Full transcript: Nicolas Brusson on London Real
0:46 Brian Rose: This is London Real. I’m Brian Rose. My guest today is Nicolas Brusson, who is the co-founder and COO of BlaBlaCar, a company which connects drivers with empty seats to people looking for a ride. BlaBlaCar is the most active ride-sharing community in Europe with over 10 million members and growing at $2 million per quarter. You’ve just raised a fairly large $100 million round led by Index Ventures with existing investor, Excel Partners and a few others.
1:12 Prior to BlaBlaCar, you were a venture capitalist and before that you had a front row seat for the 1999 tech bubble in Silicon Valley. So I want to hear more about that. But Nicolas, welcome to Silicon Real.
1:24 Nicolas Brusson: Thanks for having me. It’s a pleasure.
1:26 Brian Rose: Before we get to BlaBlaCar, I have to ask you about your experiences for that bubble.
1:31 You’re in Silicon Valley, probably very few Frenchmen had that experience. And I was wondering if you’ve taken that and applied that to now running a very large European company. Were there some takeaways there?
1:44 Nicolas Brusson: Yeah, for sure. So for me, what happened is I finished my studies, as you said, in 1999-2000.
1:49 And I moved to California, actually, to Berkeley to finish my studies. And that was like a crazy time, except I had no reference, so I didn’t know it was a crazy time. So you arrive in Silicon Valley or in Berkeley back then and everybody was talking about startups and getting stock options and starting a company and fundraising and getting venture capital money. And all of that was new to me. And you have to walk back in time and as a French engineer in the late 90s, startup was sort of a new thing.
2:18 Venture capital was unknown to me. Even Silicon Valley was kind of unknown to me. So you end up in this crazy environment. And I went there, actually, to do a PhD back then. So you went to Berkeley for a PhD.
2:30 Well, I wanted to do a PhD in the US, so I was finishing my master degree from France. And I finished that in Berkeley doing an internship, essentially. And then I got caught into this whole startup thing of late 1999-2000. And I worked in one of the hot space of the time, which was fiber optics. So essentially, you had the internet bubble and you had the telecom bubble going with it, which was like building all this infrastructure for the internet and the future of internet.
3:01 And then I had a very interesting ride. So I worked for a couple of companies, actually. And I’ve seen a company going from, I was maybe an employee, something like 30-something when I joined. And we went from 30 to 150 within like six months, raising $85 million from Kleiner Perkins, Moore David, Intel Capital. I mean, some of the big names today, actually, of Silicon Valley.
3:24 By the way, not knowing at all what was Kleiner Perkins or all these funds back then. So we built that company, no revenue, but we’ve built lots of IP and it was hiring tons of people. And then, of course, came the dot-com burst and came 9-11 and came 2002. And we saw waves of layoffs going from 150 to actually 10 employees, or 10, not even employees, like survivors, I would say, in the middle of 2002 when the company won Chapter 11. And then we had to restart that company and we’ve regrown that company from its ashes, essentially, to actually a fairly good company or revenue-making company by 2006.
4:08 Brian Rose: And you stayed on the whole time?
4:10 Nicolas Brusson: So I stayed on. So I survived and stayed on.
4:12 Brian Rose: Wow. Sounds like Ben Horowitz’s story a bit.
4:14 You know, he kind of rode through, you know, downsized.
4:18 Nicolas Brusson: And you learn a lot, actually, in this downturn, actually, because you have to become – everything is difficult, right? So, you know, essentially, fundraising becomes difficult when you could get $85 million a couple of years before or even a year before. Suddenly, you struggle to get two. When you were spending tons on, like, hiring and building factories and building IPs, suddenly you’re sending stuff on eBay, actually, to do paychecks at the end of the month.
4:48 So, you know, it brings you back to reality in a brutal way. And it brings you back to the reality of, A, at the end, your business needs to be sustainable, right? And, I mean, otherwise, when the tide goes down and when the markets are tough, actually, you realize that few companies actually stand still. So it was interesting to go through this sort of crazy hype phase and then, in a way, like, crazy downturn that was so fast in a way, if you think of the 2001, 2002 downturn, and then, like, rebuilding this company all the time.
5:20 So, of course, you take some of that. I mean, when you go to the next stage of your life and next stage of your career, those are pretty good learnings. So you do remember that, you know, when, I mean, sometimes it can get tough, right? So clearly, it’s something we use at Bebacar. And out of the three co-founders, actually, we all pretty much from the same generation.
5:42 So we all sort of lived through what we started during the bubble phase. So it’s interesting because you carry those cars of, okay, careful. Right.
5:50 Brian Rose: So you probably scale a little more carefully than some others.
5:54 Nicolas Brusson: Yeah. In a way, you try to make, I mean, you try to scale fast.
5:57 I mean, the name of the game is still, you need to scale fast, you need to hire fast, you need to make fast decisions. But also, you become realistic about not burning too much cash, fundraising when you can, making sure your unique economics of your business actually are sensible. So I always look at that, I always look at, does it make sense actually? Does it make sense? You know, in a wide sense, right? Does it make sense for society? Does it make sense as a company?
6:25 Is it sustainable in the long run? And if you think, if you start feeling it is, actually, not only you can fundraise, but you can really accelerate, right? So that’s what we’re doing. So we try to be careful not to blow a big balloon that can blow up in any downturn.
6:41 Brian Rose: You know, there’s a famous acronym, ABC, Always Be Closing. But when I talk to you, it’s almost ABF, Always Be Fundraising.
6:49 And it sounds like you always keep a dialogue going with investors, you know, when and when you’re not. And when you are fundraising earlier, you said fundraising should be a video, not a snapshot. And I’ve never heard anyone say that. And I was wondering if you could expand on that a bit, because I think that’s a great lesson for people starting out or even people doing Series A, Series B rounds.
7:07 Nicolas Brusson: Yeah, I think you’re right. I think it’s something we’ve been doing. And I guess it’s also the experience of having worked as a VC for four years.
7:13 So I think seeing the other side of the equation. So having been from venture-backed company to venture capital in a way back to a venture-backed company, you understand the two sides of this ecosystem. And it’s an ecosystem. So essentially, I think it really matters to talk to investors, not that you should spend your life talking to investors, of course. But essentially, it’s like, if you need to raise money, make sure you can pick your investors. Make sure they understand your story.
7:41 Before they invest, they might help them. I can’t remember who was saying that, but there is this saying, which is like, if you want to raise money, ask for advice. If you want advice, ask for money. And in a way, it’s true. I mean, if you go to great investors and you say, well, look, here’s what we’re building, here’s the next step.
