A word for you who follow us every week on Pause, thank you, thank you for being more and more numerous every Friday, whether on listening platforms or on YouTube. To not miss the next episodes, don't forget to subscribe to the channel and of course feel free to like and comment on the video. Thank you again and now let's get to the episode. When you are young, you have energy, time, and no money. Yeah, okay. When you are in mid-life, you have energy, no time, and a little money. And when you are older, well, you have less energy, you have time, and money. To succeed in creating a project, generally you need to have all three; you have to manage to compensate for what you don't have. First, there is the commitment to make BlaBlaCar work, let's say. Already the commitment to make this thing exist, namely more sharing, more mutual aid with beneficial effects, including for the environment obviously. So that's my motivation. It is drawn from the desire to be useful and useful to the world around me. I realized that it also had a usefulness in being able to project a kind of image of an existing, living, young entrepreneur, you know, who does things to motivate other entrepreneurs. We are a medium-sized country, and the great balances that are playing out right now are between large plates with countries that have hundreds of millions, sometimes more than a billion inhabitants. Finally, zones, if we talk about China, it's more than a billion, the United States is 300 million, and so if we want to be able to hold our own in this big game, we have to find ways to federate. Well, I think it's a bit of the moment to make Europe. Hello everyone, I am Alexandre Mars and you are listening to Pause, the podcast. We take the time to understand how to make the impossible possible by exploring the exceptional journeys of my guests, whether they are artists, business leaders, entrepreneurs, sportspeople, or activists. Resilience, success, inspiration, they reveal themselves during a pause. Welcome. He was able to transform a simple idea into a service that changed the way we travel and envisage sharing. Visionary, leader, committed entrepreneur, he is one of those who do not just dream of the future, they build it. During a pause, we dive into the depths of his journey, his challenges, his successes, and his ideas to move the lines. Hello.
Hi Frédéric Mazzella. Hi Alexandre Mars, how are you? I'm fine so far. I've rarely seen you say that things are not going well. That's a posture you sometimes have to take because I think I have a naturally optimistic nature, and also something else: as soon as I feel, precisely because of this optimistic nature, as soon as I feel that I'm starting to have less positive ideas, I sleep, actually. It's very simple. Oh, you sleep? And I'll sleep. No, because I know that when I start to say it's not going well, it's because it's me, and it's not external. So I repair myself by sleeping. And so you can sometimes sleep, you can sleep for a very long time. Oh yes, it happens, yeah, I can sleep 15 hours. Yeah, after that, you have to find the time. It's more on weekends. When you wake up, things are better, the world has repaired itself. Okay, that's me.
What I really like about you as a man, but as an entrepreneur, it's rather your commitment. That's what interests me about you, obviously. And you have a vision, a fairly positive vision, saying that entrepreneurs have something to bring. So this commitment, you've always had it. Is it something that is in you, that is logical, that is necessary? I took time to understand that entrepreneurship would be my path. I didn't know at the beginning, and even entrepreneurship was not at all part of the life plans I could have drawn, even if I hadn't necessarily drawn anything precise. But I didn't think I would be a creator of a company or project. And I think that my way of functioning is precisely to have a goal that goes beyond me, good things to do, and that's what will motivate me. Because moreover, and I've experienced it now, creating a project is so complicated, so many obstacles, so much work, so hard that if you don't have a motivation that surpasses all the small problems of the day, I agree. But motivation for some can be to make more money. For you, it's not really that your motivation. When we talk about commitment, it's often...
When I talk about commitment, it's true that the collective imagination sometimes is commitment, for example mine, which is social through my organizations, Epic Infinite. My goal is to try to fight against this social injustice. For you, commitment was very quickly about promoting entrepreneurship. For you, it's something very important to promote, to protect. There is first the commitment to make BlaBlaCar work, let's say. Already the commitment to make this thing exist, namely more sharing, more mutual aid, with beneficial effects including for the environment obviously. So that's my motivation. It is drawn from the desire to be useful and useful to the world around me. So it's primarily this one that allows me to create projects. Then it's a bit micro, but it's a bit your project. But what's interesting is that we see it, we will see it in your other engagements, what's important for you is that it's for society, not just your little project. Exactly, but I was going back to the history. That is, my little project is part of a desire to do good in general. Today, having a platform like BlaBlaCar with 100 million people on three continents that saves 2 million tons of CO2 per year, that is to say more than the entire CO2 emissions of road traffic in a city like Paris and 3% of the CO2 emissions of the French car fleet, that is a commitment and it goes far beyond just the little project because it is a general contribution to the common good. Then, by building BlaBlaCar, as I was constantly promoting BlaBlaCar everywhere I could go, I also found myself, with the success of the project, as a representative of a new generation of entrepreneurship. And in doing so, I realized that it also had a usefulness in being able to project a kind of image of an existing, living, young entrepreneur, you know, who does things to motivate other entrepreneurs. And so you find yourself, somewhat despite yourself, with a role as a spokesperson for this new form of entrepreneurship that also has a usefulness. And when we come back to it, but when you launched in 2003, BlaBlaCar, this idea of these wonderful numbers you announced was not necessarily that; it was to respond to a need. And then you are right, I like what you say, well, you were a bit caught up in this success in fact. You were put forward enormously as a representative of a certain success. I was the sandwich man for BlaBlaCar for years because anyway, someone had to do it. And then you find yourself in the situation of becoming representative of something else.
