Nicolas Brusson discusses BlaBlaCar’s journey from French success story to global winner

“It was all about being practical and preserving culture” 

- BlaBlaCar's Nicolas Brusson

Last month, BlaBlaCar announced its $115 million funding round to support its growth strategy and continue its mission of becoming the go-to marketplace for shared travel. Since its founding in 2006, BlaBlaCar’s story has had many chapters. After rapid international expansion across several continents, as the founding team brought Silicon Valley’s global ambition into Europe, and the extension of its offering to buses and multimodal transportation, BlaBlaCar is preparing for the travel rebound expected as the world reopens. Throughout the pandemic, the company’s community-based model showed strong resilience while the importance of its culture and values shone through. Today, more than 90 million BlaBlaCar community members travel by carpool of long-distance buses across 22 markets. 

Co-founder and CEO Nicolas Brusson spoke to me about BlaBlaCar’s early ambitions to be a European rather than local country winner and its progression to global player. From the company’s approach to international expansion and encouraging entrepreneurship within the team to the importance of avoiding technical debt and setting aside time to “think, read, absorb, and rethink”, read on to find out more…

Let’s start at the beginning. How did you end up heading to Silicon Valley from France to join a startup?

It was entirely by accident to be honest! The original plan was to finish my master’s degree, do a PhD at Berkeley, and become a scientist. But the Valley in 1999 was a new world of startups, venture capital, and stock options. It was like a foreign language to me - I’d never heard of any of this before. I never went ahead with the PhD – I joined a startup instead, as it felt like the right thing to do. And that was the start of an interesting journey. 

1999/2000 was the startup heyday, and I was in the hot space of telecoms – it all looked promising. But then came 9/11 and the severe downturn in the Valley in 2002. We filed Chapter 11, and had to restructure and rebuild the company, which we sold in 2006. This – very non-linear – startup journey was how I initially educated myself on entrepreneurship and raising money, before going through a phrase of expansion, retraction, and M&A. 

You then came back to Europe and joined a venture firm before co-founding BlaBlaCar. How did you go from VC to founder?

After seven years at a startup in the Valley, I knew I wanted to be part of the ecosystem. I liked the “change things, move fast, take risks” environment. But it was practically non-existent in Europe at the time. So, after taking my MBA at INSEAD, I started working as a VC in London, focusing on European tech.

But then I met Fred and, not long after, Francis. Fred had started a website called Comuto, with the simple premise of connecting drivers travelling from A to B with passengers looking for a ride. Back in 2006, that was a very weird concept. There were no social networks, let alone sharing economy then, so it took a while to take off. Until the first seed round in 2010 we were building the company with no funding. 

BlaBlaCar started in France and became a local phenomenon. It took time to build the community, but in 2010/11 things started to explode. What drove you to make the leap from French to European to a global player?

In Silicon Valley, the ambition is always global. Very few startups say they’re building products for California or the US. They’re building them for the world. I wanted to bring that level of ambition to Europe. The first generation of internet entrepreneurs did well, but they were “single country winners” – they were always “the French or German e-commerce company”, for example.

The ambition for BlaBlaCar was to be a European leader rather than just a French winner. It was in our founding team’s DNA. We’d spent a lot of time in the US and wanted to build an international team. We also felt thinking locally was the biggest hurdle for European startups back then - it’s changing now. With competitors in the US often 10 times bigger, they’d become an acquisition target. This became the ambition for many companies in Europe – to build something local and sell it to the category leader. 

We wanted to be that category leader. But, for that to happen, we had to be at least a European winner. We had a good product that worked well in France, so we expanded it across Europe between 2011 and 2014, before moving to a more global scale, launching in Russia, Mexico, and India. Today, we’re a global leader in the carpooling category, but back then that was a pretty new thing in the consumer internet space. The few companies in Europe that we turned to for advice were from Sweden or Israel - only a handful had become a global consumer internet leader.

BlaBlaCar’s global expansion and the different strategies you’ve adopted have been interesting. In several countries, you went through small acquisitions, in others it was larger acquisitions, and in others you started from scratch. What would you advise entrepreneurs expanding globally? When would you go for an acquisition versus an organic launch?

