View from the top: How Blablacar boss plans to dominate the long-distance transport market

If you live in the UK, the chances are you have never heard of BlaBlaCar, the French ride-sharing company that has been growing exponentially across mainland Europe and beyond since its launch in 2006.

But with a value of around €1.6bn and 70 million registered users across 22 countries, BlaBlaCar is a serious player in the global road transportation market. Which makes it sound quite dull – but in fact, it looks, feels and sounds like a typical Silicon Valley tech firm.

Everything from their hip head offices in the heart of Paris, where an international culture is purposefully cultivated to the marketing and social media activity, screams modernity, youth and “wokeness”.

This is not meant as a criticism but it certainly doesn’t feel like a company that is obsessed with, and dedicated to, solving what its founders see as one of the fundamental issues facing modern society – the environmental impact of the countless empty car seats on the road.

The concept is pretty simple – drivers upload the long-distance journey they are taking, and the app matches them to potential passengers who want to make the same trip. So the passenger can get from A to B for a fraction of the price of rail travel and the driver can cover their own cost of travel.

But there is a deeper “mission” lying behind this. As co-founder and CEO Nicolas Brusson explains, the purpose of the company is to solve “the empty car problem”.

He says: “You have to acknowledge that it is absurd that most cars drive empty. If you look at the inventory of empty seats in cars, it is the biggest seat inventory in the world. Bigger than trains and buses.

“The weight on the economy is huge, the weight on the environment is crazy – it’s a bit insane.”

With a venture capitalist background working in Silicon Valley and London, Brusson looks every bit the determined (but casual) tech entrepreneur in his T-shirt and jeans. He is relaxed but there is no mistaking the intensity of the man. There is an air of urgency and restlessness which is understandable when you consider the stage BlaBlaCar is at in its evolution.

“Between 2011-2017, we were all about global expansion. We were focused on taking something that worked well in France and expanding that as fast as we could in as many countries as we could,” he says.

He explains that the global aspect of BlaBlaCar’s ambitions was not accidental – they were taking their cue from other successful tech companies in Europe such as Spotify (Finland) and Skype (Sweden).

“What was interesting was that most of these companies quickly recognised from the beginning that their own country was irrelevant, that it was too small as a consumer market.

“They expanded early, before they have proven their business model and they built an international culture in the company from the get go. We consciously followed that.”

Throughout this time, the company has, in line with the tech startup model, gone through a series of investment rounds that has seen it raise hundreds of millions of euros, the latest of which netted €101m in November 2018.

And despite what Brusson describes as a “period of triage” in 2017 where they stopped for breath, took stock of what was and wasn’t working, the company has recently embarked upon on the latest and, in Brusson’s mind, the most exciting stage in its development.

As it announced that successful November fundraising, BlaBlaCar also revealed that it had acquired Ouibus, a coach company formerly operated by the state-owned train firm, SNCF. Owning a coach firm feels like a rather radical departure from digitally linking drivers and passengers, so how does buying a load of empty bus seats address the empty car problem?

He explains that traditional coach companies, in order to ensure they are front of mind for prospective customers, are forced to operate unprofitable as well as profitable routes. Indeed, before the acquisition, Ouibus was loss-making.

“With carpooling you don’t have that problem because inherently, you can pretty much have carpooling anywhere,” he explains.

“So, you can choose not to have a bus on a route without deteriorating the presence of the network and then you can optimise your bus network, lowering prices on profitable routes, let carpooling work on those unprofitable routes and then build a very strong cost leader in the market. That is the vision.”

And while they seek to dominate the long-distance road transport market, BlaBlaCar has established a spinoff called BlaBlaLines, launched in April 2018 which is essentially carpooling for commuting over distances of around 20-40km. This is where Brusson gets particularly animated.

For decades, governments around the world have cajoled, encouraged and bullied their citizens into adopting carpooling with very mixed results. But by combining his network with government influence, Brusson believes that it will be BlaBlaLines that finally cracks this particular nut.

He points out that most of the 70 million people using the long distance BlaBlaCar service, use the app around three to four times a year. But the 500,000 French users of BlaBlaLines, carpool nine to 10 times a month, on average. And he believes that if they can maintain the momentum and replicate the popularity of long-distance carpooling in the commuting market, it starts to change the game.

“If 70 million people start carpooling short distances 10 times a month – it’s just huge.”

It is only if this happens that Brusson believes that BlaBlaCar can start to fulfil its lofty, early ambitions – to make carpooling the natural, obvious thing for the majority of us to do.

“We have proven that something can have lots of social positives but can also be a great business,” he says. “But you need the profit to make the utopian part work. It needs that entrepreneurial spirit.”