We talk about commitment, it interests me enormously. Do you think that entrepreneurs must necessarily be committed? Do you think that there is a time when you have to be committed? Do you think you can be committed from the first day? Or do you think you have to first survive, first succeed in paying salaries and electricity? Do you see this commitment as an obligation?
So I think the basis is that entrepreneurs manifest their freedom, so they do what they want. Then, for me to motivate myself, it's that, that is, I don't know how to be an entrepreneur otherwise. I wouldn't be able to find reasons to get up in the morning, and you saw I sleep a lot, to do anything other than try to be useful and contribute to the common good. After that, other entrepreneurs find other sources of motivation, very good. And there are three types of entrepreneurs. There are entrepreneurs who are motivated by lifestyle, that is, I have no boss and I do what I want. Very good, except that at some point you still have to work a lot for it to work. It's a false freedom, in fact. You believe it, but you don't believe it for long. There are entrepreneurs who are motivated by success, money, or growing numbers, etc. Very good, that's also a motivation. And there are entrepreneurs who are more motivated by something of a mission that goes far beyond them and a perhaps broader contribution. And I think I am in this third category.
Where would you put our comrade Elon Musk in these categories?
Well, I think he sets missions for himself. He is in the mission category. After that, he still likes to pile up cash, be the richest man in the world, but that's not his primary objective. To make more money, I don't think so. I think when you set yourself to go to Mars or something like that, you are more in mission mode. But you still have to think about it. What does it inspire today, a Musk who takes a position on many subjects, who uses a network that he bought very expensively because he bought X a lot? We are at the limit of freedom, we are in interference. But that's another thing. That is, yes, to be free and to try to shape a part of the world as we want to do it tomorrow, okay. But you still have to make sure that it does good for everyone. And so we don't necessarily have to give lessons to everyone.
And speaking of that, do you think there is a role where we lack creating entrepreneurs in governments? Do you think that's what's happening since people followed him? It's happening that President-elect Trump asked Elon Musk to take a large part of an important mission, which will be to try to make administrations work better. What do you think? Is it commendable? Is there something that should be done about it? Do you think we could imagine something like that here?
You see, I spent time with... It's not necessarily linked only to entrepreneurship. I think it's linked to the natural and necessary efficiency of all businesses that can be applied to administrations. That's for sure. Insofar as when you are a company and you don't have infinite power, to simply have an ultra-reliable and predictable economic model called tax, which is the privilege of states, well you have to think differently. That is, you have to think by being frugal all the time because you know that you only owe the balance of your project to two things: the satisfaction of your customers and the frugality of your expenses. These two things are incredibly strong, effective, and healthy compasses in any business, and we must find ways to reintroduce them into public service and the administrative system. Except that when you don't have the means to measure or you don't take the approach to measure these indicators, the first being the satisfaction of the entire population served and the second being the efficiency of these expenses, you inevitably end up in places where you are much less efficient. And at that point, the efficiency and rationality of a company's management can be a good thing.
So you think that Musk is not a bad thing that he tries to demonstrate something? Do you think he will succeed in something or not?
Ah, he will succeed in something, I don't know. What will he do? It's unpredictable, it's unpredictable. But you have two unpredictable people, it's still interesting.
Have you been asked to join governments? Have they come to you? Not really. Because I have very often said that I didn't want to get politically involved and that I was fine where I was. You never took a position. No, okay. No, after, with the association France Digitale, which I am president entrepreneur, well co-president entrepreneur, it's bicameral as an organization. France Digitale, we have 2000 companies, startups, entrepreneurs on one side, and about a hundred investors on the other. So in fact we have two co-presidents. I am co-president entrepreneur, and Bono Grossman is co-president investor. I second Bono Grossman. For those who don't know Bono Grossman well, who is listening today, I advise you to listen to him. He was here a few months ago on Pause, an incredible story, a unique journey, and a very talented investor. So excuse me for interrupting you. So you are both presidents of this association. Yes. And so it's also quite symptomatic of the way we function. We agree between entrepreneurs and investors to carry, with one voice, the interests of all the new companies we create within France Digitale or elsewhere, because it's more ecosystemic, simply associative. So that's where you sometimes touch politics. Yes, yes. So we give our opinion, we do studies, we say what we think. After that, we don't have the controls to decide anything. We are often listened to quite often, precisely because the sides, yes, because I think we are quite objective and rational in opposition, and that politicians, whether they have strong opinions or display strong opinions while sometimes having more nuanced ones elsewhere, are very happy to find advice formulated in a non-political, transpartisan way. So they use it. So yes, we have this form of perception as objectivity.