It was all about being practical and preserving culture. We used different playbooks to scale, either hiring someone local, sending someone from HQ to set up a country, or acqui-hiring. This wasn’t buying a business in the traditional sense; we were acquiring teams of entrepreneurs who could build BlaBlaCar locally and have a lot of local autonomy. These teams of two to five people were culturally aligned with us, had the same values and were solving the same problem. Clarity on what we’d give up in autonomy and what we’d retain centrally meant the brand remained consistent. As we expanded, BlaBlaCar never had different names in different locations. 

It isn’t common when acquiring a company to use your brand and give them autonomy on the way it’s marketed and how the team is built. One of the challenges we faced was convincing entrepreneurs to give up their brand and product to be part of a global company. We learned the importance of being clear on our expectations of the local team, as well as the central. 

It’s important to be clear on your own brand, product, and tech platform, too. In your first M&A, it’s easy to believe you can manage two brands and two platforms. But after five or six M&As, you’re in 22 countries, and you have multiple brands, and different products and platforms. It becomes too complicated. Having a single brand and product helped us scale faster. 

Culture is also important.

It’s critical to ensure you have a unified culture, with the same codes of conduct and behavioural principles across different countries. 

You mentioned the importance of having a single platform to scale, but you also need a platform that’s flexible enough to adapt the product to the specificities of different geographies. In 2013-15, BlaBlaCar went through a full replatforming to enable the platform to tackle all these different countries. What did you learn going through this process? What advice would you give entrepreneurs on how to think about the architecture and structure of their products?

A platform will become more complex as it grows over time and will need to be re-engineered. It’s a mistake to think that four or five platforms with different names in different countries will save you from the fact that, after six or seven years, you’ll need to change those platforms and reinvest in tech. Having a single brand, tech team, and platform is much more scalable than multiplying the number of platforms. 

We shifted from being a monolith, in terms of code, to a service-oriented architecture. Doing that as you grow, particularly after being global with lots of specifications for different countries, is painful. You’re constantly wondering whether to continue building new features on the old platform, or slow down and spend more time reinvesting in the platform itself by creating it anew and then building features. But there’s no perfect answer. You need to find a trade-off between investing in your product and features, and continuing to invest in the old platform while migrating to a new one.

We made those hard choices in the last couple of years. We could have launched some features earlier but decided to pause and reinvest in the platform. There’s always a trade-off. Just be careful not to be too short-minded, otherwise you’ll pile up technical debt and soon find out that it takes years of replatforming to move on.

Shifting gears. Let’s talk about BlaBlaCar’s culture and values. I remember when BlaBlaCar launched in Germany. It was a very quick decision. The company managed to make it happen in just a few weeks. This was down to the culture and values you’d put in place. Could you elaborate on the key tenets of these, and how important they were for success?

Culture and values are critical for any company at any stage – and they’re tested in hard times.

Whether you need to make a quick decision, or you’re in a crisis like COVID, you’ll see how resilient your culture is.

We invested in culture early and wanted meaningful values. Firstly, you need a strong sense of purpose and be clear on the problem you’re fixing and why. Internally, we also worked a lot on our general principles around the way we work for our  employees, crowdsourcing them at a company offsite in 2013. We realised that a company’s internal culture - its sense of purpose and behaviours- is very much carried by its founders. However, that culture won’t scale beyond 50 or 60 people so, as you grow, it needs to be formalised. 

It’s important that any internal principles are embodied within actions and processes. We say “Dream. Decide. Deliver.” at BlaBlaCar, for example. While this could just be written on the wall, the agenda of every meeting is tagged either dream (brainstorm) decide (make a decision based on previous dream sessions, but no more room for dreaming), or deliver (provide a progress update on execution)”. This makes meetings efficient, and ensures the principles are relevant. 

We test our principles over time asking people if they’re being applied and how they’re embodied. If they’re not, we either work at fixing them, or drop them and evolve.

