The rollercoaster ride to scaling a Unicorn, with Nicolas Brusson, Co-Founder and CEO of BlaBlaCar

That's the main thing I've learned to be obsessed about: having stamina and running things in a very capital efficient way.

Well, thanks for having me. The pleasure is all mine.

A physicist and not an entrepreneur. I loved science and physics was my first love. I wanted to do a PhD and become a physicist, but I got sidetracked into becoming an entrepreneur.

In terms of being physically scared, it's usually when I go out in the mountains. I love backcountry skiing and I do that every winter. There is a bit of climbing involved and I'm pretty scared of heights, so it's something I need to manage every time. Last time was last winter, but it's almost every winter. It's something you have to manage. For people who have that, they understand because it really gets you in the belly and you feel like you're losing control. In terms of physically being scared, that's the moment where I really feel it in my guts. So it's provoked, though.

To be fair, I love everything else. I just need to enjoy the rest. You need to overcome that fear and that's a mental exercise that takes a lot of energy. When you're scared of heights and falling, you need to manage that. Over time you get better and accustomed to it, but it takes mental and physical energy. But you are genuinely scared; your body tells you something is wrong.

There is, although I think it takes a different shape. It's never for me that kind of physical feeling. It's more mental. I'm more introvert or brainy, so I don't react physically to work-related issues and anxiety. It's very different when you're in a mountain and you feel like you'd rather not fall. Your body overrides your brain; your brain tells you it's okay but your body reacts differently.

It was in early 2012 when two things happened within the same two or three days. My daughter was born, and we announced the fundraising of $10 million from Index Ventures. It was after a long period of being under the radar and people not believing in the model. That was the turning point where BlaBlaCar became a thing. It could have been a very stressful moment with my girlfriend giving birth and the funding possibly going sideways, but I have a great memory of it because it worked out. I was in the zone, not sleeping for three days, but I had stamina and energy. To date, it's maybe the most powerful emotions packed into 48 hours. It's going to be hard to top.

My biggest failure? I'll mention one. As an entrepreneur, you make plenty of mistakes. The question is which one do I regret or would not do all over again because it was part of the process. There are very few. I would say one thing we missed was around 2015-16 when we were very focused on expanding BlaBlaCar globally, launching new countries outside of Europe. We sort of missed the level of competition and deregulation of the transport market in Europe. Trains started to react, long-distance coaches took off. We thought they were very capital-intensive and wouldn't last. What we got wrong was the strength of the financial market and the willingness to fund companies that were losing money for a long time. We ignored that for too long and reacted around 2018-19. It was a mix of arrogance and looking at our own belly button. We could have adjusted to being a more multimodal platform offering a mix of buses, cars, and trains. Airbnb did that well from a C-to-C marketplace to a mix of C-to-C and B2C. We were not well enough surrounded or self-aware. I think we lost a couple of years.

If I go back to my early days, I didn't know about startups and being an entrepreneur. It was not part of my family; my dad was a teacher, my mom a doctor. No one in the family had that, and it's never brought up in school. Entrepreneurship is not a career path, at least it wasn't in France. It should be explained more as a career path, not just as a startup with VC funding. Schools prepare you to be an employee, which creates a divide. Kids from entrepreneurial families have the code; others don't even see it as an option. School has a role to play in introducing entrepreneurship earlier, not just at business school. At age 12-14, when I was in love with physics, it would have been interesting to see someone say they started a company. That link is still missing and would help with gender balance too, by showing women that it's a potential path. School today is deficient in science and entrepreneurship in Europe, which is risky.

