My comrade, my friend Frédéric Mazzella.
It's thanks to Einstein that I became an entrepreneur.
So then you come back to France with this little seed planted. How does this seed grow?
We had spent 150,000 euros in total. So I tried six business models, and five times you have to go to them saying we were wrong. Being able to recognize it and set your ego aside, being both persistent but not stubborn. I couldn't pay myself for 5 years. He told me, "How long do you think you'll last?" I have Italian roots, I can eat pasta for 10 years. So this is from an exchange I had about a year ago with Sam Altman. When I asked him those questions, he would take out his phone and ask and look on ChatGPT.
Welcome to On n'est pas des mythos, the podcast that smells of hard work, sweat, and good spirits. Today I'm welcoming an entrepreneur you've certainly already heard of, or at least know at a minimum. You know the company at a minimum. I have the pleasure, the honor, and the satisfaction of welcoming my comrade, my friend Frédéric Mazzella. Frédéric, hello.
Hello. Hello Jean-Pierre. Well, I don't know if I'll be able to make as many rhymes as you in my answers, but well, it's off to a good start.
Well, sorry, it might be a bit much if you want, but it's a first try.
Ah, you're setting the bar a bit high, huh.
We're trying, we're trying to adjust. Well, listen, in any case, once again I renew the fact that I'm very happy to have you because I think today you're one of the figures of the success of French entrepreneurship, of the whole startup movement of the 2000s, of what we called the pioneers. Besides, you had a show that took up that title. You also wrote a book. You're a character we find in many places, many crossroads of France, and I think you have a lot to share, and above all you've been at once founder, creator, researcher, takeover, you've had pretty much all the hats, redistributor now we'll talk about that too obviously, and before anything else I wanted your reaction to this podcast, to this title On n'est pas des mythos, and to the introduction with perhaps, perhaps too much of a dream that I did.
No, but I think it's great because it puts your feet back on the ground.
Oh, you realize? Super, and feet on the ground, there was already a rhyme, I didn't do it on purpose.
But no, it allows us to understand that, by the way, it's a form of contradiction but a fascinating one in entrepreneurship: you have to both have your head in the stars and want to make people dream and carry everyone along, and at the same time really have your feet on the ground, be extremely pragmatic. That's why, well, that's why the job of entrepreneur is magical, because it's precisely about making dreams with what you have at hand. But I think it's good to remind people that we can't afford to be only in the dream layer all the time, and that the entrepreneur's work is precisely to build here and now something that works with what we have. And so that's extremely pragmatic.
So, when we look at your path, Frédéric, there's a question that immediately comes to mind: what finally made you deviate from a fairly well-trodden path of a researcher who searches, to become an entrepreneur who finds and above all who does and who makes happen? You see, it's generally quite antinomical. People who search aren't necessarily the people who implement, and you finally went from one to the other.
Yes. Well, it's because I did indeed ask myself that question a lot. I think that in research, especially the research I was heading towards, there's something extremely, you see, fundamental, theoretical. And I'm more pragmatic than that, actually. I think I need, well, I like to, without going so far as obviously making things with my hands, even though I love that, but I need something concrete. And when you're in research, well, I was heading towards fundamental research in physics, you see, whether it's theoretical physics or astrophysics or things like that. Well, you could say it's concrete, but well, it remains very cerebral.
But are you a cerebral person?
Yeah, there's a part. But I like, I like, I like having a representation in the physical world of the thought I can have. And the more I advanced in physics at ENS, the more, already we had one course out of two that talked about Einstein, and the more, the more it became arduous. [grunt] And the more I realized, notably, Einstein's genius, the more I told myself, well, here I'm going to be useless. Well, you just have to wait for the next Einstein who advances science like 15,000 researchers, and I'm going to contribute a pebble to Einstein's mountain at best with a life of laurels in this field. So I was crushed by the weight. I felt, yeah, not capable of contributing enough to the scientific field I had embarked on, telling myself, well, I surely have value elsewhere, and I'm more concrete than completely, how to say, purely cerebral. And so I think it's thanks to Einstein that I became an entrepreneur, because I told myself, well, there you go, I can't be, I'll never reach the top, it's, it's, it's, it's the very high, it's the very, very, very high level, and finally I won't make it to finish.
You still have to see, wait, Einstein in 1905 published three papers that revolutionized light, matter, time, energy, mass. Well, you say, "What did he leave for anyone else?" He just, [laughs] he just took everything. And on top of that with really advanced theories that for the most part, well, aren't disproven today, but he even predicted things that we, that we proved later on. Well, it's crazy.
And so, but then what image did you have of entrepreneurship? How, how do you come to think that you'll be able to, that you'll, that you'll create something when in your family there's no example, if I'm not mistaken, or well, if I have a family of teachers everywhere.
It's my time at Stanford, actually. I left, I left, I was very attracted to computer science because precisely in computer science there was the science side, it's still, it's still, how to say, very articulated, very logical, very, well, very scientific, and the application side. I loved, loved that. That is, the side where you plan something in a logical way and hop, it produces something, and notably, well, it was the era of all the Toy Story and all that. I found it incredible to be able to put your creativity with computers into finally products like that which end up being very visual and creating emotions. And so I was attracted to computer graphics at first, and I went to Stanford to do an internship in a joint venture, well, a joint project between Stanford and NASA, in a team of surgeons who were to potentially, well, at least build the tools that could allow surgeons in space to operate on astronauts if ever there was a need. And [grunt] so, I developed virtual surgery environments with a lot of synthetic imagery, a lot of force-feedback tools, and so really at the crossroads, well, a bridge between extremely scientific things and extremely pragmatic things, between computing and medicine. And that's how I really fell into computing for real, because at the same time I did my master's in computer science at Stanford because I, I needed to learn, I needed [laughs] to learn computer science, you see. Well, what they call the science campus in the United States, which is more...
Yes, but we still don't have the explanation for moving to entrepreneurial action. What is it...