BlaBlaCar’s story has many chapters. There was rapid international expansion. The rationalisation of some of the countries which weren’t working. The launch of buses, railroad, multimodal, and then COVID happened. How do you think about resiliency as a CEO, a part of a company’s culture? Did you adapt the values?

Uncertain times test the resilience of your company and culture. COVID has put a lot of stress on the company over the last year. We’ve been tracking employee morale, before and during the crisis, using NPS as a key company metric. We’re proud to say that it hasn’t gone down - we’ve seen consistent employee happiness, even during these uncertain times. We were very proactive though. We over communicated and were very dedicated to keeping the team together and living by our principles throughout. We also stuck to our tech and product roadmap and in fact, there was lots of innovation over the last year, and we were able to ship more product features as we’re investing more in the tech platform. We also held an internal hackathon dedicated to supporting the fight against COVID-19, just at the height of the crisis, and ended up launching BlaBlaHelp as a result, a community app enabling people to support each other with grocery shopping during COVID-19.

Being able to keep the team together, keep your key talent, keep delivering, and keep morale up is the acid test of your culture and values. Every company faces challenges and  bumps in the road, and if people jump ship, the culture may have been written on the wall, but it probably wasn’t embedded in the team. 

Let’s talk a bit about your leadership style and broader views on entrepreneurship. How would you describe your personal leadership style?

Transparency is the main word I’d use - we’ve always tried to push this at the company. Whenever we give a CEO talk, we share lots of numbers and financials. It’s all transparent and open. Trust matters, too. BlaBlaCar was built on trust between members sharing their cars. The fundamental belief is that you give people as much information and context as possible, and assume it’ll result in brighter and better decision making. 

We encourage people to be entrepreneurs internally and talk a lot about the BlaBlaCar mafia that have gone off to set up their own companies. We say BlaBlaCar is a place where you learn and, when you stop learning, you go elsewhere. People can learn for a few years and leave. Sometimes they never leave, they just keep learning. Our culture of entrepreneurship, and accepting that, at some point, people leave and do something else creates a great deal of autonomy and transparency, and a healthy dynamic internally. 

I think the quality of your staff shows in the quality of your alumni network. There’s no stronger signal for attracting new talent than if people do great things after spending time at BlaBlaCar. Today, more than 30 people have left to start a company, with more than €60 million raised. 

What do you wish you’d known back in 2012 when you got the first $10 million investment from Accel? What advice would you give to entrepreneurs starting their journey?

Pick your co-founders and investors carefully. People don’t realise the intensity and length of the entrepreneurial journey.

Successful companies aren’t built overnight - you’re going to spend a lot of time with your co-founders. The same is true of investors. Accel came onboard in 2011, so it’s not just a year or two. You’re looking at five years plus on average.

I’m always a little sceptical when I see those incubators where people meet and – bang! – they start a company. It’s like going speed dating and getting married right away. Likewise with super-fast fundraising - you end up with two new board members you only met the month before. At BlaBlaCar, we typically spent a lot of time and knew everyone for years before they joined the board. 

I’d advise every entrepreneur to invest in those relationships. Don’t see fundraising as just raising cash and getting the best financial terms. Make sure there’s a fit. You’ll be spending a lot of time building your company’s strategy with your co-founders, investors and, more specifically, your board members. 

What life hacks or habits that you’ve developed over the years to cope with the stress of building the company can you share with other entrepreneurs?

I live in Brussels and the office is in Paris, so I travel a lot. I segment my weeks to try and spend at least three or four days a week in the office (pre-COVID) concentrating on the team. I do very few external meetings and avoid emails. 

I always save a day a week at home, with very few meetings, to go through data, and take time to think, read, absorb, and rethink. We all need quiet time, so you need to segment your week and not run like crazy all the time. Otherwise, you won’t have quality time to write or think. Spend less time on tactics, and more time thinking strategically. 

Global Expansion: 8 Tips to Make Your Next Acqui-Hire Successful

As an investor, I’ve sat on both sides of the table in more than a dozen acqui-hire situations. Companies that successfullyleverage acqui-hires can save years of work and gain a competitive advantage by adding skilled technical and operational talent, deep local market knowledge and an accelerated time-to-market.