8:01 We might be too early stage for you guys for now, but that’s what we’re trying to build. What do you think we should do? Who do you think we should talk to? Actually, most people would help you. They would invest time and emotionally get tied into your story.
8:19 And then the Deve invest, again, it’s not like a picture that they’re just discovering on that day, thinking, should I invest? They’ve seen like an old movie of how you’ve built the company, how you delivered the problems you had, the solution you found. And when they joined the adventure, you have much better alignment in terms of like, where are we going to bring this thing? They’re going to be probably more helpful. And also, you know them, right? So it’s not like just someone bringing cash to someone who’s going to bring you, who’s going to help you, who’s going to bring advice, who’s going to bring connections that might be useful to the company, which should be useful to the company.
8:55 Brian Rose: Right. And you’re actually walking that walk because you just raised $100 million funding and yet you’re here this week, you’re at the NOAA conference, you’re still meeting with VCs and investors and you don’t need it. And that must be nice for them as well because it must not feel good as a VC just to get that phone call once every three years.
9:12 Nicolas Brusson: Yeah. If I think of the time we invest doing that, it’s not, again, it’s not like a massive investment of time.
9:18 And by the way, it’s also being connected to the ecosystem because these investors actually invest in companies we partner with, a company that we might want to acquire at some stage, companies that actually develop features that might be useful to us as tech platform, as marketing platform, and so on and so on. So it’s also about being connected and being plugged in. So today what we get from, and it’s not really talking to investors for the sake of fundraising, or today clearly we’re not going to fundraise anytime soon.
9:49 We just closed a pretty massive round. It’s more about being connected to the community essentially.
9:55 Brian Rose: Let’s get some nuts and bolts of blah, blah, car out of the way. I have to ask you about the name. How did it happen and have you ever thought about different names?
10:04 I think your original name was a French word and a French URL and then blah, blah, car. If you tell me how it happened and what that name means to people when you first tell them, you know, today.
10:14 Nicolas Brusson: Yeah. So the first name of the site was actually coverage.fr, which means essentially like ridesharing.com. Okay.
10:20 So it’s the French name, which is a descriptor for ridesharing if you like. And we’ve been using that name since the early days when Fred actually started the first website. And essentially we only transitioned back in 2011. So not that long ago, she was middle of 2011. And of course, the reason was you cannot scale with a French name. It makes no sense.
10:42 But the other one was we, the root of the name was the chattiness index on the website. So the chattiness index was when you sign up to blah, blah, car and you create your profile. Obviously we ask you for lots of information like your phone number, picture, your email. We verify your phone numbers. We do a few checks. And then we ask you for a bio and a few information about yourself like smoking, not smoking, pets, no pets.
11:06 And then one of the key thing is how much you talk in a car. And that’s what we call the chattiness index. And you can define yourself as a blah, blah, blah, or blah, blah, blah. Okay. And that’s how you talk in a car. And we found that it was like one of the key thing people look at and declare actually in their profile is how much they want to talk or not talk in a car.
11:26 And what we realized actually when it was called Covertureage under the French name, and we asked people like, okay, especially when I was traveling, I remember between Paris and Brussels back then. I was always asking my passengers, I was using it as a driver, like, how did you find me which website have you used? And people were like, I use some Covertureage, something website. And I was like, okay, what do you remember about the site? And they could not remember the name, they could not remember the URL, they could not remember the colors, but they remembered the blah, blah, chattiness index.
11:57 So we thought, okay, that’s like the sticky thing. This funky thing is actually very sticky and it sticks to people mind. And also it matters to people because if you think of the activity, we end up, even though it’s an online service, we end up bringing like two, three, four, five people together in a car for like three, four, five hours. So you have this like human connections you create. And of course, you also create potentially some social discomfort.
12:22 Like, do I want to talk? Do I want to talk to this guy? Who’s this guy? So the chattiness index was also like a bit of an icebreaker to say, if you send a blah as a driver, it means, okay, I’m just going to listen to my radio and I’m not going to talk. And if you have a blah, blah, blah, it means for you it’s a social experiment, right? So you want to meet people.
12:40 Brian Rose: I was listening to an interview with one of the Airbnb founders. There’s a class right now at Stanford called How to Start a Startup and they’re podcasting it out. And he was saying that he spoke with one of his early adopters that was renting his house out. And he said, you know, there was a crisis. I don’t know what it was.
12:56 Maybe it was the tsunami or I don’t know what it was. Maybe it was the Iceland volcano. And he said he got six phone calls. And then the next day his mother called him and he said the first six phone calls were people that had stayed at his house. And so he was just impressed how it was becoming like an experience and a social service.
13:15 And when I when I look at blah, blah, car, I’m thinking, you know, you’re you’re you’re you’re selling kind of an efficient way of getting a ride and using that capacity, but you’re probably building friendships. And so is it a social piece? Is that something you have to address or is that something that just takes care of itself?
13:31 Nicolas Brusson: It’s something that kind of takes care of itself. Right. So we don’t try to mandate anything.
13:35 So we don’t say, hey, you do that to meet people. We let the community decide essentially. So in a way, I mean, jokes aside, it’s kind of the point of his bloodline index. I mean, some people just do that because they can you have an empty car and they want to fill up a car. Some people do that because it’s a social sort of experiment.
13:52 And the value of social interaction. Right. And somewhere somewhere in the middle. And you have three choices and one block or three blocks. Okay. And which is again, it’s just like a signaling.
14:02 So it’s just like you signal if you’re somewhere in the middle or if you if you don’t want to talk, if you want to talk a lot. But in terms of like social interaction, it’s very powerful because if you think of the activity, there are actually very few online activities that bring people together offline at that scale. Right. Most online activities actually do the opposite. They take the offline human interactions out of the equation. Right.
14:26 So it’s e-commerce. It’s all these things where today, like I buy stuff on Amazon and boom, it gets shipped. I don’t talk to anyone essentially. Right.
14:34 Brian Rose: Eventbrite comes to mind and then like Airbnb.
14:36 Nicolas Brusson: But I can’t even think of another one that pushes people to an offline experience. Airbnb does that. I mean, unless you rent the old flat. But if you rent part of the flat, boom, you’re going to interact with your host. Maybe even bright. But there are a few that actually create that level of human connections.
14:51 And in the case of black car, it’s always going to be the case because you’re always there. The driver and the passengers are always going to meet. You never run the old car. There is always the driver in the car. Right.
