"Bold." | Mobility with Nicolas Brusson, Co-Founder and CEO at BlaBlaCar

Today, BlaBlaCar has 80 million passengers a year - 80% of them outside France, €253 million in revenues, over 2 years of profitability, 800 employees, 21 markets, 2 million tonnes of CO2 spared a year, ... and all thanks to a single technological platform.

Today, we take a look back at the method and strategy behind the emergence of this Mobility-as-a-Service giant.

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Nicolas, over the years, we’ve come to take ridesharing for granted. But if you think back to 2007: i) taking on a stranger, ii) met on the internet, iii) in the confined space of a car, was almost a bad idea. How did you go about the whole thing?

You're right, we were off to a pretty early start. I met Fred, my co-founder, in 2006. At the time, the iPhone didn't even exist yet. The Internet was gaining ground, but we were still a long way from the peer-to-peer dynamics we saw emerging later on. 

So BlaBlaCar was not part of any major market movement. There was no mass narrative we could ride to give legitimacy to our idea.

Between 2000 and 2010, the great logic that entrepreneurs and funds loved was to take businesses that worked offline, and put them online. E-commerce for instance : you've got a good product that sells well in physical stores, put it online and sell it at a greater scale online. But that wasn't our case at all. 

People considered we were creating a hitchhiking service. In other words, a concept that already hardly worked in the 1970s - that we were going to put online to make matters worse. Had the service existed in the US, at least it might have helped us establish the model, but it wasn’t the case. So we were seen as a couple of lunatics, even at INSEAD where we were studying at the time. I remember them telling us that if we ever managed to gather 100,000 users, we'd have succeeded in bringing together all of France’s hippies and marginals. Today, BlaBlaCar is used by 80 million passengers. 

So yes, we started the “garage phase” almost too early. For us, it lasted almost 4 years. Things turned around for BlaBlaCar in 2011/2012, when the NASDAQ crisis came to an end. At that time, investment was back on track, particularly in technological innovation. At that time, Sequoïa invested in Airbnb. All of a sudden, the Sharing Economy was making headlines in the Financial Times. The whole world was about to be turned upside down by peer-to-peer businesses. We ended up right in the spotlight. This marked the start of BlaBlaCar's second chapter.

In short, imposing your truth to an entire market is long and complex. But if you manage to ride a market trend as a forerunner, you’ll gain major legitimacy.

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Great, so at that time operations start kicking off. After 4 years of preaching the good word, you can feel it starting to bite. You raise €100m, which was huge for the time. What's going on in your heads? What's the next step?

Yes, this is the start of a period of hyper-growth for BlaBlaCar. Fortunately, having had these four years of “preparation” had allowed to streamline and stabilize the model. From then on, I had just one goal in mind: roll it out everywhere. 

But that was the problem with Internet businesses at the time: how to build global leaders? In Europe, we had a lot of national champions, but we hardly ever crossed the borders, if ever. The only countries building incredible businesses were the Israelis and Swedes with Waze or Spotify. Given their limited population, these countries had no choice but to go international right away. France and its neighbors, on the other hand, were both too big and too small. Big enough to build a sustainable business, but too small to really scale up. But for us it was cristal clear: we wanted to build the world leader.

I think that vision stuck with me from the few years spent in Silicon Valley. Over there, it’s never up for debate: the world is your market. Because launching a start-up is a race for scale and capital. I reinforced that conviction during my time in venture capital in London, where I saw too many companies stagnate because they hadn't seen big right away. Almost inevitably, these companies ended up drowned out by the competition. 

So I set off with this objective: to become the European leader and then the world leader, fast. And that turned out to be a very structuring factor for the project. Not only is it extremely stimulating intellectually, but it also adds another dimension to the adventure. In fact, it has become one of our main levers for acquiring the best talent, who were attracted by acquisitions in India, Russia or Mexico, and so on. That's how we managed to forge a strong community of BlaBlaCar alumni (aka the BlaBlaMafia), like a kind of “Global Village”, similar to what we’d experienced at INSEAD.

