Today, Wednesday the 12^th of February 2014, the liquidation of Voitures Jaunes was pronounced.

 

8 weeks ago, I was proudly presenting our company in TV interviews and in the press. We were crossing the Ts and dotting the Is of our latest capital raising ; this time large enough to take us into the Big Guys category and giving us visibility for the foreseeable future. Things were good. Things were very good. The hard work of the last 4 years was starting to pay off.

 

How did it come to this?

 

In November 2008, David, Rémi and I shared this big vision of opening up the transport business. Countless Parisians nights walking back home fresh in our memory made us hope for a better service. Surely if we needed it, others did as well.

So here I was, in December 2008, embarking on a week long course to become a private hire driver myself. If we were serious about it, we would need to know what it took to become a driver.

When I came back, I was definitive : “this is a great idea, what’s more we’ll be the first. No one is doing it!” Little did I know that as I was saying that, a guy called Travis was saying exactly the same thing in California… You are not the only one to have "your" idea so you'll have to be better than someone out there.

 

The concept would be simple : offer to the most people the greatest choice of transport service by whichever mean of communication (phone call or other: this is 2008, Nokia bricks are outselling the Iphone 3 by 3 to 1, and the App store is less than 6 months old…) thanks to a state of the art dispatch system and an endless supply of available drivers.

 

We all resigned from our City jobs, moved across the channel and started the adventure.

 

Raising our seed money was hard and long, but thanks to the trust of our 34 Friends & Family and Investors we launched in great fracas with the firm aim to disrupt the market.

 

Initially, we started with in house drivers. Labour laws in France are very strict and while neither of us wanted to end up in the Courts we were not 100% happy with that decision. But all of our close advisers, lawyers and media counsellors, pushed us in this less dangerous route of hiring our drivers. You can and should trust your advisers, but remember that their main purpose is to protect themselves above all else. Listen to your intuition first.

 

We also launched with third party tech providers for our dispatch technology. In the very early days of Apps we misjudged how overwhelmingly important they would become. This made us slow and exactly the contrary of what we should have been : agile. We had to fight through every change and adaptation; not mentioning the high cost involved. Own your tech resources in-house.

 

About a year ago we came to the conclusion that our model was not efficient enough. Hiring and firing drivers was too consuming, whether in terms of time, resources and money. And the tech needed upgrading. Our set-up was stopping us from growing as fast as the demand. After 3 weeks of thinking, we redefined our vision and decided to subcontract our drivers and in-house our tech capabilities. We saw the results instantly. We became very agile, launching new features in our apps pretty much instantly and our third party drivers were literally twice as productive as the previously employed ones. We had found our sweet spot.

 

The only thing left to do was to find the institutional investors for the next stage of our development. We fought like tigers, meeting 25 funds and institutional investors in Paris and London. Thanks to the continuous financial support of our initial investors, we obtained enough time to find the right deal.

 

The noose around our neck finally loosened when we got an agreement in principle on the 14^th of November from our preferred option: a well known actor in the transport of light good “in the last mile” (which I won't name). After 2 further meetings, we agreed for a signature of all the legal documentation on the 4^th of December.

 

The day before, the 3^rd of December, as we were getting ready to leave the office for supper together, we received a call, The Call… Our saviour was reconsidering and would not be attending the meeting the day after.

 

The earth opened beneath us and swallowed us whole. Being men of action, we summoned our lawyers for a meeting of the last chance, to try and find solutions. We could not let all this hard work, our hard work, everybody’s hard work, the sacrifices, our sacrifices, everybody’s sacrifices end up in the bin of history.

 

But the situation was too dire and too urgent to find any solutions. It is with anger and profound sadness that we had to inform the staff of the fateful decision of closing down. Their tears and support will forever stay with me. They believed in us. They followed us. They worked as hard as they could, trusting our decisions and throwing themselves in it.

 

To our investors : thank you. Benjamin, Claude, Daniel, Danielle, Edouard, Emile, Emma, Gaëlle, Guillaume, Gustavo, Jean-Baptiste, Jean-Claude, Jean-Luc, John, Joydip, Keith, Laurent, Marie-Caroline, Michael, Nadine, Nicolas, Philippe, Pierre-Antoine, Pierre, Robert, Stéphane, Stéphanie, Thibault, Timothy, Xavier, Yves. Thank you for your trust and support. We are sorry it did not work out despite all our efforts.

 

To our team :thank you. Alain, Alexandre, Anne-Cécile, Geoffrey, Jean Claude, Jimmy, Kevin, Lamine, Miguel, Mohammed, Nicolas, Oliver, Perrine, Rebecca, Valérie, Yazid. Thank you for being the best ambassadors of our brand.

 

To our drivers and customers: thank you. Thank you for using our service and providing it.

 

To our partners and most of all Claudine: thank you. Thank you for your time, advice, and constructive criticism. I am very grateful that we have shared this bit of road together.

 

Last but not least, a big, huge thank you to our families. Our parents, brothers and sisters for always being here for us. But most of all, Rebecca, Nelly, Cécile, our wives for supporting us and helping us stay positive, for taking great care of our little ones when we were too busy to see them grow. We will never be able to pay our debt back.

 

Mathieu, CEO & Co-Founder of Voitures Jaunes