All year, is there something that you have that you are quite proud of in your association? Yes, there are many, but you know it's quite difficult because it's always influence. You never have a law project; it's never you who signed at the bottom saying yes, it's us who decided. We decide nothing, we only do influence. So when there are subjects that start from one side or another, we go and say what we think and then we help the decision in a good direction, but it's quite difficult to come and say that if we hadn't been there, it would have been different. It's difficult because we try to be there on the subjects.
You often talk about a word that I like very much and so much so that I put it on the cover of my last book, which is 'alignment'. You often talk about alignment, which is for an aligned life. It's an essential subject for more and more people. How do you define your alignment? When you talk about alignment, what is it for you?
Well, it's simply telling myself that I am doing what I want to do. That is, I am not doing something that I think I shouldn't do. So I am just in a mode where, well, it's this freedom to tell myself that I am acting in the direction I think is right.
Has it happened often that you didn't think that? Since you started, when you had to start? No, I think I am... At that moment, I am like a horse that refuses the obstacle. If someone asks me to do something that I don't feel, it has happened from time to time. Wait, I think, I don't think so because I say it before. I don't even ask the question. I am a nice horse, I think I say no before, I'm not going to do it.
Earlier, you were talking to me about the freedom of the entrepreneur that I conceive, but you see that many entrepreneurs like me, it's not for the last six months, it's for years and years. When you talked to me about these three realities or these three reasons that really imagine the unicorn as absolute beauty, I often say that the beauty of the entrepreneur is precisely that it is protean. You can create a small company and sell it without wanting to be on the Nasdaq. You don't necessarily have this absolute desire to achieve objectives that are most of the time difficult to achieve and that don't necessarily have a positive perspective. So when you talk to entrepreneurs, when you talk in places to students, do you bring that? Or do you very often feel people saying, 'But what interests me is that BlaBlaCar is valued at X'? Do you sometimes have a discussion like, well, no, because in fact it's as if you were telling me that in class you worked to get good grades. No, you work to learn, for the happiness of understanding. But I assure you that many people who are 14, 15, 16, 17, 18 years old want good grades. Not necessarily to learn. I don't know, because it's the proof that you worked hard. It's the stamp at the end. But the pleasure? In today's world, success is potentially associated with the number of zeros in your bank account. That's a fact. So do we fight against that? Do we demonstrate that it's the beauty of social entrepreneurship, that the objective is not financial, it's impact?
So I think the objective, first of all, you talked about alignment, is to be sure that we are honest, clear, and aligned on what we do. That is, we are doing what we want to do, what we think is useful to do. And that, when you find yourself in situations where you are forced to do things you don't want to do, I think it's tenable for a while but not very long. Because at some point, nature wants to take over. It's normal. Or you find yourself in a resigned position for a very long time and you end up withered. Most French people, citizens, are sometimes in situations where they can't necessarily decide. Yes, it's very difficult. You have to find ways to make things evolve where you are at that moment. So you have to... But you, saying that you, once again, people might say that when you are at the level of success you are today compared to what you created in the past, it might be simpler for you today to say I don't even take the obstacle. But do you see yourself at 18, 19, 20, 21 years old in those complicated years when you had no more than 500 users on BlaBlaCar in the early years when it was carpooling? You still managed to... That's an important point. We had a discussion that I love with someone here not long ago, with Emmanuel Faber, we talked about his departure from Danone, this great discussion between compromises and compromises. I have the impression that even a compromise sometimes can annoy you. Life is made of compromises, we agree. Yes, no, no, you make them, but on the other hand, they must not be things that... You make them when you know it's a path towards something better. If you make them and you know that it's the path towards something less good, you can't hold on very long. That's it. You can make compromises on the road, obviously. And I even want to say as an entrepreneur, you spend your time doing that because you have a goal, but you will sometimes go a little to the right, sometimes a little to the left, above, below, you won't go exactly straight. But it's in life in general. And so you are looking for a path. Compromises are looking for a path to succeed in moving forward. After that, what you need is to ensure that you are still moving in the right direction.
When we talked recently, we talked about your love for music and for the piano, for many instruments but for the piano. And you told me something that made me smile and made me think, that I really like. You said, well, I'm starting the piano again. You were a virtuoso, a very, very good pianist. You put it aside and then you started again. But it's not the fact that you started again that interested me in the discussion. You told me, I want to play, I will play, but at some point when I play, I realize that I am only pleasing myself. And that's quite interesting because many people would find selfishness in that: 'I only please myself because no one listens to me.' If I had, I don't know, 50 or 100 people listening to me, and I please them, there is another problem. The path where the concert hall, you will play there one day. But there, if I only please myself, I will never play. But you said precisely this side that is a bit like saying, but if it only interests me, and it makes me think of Jacques Attali who said something that was very much repeated in a recent pause, which was taken up and was quite shaken on social media because he said, 'I don't seek to be happy, I only seek to be useful.' What do you think of that?
