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In 2011, Frédéric Mazzella, CEO of a French ridesharing startup called CoVoiturage, had a dilemma. The company had recently expanded to other countries in Europe -- and in each country it had a different name. Mazzella had to come up with an unified brand. "One of our most popular features on our service was the 'blabla'," Mazzella, 39, says. "When an user registered, she would have to choose whether she was 'bla', 'blabla' or 'blablabla', depending on how talkative she was when sharing a ride. That became our name."
BlaBlaCar currently has a community of 20 million users, making it the world leader in long-distance ridesharing. "Our role is to match passengers looking for a ride with drivers who have empty seats to share costs for a common journey," Mazzella says. "Our drivers don't make any profit, which makes us totally different from companies like Uber." Last year, BlaBlaCar raised $100 million (£65 million) in a seed round led by Index Ventures with previous investors such as Accel Partners and ISAI. "With the previous investment round, our investors wanted us to prove that we were able to expand beyond France," says Mazzella, age 39. "We did that by expanding to Italy, Poland, Germany. Now the ambition is to be global and getting more usage per service by enhancing our mobile real-time experience."
Given BlaBlaCar's extraordinary growth, one of Mazzella's main concerns is to preserve the trust that users have in the service. Recently, BlaBlaCar conducted an online survey of its users, asking them to rate how much they trust someone on the scale of one to five. "A stranger in the street had an average rating of 2.2, friends 3.8 and family, 4.7," Mazzella says. "BlaBlaCar profiles had on average 4.2. We want to build a trusted network for rideshare using information that is declared, rated, engaged, activity-based, moderated and social."
Over the past year or so, BlaBlaCar launched in several new markets: Turkey in July 2014, India in January, Hungary, Romania, Croatia and Serbia in March (upon acquiring AutoHop), and Mexico in April (after acquiring local firm Rides). "Our acquisitions are what we call acqui-hires," Mazzella says. "The goal is to hire talented people in those countries." BlaBlaCar now has a team of 300 people spread over 19 offices around the world, from Moscow to Mexico City, comprising a total of 29 nationalities.
courses explaining to new hires what they do. Our biggest challenge as we grow is to keep our culture intact."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
