François-Charles Sirois and the cost of playing it safe

François-Charles Sirois wanted crêpes. The Los Angeles restaurant said it could not make them. He asked to see the chef, then proposed a contest in the kitchen. “Chef versus me, right now, in the kitchen!” was the challenge he later recalled. Twenty minutes afterward, the table received the other desserts, free. The crêpes remained conspicuously absent.

It is an unusually domestic opening for a discussion of corporate strategy. There is a businessman, a disappointed order and a kitchen that has suddenly become the site of a negotiation. The chef finds an expensive way to avoid the requested experiment. Sirois finds a story he can take home. A complimentary dessert trolley seldom works this hard.

He told the episode in Montreal in November 2013, using it to question the cost of avoiding risk. It gives a little texture to a career usually described in the language of holdings, acquisitions and boards. Today, his responsibilities include Telesystem, OnMobile and Zone3. His business life has also taken him from Montreal to Madrid, where he moved in 2024 to take up the OnMobile chief executive role again.

That move makes a useful point of entry into his story. A family name can open an office door. Running a business still requires someone to sit behind the desk, deal with the numbers and decide what deserves another attempt.

The family business changed its business

The Sirois business history begins with his grandfather Simon and Setelco, a company that grew into Telesystem. Charles, François-Charles’s father, bought the family paging business in 1978. Paging now sounds like an exhibit awaiting a label in a technology museum. At the time, it offered a way to build a much larger communications business out of a regional operation.

National Pagette helped consolidate Canadian paging and trunking services, went public in 1986 and merged with Bell Cellular the following year. The family’s subsequent interests included Teleglobe, acquired with BCE in 1992, and Microcell, whose mobile network launched under the Fido name in 1996. Telesystem International Wireless, founded with Ted Rogers in 1994, carried the business into international wireless markets.

These were the foundations François-Charles inherited, rather than achievements to be attached to his own résumé. He came into a family company with a history of changing its scale and, eventually, changing its subject. Early in the new millennium, Telesystem sold its telecommunications assets. The capital and experience accumulated in communications went toward building and backing other businesses.

There is a particular challenge in succeeding a parent after a change of direction. Familiar expertise remains useful, while the companies requiring attention look increasingly different. Networks, content and software have different customers and economics. The family enterprise had already made room for that shift before François-Charles became its chief executive.

Before the title, there were smaller companies

Sirois studied at HEC Montréal and graduated in 1997 with a bachelor’s degree in business administration. His early ventures included Up2 technologies, Microcell i5 and Masq. He founded and led those businesses, and worked in venture capital and real estate investment before joining Telesystem. His early entrepreneurial work involved e-commerce and mobile payments.

It is worth pausing over that sequence. The later board memberships can make his career appear to start at the level of established companies. The earlier businesses place him closer to the practical questions of a young venture: how a service reaches its users, how transactions work and how a business earns the right to continue. Those questions would recur in entertainment, with much larger audiences.

He became Telesystem’s president in June 2009. In April 2012, Charles announced his son’s appointment as chief executive. François-Charles’s stated aim was to build lasting value for the businesses the group owned with others. That shared ownership matters. It describes a business built alongside other entrepreneurs, with acquisitions and partnerships among his explicit responsibilities.

His cousin Denis occupies another part of that family operation, serving as Telesystem’s vice-president of investments and leading Telesystem Energy. François-Charles’s positions at Zone3 and Stingray put him in the production and distribution of entertainment. The allocation of responsibilities gives the broad family portfolio some definition. A shared surname does not make every investment everyone’s personal project.

Music travels better with a distribution agreement

Sirois is a co-founder of Stingray Group, whose president and chief executive is fellow entrepreneur Eric Boyko. The company completed its initial public offering in June 2015. For Sirois, it is a tangible connection between company building, a Montreal base and international entertainment distribution. Music can cross a border rather more easily than a cable can.

Stingray’s activities also show how many forms a music business can take. In 2021, it announced distribution arrangements with eight streaming partners, including Amazon Prime Video Channels, Plex TV and Pluto TV. The services included concerts, karaoke, classical music, jazz and music channels. Some used subscriptions; others were supported by advertising. Different commercial arrangements brought related content to different audiences.

