BlaBlaCar recently acquired the bus operator Ouibus from the French rail operator SNCF. Are you going to attack the green bus operator Flixbus on its home turf in Germany?
We’re not attacking anyone, we’re just adding buses to our offering. Entry into new markets is the next logical step after the acquisition. But first of all, you have to understand that we aren’t changing our model. We won’t own buses and we won’t hire bus drivers. For us, a bus is just a big car and the operator can sell places via our platform. The second important aspect is how nicely bus and car connect, to each other and to other modes of transport. We want to develop this complimentary offer in many other countries as well.

BlaBlaCar is active in 22 different countries. How big are the differences in the level of acceptance of car sharing?
They are quite important and depend on many different factors, cultural and technical. The price of alternative modes of transport plays a big role as well. In France, one of two young people does carpool. That is a very high rate of market penetration. We’re looking at massive growth in other markets like Russia and Brazil. All our European markets are still growing.  It’s surprising to notice that we fought seven years to get to our first million users, and we’re now adding a million users every three weeks.

It’s no wonder that with this kind of growth, BlaBlaCar is the poster child of the French startup scene. How is the French ecosystem evolving?
It’s impressive how it has developed in the past few years. There are more and more VCs active in France. It might still be a challenge to raise more than 100 million Euros in France alone, but there is enough firepower now for rounds of 50 million, I’d say.

What are your experiences with VCs?
Good VCs can be valuable coaches, and bring different skills to the table, according to the stage a startup is in. In the beginning, they can help structure a team that will function well, because they have seen many comparable situations. In a later stage, they can help with the expansion. We did about a dozen acqui-hires, for example, and our VCs helped us identify good teams to buy.

You’re also active as a business angel and have also invested in Zenpark, one of investiere’s portfolio companies. What drives your personal investments?
For me, the most important question is if a startup is solving a real problem or not. There is also the quality of the team and the size of the market, of course, but the size of the problem for me is paramount. I started as a business angel about 8 years ago. Since then, I have invested in about three dozen companies, most of them French, like the car sharing platform Drivy. I’ve also joined the Board of OLIO in the UK, a company that fights against food waste. If food waste were a country it would be the 3rd largest emitter of greenhouse gases (after China & the USA) so you can imagine the size of the problem to solve. What I like about Zenpark is that it applies the same principle as BlaBlaBlaCar to parking, namely, to liberate existing capacity that is unjustly blocked. It helped my decision that I already knew William, the co-founder, from a trip to India, where a group visited the local automotive industry. Zenpark is a good example of the new collaborative economy.