Frédéric Mazzella in Startup Europe summit in Berlin

And I get asked the question also for Germany sometimes because—

So what's the difference with the Germans?

No, no. Well, the thing is, in Germany we don't charge anything for now. There is no booking system. And so I had a joke the other day because I was in front of a German audience at WHU, which is a big university in Vallendar, actually. And they asked me when we would charge in Germany. And I told them, guys, you know, there will be at some point a business model also applied in Germany because otherwise it would mean that would be the only time that Germans don't pay and all the other countries pay for them.

Okay, so you know what to expect. What about the country you said, the first one that you started outside France was Spain? So how was that decision made? What are the criteria basically that you're looking at when you want to open a country?

For Spain, it was a bit different than the other countries later on. The first initial move to decide to open Spain was actually to make sure that our product was able to handle at least 2 countries, 2 languages, which means that you force the entire team into thinking global, at least thinking of a product that can scale in other countries. Because if you stay too long with a product with only one language, then in the end, after 2, 3, 4 years, you end up with a product which is really hard to move to another language. So I didn't want that to happen. So we made it so that we were able to handle at least 2 languages at the beginning. And since Spanish and French are very, very close, it was easy for us to test and everything. So it was the easiest language we could go to. And also it was the country with which we had the more trips already, because we had a lot of trips from Toulouse to Bilbao or from Montpellier to Barcelona. So we had a lot of cross-border trips already with Spain. So we said, okay, so We have some liquidity in Spain already, so it will be easier to start there. But then with the other countries, we look much more—

It was your beta test country, basically.

The what? Sorry?

It was the beta test country.

Yes. Well, it was something that would make it so that our product would have the DNA to scale at the very beginning. And then for the other countries, we obviously look at in more details. We do a market study and we which study parameters like the price of fuel, the price of transportation, the number of people connecting on Facebook, the number of people who have smartphones, the alternative for transportation, and everything. So we look at the environment, and then we decide which country is next, and it's the best for us to go. And then once we have decided in which country we want to go, we have 3 ways to expand. The first one is through acquihire. So we love that. When we find a small company, a small startup who has started the same service as us, like ridesharing, we go to them and we're like, OK, so we think there is a potential in this country. Do you want to develop that with us? And so when this succeeds, it's the best. It's the best for everybody, actually. Because for the local team, they get funding through us. And they get a product which already handles more than 10 million people. They get customer support which is already ready and it's plug-and-play. And so the local team can focus really on making the service very well known through communications and marketing. And so this is the best. So the first solution is to go through an acquihire. The second one is when we have people inside our team who are able to launch the service locally, then we do that. So it's kind of a spin-off. We've done that for Germany, for example. We had 5 people in our team who are Germans. And so they were able to launch the service in Germany.

So they were based in Paris first and you sent them to Germany?

Yes, they were based in Paris and then they went to Hamburg. And so that's the second option. And the third option is obviously to hire a local team. But this is the hardest one. Because when you hire a local team, you hire someone who doesn't know the space yet. So he has to ramp up on knowing what ridesharing is, what are the incumbents in the country, who should we talk to. He has to learn a lot of things. And since in a country it's really an entrepreneurial role, it's someone who will be alone at the beginning or like building a team, but it's really an entrepreneurial role. It's hard to identify the right person. It's very hard to find the very good entrepreneurs. So we do that when— so we did that for Turkey and India. It works super well, but it's a lot more effort, at least at start. So the By far, we prefer the option of hiring local players, because at least when we arrive, they know perfectly their domain. They already know everything that you need to know about the country regarding ridesharing. They are motivated. They're entrepreneurs. They want a lot of success. And we bring them all the things that help them scale.

OK. You talked about India, which is the latest country that you opened. It's the furthest away from France that you opened. To India. Yep. And why did you choose India and not the United States, for example?

As for the United States, it will not even be our next country for the United States. So maybe the question is why not the United States? I get that all the time. So—

Hey, I didn't ask that.

