When Frédéric Mazzella was struggling to find a business model for his long-distance ride-sharing company, the “It will never work” doomsayers were legion. The young entrepreneur reminded those who suggested he was wasting his time of his Italian roots. “I can eat pasta for a while longer,” he would say.

Today, Mazzella, founder and president of BlaBlaCar, has proved the pessimists wrong. And how. His company is worth an estimated €1.5bn and in the last year alone has gone from 10 million to 20 million “members” – car drivers and users – and recently raised $200m in investment, a first for a French startup company.

BlaBlaCar is the online websharing site that puts those with cars going from A to B in touch with those without transport who want to travel the same route. As the driver is not making a profit, only covering their costs, the service neatly sidesteps regulation and taxes. As the route network is mainly city to city, it has also largely escaped the wrath of taxi drivers. BlaBlaCar drivers must use their real names, which are checked.

At 39, Mazzella is fulfilling his ambition to change the world. During a recent visit to London with France’s young finance minister, Emmanuel Macron, 37, he set about challenging the idea that the digital economy will destroy the pillars of French society: workers’ rights, welfare and equality.

Macron’s “neo-liberal” economic views, including his questioning of the totem of France’s work code, the 35-hour week, are not popular in France, where employment rights have been fought for, often literally, at the barricades and on the streets.

The minister has seen the digital future and with it the inevitable clash between France’s traditional protectionism and collective rights and technological progress that requires more individual aspiration and effort.

The question the political left faces is not how to go backwards but how to construct what Macron told investors should be a “fair framework … a form of neo-progressivism around the idea of individual progress for all, in a way that combines flexibility with security”.

Visions of the future tend to veer from the apocalyptic to the fantastically optimistic. Fifty years ago, it was said the 21st century would see an automated robot workforce toiling, while redundant humans enjoyed funded leisure time. The reality, however, has been catastrophic for many workers in societies and industries that are failing to address the challenges of advancing technology and innovation and where rich and poor are increasingly alienated and polarised.

At Air France last Monday, workers stormed a board meeting to approve 2,700 redundancies as part of a restructuring of the loss-making airline, ripping the shirts off the backs of directors. Earlier this year, licensed taxi drivers physically attacked UberPop drivers around France, claiming they represented “unfair competition”. The government then banned UberPop, a ban upheld by the country’s highest court last month.

The scenes played to the stereotype of a Gallic workforce as a modern equivalent of modern-day British loom-wrecking Luddites, intent on smashing new tools that threaten their livelihoods. Sympathetic analysts pointed out that the physical violence, shocking and inexcusable as it was, paled in comparison to the psychological violence of being thrown out of work in a deep economic crisis by well-paid men in suits.

Mazzella, normally confident and talkative, seems anxious not to go out of his comfort zone on this question. He admits that, in terms of attracting investment to France, the kind of “bad news” represented by what happened at Air France travels faster than good news.

For a company such as BlaBlaCar, where the average age of the 360 staff – many of them on proper, open-ended contracts – is 29, such behaviour is “unthinkable”, he says. “We are a new generation and there has been a change of mindset and relations to work. There is a change in spirit and we have witnessed that with BlaBlaCar. Students coming out of top schools in France are now applying massively to startups. Before, they would only think of applying to very, very large companies like BNP or L’Oréal.

“This was based on the image they had for their future career – to join a big company. Now they think startups are a good way to grow professionally and many want to create their own.”

He cited the example of his own alma mater, the elite Ecole Normale Supérieure, one of France’s most prestigious grandes écoles.

“Last evening I was at my own school where I studied physics, I was totally surprised because they had organised a contest for startups. This is a school that trains teachers for top schools and researchers – that’s its purpose – and it was holding a startup contest and they were really good. This is totally unusual. Ten years ago it could never have happened.”

Mazzella, the son of a maths professor father and French and philosophy professor mother from the Vendée region on France’s Atlantic coast, deserves to be a figurehead of France’s new Generation Y entrepreneurs. Looking at his CV, it is clear he would have succeeded whatever direction he took.

As a child he sent inventions – among them one for a humane mouse-trap – to a young science magazine.