Well, there you go, but once I was there, I saw plenty of classmates not necessarily finishing their studies and others leaving to work in startups right next door. It was the very beginning of Google. When I arrived on the Stanford campus, it was the moment when Google was being created, well, Larry Page and Sergey Brin were leaving the campus to create Google right next door. And so not only were there quite a few startups, now what you have to see is that very few succeed and many crash. But so actually error was part of the path. Well, you realize that quickly. There were many startups that started and then didn't work. That is, we see it less from here because we have the impression, well, the ones we see arrive, work.
It's the ones that succeed, of course, apart from a few examples, Groupon at one point. Well, there were a few.
There you go, but on site, you see that out of 100 that get created, I don't know, two or three make it and about fifteen scrape by and then the rest stop. Yeah. So [grunt] we could see that well, and then there were...
That, that removes the mental burden of the weight of failure, you see, which is something that inhibits a huge number of people, whereas actually if you start from the principle that what matters is trying and that you may not make it, already that removes the mental charge.
It's part of the game, and so I saw people leaving for startups, people who had the same path as me, so to speak. It was a path with fairly advanced studies, you see, and who sometimes decided not to go all the way to the diploma to create a startup or to join another one. So already that changed something mentally. I told myself, hey, that's funny. Now, no one had ever, no one had ever told me that you could not finish your studies.
Yes, already it's that I didn't know.
[laughs] Yeah, it was conceptual. So I, so I still finished my studies, me, I told myself, well no, I'm not going to stop. But in any case it put the [grunt], it planted a seed very clearly around entrepreneurship because I saw that somehow creating a project, well, what we call a startup but which goes further, could be part of my path whereas before the paths I had envisaged were much more either academic or joining a company that already, because when you don't have the example it's complicated to imagine it.
And so there the question is, and why didn't you stay in the United States? That is, the big... you discover that there's a different way of seeing things and you had maybe projects where you could have joined.
Yeah. Well, it's a mix of quite a few things and actually it's very personal. You know, when, when you move it's, it's, well sometimes you move for purely professional opportunities, but there's also a very personal side. I, I had left the United States, so on one hand to learn things, and it's the right age, you see. I was a little over 20, me. And I learned lots of things. But I also realized that I was French, that I was European, and I missed it. Actually, if you want, it was France that I missed.
Yeah. Well, I'm taking a little 30-second break because we have to make a living, and because I'm telling you about those who support this episode, our friends at BDO France. BDO is an audit and consulting group that says, like that, it can seem a bit boring, but behind the numbers there are above all experts who accompany entrepreneurs, leaders, management teams of companies that are growing, transforming, taking risks, who sometimes have to reinvent themselves to keep moving forward. And that necessarily speaks to me because a company that wants to last can't stay still. You have to know how to question yourself. You have to know how to invest, innovate, sometimes take a step sideways, and above all be well surrounded to be able to make the right decisions. That's a bit BDO's philosophy: having the power and expertise of a large international group while keeping an entrepreneurial culture, proximity, and the desire to do things differently. Anyway, my friends at BDO accompany those who are building the companies of tomorrow's economy, and I'm very happy to have them by our side on this podcast.
You see, indeed, there was... Welbeck explained that when he was in Ireland, he would go buy L'Express to have a little piece of France because actually, there you go, he needed France. So you, you consider yourself a French entrepreneur.
Oh yes, completely. Yeah.
And so you, so you, so you came back for those reasons. And so then you come back to France with this little seed planted, and so, and then how, how does this seed grow?
Well, at the beginning, I worked for, well, I joined a computer company that was, that was an American company with a big subsidiary in France that did development, that didn't just do sales or distribution, that really did development. So we had development teams really in France. So I joined that team and it lasted 5 years, but I did, I did lots and lots of jobs in computing. I joined the customer support department, so customer service [grunt], where actually it was a solution, you see, it was B2B, it wasn't SaaS yet unfortunately, we did installations with versioning. It was, it was still quite, quite heavy actually because you had version 4.6.1 patched 3.2.
Ah, did I code? Ah, I coded. Yeah. Me, I... Ah yes, no, I was, I was a developer coder. Yeah.
And so actually when you did customer support in that field, it wasn't, it was software not sold at 10 or 50 euros but rather at 500,000, 1 million or 5 million euros. It was big, big solutions for, for professional clients. So even customer support, if you want, means on-call at night. It means going to modify code in production at any hour of the day and night when a bug has been detected because the machines have to keep running. And so you see, we made software for the telecom field and the banking sector. For example, we processed tens of thousands of transactions per second for Visa in the United States or for the phone operators too. Lots, lots of transactions. Anyway, it was highly transactional software with hot swap, hot backup, well, solutions quite, quite complex at the time but which teach you rigor because actually you're not allowed to make a mistake. You can't have a second of downtime, it's not possible. So actually you do replication and, and so that, that taught me a lot because I started in customer support, then I was a developer, then I was a project manager, then I was a solutions architect, then I was a pre-sales engineer, and so well in 5 years because every, every, I don't know, 8, 10 months, I'd go see HR, I'd say, well, I've done the rounds of the position, do you have, do you have anything else? "Yes, sir, is that it?" [laughs] "Do you have anything else for me?" And so they were super nice. They changed me every time, which meant I was able to discover all the jobs by doing them, in a company of the type, you see, software, well, which manufactures computer solutions. That, that helped me a lot because afterwards when I set up BlaBlaCar, well, I knew the different jobs, which moreover for having partly done them, the different jobs a company needs.
That, when you have the idea, you're still in this company or you're already...
Yes. Yes. When I have the idea, I'm still in this company. I asked for part-time.
I went to 4/5ths and, and so that freed up time for me to be able to devote myself little by little to BlaBlaCar. And then it's after that I left to do an MBA because I told myself, well, I'm very technical but I don't have, I don't have the business codes actually. I had the impression of being much too, well, much too, you're never too scientific but very scientific and not necessarily understanding how, well, how you run a company. So that's why I left to do my MBA.
