E74 – Part 3 of a 4-part mini-series with Jonathan Anguelov, co-founder and COO of Aircall. Jonathan doesn’t see VC rounds as reasons to celebrate, but he does see VC as a no-brainer if the ambition is both huge and urgent – and his vision is to build the future of telephony in less than 10 years. He reveals a love for open office working – and explains why he believes in ever-increasing employee specialisation and Sales Fordism as they take on the challenge of onboarding 10 new employees a week.
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Transcript:
Part 3 Aircall
Jonathan Anguelov
What I believe is that something that we are creating a little bit at Aircall … is the Sales Fordism. How you separate the function into the sales functions. So moving from having a full cycle sales – one guy that does the whole cycle – he hunts, he closes, he then takes care of it … to …. one guy finds the lead, one guy hunts the lead, one guy closes the lead, one guy onboards. One guy takes care of the nurturing of the lead. So, you know … there is really something going on. And I think you can split companies like that – every function. When you start your company, you have generalists, when you grow, you specialise people… so people become the best in what they do.
Stephen Cummins
Welcome to 14 minutes of SaaS, the show where you can listen to the stories and opinions of founders of the world’s most remarkable SaaS ScaleUps.
Episode 74 – Part 3 of a 4-part mini-series with Jonathan Anguelov, co-founder and COO of Aircall. Jonathan doesn’t see VC rounds as reasons to celebrate, but he does see VC as a no-brainer if the ambition is both huge and urgent – and his vision is to build the future of telephony in less than 10 years. He reveals a love for open office working – and explains why he believes in ever-increasing employee specialisation and Sales Fordism as they take on the challenge of onboarding 10 new employees a week.
You’ve got a 29M USD round in funding round from Draper Esprit which is a fantastic win for yourselves – and I know Brian caulfield. He’s a really good guy. How much of a difference does that make to you as a company and… can you share some of the things you intend to do? Some of the big changes that will occur, or are occurring as a result of that.
Jonathan Anguelov
Sure! I mean all in all, you know, we… we raised more than 40 million. The first raise is like very exciting .. and I was like ‘Wow! People just giving me money’ … and then as it goes, you know, you just realise it’s okay more responsibilities and… and actually, it doesn’t change anything! You get the money, but you just get the money to do what you promise to do. So actually, it’s more about execution. An idea isn’t worth shit, you know. It’s nothing – what matters is the execution of that idea … which is where most people fail. I’ve seen hundreds of ideas fail just because the execution was bad. So what changes? It’s that you have people trusting you… you have a good board… board members that help you with the vision, help you with the execution and, you know, we are in these big markets where, you know, Cisco is making a few billion in revenue per year. And where, you know, we need to catch up. So we need cash! And… and the only reason we… we raise is to go faster – to hire and not just build the future of telephony in 20 or 30 years, what you would need if you don’t raise catch.
But do it in less than 10 years and make a multi billion dollar company. So what changes is that okay, you have people are trusting you… you have a go-to-market strategy that is clear and … you know where you’re heading with that money.
Stephen Cummins
Absolutely! I sometimes ask people what they’re not good at … but I’m not gonna ask you that because, you know, you’re very self-aware and you’re gonna give me 20 things because I can sense that straight away. So I’m gonna twisted it around and ask you something you’re less comfortable with. It’s never a fluke when somebody has the level of success you’ve got. Yes, excellent co-founders and early employees. It’s a team. It’s a team team achievement. But what are the one or two qualities that you have personally that you feel made a difference for you – that has you succeeding in the way you’re succeeding. I mean you talked already about the fear and stuff, but what kind of skill natural skills sets?
Jonathan Anguelov
I love people. I love people. I love talking with people. I love listening to people. And I think I’m there today not because of one person I listened [to]. But because of the hundreds of people I listened to. And I got inspired by. And today with each of my employees. You know, I’m open. I don’t have an office and I’ll never have an office. I’m in the middle of the sales team actually – with all the partnership team, marketing, everyone. I’m in the middle of them. And I know that I will never have my own office – I think that’s boring. And so yeah, if you said qualities – its that I love people, love talking with and listening to people. And, you know, sometimes I take people that have three managers in between me and them and ‘hey, let’s spend 10 minutes and tell me what do you do’ and so on and I… I think it’s something usually people will say is good about me – is that I’m talkative and easy going.