Oh, you didn't? It was the second part of your question. So for the United States, So some people have tried to do what we do. So again, it's long-distance ridesharing, so it's nothing to do with short-distance on-demand rides like you can find with very good apps, by the way, but which are doing different things than what we do. So in the US, some companies had tried to do what we do, long-distance ridesharing, and it didn't work, and they invested up to $10 million into trying to make it work, and it didn't. So then we Tried to see why it did not work, and so in the end there may be two reasons why it didn't work. The fuel is cheap in the U.S., so it's like twice cheaper than in Europe. Highways are free, most of them, and the GDP per inhabitant is higher. So if you sum up all this, the financial incentive for an American driver to share his car is three times lower than the same driver in Europe. So like driving. 1 mile with your car alone in the US is 3 times less painful in the US than it is in Europe, for example, which means that an American driver alone in his car is economically equivalent to a European driver already sharing his car with 2 other people, so like 3 people in the car. So then if you want to go to share the remaining part, which is 1/3 of the incentive, it's harder. So the first one is economical, we believe. The second reason why in the US it may not have been picking up yet The distance. The distances are longer and the cities are more spread out, and the public transit is not as good— well, except for the West— the East Coast sometimes, but it's not as developed as in European countries, which are much more concentrated with a very good public transit system. So, which makes it so that as a driver, if you want to go from a city to the next and you have passengers, you have to pick them up At departure. At departure, to go around the city, pick them up, and go around the city, drop them off. So you may lose like half an hour or 45 minutes trying to find your passengers when you depart, and the same when you arrive. You just can't tell them, let's meet at this subway station, or what, because sometimes there is no subway. And so people say it's a last-mile issue. So we believe that also we can't motivate the drivers because financially it's not really interesting. And it's a pain to actually pick up and drop off.

There's no drop-off and drop-off.

Yeah, it's harder. So we believe it's the reason. It's always hard to know or to guess why it's not working, but we believe that could explain that.

And India is a lot better?

In India, it's another issue. They're like, all the trains are full. If you want to travel a few hundred miles in India, you better book your train tickets if not days, weeks in advance. Because sometimes, like 10 days in advance, there is no more space at all. So there is a high demand and an infrastructure able to transport people in a few hundred miles, which is not sufficient. Mm-hmm. So we thought we will use the cars to actually offset some of the demand from the trains, which is unsatisfied because lots of people want to travel but they can't. because the trains are full. So that's one of the reasons why we believe India is a very promising market for us.

Okay. When you scale like that, there's always issues about— because you do it fast, and then there's a very spread organization. So you need to mostly rethink your organization in terms of being able to manage the whole thing. And that's always a headache for everybody and trying to find the optimal organization. So what's your answer to that?

So the first thing is that everybody in the company is aware that the only constant is change. So things will change. Like, you will not be seated at the same place one month from here. You will have new colleagues. You may have a new boss. You will have new people. You have a new department popping up somewhere doing specificity for the company. Once you get everybody in the mindset that things are going to change, then you've done half of the job because people will think positively about the future and they will not think about static positions and keeping positions because they know that their job will evolve. So it's something we tell everybody in the company. You entered and you had a mission and maybe in 3 months, 6 months, maybe even 2 weeks, your mission will be different. And you will be working with different people, and it's okay. And that's the only way you can think about adapting your entire structure. And then the second thing we did is also to articulate our values, because when we were 60— so like every year we go to ski all together in the Alps for 3 days.

So how many people in the company now?

Now we are 220, reaching 250 in a month and a half.

So a lot of slopes.

Yeah, it's actually hard to find a ski resort now that accepts us because we're quite a lot when we arrive. And so actually, I was discussing yesterday the issue that we can't fit all in the same restaurant anymore. And so we may have to split a bit. I don't know how. But anyway, so every year we go to ski like this. And when we were 60, we went to ski. It was about 2 years ago. And we said, okay, we're growing fast now. We have a very, very nice ambiance. We have strong motivation in the team. We have strong values. We should articulate them so that the new people who will be joining us know these cultural values and that they follow it. And so we make sure that we keep this motivation, this seriousness. And so we articulated them. So notions like sharing, innovating, came up, and then we made some poetry around it. Actually, I always have the values on me, so I can read them to you. So one of them says, the member is the boss.

The member is the boss.

Yeah, it means we are building a service for our members.

Not the boss, the member.