15:01 So when you think that today, we have like over 2 million people using the service every month. It means it’s like over 2 million human connections of on average three or four hours every month. So if you think this way, it’s like millions and millions of like hours of human connections we create that would not happen otherwise. And then what we ask them to do is to review each other. Right.
15:24 So you essentially have this peer review system. And what we find is unlike most reviews, when you write like a buyer or a seller on eBay, which you haven’t met. So in fact, you don’t write the person, you write the service they gave you by shipping something. Here, it’s different. You don’t write really the service.
15:42 I mean, you write the service perhaps, but you actually write or not write, but you review, you talk about the person. So we have like over 10 million peer to peer reviews, building trust in the community. And all these, I mean, not all, but like vast majority of these reviews have a text. Right. So somebody is going to say, hey, Brian is a great guy. He’s running this show and he’s doing this and he’s doing that. And if you write with Ryan, you should talk to him about this and this and that.
16:05 And it’s invaluable because you essentially building this massive trust layer in our community that enables the service to grow because the more reviews we get, the more information we get about our members, the easier it gets for a new guy to join and say, hey, okay, now I have the choice between Brian as a driver or John or Emily. And I have like all this information about those drivers and you might pick on price and location, but you might also pick on, okay, Brian sounds like an interesting guy. And I feel like I’m going to have a nice discussion with Brian more than with John.
16:38 Brian Rose: And that information, you build a database like that, that becomes really powerful. It’s almost like a credit rating in a weird way, a personal rating.
16:47 Nicolas Brusson: Yeah, you end up building in a way, you end up building like a trusted network. And today, I mean, we’re talking over 10 million members and growth is accelerating. So in a few years, it might be hundreds of millions of members on that account on a global scale.
17:02 Of course, they’re doing an activity, which is ride sharing, but actually we’re also building this trusted community. So I attempt to think of that this way that we’re building really two core assets. I mean, one is this transport network that’s people powered. And then as you build trust in this community, there are so many other things you can do in a way. Because now you know you have so much information about these members, and you know who’s very active, who’s highly trusting in that community, and they could do much more actually than even ride sharing in the long run.
17:30 So it’s interesting to think of it this way. It’s like these two things sort of feed into each other. Right.
17:35 Brian Rose: That’s the difference between a community and a marketplace in a way. When did you decide that you’re not going to be a French company, you’re going to be a European company?
17:42 Because you’ve mentioned this, and it is a very important distinction that I think has resulted in your growth.
17:50 Nicolas Brusson: Yes. So we had a very organic start as a company. And it really went back to the origin of coverage of the French side. It was actually when Fred started the first website back in 2005.
18:03 So it was not even incorporated as a company. So he started that as a service based on his own frustration, essentially, of trying to go back for Christmas, actually, to go back to his family. He could not find a train. And he thought, okay, there must be something like that back car. And back then, it’s not like you invent something like that, because people have been doing that for a long time.
18:25 But there was nothing at any scale that was like an organized ride sharing website in a way. So he started to code that. And then he took quite some time because we met. So the three co-founders, actually, Fred, Francis, and I, actually, we all met around late 2006, early 2007. That’s when the company was formed.
18:44 And then there was this slow phase where I went into venture capital. Fred was finishing his MBA. Francis was actually still working for a tech company called Mitik in France, which is now Match.com, actually. So it was like a date inside. And then, slowly, over time, we committed to the company.
19:04 So Fred, in 2008, Francis, in late 2008 or 2009, and we had the first employee in 2009. And the 2009 to 2000, I would say 11 phase, was about proving the concept, building the community in France. So it was very much a French company, going from first employee in 2009 to, I’m going to get this one with maybe like 12, 15 by sometime in 2011. I actually joined back the company in 2011. And back then, essentially, the French community was still pretty small.
19:35 But we could see usage. I mean, we could see like, hey, people are using this thing. It’s real. It was not yet monetized in any way. So there was essentially no revenue to speak of from the company.
19:47 But we could see usage. We could see value being created. And then the idea, or at least my idea in coming back, was, hey, no one is doing that anywhere else in Europe, pretty much. And if we wait too long, and if we spend like two or three years building this French business, actually, it’s only going to be a French business. For two reasons.
20:05 I mean, A, because you’re going to have competitors doing the same thing eventually in every other country. And then also, when you get to a scale of like 1,500 people in a company, changing the DNA is almost impossible. I mean, it’s hard. I mean, it’s impossible. It’s hard.
20:19 Whereas if you do it early and you say, well, guys, actually, we’re going to change the game. I mean, our market is not fast. It’s Europe. So today, we need to think of our market as being Spain, plus Italy, plus Germany, plus UK, plus Poland. So it’s all these markets.
20:31 That’s our market. That’s what we need to tackle now. And the way we’ve…
20:36 Brian Rose: Which isn’t a French thing to do traditionally. Which isn’t a…
20:40 Nicolas Brusson: In a weird way, which isn’t a European thing to do.
20:42 Brian Rose: Right. And the French thing to do either. The countries in Europe tended to focus inward.
20:47 Nicolas Brusson: Yeah, they tend to focus…
20:48 Which is rational in a way.
20:50 Brian Rose: Right, good language.
20:51 Nicolas Brusson: It’s language. It’s also more comfortable. It’s also like…
20:54 You know what? It’s a function of Europe. We all different countries with different regulations, different tax, different visa, different that. So you tend to do like your e-commerce for Germany or marketplace for the UK. And it’s something that really became very obvious to me when I was in venture capital in London, was to see that most internet companies, especially consumer internet, in Europe, we ended up building what I call the single country winners.
21:21 So we ended up winning in one country and that’s it. So a good example of that… I mean, there are lots actually, but a good example is back in the first wave of internet, real estate. So if you think of real estate here in the UK, you have right move. No one knows right move outside of the UK.
21:39 It’s a UK-only company essentially. In France, you have something called Sologet. It’s exactly the same thing. It’s worth roughly a billion as well. Great French company.
21:48 No one has ever heard of this thing outside of France. In Germany, you have something called Immobillion. Same thing, worth probably a billion or so, only in Germany. Now, if you think like, okay, if someone had tackled all these markets and built this like European-scale company, it would have been like a 10 billion plus company actually. And that changed the game in Europe because suddenly we would be building this sort of long-term standalone big tech company.
22:12 So I always put like, okay, we’re missing out something here, which is like, why do we build like four or five or six different companies in Europe in every country as opposed to a European company? And the main issue is we don’t think of a market as being Europe, right? Or at least not early enough. So we tried to inject that DNA into Blabec car. And essentially, we had to do several things, right?
