Today, I would like to talk about Blablacar, the most successful startup in France. Blablacar is a ride-sharing app which is a collaborative platform connecting drivers with empty seats for people travelling the same way.

I think it is very interesting to know a bit more about the story of this startup created in 2006 who is now the leader in ride-sharing in the world. Nowadays, 30 million of members use this app in 22 countries. Blablacar creates revenues by taking 12% of each reservation.

As many start-ups, its start has a personal story. Frédéric Mazzella, Blablacar’s French creator, was used to go to Stanford’s university (California) by sharing a car with friends. In this way, they could take empty “carpool lanes” reserved to ride-sharing cars and save time because of the important traffic in the city. When he came back to Paris, he had no car and wanted to go to his family’s region for Christmas. There were no more places left in trains and he tried to find someone who was going in the same city. It was impossible to find information like that on Internet and finally, his sister came to Paris with her car to drive him. It is from this situation that Frédéric Mazzella has his idea!

In September 2015, Blablacar became an “unicorn”: a company not listed on the stock exchange which has its value estimated at more than a billion euros.

Blablacar’s development is interesting because the app changed a lot according to customer’s need. At the beginning, the app was launched for companies to develop ride-sharing between colleagues. It was not a success and it changed their target and developed the current concept of the platform.

The success of this app come from the fact that a lot of people use it: the more people use it, the more offers are available to new users. It is a market where the « winner takes all ».

At the beginning, the platform was free: it was a perfect way to get “snowball effect” and to gain market share. Blablacar knew its customers and it developed its app according to their states of mind. For example, it took off the incertitude and the fear of the society about travelling with unknown persons by permitting to write feedbacks about drivers.

Blablacar doesn’t stop growing: a new fundraising of 21 million of dollars in September would permit it to develop its international growth.

The past Wednesday I had the opportunity to participant in an entrepreneur event with the non-profit organization Connect. The event took place at Grant Thornton’s office at Sveavägen 20.

The day started with breakfast and networking – and greetings to some of the entrepreneurs I met at the last event with Connect. I find it fascinating how someone could go from being a total stranger, to someone you give a friendly hug, just because you were at the same event recently. I am not sure if this is specifically for the ”entrepreneur bubble”, or just human behavior. Anyhow – it definitely shows the great impact networking has on your personal network!

Since they had invited six different “speed lecturers” to the event, I got to hear about different aspects you need to consider as entrepreneur or soon-to-be start-up. One of the topics I found most interesting was actually about law. The lecturer, Sten Bergström from Grant Thornton, had many years of experience and shared some of the cases he had been working with. The name of the lecture was “Entreprenörskap, kärlek och död”, which you find translated to English in the heading. There was, for example, a company owner that died of a heart-attack at the age of 45. The only heir of the company was his son – born two months after his death. Another example was when all the leaders of a concern died simultaneously, due to the tsunami 2004.

Even if these scenarios seem to be far away from our current situation, I wanted to share the experience with you. I believe it highlights the importance of legal clarity when it comes to business – and that the legal files need to cover even the events we can’t anticipate. If you have a co-founder, make sure that your responsibilities and duties are stated. If you have children, are married or just partners – make sure that the papers speak your will, in case you (god forbidden!) can’t yourself.

This post got deeper, and darker for that matter, then I planned to. I hope though that it was interesting reading! To cheer you up, here are some pictures from the event:

Every day we encounter things that don’t go our way. All the time things happen that make us a bit unsatisfied or slightly annoyed. The natural reaction to this is to complain either to yourself or to someone else. And that’s just fine! Complaining lets you let off steam and it creates bonds between people that feel the same way.  But it’s also easy. Too easy!

Take the next step

So why not take it a step further?  Why not try to improve things? Thomas A. Edison already said:

“Discontent is the first necessity of progress.”

So next time something annoys you, don’t just think “This is stupid”, but also ask yourself “Why is this?” and “How can I change it?”