Stephen Cummins
Yeah, no, you definitely are and it came across before when we chatted. I actually had to stop us, because I went ‘no let’s get this on the thing’ because you’re definitely very chatty. Any recommended reading?
Jonathan Anguelov
It is very sales. I mean, I have a real sales mind. As I told you I love business – sales is business. One of the first books I read when I started Aircall – because I thought I knew sales, but I didn’t know sales in the end, especially sales in B2B SaaS and so on – and I really liked Predictable Revenue from Aaron Ross, which is really the Bible for sales. It’s a bible. It’s how you should do sales in a company at scale when you’re doing B2B, and… and very often people ask me ‘Can you tell me how you do sales in Aircall blah blah blah. And I’m like kind of saying 80 percent of what I read in Predictable Revenue. So they create the Bible – and then I use it and mix it with my own ideas to create the perfect sales team. I don’t know if it’s perfect today, but it works somehow.
But yeah, it’s… it’s a good book to read if you’re in that business no matter who you are – if you’re a founder, if you’re a VP of sales, head of customer success, whatever – it’s a good thing to see how, you know, you… you split functions to make them more efficient. And I’m actually… I’m actually writing a medium blog post – whatever –about …like what I believe is something that we are creating in Aircall … it’s the Sales Fordism. What I believe is that something that we are creating a little bit at Aircall … is the Sales Fordism. How you separate the function into the sales functions. So moving from having a full cycle sales – one guy that does the whole cycle – he hunts, he closes, he then takes care of it … to …. one guy finds the lead, one guy hunts the lead, one guy closes the lead, one guy onboards. One guy takes care of the nurturing of the lead. So, you know … there is really something going on. And I think you can split companies like that – every function. When you start your company, you have generalists, when you grow, you specialise people… so people become the best in what they do.
Stephen Cummins
Yeah. Well, certainly I would have seen that in Salesforce as an early employee. They actually discovered that having a CSMs there going to be the customer advocate … and then having the sales guys going out and looking for the best deal … that can get that little bit of tension. Even though it actually caused real tension sometimes.
Jonathan Anguelov
It does!
Stephen Cummins
It functiones better. Because the problem with the CSMs was that most of them didn’t have that ability to really look for the best deal. These were things they were scared to do – that they weren’t really wired that way … and then with the account managers and the sales guys, they weren’t really wired to really just be worrying about everything working. So by having the two there – so because you’ve gotta have customer success. You’ve gotta have renewals. You don’t have a business without that in SaaS. So they evolved in that way. So … if we just take that … I suppose as an example, and of course, in Salesforce leads, they separated Biz Dev … it was very separate to account management, there were different levels of account management etc. But, I suppose what you’re doing is taking that to another level and maybe dissecting it up even further and perhaps the dissection changes depending on what you’re selling and depending on what your market is. And is what you’re looking at … Is it something that .. is it like a set of decision-making that you would make and tests you would do at a certain point in time to find out what’s the Fordism formula for your particular sales pipeline?
Jonathan Anguelov
It is. Yes. It is … What I feel is that it’s important no matter what’s your business, it is really important that you have specialists. When you start your company, you have generalists, when you grow, you specialise people… so people become the best in what they do. The good thing with separating people is first, you get the best out of each person … and the second thing is that you create a kind of career path? So maybe the best guy currently in that role. Maybe he wants to move to another role or he wants to move inside that roll up … which is good. The problem is when you have like generalists, the function is that the career path is complicated … it’s a complicated thing. So it’s anyway extremely good to separate functions – to make them more efficient. The risk of course … and there is a risk… is the there it’s too separated, and you lose the customer, you lose information.
Stephen Cummins
You lose interest perhaps, because it’s not challenging enough.
Jonathan Anguelov
Yeah, of course. And… and that’s a big challenge
Stephen Cummins
And would you be interested in looking at things like RPA, robotic process automation, and kind of integrating the humans in with that. So you separate it into six or seven sections and maybe, you know, that this can be learned by a machine. And you know you can insert the humans into the 1stt and 2nd part, 4th and 5th part, and 7th part … for example. Are you looking at that one day?
Jonathan Anguelov
Probably? I mean it’s something I would love – but today … the problem is that, you know, at scale when you’re scaling fast, you know, we have 10 new employees every week currently. And doing these kinds of things you need some people to organise it and so on – and it’s not like a huge priority, but it should be – not smart enough. Again I go back to the thing.
Stephen Cummins
That’s why I didn’t ask you what your thoughts were because you’re too modest.