22:34 We had to change some of the hiring. So it was like hiring like international people. So we hired people to speak good English, but also traveled around, lived in different countries. We had to build local teams. So it was like my strong belief was the way you tackle Germany or Spain is by having a team on the ground with Spanish people.
22:54 Brian Rose: Which means acquisition potentially?
22:56 Nicolas Brusson: Which means also acquisitions. So it was like the way you do that is you hire, well, actually you acquire or acquire, I should say. And then you find these great teams and you say, hey, join us and be part of the adventure and you’re going to be Blabec car Spain and you’re going to be Blabec car Germany. And we’ve done that, right?
23:11 So we’ve done that in Italy and Germany, which was one acquisition actually German guy. We started Italy and then we started Germany together. We’ve done that in Poland. We’ve done that in Russia and Ukraine. So a big chunk of Blabec car today is the product of like some of these acquisitions.
23:29 So that’s how we’ve built the footprint all over Europe and even Russia today. And then, of course, the other thing we had to do was fundraising. Because very quickly you start building this fire power where you say, okay, we’re going to launch all these countries at once, or not at once, but pretty rapidly. And then you do fundraise. And it was the toughest, not the toughest, but the, yeah, it was kind of a tough fundraising.
23:55 It was back in December 2011 when we closed 10 million with Accel. Because Accel actually backed, you’re very much a vision of we can become European, but nothing was proven, right? So essentially like they came in thinking, okay, we think you guys are the right team. We believe the vision. We think you execute pretty well.
24:16 Go for it with 10 million. And then we continued toward the thinking of like, okay, we need to become a European company, i.e. our markets need to be Europe. And that’s a game changer. Because when you manage to do that, which I think we are in the process of doing, I mean, today we leader pretty much in every market in Europe with Blabec car, which is pretty unusual for European companies.
24:39 Then you end up changing scale completely. And you can say, well, now we’re going to tackle the rest of the world, but not from being a French company, from having Europe as our footprint. And I remember like when we raised the $100 million, which is essentially like the same story, but France to Europe became Europe to global. I remember like I had this meeting in Silicon Valley with a pretty well-known investor. And I was asking him like, okay, would you invest in a French company?
25:12 Is that a problem for you, given you’re in Silicon Valley and you tend to invest a lot in the U.S. and in Silicon Valley? And I had this slide, actually, as we were talking, which was just like one slide of the deck I was showing him, where you had essentially a map of the world with all the countries where we are and all the countries where we’re going to with dates. And he turned to the slide and he told me, well, look, when I look at this, I mean, I think of you guys.
25:39 You’re just a global company that happens to be HQed in Paris, and I don’t care about that because what I care about is that you’re a global company.
25:47 Brian Rose: So that’s interesting. It means you can shift the paradigm as your people don’t see you as being a French or German or this or that company. Your vessel says, okay, we’re a global company, but you had to have that success in Europe first for probably the credibility to say that you could go global and for, I guess, the whole culture.
26:05 Nicolas Brusson: Yeah, exactly. Because I think if you’ve only proven France, let’s say, or Germany or whatever, wherever you start from, and then you go and you say, now we’re going to go global, we’re going to be like, okay, but your initial footprint, what you’ve proven so far is actually quite tiny. Whereas if you’ve proven Europe, in a way, if you’re a U.S. company, if you have the U.S. market, which is as big as Europe, if not bigger, then, of course, you can use that as a platform to say, now I’m going to go global.
26:32 So to go global, you need Europe as a platform.
26:35 Brian Rose: Right. But that’s quite a pioneering way of going about it, as in there’s not a real history of doing it that way. And America is something that always comes up on this show. And funny enough, we’ve had people like Damian Kimmelman of Doodil and recently Nick Congerford of Nutmeg who are in no rush to get to America.
26:52 They see the size of the markets in the UK and then the regulation issues in America. And they’re not in a rush to go over there. And then we’ve got people like YPlan that see it as a very necessary step to go right away. So what is your timeframe for America? And you’re obviously not in a rush because you’ve got a lot of other things to do.
27:08 Brian Rose: You mentioned you just went into Turkey a week ago. That’s pretty exciting. Are you not in a rush?
27:13 Nicolas Brusson: No, I think right now we’re not. And I think it’s even beyond that.
27:17 I mean, we raised this round essentially being pretty clear that it was not good to the US. So it doesn’t mean it would never go to the US, but essentially it was not. And it’s interesting because you see lots of people saying that essentially if you raise that kind of money, it’s for a US plan. Well, in our case, it’s not. And it’s very interesting because it means it’s possible too.
27:41 And it means like the mindset has changed. So today if you say, and again, it’s back to what we talked about. If you say, well, actually we own Europe and that’s pretty big as a market, especially for what we do. Transport, it’s a very big market. And then if you say, well, look at Russia, look at India, let’s look at the town, let’s look at Turkey, those are huge markets too.
28:00 So people see that as, okay, you have a global play. You’re building like this global transport network. If you come to the US, great. If you don’t, that’s fine too.
28:09 Brian Rose: Yeah, it’s a bit surprising when you see European companies saying, well, actually I need to go to the US because 80% of my market is in the US.
28:17 Then you almost think like, well, okay, reincorporate in the US. And maybe you started on the wrong side of the pond. Travel and leisure actually in Europe is maybe a bigger market than the US. Talk to me about France. We had Roxanne Vars in here six, eight months ago, but you’re the second person I think that’s French that’s been on this show.
28:33 Nicolas Brusson: That could be our fault.
28:34 Brian Rose: And when we hear about tech startups, everyone talks about Rocket in Berlin and we talk about the Nordic countries. But it’s not something that we always have seen France promote, whether it’s a startup business or tech startup, you have an intimate knowledge of that. What’s it feel like being in Paris? You guys are probably one of the biggest stories there and one of the biggest pioneers.
28:55 Brian Rose: And does France get a bad rap when it comes to the impression of a startup?
29:00 Nicolas Brusson: Yeah, I think it’s a lot of bad communication at the government level to some extent. So especially about taxes and so on. I mean, every time the French government communicates around taxes, it’s a disaster. It’s always bad news when they talk about taxes.
29:16 In fact, it tends to be bad news, if I’m honest. But beyond that, the way it’s communicated is pretty poor. So it’s always poorly communicated and then you end up with these stories in English-speaking newspapers that give the impression that essentially it’s horrible, impossible to grow and do business in France, which in reality is not quite true. So in reality, it’s actually not that bad. And especially like starting a company in France is not that bad because you get quite a few subsidies, you get some help from the government.
