This guy moved 100,000,000 people! — Interview with Daniel Krauss of Flixmobility (Video)
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Daniel Krauss is the Entrepreneur of the Year in Germany. Together with two co-founders he built FlixBus, the largest bus company in Europe. In this interview in Monaco he reveals how their started and what was needed to achieve such outrageous business success.
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Video transcription:
Hi guys, today from Monaco, from Monte Carlo
I’m here at the World Entrepreneur of the Year 2019 competition.
Today I will talk for you with Daniel Krauss.
Daniel Krauss is a cofounder of FlixMobility.
When you are from Europe, you certainly know these green Flix buses
But FlixMobility is not just a bus transportation.
It’s also train and I guess also meanwhile logistics.
And the 3 founders of FlixMobility, FlixBus are Jochen Engert, Andre Schwaemmlein and Daniel Krauss
That I will interview for you today.
This is a great company, meanwhile I guess they have billions of dollar in revenue.
Check that, but I guess they are over billion dollars in revenue already.
A great company, very innovative.
They revolutionized bus transportation, public transportation in Europe.
And are on the expansion internationally and globally.
So, please welcome with me Daniel Krauss.
Daniel Krauss, Jochen Engert and Andre Schwaemmlein created a unique transport system.
Now FlixMobility is Europe’s largest bus network
Helping over 100 million people get around.
Congratulations, Daniel, Jochen and Andre.
EY Entrepreneur of The Year 2019 in Germany
Hi guys, today from Monaco, from The Wold Entrepreneur of the Year 2019 award competition.
This is Daniel Krauss.
Daniel Kraus has been chosen the best entrepreneur in Germany.
It is called Entrepreneur of the Year in Germany
You’re the founder of FlixMobility.
This is a bus and train company, a great company.
Daniel, tell my viewers what is the size or the scale of your business?
Because I think most people know FlixBus, but they don’t realize, how big you actually are
How big you operation is.
Pleasure, first of all, thanks for having me here in your channel directly out of Monaco
Which is a quite magnificant place
Absolutely, yeah!
I mean I never seen so much crazy people running around
But back to the topic. So, yeah.
Me and my co-founders, we 6 years ago founded FlixBus.
Which is the most known brand of FlixMobility.
Aside of FlixTrain, our new business and Flix Charter, our charter business
And you’re right.
From the outside, you wouldn’t recognize that we have transported over 120 million people yet
And only almost 50 million of them last year, approximately
So, you have 350,000 connections each and every day, right?
Exactly, and we have those throughout more than 30 countries
Almost all of the countries of Europe are included, but also the US
And we currently prepare a start in Russia as one of our next countries
So, we can say we are the largest mid- and long-distance mobility provider in Europe.
And we are working hard to become that on a worldwide level.
Wow! This is just amazing, Daniel
But you started your company with 2 co-founders. So, how did you know each other?
Are you just friends and “Oh, let’s do business together”?
Or did you consciously choose to fit your skills, so you have like different skills
And then “Let’s do business together”.
The fun fact is that we really are friends and had been friends back then already
So, we are the co-founders and we know each other for almost 25 years.
We went to school together, play volleyball and are really close friends
Andre and Jochen, my second co-founder, they started after university to work together
At the Boston Consulting Group and we got to know each other during that time.
And we all shared the will to start something up.
We all wanted to become entrepreneurs.
Andre and I used to have a business already
So, we had a taste already of what it means to be an entrepreneur
And all of us really wanted to be entrepreneur
And therefore we first of all looked at certain business models and markets
And what can we do .
And it was important for us that we create something impactfull
And with the deregulation of the mobility long distance market in Germany
Well, that was a huge chance, because mobility is one of the game changers for this century
It’s like a mega trend and a huge market.
And then we started and it turned out during the first couple of months and years
That our skills apparently were really complementary
But that was good luck, so to say.
Maybe we knew it like under the carpet already in advance
But we didn’t choose each other based on the skills.
It turned out that we are really complementary, which is awesome.
Yeah, it’s important in business!
It’s very important, absolutely
But it originated out of the friendship.
Okay. Probably every journalist asks you about how did you come up with this idea.
I won’t ask you this question. I will ask you a different question.
