AFTER WEEKS of burying himself in the Latin dictionary in search of a brand name, Fred had finally found it. Building upon his idea of connecting drivers with empty car seats to passengers looking for a ride, a project which stemmed from a personal need in 2003, Fred envisioned an online marketplace for services where individuals could exchange anything and everything from car journeys to piano lessons to cooking lessons. Shortened to a more catchier “Comuto,” he imagined that “mutos” would become the name of the points system or online currency.
Commuto (Latin) [komˈmuː.to]
Verb. To exchange something with another.
Anticipating what would become the sharing economy, Fred was already exploring the notion of scalable peer-to-peer collaboration in a pre-Facebook world. With hundreds of ideas swirling around, he honed in on his passion of bringing people together to create value out of waste by optimising cars, one of the world’s most expensive and underused assets.
A decade later, and with a more international brand name in place, BlaBlaCar connects more than 40 million people across three continents. With co-founders Francis Nappez and Nicolas Brusson, the founding trio have lead the charge in shaping the future of the travel ecosystem and are proud to work with over 550 employees today. It’s taken hard work, much passion and innovation over the years to get to this milestone yet the team is quick to respond in saying it’s only just the beginning of the journey.
When access trumps ownership
Passion and innovation are the common thread behind today’s phenomenon of transitioning from the era of owning to the era of usage. Thanks to new technologies and digital trust tools, people are breaking free from the limits of the past and collaborating with others they don’t know but with whom have an underused asset to share. Peer-to-peer collaboration is happening at an unprecedented scale and individuals are now sharing, renting and exchanging goods, knowledge and skills like never before.
Because of this radical behavioural shift, today’s generation are less interested in traditional ownership, favouring renting or borrowing assets that suit their flexible lifestyle instead. And it makes sense.
When you do the math, you’ll see that it costs more than €5,000 a year to run a car in Europe, yet 96% of the time the car is parked. When cars do move, only 2.7% of the time is spent going from A to B, often with only one person on board (meaning there are three empty seats). The rest of the time is spent stuck in traffic jams or looking for a parking spot. With this calculation holding true across millions of cars in many countries, it represents spendings of hundreds of billions of euros per year (4% to 10% of a country’s GDP) for an underused asset. Let that just sink in for a moment.
The waste is shocking!
By optimising cars, BlaBlaCar is creating a completely new, affordable and friendly mobility solution by matching people going in the same direction and creating trust between people who have never met before. It’s disrupting travel and creating new supply by offering up routes which were previously inaccessible through trains and busses. Over the years, BlaBlaCar has exchanged closely with many thought leaders in the sharing economy and collaborative consumption world including Rachel Botsman, Robin Chase, Arun Sundararajan, Yann Algan and Lisa Gansky. Together, they’ve pioneered new ideas and continue to exchange thoughts on tomorrow’s behavioural shifts.
The power of passion
In the early days Fred had scraped together his savings and took out a loan of €70,000 to fund the beginnings of what would become BlaBlaCar. With his good friend Damien, they started coding the first version of the platform from Fred’s living room in 2004.
With no money to spend and no salary earned, Fred stayed true to his family name’s Italian roots and lived off pasta for years. When BlaBlaCar started to bring in some euros from sales of its platforms to businesses in 2008, Fred decided that instead of paying himself a salary, he would rather put the money toward hiring someone to focus on something very dear to him: communications. Enter Laure Wagner, first employee of BlaBlaCar and today’s culture captain.
What was Laure’s first interview like? Find out here.
