You are now listening to the EU Startups podcast.
Hello and welcome to this episode of the Startups podcast. As always, I'm your host David Senna Garcia, the news editor here at EU Startups. Have you ever traveled in Europe? I'm sure this answer is a yes to all of you, but have you ever need to travel on a really small budget? That's where Blava Carar comes in. I'm sure as many of you know Blabakar has this wonderful offering for cheap ride sharing across Europe and globally. It was founded in 2006 by Frederick Matzella. He and I sat down and chatted over the impact the blog car has had on the ride sharing ecosystem not just in Europe but globally. We chatted about where he sees the impact of this moving forward, how he sees the US evolving with its access to ride sharing and even his work on promoting startups and innovation within Europe through his involvement with France Digital. So, I hope you're looking forward to that. But before, quick message from our sponsor, Phantom.
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Hello Frederick, and welcome to the startups podcast. It's a pleasure to have you here, and thank you for letting me call you Fred, which is definitely easier for my American tongue. I'm very excited for this conversation. I myself am an average Blahla car user. I definitely was in college when I had about 5 euros to my name and I needed to get around. So, I'm a fan of the service and I'm particularly excited to have this chat with you. And you of course are no stranger to us at EU Startups. I know you've had involvement with our summit in the past. So, we're always keeping an eye on Blava Car. So, it's a pleasure to have you. And before we get started on the questions, I think it's always easiest to just allow the guests to present themselves and give us a little rundown on who they are and what their company is.
Okay. So, my name is Fred, as you said. I'm an entrepreneur. I build companies, which I hope are useful for us all. So, you've named the Blahla car, of course, which is a big success. I've built a few years ago. I'm also building another project today which is called a gift for a donation as a gift where we send money to NGOs with the help of companies. And as for Blahla car, I guess we'll be focusing quite a lot on questions you have on this wonderful project. So I'll be brief for now and waiting for your questions.
Great. Yes. Well, I didn't know about this. Do please talk about it. The idea here is to kind of get an insight into the entrepreneur and his journey and his challenges. So, always feel free even though as you've said, my questions are mostly aimed at Blahla car, but if you can find any point to talk about that, more than welcome. So with that in mind, I think the best place to start these conversations is always at the beginning. I've read over and over again this story of yours of how Blahla car began about this trip with your sister. Feel free to tell us the story again because I do think it's an interesting one and highlights really where the idea comes from. But I'm curious about when you began Blabakar, what was the initial focus of it? Was it about making travel easier? Was it about not wasting resources, saving money? Even sustainability questions are obviously in the mix here. What was the goal to begin with?
Well, I think the first thing was a personal need. I just wanted to get home for Christmas and I hit the wall of everything is full. All the trains were full. I could not get any available seats. And then when I finally took a car with my little sister who had a car and she brought me home on the highway, I saw a train going faster than us and then I said to my little sister, 'Well, this train is full. There is no seat available in it. I know it because I've been looking for seats.' And then at the same time I saw all the empty cars like dozens, hundreds, thousands of empty cars with sometimes only the driver on board. And so I saw there were a lot of possibilities and available seats to go to my home place but they were not in the trains anymore. They were in the cars and so we need to make sure that we are able to search for available seats in cars. So what was the real starting point I think is to see the opportunity, to see the absurdity of waste. It was not a grand theory at first. I think it's more like physics obviousness: unused capacity everywhere and energy being lost. I think that's the main thing. I saw the opportunity of matching people going the same way, sharing costs just because the seats were available and I saw them physically. But then after of course it translates into something you can scale because it does not happen only in France but it happens everywhere. So yeah, it's part of the entrepreneurial journey.
But there has to be a social angle developed in it too. If I can think of one of my most important experiences with Blahla car, it's a trip I took from Salamanca to Valencia in Spain, which is on opposite ends of the country. I magically found a person who was making that exact same trajectory. I sat down. It was about eight hours of a car ride. I realized that he hadn't done it for the gas money. He'd done it just so he'd have somebody to talk to for eight hours because he thought, 'I'm going to be so bored sitting in a vehicle for 8 hours. I might as well meet somebody.'
Yeah. It's a big motivation for everyone as a driver to actually take passengers in their car just to not be alone and spend a good time, discover new people. Obviously it's very social. I think Blahla car you can discover it because you think it's a more affordable way to travel. It's cheaper than most if not all the other options. But what strikes is that you actually get to meet new people. That's why it's called Blahla car. I don't know if you know why we're called Blah blah car. Do you?
You know, it's because when you register on the service, you choose how much you talk in the car. You choose if you are blah blah blah or blah blah blah. It says how much you'll be chatting during the ride. So, I'm registered as blah blah on the service, but I've been told they should register as blah blah blah. Anyway, because
How many trips have you taken yourself on Blahla car?
