What I learned leading teams at Rappi (and what no leadership course teaches you)
Written by:
Andres Bilbao
Published on:
Jan 12, 2026
I took my first leadership course when I had 50 people reporting to me. It was a waste of time.
Not because the content was bad. But because it was designed for stable corporations, not for startups where everything changes every week.
After scaling teams at Rappi from 10 to thousands of people, I learned that executive leadership in startups is a completely different sport.
Why traditional leader training fails
The typical leadership course teaches you frameworks for "managing high-performance teams" designed for organizations where roles are defined and processes are established.
In a startup:
Roles change every 3 months
Processes are invented on the fly
Priorities change every week
You need a different kind of leadership and influence.
Collaborative leadership framework for startups
What works in hypergrowth:
Context over control
You can't review every decision. Your job is to provide context so clear that your team can make good decisions without asking you.
The most important executive skills are not making decisions. They are communicating decision criteria.
Speed over perfection
A startup leader makes 10x more decisions than a corporate executive. Most of them will be wrong.
Your job is to create systems to correct quickly, not to avoid mistakes.
Example on speech
Traditional executive training overvalues communication. In startups, your team doesn’t listen to what you say. They observe what you do.
If you say the customer is a priority but never talk to customers, you’ve lost credibility.
The leaders' academy we need
What is lacking in current leadership training is exposure to real leaders in real situations.
Not Harvard case studies from 20 years ago. Conversations with founders who are scaling teams today.
That’s what we are trying to create at 30X: a leaders' academy where you learn from people who are facing the same challenges as you.
High-performance team management
High-performance leadership comes down to three things:
Hiring people better than you in their area
Giving them context and resources
Getting out of their way
It sounds simple. It is incredibly difficult to execute.
Executive decision-making under pressure
Strategic negotiation and decision-making under pressure are not learned in courses. They are learned by doing.
That’s why our executive training includes practical exercises where you face real scenarios with feedback from mentors who have already experienced them.
It’s not theory. It’s training.
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