Bloomberg Línea — “Hopefully we’re going public one day,” Colombian delivery giant Rappi’s member of the founding team Andrés Bilbao said at a conference on Wednesday in which he reflected on the unicorn’s story so far, and during which he ruled out selling the company.
“I’m pretty sure there is no selling at Rappi,” he said.
Addressing his regrets when scaling Rappi, Bilbao said the unicorn’s first fundraising round diluted 50% of the company for its stakeholders, yet he believes that Rappi did well to find the so-called smart money that DST Global provided.
“They saved us millions of dollars by telling us what to do,” Bilbao recalled, speaking at Latitud’s Vamos LatAm Summit in São Paulo on Wednesday.
DST made Rappi a unicorn in 2018 by leading a $200-million investment round.
Even through difficult times, Rappi executives didn’t think about selling the company, Bilbao said, but rather managed to procure a $100-million check to keep the company going.
Advising other startup founders to think big when building a new endeavor, Bilbao said that, during its first two years, Rappi did not hit one-third of its goals.
‘There’s no such thing as a work/life balance’
Bilbao said that, in the specific case of Rappi, staff shouldn’t rest on the weekend, but on Mondays and Tuesdays.
“In a business where top sales are on Sunday, and second top sales is Saturday, we shouldn’t rest on Saturdays and Sundays,” Bilbao said.
When building Rappi, there was no such thing as work/life balance, he said.
“What work life balance? It’s life and it’s Rappi. Are you in or not? It changed, we started to chill out, and now, as investor I’m supposed to be healthy, to workout,” he said.
-- This article has been updated as Rappi says it considers Bilbao ‘part of the founding team’ and not co-founder
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