So to answer your question, if I had to sum up this chapter, I'd say: “The only way is big.” It's because we thought big that we gained access to capital, the international scene and the best talent. This was the starting point for a period of extremely strong growth for us. Almost too strong, in fact...

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I was going to say it sounded too good, too simple. Tell us about the problems associated with hypergrowth. What issues did it raise for you and how did you deal with them?

At the end of 2016, we had to face the facts: “the room needed tidying up.” We were facing 3 major challenges.

The first was development. At that time, we had already launched in several countries, including Brazil, Russia and Mexico. Things were going well, but growth was slowing down. Our LTV/CAC ratios weren’t where we wanted them to be, and we were beginning to see somewhat disparate development rates between markets. This was partly due to our acquisition-based expansion strategy. We gave local teams a lot of freedom, but this also led to over-recruitment and strategic divergence.

The second challenge was technological. Indeed, we came to realize that our platform - by dint of continuous mutations - had become incapable of absorbing the slightest innovation. Mind you, we couldn’t even monetize our service. In short, we needed a complete overhaul.

Finally, our 3-headed governance model was reaching its limits. When you're a young company, having three people makes you almost omniscient. But scaling up makes matters more complex. Having several “heads” often left the team interpreting who had given the instructions, why, what conclusions were to be drawn, and so on. Everything ended up distorted and amplified. Things had to be simplified.

So we started by a full overhaul of our executive committee. And that’s a bit more demanding than it sounds. It's a real transition, so we had to invest a lot of time and efforts in communicating all the changes to the team and ensuring everyone was onboard. It was decided that I would become the sole CEO. Fred and Francis are of course still on the board, but as non-executive members. We still have the same trio and the same discussions, but there's only one voice left.

We also reviewed our development plans. We had to transit from childhood to adulthood. As a result, we limited investments that didn’t meet our growth expectations, such as Mexico. The platform continues to operate, but we are no longer investing in its growth.

However, we still had to deal with the technology behind the platform, which was no small feat. As a rule of thumbs, technological issues are always more complex than they seem. In this case, our platform had the defects of its qualities. Its main advantage was that it was solid and stable. But too much so. We had coded it as a monolith, with its foundations set in marble. For example, we could no longer make the price of a passenger seat variable. We were completely stuck on the original linear model, which defined the price solely in terms of distance. But transport is an extremely cyclical business, with high and low seasons, and so on. What seemed like a marginal adjustment ended up being a 2-year project. We recruited a new CTO who broke the whole project down into smaller departments to regain agility.

I think this is a piece of advice I'd give to entrepreneurs reading us: Think 5 years ahead. It may seem tedious, but it will save you years.

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Very clear. So at that point, you've managed to consolidate the ship. But I recall you doing more than that. Can you tell us about the 2017-2018 pivot?

Yes, we also took a turning point. It all started with a simple observation: people loved the app. To give you a figure, 90% of our traffic came from word of mouth. People were buying into the brand and the product. What's more, with our peer-to-peer model, we were naturally benefiting from a viral dynamic that was only getting stronger. So we came to the conclusion that the time had come to integrate other services. 

Up until then, we'd only focused on the car. And that was fine at first, because it's still the world's leading means of door-to-door transport. But that's not the whole story. Thanks to our operations in India and Brazil, we realized that another colossal market was opening up for us: inter-city buses.

We're talking about markets worth $7 billion USD in Brazil, $5 billion USD in India, and so on. A multi-billion-dollar sector, but also extremely fragmented into a wealth of local bus companies. There was only one thing missing : a good user experience and an application. 

The aggregator model had already been adopted by companies such as Captain train, or Booking.com. But this time, we were going to approach it with a twist because we already had the car. That's when we decided to move from a car-sharing platform to a multimodal platform, or Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) platform. BlaBlaCar was to become the application that lets you book all the transport services you need to get from door to door.

