Description
WORK By JONATHAN ANGUELOV & PHILIPPE CHANCEL
Jonathan Anguelov co-founded Aircall. Raised for a time in foster care, he began working at sixteen
• before studying at ESCP and starting a career in finance. In 2014, with Olivier Pailhès, Pierre-Baptiste Béchu, and Xavier Durand, he co-founded from Paris a cloud telephony platform for customer-facing and support teams worldwide. Aircall has become one of France’s most dynamic startups, with rapid growth in its customer base combined with healthy profitability.
In early 2026, he launched Offstone with Gaëtan Chebrou and Emmanuel Schmidt le Roi, a real estate investment platform that extends Aguesseau Capital, the fund he created in 2018 to invest in properties historically inaccessible to individual investors.
Newfund invested in Aircall in March 2015. Eleven years later, the founder and the investor came together around this riso book.
Good Work. The message arrives early. Very early. At school. In the words of adults. In the eyes of parents. Work to learn. Work to become. And, at the end of the road, success. So we move forward. We repeat. We produce. For ourselves. For others. Always for a reason, whether it be happiness or not. However, another reality quickly emerges.
Work is also about earning a living. Earning money. Subsisting. Or even more. On a small scale, to stay afloat, to feed oneself, to have a roof over one’s head, to carry on.
Or on a large scale, to accumulate, to influence, to expand, and sometimes to dominate. Between these two extremes, the same mechanism operates. Yet, the two worlds seem to drift apart. Little by little, something slips away: values, priorities, the very meaning of effort. Not replaced head-on, but overlaid by the obsession with results, with measurement, with possession. The lure of profit becomes a horizon, leading to a kind of vertigo. Vanities take up space, sometimes discreet, often dazzling. The genius of wealth manifests itself. Yet, amidst all this, work still retains simpler, quieter, more essential faces. Hands that toil for the act itself. Bodies that endure.Gestures that repeat themselves silently For my part, I photograph this. I am not interested solely in displayed success, nor only in outward signs. I seek to capture what drives beings from both within and without: fatigue, precision, dignity. The weight of gestures and their potential beauty. For me, searching for an image is Iworking in this world. It is attempting to grasp a fragment of reality where the human gesture, even in its harshness, retains something right, something sustained. This is called grace. Thus, I observe, I explore, I walk, and I wait for my visions to become sensitive and tangible surfaces. To be present, and to be everywhere at once. In Dubai as in Africa, in North Korea or Kazakhstan, in Fukushima as in Flint or Marseille. I photograph what persists when everything else seems to want to evaluate itself, measure itself, sell itself. In this attentiveness, I continue to search for a fragile kind of truth: that of work and what it still brings, despite everything, to our lives.
Philippe Chancel
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