However, not all acqui-hires are created equal, but there are numerous pre-deal considerations to ensure post-deal success. Here are eight tips I’ve learned from the trenches.

Acqui-hire Tip 1: One Vision, Same Values

Both the acquiring and acquired teams need to share the same vision and values. The two teams must work closely and effectively together in order to be successful. “What matters most is the personal and professional fit between the two teams. They should ideally share the same goals, business and company cultures.” (Olivier Bremer, founder of PostoInAuto – acquired by Blablacar)

Acqui-hire Tip 2: Crystal-Clear Roles

Define clear roles at the outset to avoid any misunderstanding or redundancy. This starts by deeply understanding the attributes and behaviors of the other company. Micro-managing a highly entrepreneurial and innovative team, for example, can cause animosity and frustration. Be certain that both parties understand how the acquired executives and employees will fill key roles within the larger organization. Acqui-hires work well when the acquired team continues to run the business or business functions with relative autonomy. “Being clear about the future roles of an acqui-hired team is key to post acqui-hire integration.”  (Piotr Jas, founder of a Polish ride sharing company acquired by BlaBlaCar)

Acqui-hire Tip 3: One Big, One Small

Size matters. The larger the size differential between the two companies, the easier the acqui-hire will be. It’s more difficult when companies are of relative equal size, and the main variant is one company’s cash on-hand. The smaller the size difference, the more conflicts emerge around products, leadership, best practices, etc.

Acqui-hire Tip 4: Equity is King

You must agree to an incentive structure that motivates the founders and key executives within the company you acquire. This is paramount to make sure they remain invested in the success of the company at large. An acqui-hire is not a cash-out event. Use equity and options to incentivize and reward these new team members. Determine the amount relative to the value of the businesses – prioritize options over equity as motivation to stay.

Acqui-hire Tip 5: Global Incentives

The right approach is to allocate options and shares of the global company rather than the subsidiary where the acqui-hired team operated. Here’s what it is important to align incentives on the overall success of the company:

• Growth within a country is linked to the amount invested in the region, which the acqui-hired team does not control and may change over time.
• Team roles will evolve, including those from the acqui-hire. You will have to renegotiate incentives if and when roles evolve in tandem with the company’s growth.
• Finally, it is hard to define the relative value of a specific country vs. the overall company. When an exit comes, determining the respective value of each part has a high chance of creating conflict at a time when all the team needs to work closely together to make the exit happen

Acqui-hire Tip 6: Avoid Hidden Liabilities

Understand tax liabilities. There are two common acquisition structures: option-A) asset purchase: the preferable option where the acquiring company buys only the assets; option-B) company purchase: acquiring company buys both the assets and liabilities. Option-A is usually faster and safer, as you will not take on any hidden liability, which may arise in the future. However, it can trigger tax liabilities for the founders/investors of the acquired company. If you must take option-B, conduct thorough legal due diligence to avoid future liability surprises.

Acqui-hire Tip 7: Keep it Simple

Acquiring a company with a complex equity structure (i.e. many angel investors) can lead to a large administrative burden that slows decision-making. Offer angels cash or options, which can be only exercised at expiration (typically 10 years) or an exit. This way they benefit from the full economic value, but are not shareholders. If this is not possible, you can group them into a Special Purchase Vehicle (SPV) with only one signatory.

Acqui-hire Tip 8: One Brand to Rule Them All

A global brand offers significant synergies, so make sure acqui-hires rebrand quickly. BlaBlaCar rebranded all local brands into one unified international brand, including their initial market, France: “A single brand offers clarity and consistency for customers and employees. The parent brand should have a brand on-boarding process to streamline the transition, while creating a strong, unified and identifiable global brand experience.” (Frederic Mazzella, founder of Blablacar)

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 Account for these factors, but understand that every company and situation is different. The founders and executives from both parties must be diligent and transparent, and leave nothing to question. I hope these learnings will influence your thinking in your quest to go global, and as always, share your thoughts, feedback and questions with me here or on Twitter (@pbotteri).