An accomplished pianist who studied at the Paris Conservatoire – he also plays the violin, guitar and drums – he was tempted to make a career in music, but studied physics, then went to Stamford, near Silicon Valley funding his masters in computer science by working at Nasa developing programmes for doctors to carry out surgical operations in space. He also has an MBA, which he hopes sees off any suggestion he may have a head for ideas but not for business.

The genesis for BlaBlaCar is now the stuff of startup lore, and Mazzella is happy to recount it: it was 24 December 2003 and he was trying to get from Paris to his family home 500km away for Christmas. The trains were full and his sister had to come to pick him up. On the way back, he spotted a business idea. “The highway goes the same way as the trains and I could see the trains were full with no seats left and the cars were empty. I was like, oh my god, there were seats to go to the Vendée but not on trains, in cars.”

The next year, Mazzella started Covoiturage.fr – later changing the name to BlaBlaCar – but success was not instant. Between 2006 and 2011, Mazella tried out six business models before hitting on the right one. Today the company operates in 19 countries, including Britain, and will open an office in Brazil before the end of the year.

“Everywhere, I was getting people telling me I was wasting my time,” he said at BlaBlaCar’s impressive headquarters in north central Paris, a short walk from Google France. (We are in the BlaBla bistro because the canteen is home to the Friday morning “breakfast” during which staff brainstorm).

“People would say, ‘But you had a proper job and you quit to create something that will never work’. Maybe it’s a French thing, but the fact I’d spent some years in the US helped me believe it was possible. In the US they talk of ‘venture capital’ while in France it’s translated as ‘venture risk’.”

Mazzella – his staff call him Fred – says that, despite its reputation for being difficult for business, France now has the ecosystem for startups to flourish: “It’s like talking about growing trees without talking about the environment or the field in which those trees will grow.”

As you would expect, Mazzella has done the sums. “It costs €5,000-6,000 a year to run a car in France, and there are 38 million cars, meaning €200bn is spent, amounting to 10% of GDP. Yet, 96% of the time the cars are parked and not moving … and three out of four cars that are moving have only one person on board. If this under-optimisation was applied to trains or buses, it would be considered nonsense.”

The potential for optimising this even further at home and abroad is, he says, massive.

BlaBlaCar is not only changing the business landscape but the language. Among the 10 values pasted as slogans on the office walls is “The member is the boss” (the ride-sharing equivalent of: the customer rules) and “Fail. Learn. Succeed”.

Fail? “This is something culturally new [in France],” says Mazzella. “I really hope this culture we are developing will bring some fresh air.”“In French culture, one way to progress is to criticise everything, including ourselves. It’s almost a sport. It’s not we don’t like something, it’s because we want to progress, but while it’s OK to criticise France when you are among French, when you are abroad and criticise France, people believe you.

“We wanted to have French people be proud and realise things are changing in our country instead of always talking about strikes. I think because we criticise it’s one of the reasons we have so many strikes.

“Half of success is the willingness to succeed and the other half is working at it. We need that willingness to succeed to be more present than it has been in France.

“French government is doing everything it can do, I believe. It’s harder to move a country than a company and there are so many things to change, especially when dealing with new technology when it comes and disrupts things. We are new and we have a young population. Here people don’t behave in the same way as people 20 years older.” He added that the French have to be more positive: “We need to change that spirit to succeed.”

Asked if he was successful enough to take his foot off the accelerator or – heaven forbid – follow the well-worn route to tax exiledom, Mazzella looks shocked.

“Who me? No, what would I do? Absolutely not, this is my life,” he says.

■ The average BlaBlaCar journey is city to city and a distance of 200km, meaning they pose little competition to taxi drivers.

■ The average cost is 20-50 times cheaper than taxis.



■ As this is ride-sharing and similar to giving friends or family a lift and no profit is made by the driver, there are no regulation, tax or insurance problems.



■ The longest trip proposed: England to Vladivostok. The chattiest country on the BlaBla rating: Poland.



■ Eurostat statistics suggest 76% of journeys in Europe are made by car and cover a distance of more than 100km.