That is the less glamorous side of an entertainment business, and one of its essential sides. A catalogue needs a route to a listener. A television channel needs carriage. The creative work and the distribution contract belong to the same economic story, even if only one of them makes a pleasing promotional photograph.

Zone3, where Sirois chairs the board, places him on the content production side as well. Taken together, those roles put him near both the making of entertainment and the arrangements that carry it outward. They also help explain why mobile gaming belongs in his career without requiring a sudden change of professional identity.

“create long-term value for the media and technology businesses”

François-Charles Sirois / on becoming CEO, 2012

Madrid was a decision, not a pin on a map

OnMobile brought him into a company headquartered in Bengaluru, with a business built around mobile operators and their subscribers. He joined its board in June 2014 and became executive chairman that November. He served as chief executive from March 2017 until August 2020, continued as executive chairman and returned as CEO on March 7, 2024.

The return involved a move to Madrid. In describing the decision, he explained that the Spanish office was the company’s second largest by employee count and its largest by revenue. He had to rearrange his responsibilities and companies in Montreal, as well as his family life. The business’s international reach had become a personal logistical commitment.

He returned while OnMobile was working through the uneven business of building mobile gaming. At the end of March 2024, it had crossed 100 operator deployments. Sirois described the work of tuning marketing for each region, a process that could take six to nine months. Signing an operator and acquiring paying subscribers were separate stages, with a substantial interval between them.

That interval is easy to lose in a growth narrative. A contract is an announcement; successful marketing is a repeated exercise. By the following financial year, the company was emphasizing better revenue from existing gaming deployments. The mechanics of that work are modest enough to sound dull and consequential enough to decide whether an expansion pays.

A controller, a new channel and some awkward numbers

On June 26, 2026, OnMobile launched its ONMO+ Smart Console through Flipkart in India. The offering combined a controller, access to games and a service designed to work across screens such as televisions, laptops, tablets and phones. It marked a move beyond supplying telecom operators into reaching consumers through an e-commerce partner.

For a business with long relationships in mobile entertainment, that change opens a different kind of selling conversation. The person buying the service can encounter it as a product, rather than through an operator’s offering. The screens already in the household become part of the proposition. The company’s ambition depends on making that arrangement convenient enough for people to use.

The latest published quarterly results, released on August 11, 2026, give the venture a sober backdrop. Gaming revenue was INR 394 million, up 2.4% from the previous quarter. Total revenue was INR 1,241 million, down 3.8%. EBITDA was INR 15 million, including ONMO+ launch expenses. An expanding product range and a growing gaming line can coexist with pressure elsewhere in the business.

Earlier that May, an investor asked Sirois about a much larger revenue ambition. His response included a useful qualification: “my dream versus reality. That’s what we have to match”. It is a small admission with substantial room inside it. The launch offers a test of the idea. The financial results keep the test honest.

The other starting line

Away from the boardroom, Sirois co-founded the TRIOOMPH Foundation with Sylvie Leduc. Its Driving Your Success program used motorsport to encourage school perseverance. By February 2012, it was operating in 33 Quebec schools, pairing students with driver mentors and receiving support from Michelin Canada. The reward at the end of the school year included time at a racetrack.

A foundation event in August that year brought together professional drivers including Jacques Villeneuve and Andrew Ranger. The program’s school partnerships ran over ten months. In 2013, young participants from around Quebec took laps with experienced drivers at Circuit ICAR in Mirabel. It offered a memorable finish to sustained effort, with rather more engine noise than a certificate ceremony.

His support for education also extends to his own business school. HEC Montréal’s foundation described his involvement in its council of governors from 2013 and his interest in entrepreneurial training. He told the school that education was his principal philanthropic priority. Helping students prepare for business and helping teenagers remain engaged at school address different stages of the same long journey.

Culture has drawn his attention too. In 2017, he co-chaired the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts ball with Pierre Pomerleau and Kim Thomassin. The western-themed event attracted 930 guests and generated C$1.4 million in net proceeds. The beneficiary was a Montreal institution; the work depended on an organizing group and a roomful of supporters.

The connections across these activities are practical ones: partners, audiences, students and people willing to help an undertaking happen. Sirois has held positions that allow him to assemble such groups. His current gaming venture asks whether a new distribution arrangement can carry a new product into people’s homes. His education initiative asked whether a driver could make a school year feel more purposeful. Both require the invitation to lead somewhere.