This will drastically change the way you see the world. Things that used to annoy you will now inspire you to think about solutions. Most people tend to just accept their fate and deal with it. This is called learned helplessness. But it can be unlearned! Start thinking of solutions to your problems instead of just accepting them. That doesn’t mean you have to fix every issue in the world, but simply thinking in a proactive way will make your daily routine much more interesting and will get you brain used to finding solutions.

Make the change

Jay Samit, the author of “Disrupt you!”, recently gave the following advice in an interview:

Write down 3 problems in your life today. Do this for a month straight. After a while this forces you to think deeper, because you already wrote all the obvious ones. So now you start to recognize things that you haven’t thought of before, because you just kept thinking about the same things over and over.

Following this advice will generate you a huge list of universal problems. Because, let’s face it: Every human being is unique in its own way. But on a basic level we are still all the same and most of us will have a very similar experience going through our lives, as long as we live in the same area of the world. So chances are, that many other people will have the same issue as you do and if you find the right solution for it they will be more than happy to pay you for providing it to them.

So from now write down 3 new things that bother you every day on and in one month you will have 99 Problems … and a Business Idea is at least one!

I’m going to start this post by being completely honest with you : after the first Entrepreneurship class we had three weeks ago, I wasn’t really excited about it… To be even more honest, I was a bit disappointed. I took this course because I wanted to gain some actual knowledge and know-hows about venture creation: who exactly should I talk to to get money, what are the legal specifications I should be aware of, which exact steps should I follow to get my company on track? I had this feeling that none of these questions would be answered, and that I was going to waste my time trying to connect with people I don’t even know on LinkedIn, faking to care about start up events and preparing presentations on how I sold coffee on the street…

But then came Joakim Fohlman’s speech.

To keep on being honest, at first, I thought this was a pretty naive speech, explaining how we were all great minds in the room, with great ideas and a great future… But, as the speech was going on, I realized that I was actually directly touched by some of his words, and that all of this was deeply meaningful to me, especially the part about believing in ourselves and daring to take the “weird”, unusual and though path to build a future that really fits us.

To fully understand what this means to me, we have to go back a few years ago, during my graduation year in high school. This might sound childish, weird or even lame to some of you, but I had always been deeply passionate by video games. I’m not going to explain in details what I love about this media here (that would take hours to write and read), but this passion is so intense that I actually wanted to turn it into my job, and study game design. However, for several reasons, my parents didn’t exactly approve this choice, and I ended up in an engineering formation, which I thought was ok after all (many video games fan work in totally different areas, and their lifes are probably great anyway). However, a school long lasting project last year, and an intership as Project Manager in a company indirectly related to the video game area both led me to believe that I could still make my old dream come true, and go use my Industrial and Management skills in the video game industry.

Unfortunately, this path is not easy at all. First, my profile (industrial engineer) is definitely not what the recruiters are looking for. In addition, what I would really love to do is not project management, but to be part of the creative process (game design, scenario…), which makes it even harder given my formation. And finally, even if I make it, the salaries are much lower that in the companies I could work for as an industrial engineer.

Which takes me back directly to Joakim’s speech.

He reminded me of what was really important: doing the things we love and living a life we won’t regret. And the funny thing is that this actually refers to what Serdar said at the very end of the first class, after showing us the video of the guy dancing alone: “you may look crazy to other people, but at least you will enjoy the music”.

Now, I think I understand better the purpose of this class. This not about telling what to do, this is about giving us faith in our own projects and in ourselves, so we can figure out what to do ourselves. And suddenly, all the things mentionned above, that I thought useless, can actually really make sense depending on what you are looking for! I think we’ll all get different things from this class, depending on how much we invest in it, our goals and dreams, and, above all, what we actually want it to give us.

In any case, let’s just “enjoy the music” the way we like it!

Yesterday, Safia Tahar Aissa and I attended the Slush preparation. Event hold in SUP46.

What is Slush?

Slush is a world-renowned event gathering start-ups, investors, media but also companies such as Google, Samsung, Facebook… who are looking around for new companies to buy.

Slush is facilitating meetings between start-ups and investors. In this event there are a lot of different investors and as they told us “Spend the time as efficiently as you can” meaning that start-ups should focus on investors they really want.

