Building a Great Marketplace

Frederic Mazzella, Co-Founder and CEO BlaBlaCar

Frederic Mazella is the CEO and Founder of BlaBlaCar, a peer-2-peer travel company which connects drivers with empty seats to people looking for a ride. BlaBlarCar was founded in 2006 and is a Lead Edge Capital portfolio company. Prior to BlaBlaCar, Frederic was a Project Manager at Kabira, a supplier of in-memory transactional platforms that power some of the world’s largest financial and telecommunications enterprises. Before joining Kabira, Frederic was a Research Assistant at NASA for three years.

Summary Notes on Building a Great Marketplace

• Building a great marketplace
  • First thing to look at in marketplace
    • The quality of service, ratings etc.
  • What makes a great marketplace?
    • Quality of service that each side provides to the other
    • Drivers have to be good at providing service, punctual, friendly, rating mechanism
    • Building trust with people who have never met
  • Key metrics to monitor?
    • Fill rate in the cars – how many seats have been sold vs. offered by drivers
      • Wants any driver offering seats to get passengers
    • Ratings and average of rating to make sure it’s high enough
    • Monitor activity and how often riders and drivers come back
  • Advice to marketplace entrepreneurs
    • Build a service you would use
    • Frederic has been ridesharing for a long time and this helped shape the right experience to make sure it’s easy and efficient
    • Since it takes a long time to build a marketplace, it’s a good goal to want to build a service you would use
  • Make sure market is large
    • Think about the opportunity and whether or not it is niche
    • Need to have many people to participate in the network