We were very enthusiastic about this idea, but we were confronted with a situation we hadn't anticipated: the aversion of BlaBlaCar's teams to the change of vision. The mission we had originally set ourselves was to make mobility smarter and more responsible. So the pivot made perfect sense. But for some team members, this transition from the collaborative economy to MaaS with “traditional” bus routes was pure heresy. They couldn’t buy into that new story. It was surprising and very interesting to see that some people can end up being more dogmatic than you, even when you were the one coming up with the dogma in the first place.

At times like these, you usually end up with 2 populations: the old who don't adhere to the new vision, and the new who don't see anything wrong with it. All in all, it took us almost 3 years to anchor this change of position. If I had to do it all over again, I think I’d spend less time trying to convince people. Sometimes it's healthy to break up. It doesn't have to tarnish the relationship and all the journey we've covered together.

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So that brings us to 2019. At that time, the world is rocked by a global pandemic that locks us up. For a company dealing in shared travel, this is quite a blow to take. What goes through your mind when you see 10 years of work come crashing down in a matter of days?

I've always believed that the golden rule for start-ups is to survive. But to go far, you need to see far - especially in terms of capitalization. That's why I've always pushed for raising funds as long as the economic climate made it possible. I'm probably biased by my background in venture capital, but we all see how cyclical the markets are. The whole financial market can crumble in a matter of weeks. And it's not when you're hungry that you want to go out hunting. So I made a point of never having less than 2 years of runway ahead of us, or be it 100 million euros in the bank. This allowed us to calmly look at the whole situation.

But where you're right is that we urgently needed to find a solution to protect the heart of the reactor: our engineers. COVID was obviously a disaster for the transport sector, but other industries exploded. I'm obviously thinking of communication services like Zoom, but not only. So we were faced with a dilemma: if we put everyone off-work, we risked losing our best talent, who would go and work elsewhere.

We thought it through and simply refused to accept that COVID was going to be the new norm. It seemed counter-intuitive at the time, but we decided to see the pandemic as an opportunity to invest heavily in our technology. So we took that gamble, and took advantage of the crisis to rebuild our entire platform. This proved salutary to the business.

One lesson I've learned from this episode is the importance of “protecting the engine”. In our case, we had to protect our engineers. For your business, it will be something else. But from there, you'll be able to spot or create opportunities to protect it.

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Dive even deeper to avoid the wave. Thank you for these insights, which are particularly relevant these days. I'd like to finish with one last question: After 17 years working on BlaBlaCar, what’s your perception of the project today? And what advice would you give to those reading this to help them build as big as you have?

It's hard to put into words, but I feel that the project has come of age. 

After all these years of development and iterations, BlaBlaCar is no longer a start-up. It's a service that makes sense and that people all over the world have adopted because they need it. 

Just look at the figures for 2022 and 2023. The rebound has been enormous. Without the slightest marketing investment, all users came back to use the application after COVID. To put it bluntly, 2022 was the best year in BlaBlaCar's history in terms of revenue - even better than 2019. In 2023, we achieved almost 30% growth, we've become profitable and we're going to continue on that path.

As for advice, I'd say always keep in mind: “Back-to-basics”. Do you believe in what you do? Does the world need it? This will stabilize your company, your value proposition, your product, your recruitment, etc. It's the glue that holds everything together.

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About Nicolas

Before launching BlaBlaCar, Nicolas was a venture capitalist specializing in consumer Internet and telecoms investments for Amadeus Capital Partners in London (UK). He led or co-led investments in Linkdex, Octotelematics and Secerno (now Oracle). Nicolas began his career at DiCon Fiberoptics in Berkeley, California, and spent 6 years at Gemfire in Silicon Valley.

Nicolas holds an MBA from INSEAD, an MSc in Optics from Ecole Supérieure d'Optique and an MSc in Applied Physics from Université Paris XI.

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