Mario Neto: All right, so just jumping into it — you started playing football in France, I believe, at a young age. I don’t know exactly when, but you can tell us that. Then you played on professional teams — well, you didn’t get to go pro, but you played on professional teams, and that’s what eventually brought you to the US. Can you tell me a little bit about the journey, and how you ended up going from football player, very early on, to being a marketer and now CEO of Kalungi?
Antoine Vial: Yeah, absolutely. I think somehow soccer, or football for everyone who isn’t from the US, opened so many doors for me. It started really as just an activity I was doing as a kid. When I was five years old, my parents moved to a small town in the south of France, and a few hundred meters down from the house there was a soccer club. My mom went there, signed me up for a year, and I just went and played. It was purely an activity, and eventually it turned out that I loved it, and I was good at it, which became my favorite sport every single year since I can remember. Before I was 13, my mom tried to get me to love another sport — tennis, judo, horse riding, I did all of them — but always in parallel to playing soccer, and soccer was the game I really wanted to play. So I kept playing, and eventually, at 13, I became good enough that some clubs started scouting me, asking if I was interested in joining an academy. At the time, my parents recommended I not go just yet, which in retrospect was probably a good thing. But eventually, when I turned 15, a club — Montpellier Sport Club, MHSC, which at the time was in League One — close to where we lived, was very interested in me joining the academy, so I went.
I did three years there as a semi-pro, then an additional year playing for the reserve team, but never really got to become a professional soccer player for that club. At the time I thought, okay, I can probably go play somewhere else — but it was actually tricky. Luckily, when I first joined at 15, two agents came to the academy and gave a speech to all the players. They mentioned that out of the 26 players we were, starting at 15, probably only a couple — if that — would end up becoming professional. At the time, you’re young, you’re confident, and you think, I’ll be one of those one or two. I was not. So I picked up the phone and called them, and what they were doing was this: they had partnerships with a lot of universities in the States, and they were able to get players recruited by universities in exchange for a full scholarship to study. I thought, at the time, wow, what an amazing opportunity to actually broaden my horizons a little, be able to go study, get a bachelor’s degree, and continue to play — which, again in retrospect, was one of the best decisions I made. I said, okay, the professional career isn’t going to happen here, so let’s explore an alternative path, and enjoy it.
So I moved to the US. I first landed in a small town, Springfield, Missouri, because that’s the university that recruited me. At the time my English was terrible, so I had to pass a few tests, like the TOEFL, and a proficiency test, which I didn’t pass at first — so I had a semester of just English courses. The university was offering that program for athletes in my situation, and that’s how it all started: landing in the US, playing soccer for four years. I moved after a couple of years to Albuquerque, New Mexico, and played on the D1 team at UNM — a wonderful experience. We were playing in Conference USA, which is scattered around the entirety of the US, from South Florida all the way to Washington. We played games in Seattle, in Kentucky, in the Carolinas, in San Diego — everywhere. It was absolutely incredible, flying everywhere during the fall season. Very, very fun experience, and at the same time it reinforced the idea that soccer was a medium I was going to use to do other things.
I graduated with a bachelor’s in political science, because at the time I wanted to be a diplomat. After my degree, I lived in South America for about six, eight months, actually, doing a full-on volunteering trip where I joined a few missions in different countries. I started in Ecuador, then went to Cusco in Peru, and then eventually spent a few months in Cartagena, Colombia — completely different experiences. In the last one, in Cartagena, I was still leveraging my sports background — I was a sports coach for an institute that was actually a rehab institute for minors with cocaine addictions. It was pretty intense: we’re talking about kids from 13 to 18 who had fallen into very strong addictions. I was there through the different phases of the rehabilitation — the first two phases were more at the hospital, detox and then stabilization, and then there was a third phase, completely optional for kids once they were stabilized, where they’d go outside the city to this beautiful home that was teaching them to become leaders, so that when they came back to their communities they could help other kids not fall into the same traps. I was still organizing sports events and things like that. Over there I discovered — we could have an entire section of this conversation about what I learned about leadership there, because it was very much: leadership is not something you force on people, but something they have to choose. These kids really showed that, by going out of their way to try to become a positive influence in their community eventually. But that’s besides the question.
That brought me back to the US eventually, for a master’s degree in international relations. I went to NYU, where I studied for a couple of years, still pursuing my diplomacy route. It was a very interesting master’s, in partnership with the Stern School of Business and the public law school at NYU, where I learned a ton of very interesting things that had nothing to do with marketing — but that’s what I was pursuing at the time. I went to work at the United Nations, because that was kind of part of the path. I was in New York, it was wonderful, I worked there as a consultant for just short of a year. And then life happened, in the sense that I needed a visa — I didn’t have a visa to stay in the US, and I wanted to stay in the US, wanted to stay in New York. I had two options, at least the ones I thought I had at the time: go back to France and take an exam, the “Concours de la Fonction Publique,” to be part of the foreign ministry, and eventually be able to go back to New York, assigned to the permanent mission of France to the UN or something like that — which is what I was pursuing at the time. But that was very different from what I was hoping to do, because I’d have to go back to France, study another couple of years, and eventually take the test, and it would have kind of broken the journey I was on.
At the time, I had a very good friend who was working at Kalungi. She told me, look, we’re always recruiting, and this weekend Stein — Stein is the founder of Kalungi — is around, and you guys should meet. I engaged in the recruiting process, and I thought there was actually a lot more overlap than I would have expected between B2B SaaS and my previous, early career path. I decided, kind of by default — I ended up in marketing, really. I mean, I chose it, but it kind of happened — and somehow I loved it. I loved it because I found a lot of things I really liked about sports within Kalungi. I think it was particular to Kalungi, and the way leadership had set itself up to allow team members to level up — a little bit similar to what I’d experienced in my sports background, almost like a coach-to-player relationship, where the coach was someone like Stein, trying to teach and educate every team member on what he’d learned from his twenty-plus years of experience in B2B SaaS and the startup world. It felt very much like, okay, we’re a team here — I saw so much overlap with what I’d experienced as a soccer player, and it felt very familiar, a path I could recognize myself in, that I knew how it would work, and how to take advantage of it — in terms of leveling up myself, but also interacting with other team members, learning from them, teaching them. I really loved that environment.
I thought the big difference within that world versus the professional world I was in at the time is that the results were almost immediate. If what you do — the strategy you put in place and the execution you run — has a positive impact, you know almost immediately. Not immediately, but the cycles are much shorter to see if you’re doing well or not, than in diplomacy. Not that one’s good and one’s bad, but at the time it felt very rewarding and very interesting. So that’s how soccer brought me into marketing — a long journey, but really soccer was the medium that brought me to the States, and then eventually brought me all the way to New York, and exposed me to Kalungi, and then eventually I committed to that, and yeah, that’s the story.