pressing: our customers understood it, had been dreaming of it for years, but above all, they supported us in developing our proposal. It was this need that motivated us to take the time necessary to deliver a first-class product. Given our success, we went from zero to one million euros in sales in less than 18 months. The following year, we were at 3, then 9 million, then 18, then 30, then 50, then 80, then 120. Now we’re at over 150 million euros to date, and we plan to end the year at around 200 million euros.
Jonathan Anguelov, founder and former CEO of Aircall, now heads the real estate company Aguesseau Capital, which he co-founded in 2018 with Gaétan Chebrou. He poses here at Maison Boétie, a multi-purpose event space on rue la Boétie, Paris VIIIe © Aguesseau Capital
L+: How do you explain Aircall’s international success, particularly in the United States, which has become one of your main markets?
JA: One of the keys to our success has been our speed in exporting. In fact, much to our surprise, our first customer was an American. That was a real turning point in the company’s development. We first opened an office in San Francisco in 2015, which was transferred to New York the following year. My partner Olivier went to live across the Atlantic for 5 years with the mission of setting up a major office there. At our peak, we numbered over a hundred people in our New York headquarters, mainly the sales team as well as support functions such as finance and legal. If you want to succeed in this business, it’s important to succeed in the United States. So, at the end of 2023, we moved our management and executive committee there, in preparation for our IPO. To manage the handover following my departure and that of my partner, we hired an American CEO, Scott Chancellor. His objective is to develop Aircall internationally, and in particular to pursue growth in the US market, which today accounts for 35% of our sales.
L+: Apparently, Aircall has spun off a lot of entrepreneurial profiles, i.e. ex-employees who have launched their own start-ups. Is Aircall an entrepreneurial academy?
JA: We found that 90% of Aircall’s first 30 employees became entrepreneurs. So two or three years ago, we created the Aircall Mafia, in reference to the Paypal Mafia, which brought together the first Paypal executives, including Elon Musk. It says a lot about our corporate culture: we give our employees freedom, and we give young people a chance. We don’t hesitate to share our fears and doubts, which is quite rare in a tech world that’s essentially focused on fund-raising. Generally speaking, to say that a startup has raised “X million” is to say that the product is incredible and disruptive. But for us, that’s not enough: we have to be transparent about our sales figures, and we always have been. In my opinion, it’s even a French mistake to have made the amount raised the criterion for entry into the Next 40: we don’t judge a company by the amount it has raised, but by its profitability and its product. This transparency, right down to the development of our products, has created a generation of entrepreneurs, people who know what’s going well, what’s not, in short, who know where they’re going. Today, this Aircall Mafia represents over 15 companies worldwide, and I’m on the board of a number of them.
L+: Where did your early passion for real estate come from, the field in which your new company, Aguesseau Capital, operates?
JA: Not having a parachute of any kind, I quickly developed a passion for real estate. Very early on, I started buying property in Paris, mainly studios and two-bedrooms. My current partner was doing the same thing on his side. We got together and decided why not do things together by creating a real estate company. The idea of Aguesseau Capital was born when we sold all our respective properties to buy our first hotel, Maison Barbès, which was a great success. We then went on to complete over 35 transactions on Parisian properties. Today, we have over 75 million euros’ worth of real estate in the company. In 2023, given Aguesseau Capital’s growth, we were beginning to find it difficult to manage both the real estate company and Aircall. My partner had just returned to Europe. I couldn’t see myself going to the United States. Quite naturally, I thought that after 18 years at the helm of Aircall, it was the right time to pass the torch and reconcile my two passions – real estate and tech. Given the company’s size and stage of development, Aircall could evolve independently, whereas Aguesseau Capital really needed me. Despite this change, I’m still very much involved in the tech world. I’m still involved with Aircall in an advisory capacity, as well as holding shares in the company. In addition, I’m on the board of around ten companies, I’m a business angel in over 35 tech nuggets and I’m a venture partner in the Blast investment fund. The idea is to continue acquiring properties and creating hotels, insofar as Aguesseau Capital’s vision is to buy hotels and operate them. We’re also going to set up an investment fund within Aguesseau Capital to enable people wishing to invest in real estate alongside us to do so.
L+: Jonathan Anguelov, what is your vision of the hotel business?
JA: At Aguesseau Capital, we want to offer affordable 4-star hotels. We believe that today, a 4-star establishment represents a high-end positioning that has long been inaccessible to the middle class because it is too often located in prestigious, central districts. On the contrary, we believe that a 4-star establishment doesn’t need to be located in the most expensive areas of a city: it can perfectly well find its place in a gentrifying district like Barbès. In the meantime, we’ve opened the Maison du Moulin Vert in the 14th arrondissement, next to Alésia. We’re in the process of opening a hotel in the 20th arrondissement, next to Buttes Chaumont, and another near Père Lachaise. We’re also in the process of opening a more upscale establishment, Maison Iéna, on rue Auguste-Facry, adjacent to avenue d’Iéna. We’ll be offering very high-end suites, in the spirit of a 5-star palace. I believe that beautiful things should be accessible, which is why these hotels are located 5 to 10 minutes from the most upscale districts, aimed at a semi-professional population who don’t have 500 or 600 euros to spend on a night in a hotel.