The member, yeah. Yeah, because if the member is not happy, then there is no activity. We can all go home. So another value is fun and serious. Because we believe this is the yin and the yang of motivation at work. We have this one which says, think it, build it, use it, which means we are all using our own service. So like everybody in the company is using it. Share more and more to make sure that we go further. Well, there are 10 of them, but yeah, some of them, which one is— in trust we trust. I love this one. So, and then we wrote them, we put them on the wall, we made stickers out of them, so we stick them on our computers. And so it helps us in our everyday lives to make sure that we keep developing the company in the same spirit as we had at the beginning, because I believe that action-oriented values can replace processes when you grow. And the problem is when you grow fast, you don't always have time to put in place the processes, but values that you are able to express in an action-oriented way can replace processes somehow. It's a shortcut to processes because then when people will have to make a decision in their daily professional life, they will think about the value and they will make the decision which fits the value. And so not only they will make the right decisions that any— that BlaBlaCar would have made if BlaBlaCar is an entity, but also they will own this decision. And so they will feel more responsible and they'll push it forward. So yeah, the 2 things is make sure the team is ready for change and articulate the values, action-oriented values, because we're here to really deliver.

It's actually seen from the outside, meaning that you put a lot of work as well on the brand and on the fact that it is consistent around all the different countries. Was that also a key of success of expanding the same value proposition Elsewhere?

Yeah, I think so. And also in France, we changed the brand as well because we were named Covaturage.fr. So, and we soon remarked that it didn't scale because Covaturage didn't work. Covaturaje in Spanish didn't work either. So we said, okay, Covaturage is not going to scale. So we had to find a brand which scales with sounds that are used in all countries. And so we came up with this brand one day. I was Quite tired, and then I look at the website. And actually, when you register on BlaBlaCar, you choose if you are blah blah blah or blah blah blah to say how much you talk in the car. That's the reason why we're named BlaBlaCar. And so some people don't want to talk, so that's why we then you put yourself as blah and you don't talk in the car. But if you talk a lot, you say you're blah blah blah. And so that was a feature from the start. And so one day I was looking at the website, and there was this. Trip details from a driver, and it said he was BlaBla, and there was his car just next to the BlaBla icon. And I just read BlaBlaCar and said, well, that sounds good. And then actually, on the branding, it took me 5 years to find a brand that would scale, and 100 sleepless nights, because I thought it was key in the globalization of the concept that we would have one single brand that everybody can pronounce, understand, and if it makes people laugh, it's even better because they remember the brand even better. So in the end, we had 30 brands, 30 names, and I sent them to 30 friends in inline mail. And a few months after, I was asking them, so which brand do you remember in the list I sent you? And almost all the time, people were saying BlaBlaCar. So I was like, okay, this brand is really marking in the head of people, it's crazy. They've read it once in a list of 30 names.

And they remember.

Yeah, they remember it. Because sometimes it's a love or hate thing. And then I got a lot of feedback from people saying, are you kidding? You're betting the entire future of your company on this silly name? And so some other times when people understood it was blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, they were saying, oh, it's brilliant. And so at least I said, okay, it's not neutral. At least people have a reaction and they remember it, so it will save us millions in marketing. Because if they remember it just by hearing it once, it means we don't have to pronounce it through the radio, the print, Facebook, whatever. We don't have to. It's a lot less effort.

One last thing I'd like to have you talk about is there's something that is usually very difficult when you want to scale, is to hire at the pace that you want to hire. So how— what is— do you have a secret recipe? Is it a headache like everybody else, or?

I think it is a headache. It is still a very high concern for us. So we, we thought about, about it 2 years ago with my co-founders that we wanted to attract talent. And so in order to do so, we needed to make it so that the company looks really attractive. Because I was tired actually to have people in interviews and explaining them that we were changing the world and that our company was incredible. And so I would spend like 20 or 30 minutes like selling the company again and again and again and again to new people joining. And I was like, this is not right. I mean, I can't do that every day, every week, just to explain that we are changing the world. So we will make it so. That it is known that we do change the world. So now if we change the world, if you want to change the world with us, just come. But then I will not have to sell you the company. And so that's why we also— those values really helped. And then we made some contests as well to get the Great Place to Work awards and things like that to show that we have a very, very nice working environment and everybody's super motivated. So we tried to externalize our culture so that it attracts talent back. And so when we get them in interviews, they're already motivated, they already know our culture, they already fit our culture. And it's much easier to recruit talent when they already know that they are joining a company they like than when you have to convince them to join you and explain to them why what you are doing is exceptional. And so we've switched. It's taken maybe a year or a year and a half until this began to happen. And we saw people arriving knowing a lot about the company already and willing to join. And so it drives a lot of motivation, and then you become a magnet for talent. So that was our way to go around this very, very tricky problem.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.