Six dollars separated Aircall from its promise to itself. At 9 p.m. on December 31, 2015, the company’s monthly recurring revenue stood at $59,994. The goal was $60,000. The sales team started calling customers, looking for an extra user or phone number to carry the business across the line before the year ended. They made it.
It is an absurdly small sum to place at the centre of a company that would later be valued above a billion dollars. That is precisely its charm. Six dollars leaves nowhere to hide behind market size or a handsome presentation. It asks whether a target still matters when almost reaching it would make a perfectly respectable excuse.
For Olivier Pailhes, Aircall’s co-founder and CEO, the episode belongs to a longer education. He came to entrepreneurship with consulting experience, industrial responsibilities and a preference for analysis. Building a company required him to keep revising what those qualifications could accomplish.
Steel before software
Pailhes’s early career had the reassuring shape of a well-planned professional life. HEC Paris identifies him with its 1999 class. He went into strategy consulting at Boston Consulting Group, where telecommunications became an area of expertise. After seven years, he wanted work closer to making things. Managing factories with ArcelorMittal offered a substantial change of scenery.
The move took him through steel manufacturing in France and Spain. In his account of those years, curiosity was a recurring force: he gravitated towards innovation, then found himself wanting another change. By his mid-thirties, the prospect of continuing as someone else’s employee had lost its appeal. He was 36 when he met the other Aircall co-founders.
There was a personal question underneath the business decision. After roughly fifteen years in large organizations, he wanted to find out whether he could create a company of his own. A successful career had answered questions about competence. It had left this one open.
He had also arrived in Spain in 2008, a difficult moment for a steel business supplying construction. Holding the operation together for nearly six years gave him a close view of the weight of financial priorities. The appeal of a new company included the chance to shape its culture himself.
A telephone joins the team
The route into Aircall ran through eFounders, the startup studio created by Quentin Nickmans and Thibaud Elziere. Pailhes knew Nickmans from BCG. Telephony was one of the everyday business tools the studio wanted to reconsider through software, and it was a subject Pailhes already understood. Aircall was founded in 2014 with Jonathan Anguelov, Pierre-Baptiste Béchu and Xavier Durand.
The idea had an unglamorous attraction: companies still needed to talk to customers, and setting up a business phone system could be expensive and complicated. The phone sat awkwardly beside the newer software used by sales and support teams. Pailhes and his colleagues wanted calls to become easier to manage together.
His explanation of the product in 2016 was practical. A team could choose local or toll-free numbers, start using them on its devices and connect the phone to customer relationship management and helpdesk software. Collaboration was built into the proposition. The phone conversation could finally have company.
Think of the familiar customer who has to repeat a problem after a transfer. That is the sort of friction this product logic addresses. A call becomes more useful when the people handling it can see the surrounding work. The attraction of an integration is often most obvious to the person spared another explanation.
A question
A conversation
Shared context
Four founders, one apartment
In 2015, the founding team joined 500 Startups in San Francisco. For four months, they shared an apartment as well as the work. The experience made it difficult to preserve neat boundaries between one founder’s responsibilities and another’s. Everyone could see more of what the others were carrying.
There were lessons in distance, too. With a small team still in Paris, Pailhes initially wanted two meetings a day. The arrangement caused frustration across the time difference. They reduced it to a short meeting about essentials and found a smoother rhythm. A company selling better communication had to learn how much communication its own people needed.
The American market brought its own instructions. The team’s account describes customers who knew what they wanted, and features whose absence could stop a sale. Their product needed work. The shared experience gave the founders a fuller understanding of sales, development and support, while the accelerator supplied a demanding setting in which to practise.
Pailhes later moved to New York with Durand to build the US operation. Aircall had begun in Paris, tested itself in California and chosen another American city for the next stage. Crossing the Atlantic was a continuing commitment, rather than an item that could be ticked off after an accelerator programme.
The spreadsheet meets its match
By 2018, Pailhes could describe an important change in his thinking. He had initially expected his intelligence, analysis and creativity to do much of the work. The company’s progress had taught him to put more weight on the decisions that assembled the people around him: first the founders, then a core team, then a larger organization.
“I’m an analytical person,” he said. The admission gives his story some useful texture. An analytical founder can explain a market and still have to learn how a team works. His account credits the group’s dedication with getting Aircall through obstacles he had not expected it could overcome.
His early timetable also needed revision. He had given himself eighteen months to get somewhere. When that period elapsed, he felt he was still at the starting point, albeit with enough learning to begin unlocking growth. Weekly roadmaps had become successive rewrites. Eventually, immediate priorities displaced the pleasure of maintaining the original plan.
“SaaS takes much longer than you think.”
Olivier Pailhes
These are unusually useful details to retain in a founder’s biography. They make room for professional experience that helps, and professional habits that need adjustment. A polished roadmap can be comforting company. It is less demanding than a colleague or a paying customer.
A billion dollars, then a different job
In June 2021, Aircall announced a $120 million Series D led by Goldman Sachs Asset Management. The financing took its valuation above $1 billion. Pailhes set out plans for investment in technology, infrastructure, partnerships and the customer experience. The business phone had become a proposition investors were willing to fund at a very different scale.
The following year brought a measure of the business itself: $100 million in annual recurring revenue. By the time Aircall announced its CEO transition in July 2022, it served more than 13,000 customers in over 100 countries. Michael Haske would take over on September 2. Pailhes would remain on the board and serve as a strategic adviser.
The possibility of handing over had surfaced before, wrapped in a joke. On April Fools’ Day in 2019, Pailhes posted a mock resignation. Once he revealed the prank, he kept the underlying question: the skills needed to start a company differ from those needed to lead it as it grows. A founder had to think beyond his own permanent place in the story.
In 2023, after Haske stepped down, Pailhes returned. Aircall’s account of that period described a renewed focus on efficiency and a clearer route towards profitability. The company also began introducing AI-supported call and transcription tools. Leadership, finances and product direction were all moving at once.
The return call
Now Pailhes has returned as CEO again. His public explanation includes an unexpected inventory of hobbies: playing jazz, writing theatre, learning about wine and building his own Lego sets. Repeated comebacks, he suggested, were beginning to qualify as another hobby. The joke is considerably easier to enjoy than the work behind it.
He has described the 2023 interim return as a difficult period, and the subsequent board years as a chance to watch other CEOs operate at close range. This latest return carries a renewed interest in building as AI changes what voice software can do. Watching from the board gave him another perspective on his own leadership.
His stated priorities put him close to the product and customers again. Aircall is developing AI voice agents, while he argues that valuable human conversations will matter more as automated conversations multiply. The question reaches back to the original product: what does a business need to know, and who should be on the other end of the line?
A more recent update makes the tension concrete. Discussing September results, he reported 30% month-on-month growth in voice-agent volume, while acknowledging his reservations about outbound AI calling campaigns. He described work on consent, disclosure, calling hours and caller identification. The volume figure shows adoption; the reservations show a founder asking what adoption ought to look like. A tool that can place more calls gives a business another decision to make about which calls deserve to be placed. For someone whose company began by making conversations easier, that is a consequential question to keep asking.
The six-dollar finish line was clear. A target, a clock, a number. The decisions facing Pailhes now require a different kind of judgment. The telephone is still there. So are the people calling with something they want resolved. After all the changes in his career, that remains a concrete place to begin.