29:54 So actually you know that they don’t communicate on that. They communicate on like high tax brackets because that’s what gets picked up by the media when in fact the environment is not that bad. It’s not that bad at all. And in terms of companies, you know, it’s funny. We share our office with Criteo.
30:12 Brian Rose: And Criteo, you were talking about French success actually. Did Index invest in them as well?
30:17 Nicolas Brusson: Index is also an investor, yes. And it’s a company that IPO’d, I think a year ago. It doesn’t get talked about enough.
30:24 It’s a B2B business. So it’s known as, I mean, B2B Card being such a consumer internet company. Lots of people know B2B Card. The brand awareness of B2B Card is massive. Whereas Criteo is a B2B business, right?
30:36 So no one knows Criteo. But that’s a big company. I mean, you’re talking, I don’t know how many employees they have, but it must be 1,000. It’s a company worth a few billions actually on NASDAQ today. So it’s a big French success.
30:49 And even like the scale of Europe, there are not many companies of that scale in Europe today. So you have like maybe Spotify and a few others. So there are some companies coming out of France. Not enough. Not enough at like super high scale.
31:05 But again, it’s about, if you look at Criteo, what they’ve done well, again, expansion. So I think that’s kind of the key. It’s like, and whether it’s like French companies or German companies or British companies, it’s like, how do we tackle the European market or how do we tackle a bigger market from European countries?
31:22 Brian Rose: Talk to me about company culture. There was a quote that said, blah, blah, car is like a rocket internet company with a teddy bear at the top of the company.
31:30 You’re known for having really highly motivated people, really focused on what you do, really passionate people. I mean, that comes from the top, comes from you guys. Is that something? I mean, you obviously spent time in Silicon Valley where culture is such a big part of it. Is that something you made a real distinction of early on that we’re going to do certain things this way or we’re going to have things feel this way?
31:51 Is it something you’re proud of?
31:53 Nicolas Brusson: Yeah, for sure. It’s something we as a founding team and we as a company are proud of. I think it comes from two things. It comes from the activity itself, actually.
32:02 So if you think of the nature of the activity, our members are pretty proud because they do something that makes sense. So you have this feeling of participating in something good. You’re sharing your car with other people. So, of course, not only you make money or you save money because you’ll be building this low-cost transport network, but you also participate in something that makes sense from the social sense, makes sense for the environment. We increase car occupancy massively.
32:28 Blah, blah, blah, car is like 2.7 people per car as opposed to 1.5 on average in Europe. And, of course, if you do that, if you have that as a community, it goes back up into your employees and the founding team. So it’s something that matters to us, right? It’s just building this very collaborative trusting and sharing culture within the company. Fred, Francis and I actually spend a lot of time doing that, essentially.
32:57 And not just us, it’s even all the managers we have in the company spend a lot of time maintaining that culture, which is a challenge, actually, as you grow, right? Because, especially as you grow the way we grow, in many countries with local teams and even through acquisition, it’s like, okay, how do you preserve culture? How do you do that in Poland or in Russia? Yes, so we do. It’s a very good question, actually.
33:18 So the way we do that is by… So, different level, actually. To a first level, we do that by maintaining the brand and the value of the service across these countries. So we never went into adding different brand names in different countries, right? So it’s all by car.
33:35 It’s all the same service and so on. Which helps, right? Because it means the same values, the same feeling, the same site, the same service, the same communication to same marketing. Everything is pretty consistent across the board, again, at the community level. And then at the employee level, what we do is we bring back at least all the country managers every six weeks to HQ, so to Paris, for at least a week, and we synchronize, right?
34:02 So essentially, we spend a lot of time, like, talking about the strategy, talking about the next step for each country. And to do that, we’ve built some central teams, which are actually based mostly in Paris, but a bit between Paris and London, actually. So we have a growth team, which focuses, like, how do we grow the activity in every country? We have a communication team, which is about, like, how do we communicate the activity and how do we communicate in general across all these countries?
34:27 We have a brand and marketing team, which is, like, how do we preserve the brand in all these countries? And then we have a new business team, which is about, like, how do we launch new countries? So those are sort of the central pillars. And then you have all these local teams, and now we have nine, and at some point, we’ll have, like, maybe 15 or 20, essentially managing the old countries. So it’s really interesting because the fact that you bring people back together pretty often, and that we travel, these central teams actually travel a lot, and we have people actually traveling a lot, so it’s a big investment in a way.
34:57 And then there’s lots of small things, like we have a company meeting every week, where it’s not just, like, I mean, it’s not just us, the founding team talking, it’s actually every team is going to go one after the other week after week, and they present you the rest of the company. And we’ve set up, like, a video cast, where it’s actually broadcasted to all the offices. So it’s half an hour every week, I know everybody’s watching that, and everybody gets an update on what’s going on with product, what’s going on with customer service team, what’s going on with the new business team.
35:27 We actually allow people to go spend a week in any office they want, for what, I mean, for no reason, I mean, not like a business trip, so if they want to go and spend a week in Milan and work a week from Milan, we sponsor that, right? So, and the idea here is that a developer in Paris is going to go spend a week working with the Italian team, or the Russian team, and then when he comes back, he’s going to realize, oh, can I understand the challenge of his team? I understand what they’re trying to do in Russia, and it’s different from what I’m seeing in France, for example.
35:57 And then you become, like, a previous modern developer, because you start to understand, like, okay, I’m part of a global company, and I need to help these guys. And you realize that, okay, maybe the community is younger than our community in XYZ country. So we cross-pollinate a lot. And culture is essential for your success. I think it’s essential to any company’s success in the long run, right?
36:19 So if you don’t keep values and culture as you grow, it becomes disjointed, right? So today we invest a lot on that.
36:25 Brian Rose: Right, and people, employees, need much more than a value proposition. The great companies really think they’re changing the world, you know, especially the marketplace companies like Uber and Airbnb. I mean, they think they’re providing something that’s, you know, changing people’s lives.
36:40 And I’m guessing it’s the same with you.
36:42 Nicolas Brusson: I think it’s the same for most of our employees. They don’t feel, and I think frankly, they don’t feel they work for a company. I think they’re part of a movement. And again, like, also they, most of them, I guess, are very proud to work for something like Bye-Bye Car because, again, it’s meaningful.
36:59 You can talk to your friend and say, well, here’s what we’re doing, and here’s how fast it’s growing, and here’s the impact. So it’s not like working for your average company.