Initial for you. You have to learn, learning is important, and so you had a university education, you said, "Well, I'm missing that".
There you go. So [laughs]
That reassures me at least to tell myself that when I go, me, to be out in the field, I'll be able to use the knowledge that others had already consolidated and so not reinvent the wheel actually. Actually, I feel like I'm wasting my time when I reinvent the wheel. That is, moreover in computing, it's...
No, but it's not stupid. It's that you say, there are people who have already dealt with the subject before. Let's effectively recover the answer, obviously that's faster.
Yes. So and it's an investment. I tell myself, well, I learn that and then on that basis, me, I'll go explore what there is to explore, what remains to be explored, but I'm not going to rediscover what has already been discovered. So that's, yeah, it's a concept quite, well, that guides me enormously. I don't like doing the same things twice.
So how did you handle all that? Because here for once you didn't have family fortune, you didn't have, there you go, so you didn't have capital available.
Ah no. Well even on the creation of BlaBlaCar, I couldn't pay myself for 5 years.
5 years? There you go. Well that's an information that I, that was one of my questions but you answered right away, 5 years without paying yourself. There you go. But me, it's always what I tell startups. I say, "Wait, prepare yourselves not to be paid for 1 year, 2 years, 3 years at minimum." So there you go, so 5 years. Very good.
Then, I have the, I have the luck to be quite, how to say, economical, frugal if you want. I, I don't spend much. I don't need much, you see. I get around by bike, I don't have, I have no taste for luxury. So actually I also know how to reduce to the maximum. Moreover I remember a [throat clearing] time at the very beginning of BlaBlaCar which was called covoiturage.fr, I had a journalist who came to see me [throat clearing] and who told me after I explained to him what I was doing, after half an hour of discussion, he had concluded the discussion himself by saying, "Well so there you go, [grunt] you're all alone, there's not many people on your site. The few people who come, they don't pay because on top of that we were completely free." He tells me, "How long do you think you'll last?" And there, I told myself, damn, I didn't manage to make him dream, him, huh. I didn't, I didn't [laughs] I didn't manage to bring him into the vision. I... he was close to being a shareholder, that one. I clearly missed my shot [grunt] and I was out of arguments. So I said, "Listen, my name is Mazzella, I have Italian roots, I can eat pasta for 10 years. So don't worry, it'll work." And actually behind that, there's indeed the fact that when you create something, the best way not to spend money, not to, not to find yourself in an extremely constrained financial situation, is already to start by controlling your, your expenses. And so it happens that God gave pasta to entrepreneurs and I think it's their best friend, you know. That is, well you can, you can eat cheaply. And so it's, it's a bit the mindset you have to have when you start a company.
You cut costs to the maximum, contracted to the maximum. Me, I seem to remember that I knew you, so me, I knew you back in the days of covoiturage.fr, huh. So, and I seem to remember that at one point, you were even in a situation of giving up your apartment and even considering going back to your parents' place, so much you had, you had stretched yourself.
No, on... well I have, yeah, I have, I have my, I have my parents who told me they had kept my room in Vendée, that I could come back, that there was no problem. But, no, it's true that it's, you have to think, you have to anticipate. Well, the good news somehow is that when you've done a lot of math and therefore sciences, well, unbeknownst to you, finance is also math, huh, that is, you have to know how to count. And there, it's simple, it's pluses, minuses. Sometimes there are multiplications, but well it's rare. [laughs] Yes, on the output side, there's a multiplication, it exists.
There you go. So actually when you have to count what comes in, what goes out, well you, if you, if you anticipate... Yes, it's fine. And above all, wait, I had an anchor, it was that I had read that more than half of the companies that crash, it's because of bad cash management, you know? Because they didn't see the wall, they counted badly. And there, I told myself no, I didn't do [stutter] matup, matp and ENS to end up crashing my company for lack of management because I didn't know how to anticipate pluses and minuses. That's not possible, I wouldn't forgive myself. It's that if I didn't know how to count in advance...
I understand. But, but despite everything, did you have, did you not have a feeling of downward mobility during a period, during this period? Not downward mobility, no, personal, to say, but finally I'm, I'm stuck, no problem, especially when you're 28, 30 and your buddies are starting to have a job, they're well paid, you, you, you said, well no, me, there you go, I'm not going on vacation, there you go, no, I'm not buying an apartment, no.
Yes, I borrowed on top of that. I borrowed 70,000 euros to do my, my MBA, I had a loan over 8 years, when I set up BlaBlaCar I still owed money to the bank because it had lent me money so that I could do my MBA because on top of that when you do training like that, not only does the training itself cost a lot, but on top of that obviously you're not paid during that time. So it's double punishment, double punishment of course. [laughs] So there you go. And then when you, when you set up your company afterwards and you don't pay yourself either, there it's triple punishment because not only do you work but you have a loan to repay your studies but on top of that you're not paid. So...
And sometimes you even borrow to put money into the company, to put back into the company.
There you go. So yeah, so...
And there you never thought, I'll throw in the towel, you never told yourself at one point, it's too hard, the idea is good but finally, well, is it, is it a business?
No. Well, I was, I was passionate, I still am, by the possibility of developing a service like that because I found it very useful. Well, what made, what made me hold on, is different things. Firstly, I was lucky to have a few users initially who used it, and so if you want, in my phone I have more than 1,500 numbers of carpoolers. These are people I called. I called them because they used my service. So I called them at the beginning to get their feedback, to know what was needed, more than to survive. So you, you, you know that it's, we can rely on the energy of these people. And so to improve the service...
When you ask like that your first clients who see that actually you, you're struggling to create the service obviously but they help you actually, people, and they tell you, well no, there should be such a feature. What I missed was this. Well you see, they help you build your product roadmap already, and they help you, they support you mentally, morally too because you tell yourself, well wait, what I'm doing is useful for them. And so every time you get back to work, you tell yourself, well I'm working for, I don't know, I'm working for Fabrice, I'm working for, for Nathalie. There you go, you know that you, that you're doing it for someone.