The Magic of Acqui-Hire in Europe: Learnings from Blablacar

Most startups fail at getting a new country off the ground. This is why Unicorns are such a rare breed. Fortunately, a happy few have succeeded at finding this magic formula, like the team at Blablacar and turned it into a competitive weapon. One of their secret: acqui- hiring. 

This is my second post on international expansion. If you wonder how to pick your next launch country first, see my earlier post here.

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One of the most important decisions any company of any size will make is how it will successfully launch operations in a new country (the following applies to launching in new cities or states within an existing country). For early stage companies, the stakes are even higher, and finding a great country manager is the single most important element of a successful launch.

The most common solution is not necessarily the easiest, where companies hire a manager with expertise or a network in the chosen country, and enable him or her to hire a team of two or three people as support to get started. However, an experienced leader is extremely difficult to find and the risk of failure is high. Alternatively, companies will “spin-off” an existing core team member to lead the launch. While this is a good option, it can be difficult to implement because this person must meet important criteria like language fluency, geographic familiarity and more.

Fortunately, there is another, proven strategy, which I will expand on here – the acqui-hire.

Lessons from Acqui-Hire Success Stories

The best example of launching and expanding in new countries via acqui-hire can be found in Paris-based BlaBlaCar, Europe's top ride-sharing company with 16 offices worldwide. As, I was about to lead Accel’s first investment in the company, I began building a list of all the start-ups operating in a similar or adjacent space. Among them was a small company of two people in Italy called PostoInAuto (at the time, BlaBlaCar had only launched in France and Spain). PostoInAuto’s founder, Olivier Bremer, was terribly talented, but his business was not at a point where he could raise a significant investment.

As our investment in Bablacar was ready to close, I again reached out to Olivier to gauge his interest in joining the BlaBlaCar team – strong leadership, significant funding and the opportunity to retain total freedom to build the service in Italy. He was intrigued, so I connected him to BlaBlaCar’s founders who convinced him to join the adventure shortly after. Within four months, Olivier re-launched his service under the BlaBlaCar brand in Italy, and today BlaBlaCar is the dominant service in the country. Olivier went on to lead the company’s launch in Germany given his dual German/Italian background, and currently leads the business in both countries.

"There were many reasons why I decided to join forces with BlaBlaCar: we shared the same long term goals; I could feel a very good fit with the founding team; my company was early stage and by joining BlaBlaCar” said Olivier Bremer, BlaBlaCar GM Germany and Italy. “I was empowered to continue doing what I had been doing, but with a much larger budget and support from a team that shared my same passion.“

Learning from the success of this initiative, I introduced the BlaBlaCar team to companies in Poland and Russia, which have also been very successful acqui-hires.

Making an acqui-hire successful

If successfully executed, combining resources from an acqui-hire will save years of work while broadening the technical and talent bench. But, this is a highly emotional process for the acqui-hired team. Therefore, it is very important to set the right rationale and motivation to ease the process.

“Like any successful partnership, the acqui-hiring and -hired companies must fully align in terms of strategic goals, operational processes and culture. Both sides must trust the other and commit to a shared vision,” said Piotr Jas, BlaBlaCar GM CEE. “Both companies need to actively learn from one another throughout the diligence process, and maintain an open and honest line of communication in the early days of the expansion.”

Like any relationship, the responsibility for success is shared. The acquiring company must find a team with the skills and passion to accelerate growth exponentially.

“Being acqui-hired can be seen as a ‘fundraising++’ because the local team receives money to expand faster (like any fundraising) and a robust and proven product and tech platform. It also receives access to ultra-relevant experience in their field, fast-growth methods, tailored customer support – provided by HQ in our case –, a strong international brand with related communication methods and positioning,” said Frederic Mazzella, BlaBlaCar co-founder. “Thus it is not only about the money.”

Since its acqui-hire of PostoInAuto, BlaBlaCar developed a team that scouts potential acqui-hire opportunities across the globe. While it’s not possible to find strong acquisitions opportunities in every country (the launches in India and Turkey have been organic), it remains a key element of its fast global rollout.

The interesting element of the acqui-hire strategy is that it does not require a lot of upfront cash to implement relative to the resulting growth (assuming proper diligence ahead of time).