37:08 Brian Rose: Right, well, you’ve done your job. What can you learn from Uber and Airbnb? I mean, I know your service is different because you actually create demand, which is kind of fascinating about what you do.
37:18 You know, when you offer up these routes that previously weren’t available, all of a sudden, you know, people take those routes, which is kind of fascinating and different. But what have you learned by watching them both scale and, you know, different ways to attack a marketplace, different things not to do, or have you not learned anything or you go to a completely different company?
37:37 Nicolas Brusson: So Uber clearly has been fascinating to watch, but maybe two things. Actually, one is scaling speed.
37:42 It’s phenomenal.
37:43 Brian Rose: Yeah. Phenomenal. 250 cities or something?
37:45 Nicolas Brusson: 250 cities in a very short time.
37:47 So if I look at that, I’m like, wow, right? From the scaling point of view. Impressed.
37:52 Brian Rose: How did they do it, right?
37:54 Nicolas Brusson: Yeah, I think they impressed every company.
37:56 I don’t know if it’s the fastest company ever, but pretty close. Yeah. So there’s something impressive here. The other thing about Uber is obviously the regulation challenge, which for us is very different, though, right? So we don’t have that regulation challenge at all.
38:14 So it’s kind of interesting to see how Uber is attacking that issue being so frontal with regulators. And for us, it’s never been an issue, and maybe less so than Uber or Airbnb, because the old paradigm of a black car is around cost sharing and sharing a ride you would do anyway.
38:31 Brian Rose: Talk to me about safety. Is it an issue that comes up? I guess it’s probably a glaring thing people ask right away.
38:38 Is it safe to ride in the cars with strangers? I don’t know if you offer a service for women only, or if that’s something you’re looking at. I could see why there’s demand, but I could see why there’s demand for a lot of different marketplaces like that. What do you say to people when they ask you, and has it been an issue?
38:53 Nicolas Brusson: Yeah, so obviously it’s core to what we do, right?
38:55 Right. So trust and safety is core to what we do. And again, if you think of the assets we create, so this transport network and this trusted community, it’s a trusted community, so trust is very much there. And so what we end up doing, and then I’ll go into some more details, but it’s like verifications. So we end up verifying things about our members, whether it’s like essentially you cannot sign up to the service without verifying your mobile phone.
39:23 So every account is linked to a mobile phone. In some countries, you can only Facebook connect to the service, like Turkey, for example. Okay. Interestingly, we’re doing that. And then over time, actually, we built a lot more.
39:35 You’ll be asking for your bio. We verified your bank account when you get a payment in countries where we enable payment. So we do lots of verifications. So you have like a strong verification block, essentially. And then the other one, which is very powerful, is peer reviews, right?
39:51 So we allow people to wreck each other. So over time, actually, we built lots of information, verification, and knowledge, and peer review, and self-regulation within the community to ensure you enable trust. The other thing we do is we have like a ladies-only feature. So if you want only to have like female passengers as a female driver, you can, and same thing as a passenger. Increasingly, you can see also who booked in the car.
40:19 So for example, if you’re a female passenger and you see that actually in the car, you already have a male passenger and a female passenger, and you’re going to be the third person, you probably feel more comfortable if it’s the first time you use the service. It’s all these things actually help building trust. And last but not least, we have a customer service team, essentially almost pretty much 24-7. You have helped people run and search a ticket, reply to alerts, and things like that, right?
40:49 So it’s something we take very seriously as we should because that’s what powers the rest, right? So it’s like building this trusted community in the long run that’s going to power black-back cars or transport network, or maybe something else in the future.
41:02 Brian Rose: Right. What’s next for you? You’re the COO, the next 12 months.
41:05 Are you shooting for profitability at some point? Do you kind of look at that by local markets, or what are your big milestones coming up?
41:14 Nicolas Brusson: Yeah, so today, I would say it’s two things. It’s global and mobile. So it’s really getting into this global footprint.
41:22 So we’re super excited by markets like Russia, who’s been the fastest-growing market we’ve had since the beginning.
41:30 Brian Rose: Really? Why?
41:31 Nicolas Brusson: I think what we do in countries like Russia, but I think we’ll see also Turkey, maybe India even more, Latin America, it’s more fundamental than what we’ve been doing in Europe. Because in Europe, actually, the transport infrastructure is pretty good.
41:48 It’s expensive, it’s old, but it’s pretty good, right? And it’s there, right? And I would say it’s in that equation with the demand. In countries like Russia or probably even more Turkey and India, we’re not yet, but we’re very keen on India and we plan to go in the near future. The infrastructure is actually not that good.
42:11 It’s not like you have great trends in those countries. It’s not like you have right anything, really. It’s technology from 30 years ago. Yeah, it doesn’t scale with demand, right? So sometimes it’s fully booked.
42:25 And that’s it. Come back later. I hear that story a lot in Turkey. I’ve heard the story in India. In Turkey, we launched before a big weekend actually in Turkey.
42:33 And the biggest issue people had was not even like price or anything like that. It was they could not book a bus ticket anymore. It was too late. Everything was fully booked. So by doing that, we enabled, we created this additional supply, which is very, very good, because you end up like riding in a car, which is faster than riding in a bus.
42:50 It’s cheaper than the bus and it’s available.
42:52 Brian Rose: Wind’s across the board. Wind’s across the board. You love those businesses.
42:55 Nicolas Brusson: Yeah, exactly.
42:56 So if you look at like, whereas in Europe, if you look at like a train, for example, we’re not going to go faster than the German trains or the French trains. But back to emerging markets, I think there is a huge play for us there. So it’s going to be one of the focus values for the, I don’t know, like one, two, three years ahead. And the other thing is we launching these markets just on mobile. So Turkey is just on mobile.
43:23 So today we’re also shifting, because we’ve always grown from desktop. So we have both. So we have usage on both. Right now, all these new markets, it’s going to be 100% mobile. Wow.
43:35 So it’s like a shift also of like, it’s a double shift of DNA. It’s like now we’re a global company. And by the way, the only product we’re going to launch in these markets is a mobile app.
43:44 Brian Rose: Is that pushing from the top, saying if we can own this in mobile, that’s where the market’s going anyways. So let’s not try to hedge our bets.
43:50 Let’s just go. Do you mean it’s like, yes. Or is that a necessity in emerging markets where the marketplace is mobile only?
43:58 Nicolas Brusson: It’s in fact both, because if you look at usage in these markets, it’s gone mobile actually even faster than Europe or the U.S. Because they almost skipped to some extent like desktop.
