
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.
Subscribe to our newsletter below
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
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
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.