If this was your actually initial business model
Or how many times did you have to pivot, to change the business model
And maybe what was your initial stuff? What did you think at the beginning?
So, before we started…
Our first buses were out there running in February 2013
Prior to that we obviously prepared our launch and everything, acquired our partners and everything
And in early phases, which already started something between 2009 and 2010
We just wanted to tackle that market, we wanted to become a game changer in mobility
And we didn’t know how.
And then we thought whether we buy buses, we lease buses
Or at the end we came with our current business model having a partner model
It’s something like Uber, but also like franchise but at the end something different and special to us
But it’s still centralized?
The platform itself, the technology platform, it’s centralized, of course.
But the partner network we rely on of about approximately 300 mobility partners
Is the small and mid-size bus companies, which been around for decades
Sometimes in the third generation, for instance.
That’s the core, because that makes us really stable and fast on the other hand
And also not that capital-intensive, right?
Exactly. We take care of investing in technology and all the costs to acquire customers
And our partners take the investment in the buses.
So, prior our start we weren’t sure what is the right model.
But when we have found that at the point of the start, we really were lucky that it still remains the same
So, it’s exactly the same. We of course tweaked a little bit how the revenue share works, how we can engage our partners more with some bonuses for instance
And these kinds of things, but the core of the business model is the same as it was when we originally started
Okay. Great.
You know, now all these peer-to-peer platforms are coming. Do you play with that ideas?
Do you want to disrupt yourself or you’re waiting to be disrupted by somebody, or do you think peer-to-peer wouldn’t be viable for your business?
I think if it is a virtually deeply integrated platform with a brand and a single centralized company who is reliable
And who takes kind of the contract to the customers..
We own the concessions and we are the contact and contract point, then it is a little bit different
Because we gave a promise in terms of safety, security and it’s always the same, good experience
But looking at the b2b side of our business, how we interact with our partners
And if there are other like similar business models in terms of car pooling
For these rather lightweight platforms I am really sure technologies like blockchain will disrupt them.
Either they will disrupt themselves or they are going to be disrupted. We are playing around with several of these technologies.
Whether it’s blockchain for these peer sharing ideas and see how we can incorporate it into our business model
But also other new technologies like virtual reality, for instance.
So, we really try to be ahead of the technology wave and if there is something applicable, we are not afraid of disrupting ourselves
This is what we already did when applying trains to routes, where originally buses were running around.
Okay, so you found your current business model in 2013 and since then you scaled it to that dimensions in 6 years. It’s just unbelievable.
This is amazing. Tell me maybe 2–3 leassons you have learned during that time, for you as an entrepreneur, for entrepreneurship
What do you need as an entrepreneur to be able to perform on that level?
I think you really need to follow wishing and a certain purpose. If you just do that in order to get rich, it’s not enough.
That may last for a year, maybe two. But if you really build a business which sustains, you need just more.
So, it has to be a vision and purpose on the one hand.
On the other hand you really have to be durable, because there is so much downs
And everything what supposedly can go wrong, will go wrong. You just have to take it into the equation, and then it’s not that hard.
It doesn’t really kick you that hard.
And ultimately you really have to have an absolute will to succeed.
So, this winner mentality.
Exactly. I mean it’s serious. We are responsible for thousands of people, so it’s really serious on the one hand.
But on the other hand I really try to remind myself that it’s kind of a game, a serious game of course.
To really stay a little bit ahead of that in lightweight with a certain ease.
But at the same time as you would think of every sports tournament, every competition you’d enter
You really want to win and you have to keep that will to the end and hopefully end will never come.
I am grateful you are telling me this, because this is actually one of the billionaire motivations I have identified in my book The Billion Dollar Secret
The will to win or this fun being competitive and playing the game of business. This is one of the billionaire motivations.
So, you are on the right path to become one. I wish you a lot of success in this competition here in Monaco.
I hope we will get finally a winner of the World Entrepreneur of the Year from Germany.
We as well. Thank you very much. It was a pleasure to talk to you.
Pleasure talking to you. That’s it!
Thanks for watching!
That’s it from monaco, I wish you a great day, I wish you a fantastic day.
Let’s do something extraordinary today!
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