Move fast. Be lean. Live long.

Reflecting on a defining year at BlaBlaCar

As entrepreneurs building long-term, sustainable businesses, we need to make ourselves immune to hypes and cycles. We should never become complacent in our existing environment, assuming it's the norm. Things change quickly and our industry is made of fast cycles. This post is about the experiences, factors and motivation that have driven some of the changes we've made at BlaBlaCar over the last 12 months to remain a nimble, high-growth and durable business - regardless of external market conditions.

Rewind to January 2016. BlaBlaCar has expanded to 13 new countries, raised $300 million ( the largest amount ever raised by a French startup), and multiplied its headcount by 6 in only three years. For our team of then 400 people, with an average age of 29 years old, startup euphoria is the norm, not the exception.

Anticipating cycles

Yet Q4 2015 showed signs of the market cooling down, and private investment pulling back. Was this going to be the end of a buoyant business cycle? Having worked in the tech start-up environment since early 2000, I lived through two crises. I experienced the dot com bubble first-hand, as an employee of a Silicon Valley telecommunications company which I saw grow from 30 to 150 people, and brutally scale back to 12 employees by the end of 2002. In 2008, when Lehman Brothers collapsed, I was working at VC fund Amadeus Capital Partners and saw VC investment divided by five. Over the years, I grew paranoid about cash-burn, having seen companies fail because they ignored realities of financing for too long. 

Following our recent rounds of fundraising, BlaBlaCar had enough money in the bank not to be concerned about the short term. But we knew that we should not be blinded by our recent successes. Capital efficiency was key if we were to preserve long-term value creation irrespective of the cycles. It was time to anticipate, to focus and be lean.

Shifting focus 

When we launched our carpooling platform over ten years ago, we dreamt of a more open world where people were empowered to travel easily by sharing their cars and grew increasingly connected to the places and people they love in a smart, simple and affordable way. We knew this would only make sense if it took place on a global scale, which lead to "footprint" being the motto behind our ambitious global expansion.

After years of successfully investing in international expansion, we decided to put it on hold and focus instead on bold innovation, the creation of new services, and growing usage in our existing markets. In a “scale-up” like BlaBlaCar, such a strategic shift is not an overnight transformation, and it meant we had to make difficult decisions. We organised our resources to focus on increasing usage in our strongest markets, closing down offices in geographies with slower growth. This meant we had to let great people go, recruit new talents, and recenter our team to align it with this new future. It was not the first time in the history of BlaBlaCar, but nevertheless it was not easy.

The renewed focus on high-growth markets led us to attract significant new funding, including a strategic investment by Baring Vostok, a leading Russian tech investment fund, to support our development in Russia and across Eastern Europe. Expanding to Russia in 2014 had been something of a wild bet, but by 2016, it had become our largest market in terms of usage. Today, the region continues to show unprecedented growth with no signs of slowing down.

In the last quarter of 2016, we began shifting our “scale-up” back into disruptive innovation mode. “Le Lab” and an Insurance team were created – two startups within the startup, with the mission of disrupting our company from the inside. We developed an ambitious manifesto to improve our core product and address how people will use it in the future, and also began working on pioneering new services around the car experience. Today, our vibrant sharing community brings a larger opportunity to build other businesses and innovate across new verticals, creating new value for members. 2017 will be the year we start building this wider ecosystem around our community.

We feel proud about what we have achieved to date, igniting large-scale behavioural change and bringing people together in more ways than one, globally, but there’s still more work to be done. While BlaBlaCar counts more than 40 million members across 22 countries and more travellers per quarter than British Airways, we are still only scratching the surface of our potential reach and impact. Around 80% of city-to-city travel in Europe is done by car, and only a very small portion of those vehicles are being shared. There is still a significant potential to be unlocked, to democratise travel and optimise the entire car experience. We’re excited by the potential that lies ahead.

Geared for long-term growth

From Brexit through to the US elections, the world order seems harder to grasp today than it has for some time. By the end of 2016, however, our team had successfully adapted to a new business environment, preemptively making difficult adjustments and taking new, bold bets for the year to come.

This January, we opened our annual kick-off meeting by sharing four messages with our team: “be obsessive”; “be optimistic”; “be lean”; and by all means, don’t forget to “live the adventure”. Building a sustainable, successful business means never getting comfortable. It means moving fast, leading change, and keeping your eye on capital efficiency, at every stage of your growth. But more than anything, it requires a team of passionate and agile talents, who dare to believe they can do it – and never let go until they do.