That, that helps a lot. And then afterwards, there was the other thing too, it was that I had maybe a little, I had understood that it was, it was still that what I had to do going forward, that is, I couldn't just continue to be a position in a company. Actually I, I could see that I had done several positions, I had done lots of positions. At some point, I need to have a complete vision of what I'm doing which goes from customer support to the brand, passing through development, fundraising and then the, well I don't know, communication, marketing and development. I needed to have a complete life, the product obviously.
And what, in your opinion, where is the tipping point? At what moment do you tell yourself, that's it? Because there's always a moment, earlier you were talking about the magical moments. We have the idea and me, I find there's an even more magical moment, it's the moment when we understand that our idea is starting to work and you have the first feedback where you tell yourself, wait, it's off, you know.
There you go. Yeah. Well there, that moment, me it's still the moment when I finally found a business model really. That is, we were no longer in a logic simply of managing to, to grow the, the, the community because the problem I had at the beginning is that sure the community was growing but the more it grew, the more we lost money. I was, it was the story of, you know, that famous curve there. But at the beginning, you invest, you grow your potential but you don't yet have the means to be autonomous in the long run. So I tried six business models. So that means five times you crash, huh. That means that still five times when... [laughs] That's what trying means. Yes, because when we retell the story, we say, "Ah the guy, he did six business models anyway." He says, "No, that means five times we were wrong." [laughs] And that means that five [grunt] times you believed, five times you brought people along with you and you told them, "This is what we have to do," and five times you have, you have to go to them saying we were wrong. It's no big deal, sorry. Uh, we're going to pivot, we're going to do it differently. Or sometimes it even removes people because actually sometimes you have to readjust. So obviously the readjustment of the model, sometimes that also means readjustment of the team, of partnerships.
Those are, those are complicated moments, huh, when you have to call someone to tell them, well finally we won't be able to do what we said because well it doesn't work like that.
So it's that, but you have to manage to adapt. Moreover, I think that a very important notion behind, behind that, is understanding in the sense of intellectual understanding, but also understanding, assimilation of what sunk cost is, that is, irrecoverable costs. That is, you invested in something, you thought it was an investment, you thought in the sense, well you said, well I've laid a first stone and then I'll manage to lay a second stone on top. And then there, the first stone you laid cracks, actually it's, it's collapsed. You're left with the second one in your hand. There you go. And there you say, no, I'm still going to put it on top. [laughs] You see, you keep investing. And that, if you keep investing, actually you're going, you're going, you're going to just destroy all your stones. So, so actually it's there that you have to tell yourself, wait, no, actually it's a bit... well I'll take another example, but it's like when you've started hammering a nail. If it's gone in crooked, you have to stop hammering, you see? Because if you keep hammering...
Or always, moreover the reflex is you hammer harder.
Yes, you hammer harder but how does it end? It ends, it [laughs] ends, there you go, and it ends with a crooked nail. And then you say, well I have to go get the pliers, wait I have to pull out the nail. So it's even worse. So the, the irrecoverable costs, so the sunk costs, are very important to understand because it's when you've tried, being able to recognize and set your ego aside, that actually, well no, that wasn't what needed to be done, even though you were convinced it was. And so understanding that it was a try and that it wasn't necessarily your first step for the future because otherwise you won't be able to have enough resources to try several things and you'll put all your resources into something that in the end will be... and, and you'll on top of that, you want, you'll put all your energy indeed on, on the wrong path, so maybe it's just next door actually.
The ability to record the signals, that's it, the real, the real success of entrepreneurship is that you put yourself in a situation and then you have to, you have to indeed try to understand what's not going right to precisely try to detect what could perhaps go better. Well, you have to re-evaluate. There you go, that's what you did. That's what you did permanently, you.
Yeah, you have to re-evaluate permanently.
That was your researcher side actually. That, you had a predisposition for it, for once.
Yes, because I, well I think it's because I got used to, to going looking in paths that were dead ends and to do a little U-turn and start again elsewhere. And that's a research approach indeed, that is, you open up all the possibilities and you know that you have to go full tilt on one possibility when you, when you want to dig the furrow. But there are times still when you hit a wall, you have to know how to come back and start again. And I think the only companies that manage to progress are those that have really assimilated what sunk cost is.
Yeah, I understand. It's, it's, it's very interesting. And well listen, we're going to try to approach this, this relationship to sincerity. We have a little surprise. So we, we asked a comedian, Ino, to join us and to do a little portrait of Frédéric Mazzella trying to approach, trying to demystify actually the usual portrait one can read of you. Is Ino there? Should I be afraid?
Listen, be a bit wary anyway. [laughs] Prepare yourself, prepare yourself some scathing answers. [laughs]
Well, hello Jean-Pierre and hello Frédéric. Well, I'm very honored and a bit feverish, I admit, to be appearing before the jury of Qui veut être mon associé. Yes, because for me, [laughs] I don't have a startup and for me the word pitch, it's a chocolate-filled brioche.
Well, the podcast is called... [laughs] You've tasted it too? A long time ago. But yes, he's careful now. [laughs]
Well, the podcast is called On n'est pas des mythos and I admit it's quite funny to have chosen that name for a guy who calls himself Jean-Pierre Nadir when his name is Nadir Benabadi. Not wrong, we're not... [laughs] but I don't throw stones at you Jean-Pierre because me too I'm fed up with having my first name massacred at Starbucks. Well Frédéric... Ino, I see it, I have it in my mouth, huh. It's good. He repeated it for 3 weeks. [laughs] Well Frédéric, is your name really Frédéric?
Ah yes, well, from, from almost what I've been told, yes, well it's what I've always known.