I hundreds. But, it's a lot and especially in the beginning to really proof test the service, proof test the concept, improve the features that we needed. But then as you mentioned there are two sides. After you realize it's a cheap option to travel, it saves a lot of money for drivers, it's cheaper for passengers, then you enter into this wonderful add-on of the service is that you meet people, so that's social angle, you discover people, and it's also a lot more environmentally friendly because of course you divide the CO2 emissions per the number of passengers in the car. So, we've made the calculations that Blahla car alone saves more than 2.5 million tons of CO2 a year when we compare a world without Blahla car and a world with Blahla car. So, it's really significant. 2.5 million tons of CO2 per year is twice the amount of the CO2 emissions of a big city like Paris for the road traffic. So every year we offset two times what a city like the city of Paris creates in terms of CO2 emissions on road traffic. So it's quite significant and it's thanks to the big network we have today. It's 100 million people who use Blahla car on the planet today from Brazil to India which are our two biggest countries. So there are three advantages in this whole thing. Not only it's a cheaper option but it's also social and environmental so it has all the benefits you could ever think of which has made a big part of the success because there is no reason to not use it.
I've also come across these data you pointed to and of course they're very interesting. And then there's also a topic that you've spread beyond just car pooling that there's buses, there's train offerings now. I have to wonder, is the environmental impact also being transferred when you're involving buses and train offerings or is that something that only really stays within car pooling because of its shared nature?
Sure it's transferred. For the other means of common transportation like buses or trains, it's already embedded in the model that it's better for the environment and for the energy savings to actually have a lot of people traveling together in the same vehicle. That's the main thing, the main topic that common transport has solved and the main reason if you wish for this to have developed because it's a way for people to share the cost of the energy which is needed to move people around. And so by saving the cost on energy, you also save on the environmental impact. But the goal then is to make sure that your fill up rate is correct, is good, because if you have big vehicles traveling empty then that's a total waste and we can see that it's not what should be done. So our goal when we enter into any kind of ground transport like this whether it's buses or trains is to make sure we improve the fill up rate of all those vehicles and make sure that they never travel empty or with empty seats. We do our best to bring as many people into this shared capacity that is made available to the network of the people who travel with us. So it's the same logic that we apply to these transport solutions as we apply in carpooling.
And is there any because so we've covered car pooling, buses, trains, the obvious last mode of transport is airplanes. Is there any kind of is that a different ballpark altogether? Is there any kind of plan moving forward to address that?
No, I think it's really a different play. So never say never but for now it's not something we focus on. For now what we think is if you want to fly then you know where to fly, where to find your flights and there are a lot of flight comparators out there, a lot of OTAs in that space who do the real job that is needed for this activity. But then if you think about ground transport you should think about Blahla car and then Blahla car you'll find carpool, buses and trains. So anything that can bring you on the ground is discoverable on Blahla car but we don't venture into the flight space.
Car pooling feels so natural in Europe and hitchhiking even feels so natural here. Me having been raised in the States and spent a lot of time there, hitchhiking is less and less common and ride sharing car pooling is even less so. Do you think that ride sharing has a true global appeal or does it just kind of work in some settings? If we're talking about the US, it's like everybody has a car. Everyone's forced to have a car depending on just where you live and how cities are structured. So, do you feel like there's a true global application for what Blahla car offers?
Yeah. Well, I think it's a globally appealing concept because empty seats are available. It's universal. It's available everywhere. But the adoption curve is really local. It's like a seed that grows only if the soil, which means the habits, the trust, the alternative is right. And the real driver isn't really car ownership. It's more pain. By pain I mean high prices, long distances, limited public transport, congestion, parking. When pain is strong then people try new behaviors faster. Then you have the culture which matters a lot through trust and social norms. In some places sharing with strangers is natural, in others you need stronger reactions like profiles, ratings, verifications before it feels safe. So it's a combination of all this and the economics of course matter too because where buses and trains are cheap and great, ride sharing must win on flexibility and community. Where alternatives are poor or expensive, ride sharing wins on price and availability. So you have different angles to look at it. So to me I would say carpooling can work almost everywhere. You just need roads and smartphones and cars and then you have an app for carpooling with Blahla car. But it's not exactly the same recipe everywhere. You need to localize the trust system and the value proposition. And so you were talking about the US. One of the reasons we think today that US is not adopting carpooling, there's no solution for carpooling in the US, and we're not in the US at all and there's no actor which does what we do, is also because the price of gas and the convenience of moving around is not well, the price of gas and the price of everything around cars is a lot cheaper than it is in most countries where we operate especially when compared to the GDP per inhabitant. So the pain that the drivers feel when they go at the pump or when they have trouble with their car is a lot lower which is not an incentive for drivers to propose their seats for sharing. So we believe that's a real driver when it comes to having drivers proposing their seats to passengers, that if they don't pay much, if they don't feel the pain of paying a lot when they move around with their cars, they don't feel the need for sharing the cost as well.
I imagine though that may be changing and I'm not getting political here but with obvious current economic and political happenings, the price of gas is shooting up and I imagine that more and more people are considering even in the US to see these kind of things adopted. Is there any plans to go to the US or do you just...
Plans to go to the US right now? And you know the events you're talking about are still very recent and they don't create a massive trend which would spread over several years at least for now. So because we're talking about real economic equilibriums here and we don't know what will happen in the coming months or years. So, we'll see. But for now, it's very early to say anything on whether or not the fact that the price of gas is going up could trigger a new interest for carpooling in the US or not.
