Leopoldo Alejandro Betancourt López: No One Wins Alone

Leopoldo Alejandro Betancourt López has little patience for the idea of the lone genius. Asked in early 2022 what skills a leader needs, he started with persistence and moved quickly to the people around that leader.

“I believe in good leadership, but also I believe in people. If you don’t have the right team, you will not get anywhere,” he said.

The Swimmer Example

He tested the point against a sport with one competitor. “Nobody’s a single player who makes everything happen by itself or by themselves. That’s basically not true,” he said. A swimmer who wins alone in the pool still depends on others, in his telling. “You need the right trainer. You need the right coach. You need the right instructor.” Alejandro Betancourt López used the example to argue that support matters even where the scoreboard shows one name.

If an athlete in an individual sport relies on a team, a company with hundreds of employees cannot rest on one executive. Large goals need large teams, in his view. “If you want to be substantial and make an impact on whatever you’re trying to transform or achieve, and if it’s substantially significant, you are going to need the right team,” Alejandro Betancourt said.

What Venture Investors Weigh

Of the 885 venture capitalists surveyed by Gompers and his co-authors, more than 90% called a company’s management team an important factor in the success or failure of their investments. More than 55% named the team as the single most important factor, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Fifty-eight percent said they help hire board members and 46% help hire employees after investing. Eighty-seven percent give guidance on strategy, 72% connect their companies to other investors and 69% to customers.

How Alejandro Betancourt López Applies It

“If I don’t believe in the people behind it, I don’t invest. It’s all about people,” Alejandro Betancourt López said in 2023. He has learned “from venture to venture that the biggest factor is people,” he added.

Auro, the private-hire operator listed on his résumé among his founding ventures, employs close to 5,000 people, Merca2 reported in 2026. It is a business that runs on drivers, dispatchers and managers well beyond any single executive, and Uber bought 30% of it in February 2025. Back in 2020 the company held “about 2000+” licenses, mostly in Madrid, he said at the time.