“We acquired three companies in short amount of time and each time I re-used the same term sheet template. Most of the consideration for these deals was equity and options, so cash is not a requirement. To be successful, you need to have the right skills and having someone in the core team with M&A or venture background helps a lot,” said Nicolas Brusson, BlaBlaCar co-founder.

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Today, more than 50% of BlaBlaCar new members are coming from acqui-hires – an impressive ratio proving the effectiveness of the approach.

While this is one example of many across our portfolio and beyond, the acqui-hire strategy remains consistent and taps into a set of best practices, regardless of country: find great talent, maintain great culture and clearly communicate strong values across each local teams.

When And How To Pick Your Next Launch Country

(This post was originally published on TechCrunch and has been enriched with a few quotes from the Blablacar founders)

International expansion is a challenge any globally ambitious company will face — some sooner than others.

As a long-time investor in both the U.S. and Europe, I often get asked by the venture community about the difference between the two. In my opinion, one of the key elements is the market fragmentation, which is something that European companies tend to come up against sooner than their U.S. counterparts. I like the way Frederic Mazzella, the founder and CEO of Blablacar, describes it: “When I'm asked if it's easier to launch a business in the EU or in the US, I say that it's like comparing a 110 meters hurdle to a 100 meter run... In the EU we have to adapt to 28 different countries, regulations, cultures and markets, which slows down the growth”.

While both the U.S. and Europe are consumer markets of more than 300 million people, grasping this potential in Europe is more challenging — and few companies have managed to do it successfully, given the region’s many diverse, distinct markets. As a result, I’m going to talk about international expansion using European examples and context for this piece — hopefully with takeaways that are universally relevant.

Can you go big without going home? Sure you can — if you give enough thought to the dynamics of expansion, starting with when and where to go next.

Is There Such A Thing As The “Right Time” To Launch In A New Country?

The first question the founding team of a consumer service needs to address concerns the timing of the launch in a new country. At McKinsey, and in most books on strategy, you will read that you can only replicate something successful, so you need to wait until your home country is cranking before starting abroad.

This is sound judgment. Unfortunately, it does not play out very well in the startup world. Why? Because by the time you have proven your model is a success in your home country, you already have other startups doing the same model in other key European markets, and competition gets fierce. As Nicolas Brusson, the co-founder of Blablacar puts it: “By the time most European companies go international it is too late…We decided to go early into different European countries — adding a local team each time — before proving the business model, something very few players do.”

On the other hand, if you do a full roll-out with something that is not working or tuned enough, you will waste a lot of resources, which can sink the company.

So when is the right time? Every company will have a different answer. In my view, given the current competitive environment, the sooner the better. However, it is critical to do it gradually and in a controlled manner.

Here’s how I advise startups to approach expansion:

Nail your MVP (Minimum Viable Product) first. You need to have a service with a clear value proposition that works in different markets. You don’t need bells and whistles, just something simple but effective.

Field test your product with a meaningful amount of customers — typically a few thousands or tens of thousands. This should give you a good idea of what to expect.

Complete your initial marketing playbook. You need to have identified acquisition channels (SEM, Facebook, offline…) at a reasonable cost with payback typically in less than nine months. Make sure your approach is scalable.

Taking a thoughtful and considered approach to scaling internationally is key.

How To Pick Your Next Country?

Once you’re clear on the ideal time to launch in your next country, the question becomes “where to go next?”

While every business and situation are different, the following three elements should always be considered when choosing your next market:

Market Potential: The “market potential” is a mix of different elements that must be weighted specifically for each business. It includes the market size, of course, but also the competitive dynamics, your network in the country (or your investor network) and the similarity with your home country. For example, in my experience, what works in France tends to also work well in Italy and Spain, but the U.K. can be an outlier.

Cash Requirements: Be clever with your resources. It is very important to assess your cost of capital and how much burn you can afford. If you raised €20 million in your Series A, you can take more risks and launch abroad sooner than if you raised €3-4 million. Picking a large market is attractive, but if it requires a level of investment that would reduce your runway considerably, you may be better off picking a smaller market. I have seen too many companies go big, burn big and then have to retrench, which is not a good position to be in.