Perfect. Well, when Nadir contacted me to write this chronicle about you, I told him, "We're talking about the guy who founded BlaBlaCar and who realized the dream of 100 million people suffering from logorrhea verbal in 41 countries and of being able to make other people pay to listen to them, tell their lives between Créteil and Cannes, Rio and Sao Paulo or Mumbai and Pune. We're also talking about the guy, still, who launched France Digitale, who reinvented the mess hall with DIFT, who has his show on BFM Business and who has just launched one in his name, Fred 24. Yes, Fred 24 because he's humble, Frédéric."
No but 24 is because he's available 24 hours a day unlike me. That was the difference. There you go, after all the rest it's the same.
Of course, of course. Do you think I'll be up to it? And Jean-Pierre answered me, "You know Ino, Ino" because at the time he didn't pronounce it very well. [laughs] Fred fascinates me as much as he exasperates me. He's too perfect to be human. You know he's the kind of guy, it's a bit like Barney in How I Met Your Mother, you take a photo with him, you can be sure that you have your eyes closed, your fringe all over the place, your chin receding while he's always under his... because it's me who chose the photo. [laughs] That's it. And you always have a good profile. You only have good profiles. That's what's annoying. Well, we're going to try to make him a bit more accessible with this podcast. Achilles had his heel. Fred has his blind spot. Find it. Yeah, that's what he told me. Ah, those were my words, huh. [laughs] Mot. Well, Frédéric, I'm going to try to make you mortal among mortals so that our existence doesn't seem so vain next to yours. And it's going to be hard. Well, I start with your childhood. Son of a teacher like Nadir, born in Nantes like Nadir in 1976, not like Nadir. [laughs] You're the third child of a sibling of four, oh there, there, well there for a winner like you that must have been annoying, huh, not to come first, at worst if you were the youngest you could tell yourself they saved the best for last but no, your parents had to have a little sister right after. That must be a bit hard. Well, as the famous pediatrician and psychoanalyst Françoise Dolto would say, and incidentally also Carlos's mother, everything is played out before 6. But well your parents understood that well because at the age where your kindergarten classmates learn to take a nap on the floor, you, your father teaches you to count in binary.
In binary? Jean-Pierre, do you know how to count in binary? Oh [laughs] no, I don't know. It's, it's powers of two, two, you know.
That's it. Of course, because me frankly kindergarten, I was rather on a rule of three: eat, play, whine. There you go. At the age where your schoolmates learn to play Kiss Kiss at ABC, your mother signs you up for the conservatory, piano prize obviously, you also play violin, drums and guitar. Well that, the guitar, we can tell it's not a moment that grew but rather hormones and fireside evenings, Nirvana grunge around 15.
Yeah [laughs] that's it, on the... the guitar and even the drums I started late. Yeah, I started with the violin, the piano, you see.
He almost apologizes [laughs] but you were an adolescent, you're right. And then afterwards, itinerary of a perfect child, Henri-IV prep, ENS Stanford where you develop a tool for surgeons, just that. Mission at NASA of course, MBA at INSEAD, bla bla bla. Oh, that's funny, it reminds me of a company name. But when do you sleep Frédéric? It's a rhetorical question, huh, yes because my sources told me you sleep very little and at the same time it's understandable. It's not funny counting sheep in binary. One sheep, zero sheep, sorry. [laughs] [grunt] I imagine that's how it is. Moreover, it seems that it's during one of your insomnias that you got the name BlaBlaCar. Is that true?
Yes. Well, it's more, it's a period of hypnagogia, it's called. That is, it's the moment when we pass from wakefulness to sleep or the moment when we pass from sleep to wakefulness. Moreover, there's a little phase like that which lasts sometimes a few seconds, sometimes a few minutes which is extremely prolific and creative. And so if we note our ideas when we pass through that period, well actually it's quite funny, that, that gives surprising results.
Well that's good because that's called productive insomnia. Whereas me on my [laughs] side when I don't sleep, I send voice messages to my exes. There you go, to trash them or win them back, generally both at once. Spoiler alert, it never works. There you go. Well just now let's get back to BlaBlaCar. You didn't create it in your garage like the 2.0 entrepreneurs.
No but because garages, that's a Californian thing. Us in France we have small apartments, we have maid's rooms. So [laughs] it's not the same.
No, for you it all started because you were simply unable to buy a train ticket in time to spend Christmas with the family in Vendée. Well we work for NASA but we don't know how to use the SNCF website.
It's not that I don't know how to use it, it's that all the trains were full.
Yeah, we left it a bit too late.
[clears throat] So the result: your little sister kindly drives 150 miles to come pick you up and take you. And there, on the way, you look at the empty cars and you think, hey, there's a business to build.
Uh, sorry, but did you have so little to say to your sister to make all these observations? Not very BlaBlaCar, huh. I have my doubts. [laughter] This story bothers me.
A trip lasts 4 or 5 hours, so we have time to discuss several subjects. I don't know. [laughter] [catches breath] Honestly, there's something that doesn't add up, something that makes me doubt. I don't understand why you didn't rent a car that day.
So I asked your Fred 24, who answered me very kindly: "You know, I can't reconstruct a logic that's too perfect after the fact." [laughter] "No one is ever betrayed better than by their own." That one works well, huh. [laughter]
So I think I've got your blind spot, Fred. Your little sister — actually, you had her come so she'd pay for being the youngest, yes, the little darling, to spoil her under the Christmas tree. And that's the founding story of one of France's biggest unicorns: a simple family revenge, not a pretty Christmas tale. We're not at the bottom of the well here, my friends.
So Fred, I admit my hypothesis is perhaps a bit far-fetched. The market may not be ready to hear it. Your family probably won't invite me to Christmas. But the hope I have is that by iterating, I'll eventually find a few failures in such a perfect life.
Because, as a famous successful entrepreneur born in Nantes says, before finding the right model, you sometimes have to accept testing several of them.