It's funny, I've never formulated it like that. Well, for me, being useful makes me happy. So anyway, if you want, it's somehow an alignment. So I know that when I feel useful, I feel happy. And conversely, when I took the example of the piano, playing the piano is truly a pleasure, an immense pleasure, but I say to myself, well, it's not useful to anyone else but me. So does it really make me happy? It makes me happy because it makes my spine vibrate, you know, it gives incredible sensations. Music connects us almost to the universe. Music speaks to everyone, it's fabulous for that. It makes us travel. But it's a pleasure that we can share, that's also why there are concerts where sometimes 80,000 people share an emotion at the same time, and it's magical. But it's true that when you play alone in your corner, you say to yourself, I'm not useful to anyone. But it's funny because it makes me think of something. You see, nine years ago, when I started an organization called Epic at that time, I wanted to be a social worker. And when I looked at that, I had a discussion with someone I really like in the United States who told me, 'But social worker, your usefulness will be much smaller in number than if you stay on this subject that you know well, which is entrepreneurship, and you become a social entrepreneur.' And that's why I created Epic at that time. And indeed, after almost 10 years, almost 2 million people have seen their lives transformed, whereas if I had been a social worker, it would have been a few hundred. My question for you is: at what number, at what number did you put a number behind when you play? If for example you played to me, if I was happy, would that be enough for you or not? Earlier you said 80 or 100 people. Is there a moment when it can be just your wife, your two children? Is there something that is sufficient, or does it have to be a lot? Earlier you were talking about BlaBlaCar, you said three continents, I felt you were proud of what you created with the team. But would it have been enough to do it well in France? It's a notion of optimum efficiency of the energy invested. That is, in the morning, I want to be in the place where I can bring the maximum added value. And that's why it explains the creation of my new project Dift. That is, I will tell you the reason why I created this project. One day I was in front of the premises of BlaBlaCar and there was the climate march that was leaving from Opera and going to République, and I saw 20-year-old kids with signs that said, 'When I grow up, I want to be alive.' First, I said to myself, that's quite a slogan, they're good at marketing. And above all, you say to yourself, okay, we have 20-year-old kids, they don't even know if they will be alive later. You see, the level of hope has fallen quite low. And if you compare that to what happened in other social movements, like May '68 or something, there were beautiful slogans but it wasn't that. It wasn't 'we don't have the hope of life'. Here it's 'we don't have the hope of living', that's serious. And faced with that, I think it's a fairly normal reaction: I said to myself, what can I do to try to give hope? How can I contribute to that? How can I be useful? How can I improve this situation? And so you quickly come to the list: what do I know how to do? What can I do? How can I be useful? And as an entrepreneur with what I have learned, what I know how to do, what can I build? And the first thing that came to mind was to find a way to make sure that instead of simply having the despair of saying 'I might not be alive', to give everyone a means to act. Because acting not only makes you happy, but also obviously makes things progress. So you have two solutions when faced with something so desperate: either you sit down and cry, or you roll up your sleeves and act. I am obviously in the second category. And so I said to myself, what can I build as an entrepreneur to try to respond to that? And that's where my desire to launch a new project, which today is called Dift, came from. It is a means of action that sends a lot of money to associations that fight against almost all the disorders that our society can cause, from social to environmental, including health. Today, after the second year, what are the metrics? Earlier you were talking about the metrics of BlaBlaCar after 20 years. What are the metrics here? We have 300, 350 client companies that have already used the Dift to distribute it to their customers or their collaborators or their partners. We have funded a little over 200 associations and we have redirected about 10 million euros. So that's starting to be significant numbers, especially for such a short existence.
And your goal is 1 billion, right?
Yes, well, you have to set a goal. You're right. We could put 10 billion, but yes, for now, it's about telling ourselves that we are creating a platform that has the potential to multiply efforts and impacts. We will continue our discussion in this pause we have today with you, Frédéric. We also have friendly pauses, so people who love you very much will leave you a message, often a question, and sometimes we also have family pauses. This is the case here. Let's listen. Hello Fred, it's your sister Hélène. They asked me to ask you a question in this friendly pause. So it's not easy. I thought of a lot of questions, professional, personal, funny, less funny, and finally I thought, well, do you remember? You must remember, Liberto egalito? So what is it? Make us understand what it is.
Hello Fred, it's your sister Hélène. They asked me to ask you a question in this friendly pause. So it's not easy. I thought of a lot of questions, professional, personal, funny, less funny, and finally I thought, well, do you remember? You must remember, Liberto egalito? So what is it? Make us understand what it is.