As a student, I was attracted by science and physics. I loved the idea of modeling the world with equations. My early career had nothing to do with companies or startups; I knew nothing about them. After my studies in France, I moved to Berkeley to do a PhD in physics. My hero would have been any Nobel Prize winner in physics. I ended up there in 1999-2000 during the dot-com and telecom boom. I had a degree in optical science. At that time, the fiber optic network was being built and companies were being built. I switched to a startup in late 1999/early 2000. I didn't know what a startup or venture capital was. The company had raised from Kleiner Perkins, which I didn't know. I joined the company, it was about 30 people. We raised another $80 million, a huge amount then. Then 9/11 happened and 2002 was a downturn. The company went from 150 to 12 people. We went through Chapter 11 and had to rebuild. That was my real entrepreneurship experience. We had patents and ideas but no revenue. We had to finish the product with no money. We turned the business around, refinanced, shipped the product, made revenue, and sold the company in 2006. That early experience was full drama: euphoria, bubble days. For example, we turned down a $300 million offer from Lucent Technologies with no revenue. 18 months later we were bankrupt. It was a learning experience. Then I went into venture capital because I realized that survival depended not only on product but also on financial agility and investor relationships. I wanted to understand that better. So I did an MBA at INSEAD, met Frederic, and started BlaBlaCar as a side project. After INSEAD, I went into VC in London, investing in companies across Europe and the US. I went through the 2008 financial crisis, learning a lot from both successes and failures. At the same time, BlaBlaCar grew from a project to a company, really taking off in early 2012 with the Index Ventures funding. Then I left VC and went full-time on BlaBlaCar, and we grew the company.

Absolutely. The move into startups was accidental. The move into VC was deliberate. What you get out of it is always different from what you expect. I didn't think I'd go through the financial crisis. But these experiences taught me stamina and capital efficiency. I saw that during the bull market, people financed growth at any cost. Now cash is not free anymore, and valuations have come down. Those learnings from harder days will be useful to many entrepreneurs. The great companies will be those that manage scarcity well or start during this period.

Exactly. I think a fantastic cohort of companies are being started now.

Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yes, in a way we started this company a bit too soon. The ingredients for something like BlaBlaCar to be successful were not yet there when we started in 2007. It was pre-iPhone, Facebook was still a closed network. The notion of booking a seat in a stranger's car was seen as hitchhiking online. But we believed it was a trusted community with pre-booking and payment. Things changed when having an online profile became normal, and the sharing economy emerged with Airbnb. That gave us a frame of reference. We had to keep the company going between 2007 and roughly 2011-2012 with almost no funding because the financing environment was horrendous. Also, investors questioned why no one was doing this in the US, but we believed it was a European play due to higher gas costs and city layouts.

The best way to describe it is different phases. First, early days just trying to survive, hyper capital deficient, keeping it as a project on the side. Then high growth land grabbing from 2012 to 2017-18, fundraising, becoming a unicorn. But we made mistakes, overspent on marketing and hiring, and didn't know our steady state. In 2017-18 we realized we had too many things going on. We changed operating models in some markets instead of closing them, cutting down everything and regrowing. We also started offering buses and trains to become multimodal. During COVID we had cash, didn't lay off anyone, and focused on engineering. Since 2022 the company has been profitable, so now we're on a profitable growth track.

Many companies think they have a strong culture but it's tested in harder times. At BlaBlaCar, people join for the mission: zero empty seats, reducing CO2. Culture is real when principles are embodied in processes, like member day where you use the product and spend a day in customer service, and fail-learn-succeed sessions. For mentorship, we created the Rise program for women, pairing young managers with VPs for half-hour coaching sessions. It's powerful for both sides and we're starting season three.

I'd love someone from a different field, like an athlete. Roger Federer or Michael Jordan. They manage their brand and business so well. It would give a radically different perspective on the company.

We're still at the very beginning. The vision is to enable carpooling on shorter distances, door-to-door, replicating the convenience of a car without owning one. We're experimenting with 20-40 mile trips. The holy grail is everyday journeys for people in suburbs and rural areas.

I'll pass on something from Vinod Khosla: 'If it doesn't scale, it doesn't matter.' The problem of climate change is so big that whatever you do must be scalable. That marked me in the story of BlaBlaCar.