In The Big Chair - Jens Wohltorf of Blacklane

Jens Wohltorf, CEO

In January, Blacklane secured its highest funding round yet at $45 million, bringing its total to $85 million and allowing the Berlin-based private car company to expand service to the Middle East and invest in tech upgrades.

Since Jens Wohltorf co-founded the company in 2011, Blacklane has grown its reach to 250 cities and counts 260 people as employees.

Six years in as a business, what is the hardest thing that you now have to do as the CEO?

The hardest and most time-consuming things are people- and culture-related. When you start a business, in the first few years, you are heavily involved in operations, doing everything.

But as you become bigger, startup mentality and agility and all those things are important to you, but you have to invest a lot in making sure these things aren’t changing.

We are in 250 cities and have 260 employees now. You start seeing silos growing and a different corporate culture growing, so you have identify it quickly and kill it.

But how do you do that?

We’re constantly monitoring what’s happening, looking across departments. Having an open ear and talking to as many people as possible.

We have regular “consultation hours,” where the management speaks to the teams to get a sense of the roots that are growing within the company.

And, of course, as you grow, you have to talk more and more. So now there’s less time that I have to deal with operational issues.

Do you miss that part of being the boss?

I’m not sure if “missing” is the right word, but I am interested in operations and getting on people’s nerves with it!

I find it quite challenging personally to grow into a role that is dealing with people-related topics, as this is not how I started.

So what about Blacklane’s biggest challenge?

Handling the growth, in a variety of dimensions – staff, recruitment, engineering.

All those requirements across the board is quite a challenge for us, as we have to make sure we keep up the business growing whilst not compromising the culture.

On the business side, we invested the first five years at Blacklane going broad – scratching the surface a little everywhere.

Now, in the next stage, we need to go deep, instead of broad. This means deeper into source markets, creating brand awareness in places such as China or the Middle East, where nobody knows us.

What’s the customer acquisition strategy now?

Historically, Blacklane was built on English-speaking Google Adwords – very simple.

Now, we are learning how to localize – and that means not only language, but it also consists of payment preferences, currencies, design.

We have to think about other language services, such as Mandarin. Should we bring Mandarin-speaking drivers to all our markets, somehow leveraging technology?

What about the business deals?

We have learned over the years that it is very important to come up with a handful of integration options with distribution players out there, instead of customizing every single integration just for the sake of a big travel brand that we might be talking to.

Our vision was always about removing the stress from travel.

Jens Wohltorf - Blacklane

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Often you are dealing with very old systems and very old technology in the travel space. When we started Blacklane, we were very impressed by the travel brands but very shocked by the systems behind them.

We are trying to make things possible, but if we were to start again, I would say that instead we would have five options, hopefully the right one is among them, but if not then let’s talk another time.

Do you think those systems in the industry that surprised you back then are now evolving?

It’s changing, but not all over them. Some businesses are seeing the issues and addressing them.

Others, however, are sitting on cash cows and waiting. 

There are some airlines out there that are completely rebuilding their entire tech stack, to make it more dynamic – that’s the right strategy and they will win.

How easy was it to do a deal with Amadeus then?

Well, they are an old player. We were dealing with technical constraints, but on the other hand they are offering a world that is almost unreachable for us.

Connecting to a PNR (passenger name record), for example, is a very nice feature – if your flight is cancelled or your transfer changes, we have that information. They have big systems, but they are constantly changing them.

Would you say partnerships are the main way to grow for Blacklane?

If you think of the customer, they first need to have a transfer solution wherever he or she goes – so we need to have a presence in those markets, especially in the most important frequent traveler streams.

But also we need to look into the digital world, such as where they are placing their bookings.

For example, if you are a big multi-national corporation, you will never book a car through a Blacklane For Business account, because you are not allowed to.

So we therefore have to be well-positioned so that a traveler can book through a travel management company.

Is there a temptation to lower the price by using cheaper cars, so that you can then get higher volumes of customers?

We’ve tested this, in the very early days, with something we called Smart Class, using the small Smart cars. We also launched an economy class.

People talk of lessons learned and failing, and all that stuff – these were both so successful, from a customer perspective, that we haven’t had enough capacity any more to hold up the quality of the bread and butter business.

We realized as a an organization, which has been trained on zero tolerance of quality issues or failure, if a driver is late or a car is not clean, that it’s difficult to unlearn this for these types of cars, where we can be a bit more relaxed.

I would love to use smarter and more advanced technologies to utilize the cars so perfectly well that even an E Class for a transfer comes down to a price that other companies can only serve as an economy class car.

You’ve brought in a lot of money so far, so what has been Blacklane’s capital-raising strategy?

The last two rounds were targeting regional expansion and going deeper into markets.

Empathy and emotional intelligence is something that technology cannot easily provide.

Jens Wohltorf - Blacklane

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The round in 2016 was targeting Asia Pacific, and the most recent one was for the Middle East.

We’ve also made some technological advancements, such as the Pass product.

So this all has to be paid for. We are constantly thinking about adding new services of cars – smaller, bigger, longer, shorter, more electric, you name it – as well as extending our reach from pure ground transportation into the airport experience.

Our vision was always about removing the stress from travel. I was super-stressed out from traveling the globe all the time.

Why do you think, generally, so many travel startups have not reached the heights that perhaps you have?

Travel, by definition, is a global phenomenon. We realized very quickly that it’s not good to have Blacklane in just Berlin or Munich – we must be in London or Hong Kong as well.

This involves funds, scale, trust from investors. It’s not easy.

The established players that are killing small startups are typically platform businesses, so they have no identity or DNA when it comes to being in the mindset of a supplier, or service delivery.

Still, it will be interesting to see over time how those relationships between suppliers and intermediaries evolve as a result of that.

How do think this all plays out, over time, as we talk more about self-driving cars and things like that?

Very well, I think.

As long as humans are involved in services, there are advantages and disadvantages.

The disadvantage is that you have human error, such as underestimating the traffic or being late. But you also have factors such as empathy, being able to gauge if a customer is in the mood for a chat or not.

Empathy and emotional intelligence is something that technology cannot easily provide.

I imagine both scenarios. Say it’s a long journey, in a self-driving car, you might have a need for a driver, almost like a cabin crew.

But in a short, inner-city ride, it’s not so necessary. It becomes a commodity.

You still need to a lot of emotional intelligence to anticipate the needs of a busy business traveler.