Well, the name of the company BlaBlaCar is Commuto. The reason is that Commuto... The reason is that initially when I wanted to launch my project, there was not only the desire to find a name that could work internationally, and so quite quickly you turn to two categories of names: either Latin or Greek names, or English names, so that it can go very far and be understandable in many countries. It turns out that 'commuto', 'commutare' in Latin means to exchange a service to obtain another. So initially when I had the idea of BlaBlaCar, of the exchange of service to do carpooling, I said to myself, ah, we're going to create something much broader where it will be about service exchange, a bit like eBay for goods exchange. Here we create service exchange. For example, I give you an English lesson and you cut my hair, I trim your hedge and you, someone else takes me, I don't know, to Paris-Vendée by carpooling. And so I said, we can create an environment in which we create new services. And so this word came perfectly to function: Commuto, in Latin, I repeat, Commuto, Commutare, which means to exchange services in Latin, which gave in English 'commute' in the sense of going from one place to another. And then to symbolize all that, I made a tagline that took up the values of France but also went with Commuto, and so it was Liberto egalito.
Equalito Commuto to come with and in this great system of Commuto I planned to have a currency to exchange services, which I called Mutos, since you had Commuto, so Mutos was what you could exchange. And it comes from Latin, you see, not too clever sometimes, that's what it means. Actually, no, but it worked very well, Commuto. Butberto, I love it. So that's the very beginning, so we're at the start. Thank you, thank you, Hélène, this is great.
I knew a number of topics about how you started this. We talk about entrepreneurship, we talked about music—why music? Because at one point it was kind of your option. You had looked into that. Both your parents are teachers, it's also important to talk about family. Teacher parents gave you this love of music. You went regularly, you grew up playing all sorts of instruments, you went to La Rochelle, and then even later to the Conservatoire de Paris. There's a moment, like sometimes young people passionate about sports or music, you tell yourself either you're not good enough, it's not for you. You always have a lot of doubts. You know, when you do things, it's not that you don't have doubts, it's that you overcome them. So yes, I've always had many doubts, I still have many, and I have them every day. I live with that, and that also allows me sometimes to ask myself what it's for, so that reason takes over, what needs to be done, and that way you can overcome your doubts.
So music is what allowed me—already brought me a lot. Music brings a lot: rigor of work, creativity, possibilities, emotions, sensations. It's quite magical, music. And when you later create a project, you realize there are similar things. For your project to work, you'll have to work a lot, you need to put emotion into it, especially because at the beginning you don't have enough data to know where you're going, so you have to feel things and structure them by appealing to something internal rather than external data. Then there's a lot of creativity to evolve your project. So on these three dimensions—work, creativity, emotions—entrepreneurship and music have many similarities. So, did I see myself at 16 or 17? You don't really know what you'll do. I thought it was fine to lean toward music, but I also didn't let go of the practical side; I loved math and was in a scientific track in high school. I pursued a scientific curriculum, thinking I love math so I'll do that now, because if I want to do music later I can always go back—which I actually do a bit now—whereas the reverse would be more difficult.
You say something that doesn't surprise me, but it's true I have this discussion with other entrepreneur friends about doubt. You, you say you doubt all the time. I have two categories of entrepreneurs: people who doubt little or not at all—well, maybe they don't say it—but they work. Personally, as an entrepreneur, I work a huge amount upfront. I spend a lot of time to qualify everything, look at market studies, and then I know we'll probably pivot, but doubt accompanies me very little. I am quite convinced. I know why I do it. And then there's the other category, like you, who doubt as a way to progress and change. Both change, but in different ways. You, you see yourself truly in that category, continuously, every day, always questioning.
Well, I try to prepare a lot too, but I especially try to feel my doubts and not ignore them, because I think they teach me things. Doubts teach you how to navigate an iceberg field and not hit the icebergs. You mentioned work earlier—you never really let go of work, we can see that because you did high-quality studies: math sup, math spé, Normal Sup, and then you finished by going to the United States to one of the most famous schools in the world, Stanford. For you, diplomas were essential. Were you extremely pushed?
Well, it's true when you have two teacher parents—math teacher and French teacher—you're kind of between the anvil and the hammer. But they pushed you a lot. For parents listening, I think it's more about giving desire than pushing. So, how do you give desire? Many parents would be happy to know how you make your child love math. I love math. How did they give you that desire? They showed you things. I remember my father made me count in base 2 when I was 4 or 5 years old. Base 2 is with only ones and zeros. So it was fun. You can decompose numbers: 2 in base 2 is 10, because it's base 2. In base 10, 10 is 10, but in base 2, it's... I hope everyone is following, because I'm trying to keep up. 4 is 100 because 2x2 is 10x10, so that seems logical. So you were 5 years old, something like that.