Last year, CareMonkey – an Australian start up who has a risk management system that automatically keeps medical and emergency data up to date and makes it instantly available on mobile devices- won the Slush 100 pitching competition and received a price of 650.000€ – big prize for this kind of event J-.
This year, Slush is going to be held in Helsinki on November 30 and the firs of December don’t miss that!

Why we went to the Slush preparation event?

Even if, at first we didn’t plan to attend Slush event, we went to the preparation phase to meet some entrepreneurs and we did get the opportunity to meet some of them and discuss their ideas and their plans.

One of their ideas was: an application that helps reduce bullying and cyber violence in the student life (Speak Up!). In this application every student could post something –anonymously or not- about an incident including the location and a photo if one has been taken and comment about what they saw.

Nowadays, people are afraid to go to talk to someone if they are facing problems or if someone in their circle is facing one and I think this application could incite them to help control all these kind of bullying or violence.

We discussed about the future of this application (develop it in the work world, as well and deploy it all over the world). This discussion was very interesting and helps us to see what the next steps were after the idea.

The entrepreneurs were all open-minded, glad to share their ideas and ready to listen to our ideas and our feedbacks.

I am looking forward to go to other event like this one. Let me know if you hear about something like that 🙂

Find more about slush: www.slush.org

This week we have learnt that invention is the novel idea with great potential while innovation is the commercialization of the novel idea. KTH innovation comes in to help students and researchers to commercialize their results and business ideas. The first time i got know about KTH innovation was five years ago when i started my studies at KTH. It wasnt until my third year at KTH that is when i actually understood what they are about and how they help aspiring entreprenuer with their expertise in commercialization and business ideas.

How do they help

KTH Innovation main goal is to help students and researchers get their ideas to the market. Their support is free, confidential and they do not claim any ownership to your ideas. Their selection process is neither strict and nor a competition where a winner is picked. Furthermore, they believe that all ideas are worth testing and evaluating.

They support in different areas of commercialization and cover start-ups, licencing and corporate collaboration.

They also collaborate a lot with other organisation that offers support to entrepreneurs and start-ups such as STING (Stockholm Innovation and Growth), THINGS and OPEN LAB.

How can they help you?

KTH innovation can help you in very many ways. They not only help with your ides but also organizes events such as workshops and motivational lectures to help you develop as a potential entrepreneur.

If you have a create idea, get in touch with them and they will guide you and offer you great feedback on your ideas. If you take it further they will assign you a business development coach who will follow up on you and lend you the support you need all the way. KTH innovation can also help you with funding, applying for grants and stipendier.

If you currently not ready with an idea follow their Facebook page and you will be updated with the current events that might be of interest to you

Happening currently’

Bicky Chakraborty, the founder of Elite Hotels has donated five million SEK to KTH. The money is to be used in entrepreneurship programs and help in promoting an entrepreneurial mindset among students and researchers at KTH.

With this new source of funds a new programme has been created by KTH Innovation called the Bicky Chakraborty Entrepreneur Program. The program offers funding, coaching, tailored courses and mentorship to accepted entrepreneurs for one year. The application is open and for more information contact KTH Innovation or check out their website.

I went to the Finance Day fair at KTH yesterday, to discus in what grade innovation is progressed into Swedish banks. The innovations that occur are more than often linked to software development to rise the overall user-experience for their customers.

In order to follow the conclusion of my observations I have to introduce a little bit of background information about the Swedish bank system. The system is based out of a software that was developed in the early 80s, which hasn’t really been updated since then. If this is the first time that you hear about this, the reaction might be: “huh – that sounds bizarre”, but think about how “perfect” the system has to be. For all transactions that is done on a daily basis, every day, it cannot be paused – it has a life of its own. Which means that you never get the time to change system and move over files and such. So the way that the Swedish bank system has followed the technical development (as everything, that still exists on the market is bound to do) is to innovate “plugin-program” that is docked on to the system.

So back over to the conclusion, since the banks is bound to follow a progressive development of their software to keep up with competition. Software will forever dock on to the gigantic system creating a even bigger lock-in effect. When will the innovation (with capital I) that will bring us a paradigm shift in the Swedish bank market?