L+: What role does networking play in the transition from telephony to the hotel business?
JA: When I met Harold and took part in some of his events, I discovered the power of discussing and meeting people who don’t only have the same issues or the same types of company as me, or who are at equivalent stages of work to mine, and sometimes even at a younger level. Being able to help each other, introduce the right people to each other, move forward together, and, with the aim of sharing our doubts and advice on the different situations we may encounter when we’re an entrepreneur or the boss of an ETI or SME, is a real strength. I think that’s what Harold Parisot has achieved with the Chinese Business Club, bringing together people from all walks of life, be they journalists, politicians, businessmen or tech personalities.
HP: To complete Jonathan’s answer, I’d add that what makes a network strong is that it’s diverse. And I think that the more eclectic the list of participants, the more it creates real added value.
L+: What continuity do you see between the hotel industry and Aircall?
JA: What I see above all is that the hotel industry is an ageing business, rather like corporate telephony. These are mature businesses. It reminds me of when company telephony consisted of a black landline set on the desk. When it rang, at best it displayed a number, at worst it didn’t even have a number. In short, the only function this phone had was to beep. In the hotel business, particularly in Paris, the same is true. To see for yourself, just look at the social hotels in Paris (which provide emergency accommodation, editor’s note), as well as the entry-level hotels (1 or 2 stars) that haven’t been renovated for 20-30 years. They look like hospital rooms at best, squats at worst. You can recognize them by their white tiles and dim lights. How can you be in the most touristy city in the world and leave buildings like that to rot? I want to renovate all these magnificent buildings forgotten by time and restore their beauty, and that’s what we’re working on at Aguesseau Capital. For our hotels, we’ve redone the floors, the insulation… We want properties that can stand the test of time, and we want to offer Paris accommodation that’s accessible, decent and aesthetically pleasing, especially from a decorative point of view.
L+: Aircall is a French company with an international outlook and a strong American footprint. Is this precisely the market that you, Harold Parisot, would like to focus the Chinese Business Club on, given that you want to move away from the idea of a business club exclusively dedicated to the Chinese market?
HP: For me, the Chinese Business Club is an Anglo-Saxon-style business club, in other words, one in which our members and participants expect above all a return on investment. We have an annual membership renewal rate of 90%. No, I’m not trying to get particularly close to the United States: I’m just trying to de-sinify the Club, without changing the name and without turning my back on the Chinese either. There will be five times less Chinese investment and tourists in France in 2023 than in 2019. That’s why I haven’t changed the target audience, but I have broadened it to include start-ups, very small businesses, SMEs, ETIs, entrepreneurs… The idea is to tell all these young entrepreneurs that if their company does well, perhaps with a good network and address book, their business will grow exponentially.
L+: As we’ve seen, Aircall is an emblematic figure in French Tech. All the more so in that it is one of the few, if not the only, company to be a centaur in the Next 40. One of your members is Frédéric Mazzella of Blablacar. How does the Chinese Business Club relate to French Tech?
HP: I can confirm that Frédéric Mazzella, founder of Blablacar, attends almost all the Chinese Business Club lunches. Secondly, BPIFrance le Hub has been a member of the Chinese Business Club for several years. As for the link we have with French Tech, it’s a close one, since Roxanne Varza, the director of Station F, who was literally blown away by the positioning of our club, offers a few Station F entrepreneurs and startups the chance to take part in a free test lunch, after which they are free to join the club or not.
L+: What would you say to a start-up or scale-up entrepreneur hesitating to join the Chinese Business Club, whether from a business or cultural point of view?
HP: To be totally transparent, I doubt there are any other places in France where, when you walk into the room, there are as many French billionaires gathered around the table. At every lunch, I have the Bouygues, the Dassault, the Courtin Clarins or the Bolloré. All these contacts and potential investors are personalities who are usually considered inaccessible, or at least highly sought-after. They’re just decision-makers. That’s what makes it worthwhile, because the contacts you meet are either yes or no, but at least it’s a big time-saver.
JA: I’d like to add to that, as I’m part of the target group. The Chinese Business Club is a good way of finding a product as well as testing it in a market. Normally, when you’re a company, you have something to sell. But what better way for an entrepreneur than to gain access to the heads of major groups? Signing your first major accounts is a decisive step in the development of a company, but one that remains difficult at first.
FUTURE LUNCH INSERT
The Chinese Business Club lunches return on June 24, with another French Tech figure as guest of honor: Eric Larcheveque. Founder of the Ledger unicorn, his secure digital wallets have earned him the respect of the crypto-Blockchain community. With the show “Qui Veut Etre Mon Associé”, broadcast on M6, he has become a household name. Following in the footsteps of Antony Bourbon, he is the second member of the entrepreneurial reality show’s jury to speak at Chinese Business Club lunches.
Read also > Harold Parisot welcomes Tony Parker at the Westin Vendôme, Paris, February 2, 2024
Featured Photo: © Chinese Business Club/Aircall