Bravo! Thank you. [laughter] Well, thank you, Ino. Thank you very much. Perhaps a reaction before Ino leaves us?
Uh [laughter] yes. No. So regarding the blind spot, well, I'm [laughter] skeptical because I love my sister. Well, I've always loved her. So there you go. Uh, she might ask for a right of reply.
Maybe she already is very happy, but yes, but above all she contributed in the end to the success. [clears throat] So in any case, at least she picked you up in Paris with her car.
That's been going on since... I think. Since... yeah, that's it. Yeah. And indeed, well, it was seeing the TGVs pass, because on the A10 motorway, you get overtaken by the TGVs.
And seeing the TGV pass, I thought, there you go, I'm sure there are more seats on this TGV because I tried, I tried. And at the same time I saw the motorway with the empty cars.
With the empty cars, I thought, well, there were plenty of free seats to go to Vendée, but they weren't in the trains, they were in the cars. So we're going to index all these free seats that are moving around.
So that's the idea, but well, you know this, well, you know this, but when you're an entrepreneur, there are a few seconds, sometimes a few minutes of ecstasy when you come across an idea, something that doesn't exist and that makes you dream, and then afterwards it's a few years of hard work.
That's what we'll talk about next. [laughter] But it's really that contrast where, there, you're super excited. Plus, an entrepreneur is excited when he finds something that doesn't exist.
Unlike someone who, for example, would be looking for gold. Someone looking for gold finds a nugget, he's happy. But the nugget already exists. I think that's not the happiness of the entrepreneur.
The happiness of the entrepreneur is to find something that doesn't exist. At that moment you say, "But this is crazy, I found something that doesn't exist," and above all to tell yourself that you'll be able to model it.
Because that's the real issue afterwards: there are plenty of people with ideas, but people who manage to get there and then execute — because you see there are already the two phases, namely whether I'll actually be able to implement my project and if so, how, and then taking action.
And that's another subject we'll develop at length. Well, that's it, because the ecstasy of the first few seconds goes fast — ah, there it is, I've had the idea, boom, click — but afterwards you have to work.
Listen, thank you. Thank you all. Thank you. Thanks for testing the plaster with me. [laughter] See you soon.
See you soon. So if retrospectively you think about the three big decisions that were structuring, that made BlaBlaCar's success, what would they be? If you had to pick three, where there were very important moments, you said, okay, now we do it this way — the brand maybe.
Apparently your mantra is "bigger the logo, bigger logo." So I read that. [laughter] Yeah.
Well yes, because it's especially when you're building something that necessarily has to be known. Because what you have to see is that BlaBlaCar can't work if it's not known, because it's a two-sided marketplace.
That is to say, on one side you have millions of drivers and on the other you have millions of passengers. It's not like a marketplace with merchants on one side and customers on the other, where the merchants — there might be a few, let's say hundreds or thousands — you can more or less go get them as usual, prospect them, maybe even almost one by one, telling them, "Become a merchant on my platform and the customers will come later."
Here, with carpooling, since you have millions on each side, there's no way you're going to make a list to go recruit people — [laughter] that doesn't work. So in fact, you don't have lists, you don't process people on the phone.
No, there's none of that. There's none of that. So in fact, it has to take off.
And a marketplace of that type is a bit... So the example I like to take is as if you had, for example, you take sand, you take two grains of sand in one hand, two grains of sand in the other, you send them at each other, you'll get zero transactions.
If you want your marketplace to work, you have to take a big handful of supply, a big handful of demand, and send them like grains of sand against each other. And there, you get plenty of transactions in the middle.
That's what happens when you start a marketplace. You need lots of supply, lots of demand, because you need volume. And because at the beginning, you see, you have someone looking for a Montpellier-Bordeaux for tomorrow at 2pm, and then another, a driver offering a Paris-Strasbourg for the day after tomorrow at 6pm.
Well, you have no way to sell a Paris-Strasbourg to someone looking for a Montpellier-Bordeaux. It's dead. So at first your marketplace doesn't work and you cry because you see trips, you see offers, you see demands, and they're never going to meet — that's not possible.
So being known was a necessity for a platform like BlaBlaCar. And that's also perhaps where my obsession with "bigger the logo" comes from, [laughter] — you just can't miss a single opportunity to get known, because otherwise our marketplace will never work.
But just to get known, often you have to go through the media. You didn't have great predispositions at first — you were rather, yeah, you were rather a somewhat reserved person, let's say.
So, yeah, and I remember your first interviews at Europe 1, I sent you a little message, so, and we felt there too that you were improving enormously as time went on, and you made efforts. You put yourself in the situation, you worked.
Well, what I did was I watched my TV appearances and I cried. [laughter] Ah, well, no, actually, well, you see, and I compared myself to the others I saw go by, I thought, well, he, huh, he manages well, you know, he presents well, he has [grunts] he has the right arguments.
And in fact, so I worked on that, yeah, I watched, I dissected a little how all the people who manage to be clear when they appear in the media do it.
And in fact, if I can just give my conclusion, it's — well, it's funny because coaches, they often tell you, they'll tell you, be yourself. Hm. And in fact, that's the hardest part, because there you're saying be yourself, well, in front of cameras, in front of microphones, it's super hard.
And in fact, well, it comes back to a notion of alignment, but it's true that when you're yourself and you, well, you let go of everything that constitutes you and the whole way you're capable of interacting with your environment — always, because in fact we talk with everyone, we talk — well, there it passes through the camera much more easily.
So there you go, the recipe is that.
It was a lot at the time, BlaBlaCar was at the heart of everything. There was hardly a topic where we didn't have — start of the holidays, fuel price increases, strikes — the start of the holidays at the heart. So you quickly understood that it was a tremendous lever for you.
Yes. Well, that even has a name, huh. In media, in communication, it's called piggybacking. Okay. That is, you're going to ride on a news item that arrives — when a news item arrives and you're going to offer a slightly alternative narrative.