After that, I always loved counting. I always loved counting. My father tells me that when I was little, I would count all the gradations on a sewing measuring tape. I practiced counting from 0 to 100 on the gradations. You really liked that. So, how did they—do you think you just liked it, and since you were very good, you continued to like it? Yes, because you have the pleasure of success, the pleasure of understanding. You understand because you have the previous tools to understand the next, so you can pass the levels. Me, I was often second? No, third or even... I remember once I got a grade below average in 8th grade, and it was very hard, but after that I had many more. In high school, I had 19.5 out of 20 in physics. They couldn't give 20. But then you see the transition: in high school you have 19.5, then you arrive in math sup, and I remember my first test. Our physics teacher, Mr. Kabarocas, from Agen, with an accent, said, 'You were among the best in your classes, here you are 46, there will be a first and a 46th.' He sets the scene. Then he returns the papers in reverse order, so you pray he never says your name. At one point, he says 'Mazzella, 2.25, 41st ex aequo.' And he looks at me and says, 'I counted everything, don't come asking for a quarter point. You have 2.25 out of 20, that must be strange for you because you've never taken such a hit.' So it's a principle. I've often seen in the US—I spent a lot of time there, I saw my children grow up there—and there it's the opposite. Do you think this system of some prep schools, physics or math, where at the start they beat you down to show you're not good, is positive? It's a principle: make you hit bottom and hope you come back up. I think it's not that extreme everywhere, but there is a notion that to succeed, you need to go into work mode, intensive work. You know this well: to succeed, you have to go through the work phase and stay there intensely. So you have to understand that nothing happens without work. When I talk about entrepreneurship, I often say there is no elevator for entrepreneurs, only stairs. So either you understand that and you put in the effort, or you think there's an elevator somewhere and you'll look for the button for a long time but stay on the ground. Don't believe in Santa Claus. There is only one way to succeed: work hard. I think it's good to teach us, including in our studies, that work is extremely important. And one way to do that is to show us that we don't know much. I can give another example: when I entered Normal Sup, you go up another level. The director welcomed us in the Salle du S, the hall where they welcome all students, and she said, 'Congratulations, you are the elite'—not at all. 'Congratulations, you entered Normal Sup, you know how to fill out a questionnaire.' You think, 'Wait, you just passed grueling 3- or 6-hour exams, thousands of candidates, and in my physics class we were 23 accepted out of thousands. So it's very selective.' And she says, 'Congratulations, you know how to fill out a multiple-choice questionnaire.' I thought, 'Well, your questionnaire was a bit tough, Madame... Christine Benard, I think.' And she said, 'You have to imagine that the questions you answered were imagined by other people. Starting today, we will learn together to imagine the questions.' And you think, 'Ah, okay, so until now I've only been answering problems that others formulated. From today, we will formulate problems.' That's very beautiful, and it's a great realization that we don't know much, and that the field of possibilities is infinite. It opens the mind and helps us to go further. I have never met someone who truly succeeded in their engagement, financially, or in the impact they made, without working more than others and more than reasonable. When I say 'more than reasonable,' it means we all sacrifice something. I have never known an entrepreneur who didn't sacrifice something. You, what did you sacrifice during those years of entrepreneurship? Is there something you think, 'That's just the price I had to pay'?
Do you think that's positive? I think it's not that extreme everywhere, but there is a notion that it's important to put yourself in work mode, intensive work. You know this well: to succeed, you have to go through the work phase and stay there intensely. So you have to understand that nothing happens without work. When I talk about entrepreneurship, I often say there is no elevator for entrepreneurs, only stairs. So either you understand that and you put in the effort, or you think there's an elevator somewhere and you'll look for the button for a long time but stay on the ground. Don't believe in Santa Claus. There is only one way to succeed: work hard.
I think it's not that extreme everywhere, but there is a notion that it's important to put yourself in work mode, intensive work. You know this well: to succeed, you have to go through the work phase and stay there intensely. So you have to understand that nothing happens without work. When I talk about entrepreneurship, I often say there is no elevator for entrepreneurs, only stairs. So either you understand that and you put in the effort, or you think there's an elevator somewhere and you'll look for the button for a long time but stay on the ground. Don't believe in Santa Claus. There is only one way to succeed: work hard. I think it's good to teach us, including in our studies, that work is extremely important. And one way to do that is to show us that we don't know much. I can give another example: when I entered Normal Sup, you go up another level. The director welcomed us in the Salle du S, the hall where they welcome all students, and she said, 'Congratulations, you are the elite'—not at all. 'Congratulations, you entered Normal Sup, you know how to fill out a questionnaire.' You think, 'Wait, you just passed grueling 3- or 6-hour exams, thousands of candidates, and in my physics class we were 23 accepted out of thousands. So it's very selective.' And she says, 'Congratulations, you know how to fill out a multiple-choice questionnaire.' I thought, 'Well, your questionnaire was a bit tough, Madame... Christine Benard, I think.' And she said, 'You have to imagine that the questions you answered were imagined by other people. Starting today, we will learn together to imagine the questions.' And you think, 'Ah, okay, so until now I've only been answering problems that others formulated. From today, we will formulate problems.' That's very beautiful, and it's a great realization that we don't know much, and that the field of possibilities is infinite. It opens the mind and helps us to go further. I have never met someone who truly succeeded in their engagement, financially, or in the impact they made, without working more than others and more than reasonable. When I say 'more than reasonable,' it means we all sacrifice something. I have never known an entrepreneur who didn't sacrifice something. You, what did you sacrifice during those years of entrepreneurship? Is there something you think, 'That's just the price I had to pay'?