Jonathan Anguelov
You need so much people to take care of those kinds of things … and I think the focus currently is more around the execution. And of course, if we can do things automatically by robots as you say … like thanks to different algorithms or whatever, we’ll do them. It just there’s always a time … as an entrepreneur, or as a VP of whatever, one important thing is the focus. Focus is what makes companies and people are successful. And I think currently the focus is hiring, building a great product, executing our vision, and talent absolutely. So I try to not do everything at the same time because otherwise, we might hit the… hit the wall at some point.
Stephen Cummins
So I guess North America and Europe are your main markets. And you mentioned Australian – the English speaking world. Do you do business with Asia as well at the moment?
Jonathan Anguelov
Not so much … a little bit. More than 30 percent of our revenues are coming from the US. The rest is split between the UK, France, Germany, Europe in general basically … Spain too. And Australia. Large tier one countries. In Europe we’re more focused on the largest countries – it’s UK and France – they’re almost same at about 10 percent of our revenue each. And the US is by far the biggest part of our business – even though we’re not Americans … but that’s why I’m… I’m quite… quite happy if I can brag about something, it’s that. But yeah there is still a lot to do because American investors say ‘30 percent? .. that’s all? … that’s shit!’ Like, yeah okay. All right. While European VCs they say ‘Wow! That’s amazing! I love the VC world.
But. Yeah, Asia is not our focus …you see what I mean… I mean regulation is a bit more complicated for phone numbers, telcos et cetera. So currently it’s not a focus – probably would be one day.
Stephen Cummins
Yeah, yeah, and you need partnerships and joint ventures and all those sorts of things going in there … Now, let’s imagine a world in a few years time … you go .. ‘You know what! I built this beautiful Hotel over there … I think I just want to go there and lie back and read some books for about three months. I’m going to sell the business.’ Let’s just imagine you did that. And then you got bored, which you would do and you came back again. But let’s say you were worth … I don’t know the 50 or 60 million … Would you choose if you go back in the next time to invest your own money or would you go the VC route again?
Jonathan Anguelov
Depends how much I exit for – of course. No, the truth is that VC is quite convenient when you don’t have so much money. When I started, you know, I didn’t have so much money. So it was kind of helpful.
Stephen Cummins
But, you know, what are the negatives?
Jonathan Anguelov
The negative is that you’re stressed. I mean, you know, the Hotel for instance, you took the example of the Hotel … I invested all my money and that’s all the money I earned. Plus what I leveraged from the bank. And so, yeah, it’s stressful … but the good news is that you buy real estate. So somehow … its not so much risk. I mean, you know, real estate stays valuable. So its different, but I would say I’ll start … I’ll bootstrap as much as possible, and raise if needed. You know, raising money … and I think it’s really important that people understand that … is that raising money is not a win … you raise because you’re actually not smart enough. Again. Because you need cash et cetera… et cetera.
Stephen Cummins
And it’s very important who you raise the money with, right?
Jonathan Anguelov
Extremely important, who’s on the board, et cetera… et cetera. And yeah, I don’t see raising … that’s why a lot of people say ‘Yeah, well done! You raised a lot!’ Yeah. When someone raises I’m like ‘Dude, good luck. Now good luck. Because now it’s the real thing that happens. And if I could have not raised, I wouldn’t have. But as we are in this very competitive business, very complicated …
Stephen Cummins
Need to move fast …
Jonathan Anguelov
… But as we are in this very competitive business, very complicated. We need to invest … and organic growth wouldn’t be enough to build a multi-billion dollar company these days. Nowadays it’s hard – especially what we do at Aircall. So I would invest until I can .. I was always depends on how much I do an exit for. I understand today, being an entrepreneur today is not just being reach. It’s having an idea and being good at executing on it. So if you need to raise, you raise. But if you don’t need to, don’t do it because you see everyone’s doing it.
Stephen Cummins
In our Next and final episode from this mini- series our guest Jonathan Anguelov, an arch pragmatist, gives amazing advice to anyone thinking of becoming an entrepreneur.
You’ve been listening to 14 minutes of SaaS. Thanks to Mike Quill for his creativity and problem solving skills and to Ketsu for the music. This episode was brought to you by me, Stephen Cummins. If you enjoy the podcast, please don’t forget to share it with your network, subscribe to the series and give the show a rating.
Listen to 14 Minutes of SaaS on Spotify / Apple podcasts / Goo