BlaBlaCar

You can't just keep getting a new job, then not show up, get another one, and just kinda go through the cycle over and over again." And Esther told him not to worry about it, that she was going to head out soon, that she was gonna go to Alicante for a bit and then maybe even ask her mom if she could stay with her again in Sevilla, just to kind of gather herself and see what her next travel plans would be.

So the next day she left in a BlaBlaCar rideshare, which is kind of like a carpool app for people heading to the same places.

She messaged Miguel and Vanessa, letting them know that she made it to Alicante safely.

Once in Alicante, Esther went to stay at a shelter that assists people without stable housing.

There was also an argument between Esther and the staff attendant at the medical center over her wanting to stay the night there and being told that she couldn't, at which point Jose stepped in, trying to pull her away and take her out of the medical center.

After leaving the hospital at around 4:30 AM, the two of them walked to an area under a highway, intending to get some sleep there.

Investigators were able to establish that partly because that's exactly where her remains were later found, and partly because Esther had separately arranged through the BlaBlaCar app for someone to pick her up there and drive her to Valencia the following day, which never happened because Esther was murdered.

That means that the messages sent from her WhatsApp at 5:30 PM the next day on August 23rd, the strange ones that Pepa received, weren't actually from Esther, which of course her mom and her family suspected from day one.

So those are like interesting nuances.

The other story that I often share is a French tech company called BlaBlaCar.

And there was sort of the early lift model with long distance car sharing.

Frederik Massala, the founder and the former CEO we spoke to, was also, he wanted to build a global business.

But it was a very French business back then.

The company was, in fact, called Couvre Tourage, which I'm butchering that for sure, but which is French, right? And when you want to build a global brand, having a French name can be quite difficult in building that global brand.

So he changed it from being Couvre Tourage to BlaBlaCar, which is more commonly understood.

That you can have conversations in a car as you drive from A to B.

And I had a wonderful childhood growing up there and then studied in the UK and the US and actually studied psychology, which I think I realized very early that that was probably not the right path for me, but sort of kept going and learned a bunch of really interesting things that I actually find very helpful both as a VC, but also as someone that manages teams.

And then I wasn't really sure what to do and got really lucky because I met the BlaBlaCar team very quickly after I left school and joined BlaBlaCar, a French tech company, as an early employee.

And that was towards the end of 2012, early 13. and spent five years at BlaBlaCar building out the international expansion.

So BlaBlaCar, for those that don't know, is, as I said, a French tech company, and then it's a B2B2C marketplace.

And we went from being purely French to being truly global within, I think, probably two to three years.

And we went into 22 different markets, initially all of Europe, and then outside of Europe, sort of India, Turkey, Mexico, Brazil.

The experience of going through that journey from very small sizes of revenue to substantial revenue and global expansion is a very special experience indeed.

Not many people get to see that.