I have an approach where I try to do everything to make it work so I have no regrets. So I put in maximum energy, I put in everything. I'm quite whole about that. Why? To have no regrets. That is, to say to myself, if it doesn't work, I did everything I could. Because for me, the worst would be to think it didn't work because I didn't try everything. That reminds me of what I wrote in my second book, which was really a hymn to entrepreneurship. I have a chapter called 'The Idea Doesn't Exist.' So I often get this question from entrepreneurs or would-be entrepreneurs: 'How do I find the idea?' As if the idea comes to you like Newton under his tree with the apple falling. So explain to us: what happened in December 2003? Because that's the beginning of what became Commuto, carpooling, BlaBlaCar. What happened? That's your apple falling. Something happened that changed your life.
I had to return to Vendée from Paris for the holidays, and since I left it too late to book a train ticket, there were none left. I called my little sister, who lived in Rennes, and asked if she could pick me up in Paris and drive me to Vendée, because otherwise I had no way to get there—I would have had to hitchhike, which was complicated in December. So she came to get me, and on the A10 highway heading to Vendée, we saw the TGV trains passing us. I said to my sister, 'You see, I'm sure there's no room on that TGV because I've looked everywhere.' At the same time, I saw dozens of cars on the road going exactly the same direction as the TGV, mostly empty with plenty of free seats. I thought, 'There may have been no more free seats on the trains to Vendée, but there were plenty in the cars.' So we needed to find a way to make all those free seats in cars going to Vendée available so that people could reserve them like a train seat, but it would be a car seat. So I had my sister, but you had to know my sister to get a seat to Vendée, which isn't a service. So you need to index all that. So when I had the idea, I thought it was as simple as can be, and I couldn't understand why it didn't exist. I didn't sleep for 72 hours, thinking, 'It's simple, how come it doesn't exist?' I thought it might be illegal or something. But no, there was no good reason—just that no one had actually done it. So it became a competitor later. But we should thank the SNCF, because if there had been more trains that day to Vendée, you might not have experienced that. But it's very complementary too—competition with buses and trains, and it's all decarbonized transport, so it's positive.
Frédéric, we talk about entrepreneurship. You explained earlier that time is the ultimate resource for entrepreneurs. You said that because you could afford it—you were young, no family, not much debt. You could afford it. Do you consider that, or do you advise young people not to wait too long? When you give advice or when people ask you, do you think there is an age to start? I think there is no age—it's just that sometimes it can be a bit more complicated because you have more responsibilities, so a bigger risk. What do you think?
I think it's possible to start at any age, but the methods won't necessarily be the same. Like many things, you can do things at different ages, but you won't do them the same way. When you're younger, you have energy to spare, you have few needs, no one depends on you—except maybe your cat. So you have a freedom that allows you to dedicate energy that is hard to dedicate when you have broader life constraints later. But later, with more constraints, you may also have more means, so you can start differently. It's the triptych of energy, time, and money. When you're young, you have energy and time but no money. In midlife, you have energy but no time and a little money. When you're older, you have less energy but time and money. The problem is that to succeed in creating a project, you generally need all three. You have to manage to compensate for what you lack. So my advice to a young entrepreneur is to find companions of reflection—co-founders. Because alone, it's too hard.
Yet BlaBlaCar started alone. Yeah, but I was always surrounded by friends. I consult many people, I ask them lots of questions. So you say, 'Have co-founders, don't be alone.' Yes, don't go alone, go with co-founders—as complementary as possible, people who know how to do different things, who are different, good at what they do, and passionate. On entrepreneurship, we were talking about the promotion of entrepreneurship that you've been doing for years. Thank you for that. With a small number of people, on the fact that France is a country of entrepreneurship—which I consider it to be. We have incredible talents, engineers, many beautiful things. But we have a world that is becoming more complex with enormous giants, American and Chinese. Today, as you well see, entrepreneurship in France—do you think we can continue to develop well, succeed, have access to capital? Do you think we will have to imagine other things? There is a shift in the chessboard right now, between December and January, very clearly. So we need to see what that means. Global balances go far beyond entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is a small boat on a moving ocean. How will it evolve? Hard to predict. What we have is very great resources of creativity and work in France. We also have a country that is extremely good at putting us in situations to reflect and think about building the future. We have good living conditions overall. So we have many assets. But we also have to understand that we are a medium-sized country, and the major balances are between large plates with countries of hundreds of millions, sometimes over a billion. China is over a billion, the US is 300 million. To stand out in this chess game, we need to find ways to federate and completely rethink. I think there is no other solution than to really bring forces together. It's the sense of history: nations are built by federating populations to do greater things. Even France was built that way, federating everyone, speaking how many languages, and then coming together to make a nation. So I think it's time to make Europe. It's been time for a long time, but now it's the real moment. Apart from saying it, do you imagine things to do, to push a voice, to try to do things yourself?
