Nicolas Brusson0:12
The vast majority of empty seats traveling around the country, traveling around the cities using cars, and back then in 2006, 2007 we thought that there would be a potential to unlock this massive inventory, number one, through technology because it was the beginning of the smartphones, which obviously today are very widespread and everybody has one, but back in 2006 pre-iPhone it was not obvious. The second thing that fundamentally unlocked this huge market was more behavioral: if we can create that trust layer between users we would over time unlock essentially the idea of sharing, enabling drivers and passengers to share the car. BlaBlaCar is a community of almost 100 million members across 22 countries. At the beginning of that adoption was in truth very slow, so we had a very hard time to convince users and an even harder time, I would say, to convince investors. We went through three different phases. We went through that first phase of demonstrating, unlocking the product and adding the first users, which was very much about shaping the behavior, about creating the product. We had a certain phase from 2012 to 2016 or 17 where we had cracked that usage in France and we could see actually the users are loving the product, using the product more and more. And we realized back in 2011, 2012 that no one was doing that at any scale in any other country, so that's when we decided to go fundraise and we raised back then ten million dollars from Accel Partners and then in 2014 a hundred million and then another two hundred million after that to go global. Then we engaged into a third phase which I would say started around 2017 where we realized that BlaBlaCar had become fairly mainstream or pretty widespread in several countries and that we became really good at gathering lots of traveling time from people and that we could offer more than carpooling which was the initial promise. The car remains and will remain for a long time the universal connector. So the car is the only means of transport on mid to long distance that can really go from any point to any point. Trains, buses, planes are constrained by bus station, train station or airports, that are the only points you can connect on the map. Car can connect anything anywhere to anywhere. So if you think of an integrated network where you can combine trains, buses and carpooling, you can suddenly open up a much larger potential of connections within a regional country. And that's what we are slowly building: how do we make transport more efficient economically because it makes no sense to leave empty seats in cars or buses or trains, but also from an environmental standpoint obviously having cars driving 70% empty makes no sense whatsoever. During that crisis it sounds a bit counterintuitive but we actually launched two new products. So we launched BlaBlaRide, and BlaBlaRide is about scooters inside the city, so it's our way to get into micro mobility. And we believe that's going to matter because during the rebound of transport we believe that many people will probably not want to take commuter trains and metros and so on, and we believe that bikes, scooters probably gonna thrive inside the cities during that rebound, and we wanted not only to play on that shared mobility but also longer-term to start connecting the different offers on the car. So we have BlaBlaBus on long distance, we have BlaBlaLines which is about carpooling for commuters on a daily basis, so it's home to work type journeys, and BlaBlaRide which is really inside the city and on very short distances. Another project we launched during the crisis in the middle of April during the lockdown is a product called BlaBlaHelp, a product to help people do the groceries during that crisis. And it was one of the big problems during the crisis was for all the people with conditions it was pretty risky and pretty scary for them to do the groceries. So we leveraged the community connecting people on a local basis and enabling them to match in a way and help each other do the groceries, leveraging the trust we've built. So that essentially the person you contact and you trust to do your grocery, take your money and bring back some goods, is a BlaBlaCar member and you have all the information about that member to be able to trust that member to help you and do the groceries.
