In the Big Chair - Nicolas Brusson of BlaBlaCar

Nicolas Brusson, Co-founder and CEO

BlaBlaCar is an online marketplace for carpooling. It was founded in France is 2006 and has since grown to cover additional markets including Belgium and Germany and has widened its offerings to other transport modes.

Prior to taking over as CEO in 2016, Nicolas Brusson had been chief operating officer at BlaBlaCar. The company announced €101 million in funding in late-2018 as well as a partnership with French rail operator SNCF to build an intermodal transport platform.

You recently announced funding of €101 million, can you provide some further detail on how you plan to invest it?

BlaBlaCar’s mission has evolved beyond long-distance carpooling. In 2018, for example, we expanded our offer to include long-distance buses and a commuter carpooling service, both of which saw early success in France.

Now, we want to become the go-to platform for shared road travel and will focus our energy on building a combined carpooling and bus network.

Our enemy is still the empty seat, and by combining coaches and carpooling, we hope to fight wasted capacity, reduce CO2 emissions and cut the number of cars on the road.

In Q2, we plan to kick off the rollout of BlaBlaBuses across Germany and the Benelux region, providing a competitively priced service that meets consumers’ diverse travel needs.

Tell us about your plans to develop an intermodal transport platform with SNCF.

We are uniquely positioned to combine carpooling, coaches and rail to offer affordable door-to-door travel.

Buses are already available on BlaBlaCar’s app, while carpooling will soon be available via SNCF’s OUI.sncf booking website, and other integrations are planned to enable intermodal bookings through both our platforms.

Do you anticipate similar partnerships with other train operators across Europe as you seek to extend the mobility strategy further?

It’s not something we’re exploring right now, but we’re always looking for bold bets that can help us achieve our vision for an intermodal network built on shared transport solutions, so nothing is off the table from that perspective.

Everybody talks about intermodal; how do you think your strategy will really make a difference?

We focus on shared mobility - something that’s particularly important to consumers in the current context of global warming and rising fuel prices.

By combining coaches with carpooling, we can offer greater access to mobility for the millions of people who live outside a major urban center, are underserved by public transport networks and for whom cars are still essential for the first and last mile of their journeys.

Our platform is uniquely positioned to improve the granularity and frequency of transport options available, whilst also reducing emissions and the number of vehicles on the road.

What are the greatest challenges your business currently faces?

Over the past 10 years, we have grown BlaBlaCar to 70 million members across 22 countries, adding 30 million users in the last three years alone.

Beyond the rollout of our new, intermodal network, one of our greatest current challenges is to grow our short-distance carpooling service, BlaBlaLines, and create behavioral change around the daily commute.

Short, commuter journeys represent one of our biggest growth opportunities, and one of the most fundamental problems we need to solve when it comes to reducing emissions and wasted capacity.

Although very ambitious, these new goals are nothing we haven’t delivered before.

We are very excited by the potential that lies ahead, not only for the business, but also for the markets where we operate, where BlaBlaCar can make affordable, sustainable travel accessible to millions more people.

How do you go about making the concept of carpooling appealing to a wider audience?

One of the early obstacles we faced was trust. That wasn’t unique to our business - it was something that affected the whole sharing economy in its early days.

The race to become the all-in-one transport app is already underway. The rise of transport aggregators has been paralleled by an explosion in mobility services, from e-scooters to autonomous vehicles and carpooling, and every combination in between.

Nicolas Brusson - BlaBlaCar

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Over the years, and with the right set of trust tools, sharing economy platforms have helped to create a sense of community and openness.

Now, most people wouldn’t think twice about sharing their car or home with someone when they seek out these services.

In France alone, 40% of 18 to 35 year olds are now active BlaBlaCar members, and the service has been widely adopted amongst older age groups, too.

Showing the clear benefits of carpooling, whether economic or environmental, has of course been hugely important in bringing our platform to the mainstream.