Yes, we need to reduce the complexity of the multiplicity of schemes. From a purely pragmatic administrative point of view—company creation and how to grow a company—the image is that when you start a company in the US, you run a 100-meter dash. When you start a company in Europe, with 27 countries, you run a 110-meter hurdles with 27 hurdles because regulations, labor laws, currencies, taxes are all different. France is very easy; we have a lot of luck in France. The ecosystem is now extremely well structured to support entrepreneurs when they start, from incubators to funders, and also the image of entrepreneurship has become extremely positive and attractive. All that is very positive, but we must not forget that we are a medium-sized country with 65-70 million people. So the region, the continent, will determine whether we survive. And we also need to think about helping our European ecosystem. That means it's important that we as Europeans also think about buying European solutions, not always buying solutions from elsewhere. When you buy something today, do you try to buy European first? The difficulty is when the products are not of the same performance; then you have to accept the compromise we talked about earlier. Do you manage to do that? I try. I think about it all the time, and then you make your choice knowing if it's a compromise you can accept.
So, coming back to Commuto, carpooling, BlaBlaCar—there was a moment something happened. What was that moment? I never really understood that moment of breakthrough. It was around 2008-2009 when there was real growth. A click, a moment when you said, 'I've got it.' You changed your business model many times. Yes, I changed six times. A lot of pivoting, but not after. So what was it? Is there something where you found the alignment was good?
In terms of traffic on the public site, it was always exponential. Exponential means doubled each year. But at the beginning, you go through—you've had a lot of math with me, so I'm happy. Let's continue with exponential and linear. I'm ready. Exponential is 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64... So we had growth that was always exponential. The problem was that depending on the economic model you apply, you may or may not succeed in compensating the costs, which are also exponential. Because when you have exponential growth in service, you have exponential costs that follow the traffic. So we had exponential growth, which was great, but also exponential costs. In front of that, we had to find an economic model that would match that exponential growth. The first model we found was selling carpooling platforms to companies. That wasn't what I wanted to do initially, but if you want... We had about ten companies calling us, saying, 'This is great what you do on covoiturage.fr, I'd like that for my company.' And I said, 'Sorry, that's not what we do, we have the public site.' But when you're eating pasta, can't pay anyone, and have no revenue on the public site, which is starting to cost a lot, after the 11th call you say, 'Okay, how much?' You change your mind. So we started developing carpooling platforms for companies. But the problem was that the revenue growth from that activity was linear. Initially, it was good—it covered some costs compared to the public site, which had no economic model and was growing exponentially and very costly. But then, you have to remember your math: an exponential always crosses a linear. Exponential costs rise steeply, and when your revenue is a straight line, at some point it goes bad. It goes very badly—you plunge into costs. So we absolutely had to find an economic model that would follow. We tried six, and the sixth one worked. That was around 2011. At that moment, I said, 'Okay, we're out of the woods because we found a way to have revenue that compensates our costs.' It's been the same model since 2011, with small evolutions. So that was the good moment. Growth was strong, you found the business model, funding arrives, you can move on from pasta, you raise a lot of money. And you have the name that goes with it. A journalist once came to see me at the very beginning of covoiturage.fr. I spent three quarters of an hour trying to convince him my thing would work. At the end of the interview, he said, 'There's almost no one on your site, you're all alone, the few people who come don't pay you a cent. How long do you plan to keep going, Mr. Mazzella?' And I was out of arguments, so I said, 'Well, listen, I'm Italian, I can eat pasta for ten years. Goodbye, sir.' I'll hold on thanks to pasta. If that journalist is listening—maybe he wasn't a journalist, he was just gathering information. So that was around 2015, I think. 2014-2015, you started raising a lot of money. Those years continued for many years, when many companies raised a lot of money. That's when we saw the appearance of unicorns worldwide. You were among the first unicorns in France. You raised, I think, 200 million euros at a valuation that you announced fairly early, which was 1.4 billion euros. So considerable amounts. So we are far from a few years after, it went very fast from what you were living.
How did you live it? Were those moments, were you caught up in it like a moment of pause? You found yourself sandwiched, you were there at the moment and you say, well, we want to, we need you because you are going to represent entrepreneurship in France. Also, do you think that after eating pasta for so long, it wasn't necessarily the sums you should take, maybe you should be more reasonable, or did you say, wait, you know what, I take as much money as possible? How did you experience it? But you have to see that at any stage of development, a company is capable or not capable of absorbing a certain amount of money. You can't arrive at a very young project and tell it, here are hundreds of millions of euros or something.
For the team to be able to absorb it, behind these financings there is always a plan, a spending plan, and the spending plan is very clear. When you start raising these sums, at least for the format of company project we are talking about, it's to go international expansion. So you quantify the costs, you say, well, we will put 5 or 10 million on this country, on that country, on that country, on that country, and so everything is measured. It's not just money that arrives and you think you can do whatever you want. It's not at all the case. It's very planned.