44:10 And today, like forcing yourself to say, well, now that’s all we have in these markets. We are launched by the cars, 100% mobile app in these markets. Scary. A little scary. It’s a little scary, but it forces you as a company to actually innovate on mobile.
44:26 And suddenly you break the circle of being in your comfort zone of thinking like, okay, we need to develop the desktop features. And at the end, if you become really good at something, the danger is that you stay there. Because it’s your comfort zone.
44:41 Brian Rose: Innovator’s dilemma, isn’t it?
44:43 Nicolas Brusson: Yeah, exactly.
44:44 So in a way, I’m kind of using right now emerging markets to say it’s 100% mobile. And then suddenly as the usage is going on in these markets, of course it flows back into the old tech and product team and so on, which is like suddenly it’s like, oh, we need to be better at building a product for mobile. We need to be better at marketing on mobile. We need to be better at getting users and acquisition channels on mobile. So all these things tend to follow.
45:08 And I hope like in a year, when we develop something, we’ll think, okay, it’s just mobile. Oh, by the way, we need to do desktop as well.
45:16 Brian Rose: Right. That’s right. But that’s what you want essentially.
45:19 Nicolas Brusson: And it’s a risk for us to be, in the long run, to be stuck to a desktop application for too long. And the danger is that there is like lots of platform stickiness in a way. So if people discovered something on desktop, even though you have a great mobile app, they might not try it because they have the same comfort of like, oh, okay, I’ve been using Expedia on desktop for a long time. Oh, booking.com on desktop for a long time comes Hotel Tonight on a mobile app.
45:49 Bang, I’m going to switch to a new usage. You can lose people because they see that as, okay, I’m not going to use the same thing on my phone as I was using on my desktop.
45:58 Brian Rose: Right. It almost has a legacy issue. I feel that with Amazon, I’m still more comfortable buying Amazon on my desktop because I think I learned it that way.
46:07 So I know it’s not exactly what you’re talking about, but it’s like I’m less likely to use their app because I’m not used to it.
46:12 Nicolas Brusson: Mobile enables actually more features. It’s location aware. It’s lots of things, right? It knows lots of things about you actually on your phone, by the way, which your desktop doesn’t know.
46:20 If you think of it, like a desktop is pretty clueless about who you are compared to the phone.
46:25 Brian Rose: Right. It has cookies and IPs, but it doesn’t have a whole lot of other information.
46:29 Nicolas Brusson: Yeah. So you shouldn’t look at it as a limit.
46:31 You shouldn’t look at it as a limit.
46:33 Brian Rose: Yeah. So you can do something a lot more personal on a phone than you can do on a desktop. Profitability. Is that something that’s on your mind?
46:40 Nicolas Brusson: No.
46:40 Brian Rose: Is that something where you would like to get there?
46:44 Nicolas Brusson: Eventually. Good to see you. I hope so.
46:47 So eventually we want the business to make sense. No, today, not at all actually to be clear because today it’s about growing the footprint. So today we choose not to be profitable. We choose to grow the footprint. I guess what’s important, as I was saying earlier, is to make sure your unit economics actually makes sense.
47:11 And then if you realize that, okay, my unit economics makes sense once I monetize or once I activate my business model, then in my mind it’s okay to fundraise and scale because you know long-term you’re building value and you’re building something that can be profitable in the long run. Today, essentially, if our choice was to be profitable today, we would be missing out on something much bigger. And much bigger for the company, but also much bigger for society, much bigger for how we can change transport and the way people travel on a global scale.
47:43 So today if you want to do Russia and Turkey and Latin America and India, all of that at the same time, of course the trade-off is you fundraise, you don’t become profitable, you build this massive usage and massive transport network and then over time you rationalize that as a business. And you have the capital, so you have the luxury of making that decision. And that’s the most intelligent decision.
48:07 Brian Rose: Yeah, and that’s the point of the fundraising. Right, right, right.
48:11 Brian Rose: I always ask everyone that comes on here a couple questions at the end. I’m going to ask you, if you could make a phone call to the 20-year-old Nicolas and give that young man a bit of advice. I’m guessing you were still in France or you hadn’t gone to California yet. What would you tell him?
48:30 Nicolas Brusson: To the 20-year-old Nicolas, oh my God.
48:32 Nicolas Brusson: Yeah, it’s interesting. So 20-year-old I knew nothing about startups and I was studying physics.
48:40 Brian Rose: Were you entrepreneurial?
48:42 Nicolas Brusson: No. At all? No, no, no. Interesting.
48:45 No, it’s interesting because if I think of it, I don’t know if I would change, I mean I would change plenty of things, right, but at the end I tend not to look back so much because you cannot change the past. Yeah. So I tend to look at like what are we going to do for the next five years more than what I could have done differently in the last 15. So back then it was like my life was science and physics and in a way, and that’s a background we share with Fred, actually we both have a physics background and it’s interesting because I think the way we think still today in terms of like these communities and these big numbers and so on is very much like physicists.
49:22 Like you think of that as like, it’s not really math because it’s not like absolute reality, absolute numbers, it’s more like you try to model people’s behavior.
49:32 Brian Rose: Like applied physics.
49:33 Nicolas Brusson: Yeah, it’s applied physics, right, so it’s like because people often ask us like how do you know it’s going to work in a market, it’s not going to work in a market. And what we do is we do this rational analysis of, you know, are they cars and what’s the price of petrol and what’s the cost of transport, but there is the whole aspect which is like culturally is it going to work or not and how people behave and that’s more like touch, it’s more like physics where when you launch, you launch your activity, you launch your service and then you see how people interact.
50:07 How do they contact each other? Do they call each other? Do they message? How do they review each other? How do we make sure like when people have spent two or three or four hours together, they’re comfortable reviewing each other?
50:18 And you kind of try to model that into a product that makes sense and in a way it’s a bit of physics skills, right? It’s a bit like the way you model how is like a camera working, how is something falling on the floor? It’s actually, there’s no, it’s not like pure math, it’s just like modeling something and we think of the business a bit like that.
50:42 Brian Rose: And you have wonderful data, right?
50:45 Nicolas Brusson: I guess I’m glad I studied physics and then the way I get into startup is, frankly, it’s a bit of luck.
50:52 It’s a bit of like a random path. If I think of luck, I mean, we, you know, 2007 actually, there was this massive strike actually in France. So like one of the biggest train strike in history. And guess what happened? Like lots of people actually discovered for the first time blackback car, which was not called blackback car, but for the first time we could see the light.