Typically when there's a strike. Well, talking about carpooling is very relevant because you're going to have hundreds of thousands of people who are stuck on their travel and who are looking for solutions.
That's — I meet an incalculable number of people who throw themselves into my arms telling me, thank you, you saved me in 2021 because I was stuck, I don't know where in France, I had to go somewhere else, and it was you who saved me.
It's not me who [laughter] — it's still the idea that he had one evening or one night that saved them. And so the three big decisions, what would you say? You'd say the name change, I imagine.
A name change. Yeah, especially since it wasn't easy because it was a name so obviously BlaBlaCar and we were coming from covoiturage.fr, which was known. Yeah. Plus, people were typing "covoiturage," you see, on Google. So we appeared first with covoiturage.fr.
Changing your brand is always potentially taking the risk of losing your first place on Google. And therefore losing your traffic. Losing your traffic for a service like BlaBlaCar means what? Well, it means the marketplace doesn't work anymore.
So, you see, everyone was a little bit — especially when you also have the chance to have the generic term that fits. That is to say, you also had the name that, at the limit, we would all have liked to have.
I was saved by my marketing courses — well, my brand courses, even brand courses at INSEAD, where I had a professor who explained to us the difference between a frame of reference and a point of differentiation for a brand.
So the frame of reference is when you call yourself, for example, I don't know, take an example, you want to sell cars, you call yourself "Car." The problem is that since there are plenty of car suppliers, you end up with a very weak brand because you can't impose points of differentiation to valorize your brand.
So if you bear the name of your frame of reference, which is "car" in this case, well, you won't manage to differentiate yourself and therefore you won't succeed — you'll lose.
And so to succeed in having a strong brand with the quality you want to put into it, and the good service you want to provide, and put all those elements into the brand, you need a brand that's different from the frame of reference in which you operate.
And in fact the problem is that when we were called covoiturage, at the same time as us there were — I had plenty of sites called 123 covoiturage, called covoiturage Wazee, covoiturage bidule.
Uh, we should point out that it couldn't be protected — you couldn't protect "covoiturage," obviously.
So I had the brand, in fact everyone didn't care — but and uh and so there you find yourself drowned, not only do you find yourself drowned in services that are less well made than yours, especially since we at BlaBlaCar put an incredible accent on building a network of trust.
Otherwise there wouldn't be 100 million people in more than 40 countries today on BlaBlaCar. We built a network where you have profiles with all sorts of certifications, reviews, which mean that when you get in a car, you know who you're getting in with.
Well, it builds trust. There's that, and then there's the reliability of payment systems. Well, there's everything that goes with it to build a really solid service. But you do that, and next to it you're going to have other little things that aren't a service, and the guy will say, "Carpooling sucks, I tried it, it doesn't work, I got scammed already once." Yeah.
And so there, at that moment you want someone who makes a remark like that to get back in return another brand saying, "Go on BlaBlaCar because BlaBlaCar, they do this, this, this, this." And there you can hang all your brand elements on a brand that isn't the generic name of the activity.
So that's why it was important for us to change the brand, beyond the fact that — plus we needed an international name because "Covoiturage Rage" — we tested it, it wasn't great [grunts]. But it's true that we don't think about the fact that it could be an international version.
Ah, it's completely international. It's called a glocal brand. That is, it's both global, it works everywhere, but at the same time considered local everywhere.
If you want, in Spain they say "blablar" and they think it's Spanish. Well, it's because "blabla" is an expression that exists everywhere in the world [grunts] to express, to talk, you know.
Yeah, yeah. Which is not — which is indeed not the idea we'd have. So at first, on the contrary, we might think it's really French-French, whereas not at all. So that has to be pointed out.
Ah, and by the way, the two biggest countries of BlaBlaCar today are Brazil and India.
Which is what I called Indie, so [laughter] in his little, his little, his little note. Afterwards, among the other decisions you said that really changed things, it's precisely the ability to go and try lots of economic models until it works.
And then maybe the ambassador network, don't you think?
Yes, yes, the ambassador network, but also with this notion of building a community of trust. So both the brand, the economic model, and the community of trust, truly, with all the tools needed for that.
And yes, mechanisms of belonging that make everyone proud to be part of this community.
Yeah. And to do all that, you had to find money at some point, because we haven't said it yet — just to finish this chapter — you had to raise money. And what made the difference?
That is, when you managed to seduce investors, was it the profile of the entrepreneur that you were, and so everything you told us about your journey, or was it the model that seduced them?
How did you manage, on a model that was not very lucrative and that still required quite a lot of capital to finally get to the product you dreamed of? So how did you manage to seduce them beyond the business plan?
I think that, well, first of all, we had pretty good traction, excellent word of mouth. So in bootstrap, with the little means you had put in, you managed to create the traction.
Yeah, I remember that at one point, well, when we raised 1 million, uh, we had 400,000 subscribers and we had spent a total of 150,000 euros.
Ah yes, and without paying yourselves, huh.
Of course [laughter] — no salary, so we were... your contribution, your capital contribution was to be poorly paid for years.
There you go. So the investors said, oh, it's this little team — if they're capable of generating 400,000 subscribers with 150,000 euros, what happens when I give them a million? You see.
So I think there they were well advised, the first ones.
How many millions was that, I think? Yes. [laughter] Ah, they were happy. They're happy. [grunts] For sure.
So there you go, that was — I think there was that, and there was also the demonstration through the example, through the reality of what we were living, that we were — and I too was very adaptive, that is, I'm not going to lock myself into something that doesn't work. I know how to move, I know how to pivot.
That's extremely important for an investor when he's going to follow a project, to tell himself: if he hits a wall, is he going to end up in the wall or is he going to manage to avoid the wall and find how to get to the other side?
So there's a form of the investor's trust in the entrepreneur's creativity, tenacity obviously too, well, perseverance, determination, but also creativity to be both persevering but not stubborn.