But we’ve also been surprised to learn that, although our members tend to start carpooling to save money, it’s often the softer social benefits that create lasting loyalty - things like meeting new people, sharing new experiences and reducing the loneliness of long journeys.

You recently developed a new search algorithm to dynamically match drivers and passengers. Can you say what impact this is having on your service?

At its core, BlaBlaCar is all about leveraging the scale of our carpooling community to bring transport connections closer to everyone's doorstep.

In the past, BlaBlaCar encouraged users to search for central meeting points in larger towns, to increase the chances of finding a match. Drivers would publish their route and be matched with passengers searching for the same journey.

But now that carpooling is a mainstream activity, greater granularity is possible.

Last year, BlaBlaCar’s engineers launched a new, smart algorithm that uses machine learning to dramatically increase the possibilities.

Now, drivers traveling from A to B are also matched with passengers looking to travel a sub-segment of the journey, dynamically unlocking millions of possible meeting points along the way.

The result is that rural areas, villages and suburbs now have far greater connectivity. Across our French network, 20% of driver-passenger matches are now the result of our new algorithm.

BlaBlaCar announced the acquisition of Less a year ago, followed by BeepCar in Russia in June. How have these acquisitions been integrated, and what have they brought to BlaBlaCar?

All of our 2018 acquisitions - Less, BeepCar and Ouibus - were crucial to last year’s strategy of consolidating our position in key international markets and expanding our service offering.

For example, our acquisition of BeepCar allowed us to consolidate our growth in Russia, which is now one of our largest markets with over 20 million users. We also, of course, benefit from the talent and expertise of the teams that came onboard.

The whole area of ground transportation is attracting interest from the investment community. Do you see that as a good thing?

Of course. As interest heats up, I do think that mobility companies will see increased pressure to show that they are on the right side of the climate equation, with a positive impact on the urban and rural landscape.

This surge in interest also allows us to keep our focus where it should be - building a people-centered network that makes transport affordable and accessible, not a flashy mobility trend with no lasting impact.

Is a single platform for city and intercity transport - scooters, bikes, cars, trains - a possibility? If so, what needs to happen?

The race to become the all-in-one transport app is already underway. The rise of transport aggregators has been paralleled by an explosion in mobility services, from e-scooters to autonomous vehicles and carpooling, and every combination in between.

Together with the expansion of the sharing economy and moves by densely populated cities such as London and Mexico City to restrict car access in high-traffic areas, these trends all point towards a changing model of car ownership, from personal to shared.

One thing that will not change is the need to optimize usage and cut down costs, two of the benefits that BlaBlaCar is uniquely positioned to deliver.

And, a few questions about you - how did it feel when BlaBlaCar reached profitability in 2018, was it sooner or later than expected?

It was a great achievement for our team, but not a moment to rest on our laurels.

Our priority has always been to build a category-defining business that’s sustainable for the long term.

That requires investment - whether expanding into new markets, building out the team or launching innovative new products and features.

This year, we will invest into our growing bus network. Cementing future success is just as important to me as that 2018 milestone.

What have been your standout highs with the business since you started it?

At one of our annual kickoff meetings, my co-founder told the team to be optimistic, be passionate, but above all, to live the adventure.

I take that message to heart - for me, building BlaBlaCar has been the adventure of a lifetime.

Besides growing the company, I’ve enjoyed giving back to the European startup community.

It’s a great pleasure to pass hard-won lessons to other entrepreneurs, and there’s a great sense of pride and fulfillment that we, after all these years, are in a position to give back to the community.

I’m also proud that we have instigated large-scale behavioral change around car usage. That’s something that many people told us was impossible, so it’s amazing to see how far we’ve come.

I’ve always cared about the environment, but the more I read about it, the more alarmed I am by the huge waste and inefficiency I see around me every day.

We’ve gone some way to improve that, but we’re still only scratching the surface. If every road journey were shared, we could go so much further to reduce carbon emissions without limiting freedom to travel.

If you're not carpooling, what's your favorite way to get around and why?

Besides the obvious, I’m a big back country skier.