Human Capital: Money is not everything; it is reasonably easy to get. The real challenge of international expansion lies in finding the right team, both at HQ to support the local launch and locally to scale the activity.

I typically encourage companies to start their expansion with one country and digest it to the point where it is scaling before launching a new one. It does not mean you need to wait a couple of years — a few months may be enough.

Most technology markets are winner-takes-all.

You can then accelerate the number of launches over time if you are successful. It’s key to remember that most technology markets are winner-takes-all — or at least takes most. It is, therefore, much better to be the leader in three countries than No. 5 in 10 countries.

Also, the more countries you support, the higher your cash burn and the fewer resources you can allocate to win in a given market — this is something that needs constant evaluation.

In summary, taking a thoughtful and considered approach to scaling internationally is key — and the sooner the better. First-mover advantage can offer a decisive advantage over competitors — and accelerate a company’s ability to become the global category leader early on.

While there may not necessarily be a perfect time for launching in a new market, preparing your business for expansion early on will support your continued success in a world where scaling internationally fast has become a requirement for any founder with global ambition.

European Unicorns (or not!) @ TC Disrupt London

Exciting couple of days at TC Disrupt London: I had the chance of starting my Monday morning with an interview at Bloomberg TV "On The Move" with Jonathan Ferro and my Tuesday Morning with a panel at the conference led by Ryan Lawler.



Both discussions addressed the theme of European Unicorns  - ie can Europe produce large venture outcomes. A few years ago, the potential was real. Today, it has been realised as Europe has demonstrated its ability to generate multi-billion outcomes with companies like Supercell ($3B), Qlik ($2.5B), Criteo ($2B), Just Eat ($2.4B), King ($3.6B), Zoopla ($1B), Waze ($1B) among others...The questions is now turning into whether Europe can create $20B+ outcomes. Time will tell but all pointers are in the right directions. Unicorn are not supposed to exist but we are seeing a lot of them in Europe these days with the maturation of the European tech ecosystem. May be we should stop calling them Unicorns!

Sharing economy: it is not about cost but value

Short interview on Bloomberg by Caroline Hyde on the sharing economy and the London ecosystem during the London Tech Week. It was fun!

Here is a quick summary of my discussion on the sharing economy and wider changes in the European technology scene.

 

Sharing economy is not about cost but value

Accel has made a few investments into sharing economy businesses. More than simply offering customers a chance to save on cost, the sharing economy revolves around the value of innovation – marketplace services change people’s way of living by granting them access to a new service. For example, BlaBlaCar, the long-distance ride-sharing network, connects drivers with paying passengers, and is now carrying more people per month than the Eurostar for much less investment. Another example, Vinted, the social marketplace for second-hand clothes, allows users to chat about fashion and swap clothes on their mobiles, and is seeing more than one item listed each second 24/7.

 

Europe is a collection of tech hubs...hard to know where the next big things is coming to come from

Having worked in Silicon Valley, I can say that, while both the US and Europe are full of innovation, the European tech scene is much more fragmented, as it is spread across a collection of hubs, including London, Paris, Tel Aviv, Berlin, Moscow and the Nordic countries. As a result, you never know where the next big innovation will come from. We’ve backed Funding Circle and Mind Candy in London, BlaBlaCar and Vente-Privee in Paris, Supercell in Helsinki and Avito in Moscow.

 

The flourishing of these hubs has been a really big development for the region. When Accel first came to Europe 15 years ago, most of our investments were concentrated in the UK and Israel. Now we invest across these hubs. As they grow in number and size, it is beneficial for each individual hub, too, as their businesses can leverage them to extend their network and expand across Europe and around the world.

 

Another important regional development is the number of billion-dollar-plus exits over the last few years, such as Supercell’s partial sale to Softbank, which have been really additive to the ecosystem. We have companies like Spotify and Rovio in the pipeline as well, so there are plenty more exciting things to come.  Europe has reached a truly interesting time for innovation and we are excited to see what’s next.