51:13 We could see like, ooh, people are using the service. It’s interesting. In 2010, I think it was, there was the ash cloud. We talked about the ash cloud earlier. All the air traffic actually was stopped for like a week, I think, something like that, right?
51:27 It was massive. And then for the, it was like a huge spike of activity and PR for us all over Europe because people were stranded. So trains were full. So people were actually helping each other with cars. And people were like, we’ve seen some metering to Paris.
51:42 We’ve seen people like a massive peak of activity. It was almost hard to maintain the servers actually back then. And like, again, it’s this like kind of lucky event that sort of triggered the marketplace in the early days. Of course, now it’s different. We have money.
51:58 We have recipes. We understand how to educate the market. But back then, frankly, it was 2007 and even 2010. We almost knew many. So yeah, ash cloud to kickstart your activity.
52:09 Brian Rose: Right. These were lucky events in the creation company. Second part of that question is best advice you’ve ever received, business or personal in your career?
52:19 Nicolas Brusson: It was a hard question. I wish I had prepared because you received so many advice and sometimes you don’t realize the advice.
52:27 I mean, what I mentioned was, yeah, in the early days, it was, well, actually one of the best advice was, I remember like when I was working in venture capital with Hermann Auser, who’s a very emblematic figure actually in UK venture capital. He was the founder of Acorn, which is the UK Apple and then Aarn, which is the processor’s phone. And every time we saw companies, you had these entrepreneurs saying, oh, my exit strategy is going to be something, something, something.
52:59 Like I’m going to sell to eBay. I’m going to be acquired by this and that. And Hermann Auser was like, don’t worry about your exit strategy or don’t worry about this thing. Just keep growing 100% year on year and something good is going to happen. And I think it was the best advice he was giving to these guys.
53:14 And when people ask us, I really repeat that, because I believe it’s true. It’s like, you know what? Focus on like growth, expanding, building a great service and growing fast. And then like, essentially something good is going to happen.
53:26 Brian Rose: Last part of that question is to the 20-year-old that’s out there listening to us that could be living in one of the markets you’re about to enter, or Turkey, Brazil, or some of these other India.
53:36 What advice do you give to them if they want to have a career like you, you know, if they want to, you know, start from non-tech or non-entrepreneurial and become to grow to one day be the COO of a company like BlaBlaCar? What would you tell them?
53:49 Nicolas Brusson: I would think today the environment has changed, especially in Europe, right? So if we talk about like European entrepreneurs, I mean today you have like first, I mean, sorry, second or third generation actually entrepreneurs.
54:01 So you have people that, you know, started companies in the 2000 era, they started companies like us. So we said like, get mentorship. And you can do it in two ways. I mean, A, you can do it by get a bit of angel investment from guys who’ve done it before, or even go work for these companies actually for a few years and see like what they’re doing well, what they’re not doing well, how they structured the company, and maybe just doing that for a few years is going to teach you a lot when you start your company.
54:28 So, you know, if you’re just out of school, I mean, obviously you have these like complete outliers like the Marcus Zuckerberg and Bill Gates, which don’t even finish their studies and they build these incredible companies. But I think there is this study actually showing that statistically the most successful entrepreneurs tend to be in their 30s, like early 30s when they start their company, which essentially means, yeah, they’ve been working for like five, 10 years. So they’ve been seeing a bit, quite a bit, but they still have hunger, right?
54:55 So they’re not like 50 year old and thinking like, okay, I’m going to retire pretty soon. So I think it’s, to me, a good advice would be, hey, maybe you work for some of the best companies out there growing fast, see how they’re doing, see what they’re doing well, not well, get mentorship from the other founders or exec teams or some of the employees that have been there from day one or from the early days, learn from that and then maybe start your company.
55:21 Brian Rose: Yeah, yeah.
55:22 I’m always a little suspicious when people kind of start a startup straight out of university and I always think, you know, there’s just so much you can glean from being around mentors or whether they’re formal or not or even, you know, I used to slam my previous career in banking, but I even think even a big company, you can learn a lot for a couple of years just to see how things can be run. I think the best advice is to just go do something.
55:42 Nicolas Brusson: Yeah, and just for me, it was my path.
55:44 I mean, like seven years in Silicon Valley was you’re being involved in like different stage. I mean, I’ve seen a company from 35 to 150, down to 10 to 10 to back to 150. So you see these phases of growth, right? So you see like from like raising crazy, crazy around and money doesn’t matter to chapter 11 and not paying ourselves. I learned a lot and then I learned in venture capital, which is very interesting too, especially if you’ve done actually seven years of like being an operator in a startup and then you jump into venture capital because then again, you end up seeing from a different perspective, a different prism, you know, from the board, essentially, you end up seeing lots of companies at different stage.
56:24 Brian Rose: Yeah, it’s quite a perfect CV for what you’re doing now. So I guess that’s why you’re here. Nicolas, thanks so much for the time. Thank you. If people want to look for a job with you or if they just want to get on BlaBlaCar, what’s the best way for them to do it?
56:38 Nicolas Brusson: So it’s all on the website, right? So you go to blabbercar.com and then we have like websites for every country and I don’t know how many job openings we have, but tons in every country.
56:47 Brian Rose: And if you’re in Turkey, go straight to the mobile, right?
56:50 Nicolas Brusson: Exactly. Just download the app.
56:52 Go right to the app.
56:53 Brian Rose: Fantastic. It’s a great story. Now I understand why, you know, index is back and you were so big and it’s interesting, you know, other marketplace companies, you know, have a lot of press surrounding them and I think yours now is just really bubbling and getting there because it took me a while to understand exactly what’s unique about you guys. But it’s definitely something special and I see kind of real potential for exponential growth, which I guess you do too.
57:16 So thanks so much for being here. As we say on Silicon Real, it’s about the people and we should all the best come back in a few years and let us know how you’re doing.
57:24 Nicolas Brusson: Sounds good. Thank you.
57:25 Brian Rose: Okay, thank you.
57:26 Thanks. This week on Silicon Real. We persuade people to take trips that they weren’t planning to take. Nine out of ten people that booked with us weren’t planning the trip before they saw the email. Right from day one, over half our traffic was on mobile devices.
57:49 We are trying to build a loved brand but we know that the way you do that is through analytical marketing. We’re curating a customer as well as a list of hotels. We’re very definitely the market leader here. It’s a profitable business. We go very, very fast in markets.
58:04 Once we get confident, we know what we’re doing. Success in business has always seemed to me to be the product of doing lots of well-executed incremental improvements. On Monday, Silicon Real presents Tom Valentine, Secret Escapes. We call it hotel porn.