And I think they had seen that, they had seen this adaptability at the same time as real traction. So they said, "Well, he'll find a way. He'll find how to get through."
Yeah, I understand that well. Obviously, at what moment did you say, well, finally we have the potential to become a European leader, and to go faster we need to buy companies, because that requires raising capital again?
And so because you made this move, at some point you bought up all the companies that were around to build the reference platform.
Yeah. Well, I think the international ambition was always there. Uh, by the way, it's funny because I found a photo there of a conference — well, of a startup championship that I did in Oregon almost 20 years ago.
Ah yes. [laughter] Where, you know, initially the project was called Comuto.
Yeah. Comuto, which comes from the Latin, Comuto, Commutaré, which means to exchange one service for another. Well, there was the notion of mutual aid through service, and that's why the company is called Comuto today. It's called BlaBlaCar, but and my slogan was Comuto, the way to go.
And you rhyme too. Ah, well you see [laughter] and I found a photo where I had my stand, you see, at the other end of the planet presenting Comuto, the way to go, in an international startup championship.
And so I've always had this desire, this will to go and seek the potential of what is the internet, after all. The magic is that you can have people using your service everywhere on the planet. It's really fabulous. [grunts] And so I've always had the desire to go and seek that potential with this project, with BlaBlaCar.
Afterwards we can talk about DIFT because I have the same on DIFT, but uh, it's always been part of the DNA. And by the way, even going to INSEAD to do my MBA, it's a business school, you know, that's very, very internationally oriented.
It's The Business School for the World, or now it's also force for good behind it. But they've always had this very, very strong openness. In my MBA class, there were 93% non-French, even though the school is based in France, you see, with 91 nationalities. [grunts]
So you have a class where you're 500 and there are 91 nationalities. Well, it's very, very international, and I've always had this very international approach, which also allowed me to pitch BlaBlaCar enormously to all my classmates.
So I had feedback from all these people about their understanding of what carpooling could be in their country. Plenty of them told me, "It'll never work where we are." And others perhaps said the opposite. So there you go.
And so this international openness, I've always had it from the beginning. And it's true that at one point, when we had managed to prove that it worked in France, and when we found our economic model that allowed us to breathe a bit, telling ourselves, okay, this is good.
Because what happened is that at first we had growth that was quite exponential on new users, on the long-distance carpooling service, but the only economic model we had found was selling carpooling platforms to companies.
And so that was a somewhat linear growth in B2B. The problem is that when you have growth and revenues that are linear — and how to say — when you have revenues that are linear and usage growth that's exponential, if you remember a bit of our math classes, there's a moment when they cross and it hurts a lot.
That is, it's always the exponential that wins over a linear one, huh, because it crosses and then it crosses the ceiling and goes all the way up.
The problem is when the curve that crosses the ceiling and goes all the way up is the costs.
It's the costs, not the [laughter] — it's annoying, and your revenues are linear like that, and so it doesn't move forward.
So there, when we found the economic model that was indexed on the real volume of usage, we ended up with costs that were always exponential, but revenues that were exponential too. And so there you manage to follow the progression of your activity.
And so there, from that moment on, we were secure in the fact that we were capable of arriving in a financially funded growth zone.
And so at that moment, then something else happens: there, financiers — you find plenty of them right away, investors, it's much simpler. There they say, "Ah yes, there it is, ah well there it is, it works." And so they had the volume, now they have the economic model. Well, that's good.
And so there, they come to help you obviously extend the model internationally. So we raised a lot of money for our international expansion with mandates.
So, uh, what year is that?
So the fundraisings we did for real international expansion started — well, a first one in 2012, early 2012, and then two bigger ones in 2014-15.
In 2012 we raised 10, then a bit more, a few tens of millions of euros, and in 2014-15 we raised 100 million and 200 million, with really an ambition — in total it's 350 million, 400 million, a little bit more because there were other fundraisings afterwards.
But the expansion fundraisings, if you want, it was really that. So it's in the hundreds of millions, with the double mandate I mentioned: a big mandate which is international expansion, but several ways to do it.
Either go create the service ourselves locally, but we know it takes money and it takes time. Or go try to find teams in the different countries that have all the right DNA, that have already started a carpooling service too, and do a partnership together — well, do an acquisition, do a merger even if you want.
Make sure these teams on the ground join the house Mire to really boost local traffic. So we did that quite a bit, because we were lucky enough to have investors — it was Axel at the time — who had really scanned to find out who was doing carpooling when they decided to invest in us.
If you want, they had seen about fifty teams on the planet doing carpooling in different countries, and they had come to the conclusion that we were the most advanced and that it was on us that they had to move forward, that they had to invest.
To buy the others. There you go, like a coach, they gave us money saying, go see this team. They're good, they're not very good. Uh, they [laughter] there you go, and so they told us to go see.
They had all the info, they had all the info, and that helped us a lot.
Champion. He wanted to make a champion, they needed the captain, so he found him. And after that, it's obviously always interesting, but don't you have a frustration about this international expansion?
The frustration being that you never managed to conquer the American market, because in fact your ambition starts in the United States — personally, you have the creation, the youth of your entrepreneurial vocation, and finally it's a model that takes off everywhere except the United States.
Yeah. Well, it's funny, it's a singularity. Indeed, I think it's both a shame and also a chance. It's a shame because it's a very, very big market, and we can explain why today we think carpooling doesn't work in the United States, because what we do doesn't exist in the United States. Yeah.
So there aren't other companies that would have managed to do the same thing. There are people who tried. So there are a few structural reasons why we think it doesn't work.
The first being that gas isn't expensive enough, quote-unquote, that is, the interest for drivers in sharing their travel costs isn't as strong as in all the other parts of the world. So that's something that can already explain why carpooling isn't developed in the United States.
But then, as I said, it's both a chance and something that's a shame. So it's a shame for that, but it's a chance because we didn't have an American colossus who would have raised billions when we raised millions and who would have wiped us out.
