Simón Borrero and the unfinished business of getting there

Before Simón Borrero had an app, he had a telephone number. At university, he and a friend printed cards advertising a delivery business called Tim Marín. Students could call for drinks for their parties. The founders, meanwhile, were trying to study economics and answer orders deep into the night. The arrangement had a certain entrepreneurial purity: every customer interrupted their homework. Eventually, they stopped.

Years later, Borrero would help build Rappi, the delivery and financial services company with operations across Latin America. The resemblance to that student enterprise is hard to miss. The desire was already there: people wanted things brought to them. What was missing was a practical way to coordinate the transaction without requiring two students to remain permanently attached to a phone.

His career is full of these early, imperfect versions. An audience arrives before a business does. A shopping interface looks promising until somebody has to deliver the shopping. An expanding company attracts capital, then has to demonstrate that it can earn its keep. Borrero keeps returning to the gap between an idea that sounds plausible and a service that somebody can actually use.

A full agency. An empty order book.

He grew up in Cali, Colombia, in a large family. In his telling, his father supplied discipline and entrepreneurial ambition; his mother taught him about family and connecting with people. Toys had to be earned. Selling juice was one way of getting them. It was an early introduction to the slightly inconvenient fact that wanting something and paying for it are separate activities.

One university venture put that distinction in particularly sharp relief. Borrero and friends created an online modeling agency, recruiting through the social network Hi5. They attracted 5,500 models. They found work for none of them. As opening acts go, it was an impressive demonstration of how a large number can conceal a very small business.

The episode is funny because he tells it plainly. It also gives his later work some useful texture. A platform needs more than registrations. There must be a reason for people on each side to keep showing up. Models needed bookings. Merchants would need orders. Customers would need their purchases to arrive. Counting the people in the room was only the beginning.

After learning to build websites, Borrero put his remaining 700,000 Colombian pesos into Imaginamos, a software and digital services business. He hired the teacher who had taught him. Here, at last, was something companies would pay for. Client work also placed him among other young people interested in starting businesses of their own.

The shelf on the screen

Borrero studied business administration at Universidad de los Andes. His technical education included teaching himself programming at night. That combination matters: he could approach an interface as a business problem, then get involved in how it was built. The question was less abstract than “What is the future of commerce?” It was closer to “Why is buying groceries on a screen such a nuisance?”

He took time away from Imaginamos to pursue EADA’s International MBA in Barcelona in 2009-10. He later described wanting broader horizons and stronger leadership skills. Running a functioning business had given him something to improve; studying abroad gave him a chance to reconsider how far it might travel.

Grability, co-founded in 2013 with Sebastián Mejía, approached grocery shopping through the interface. Borrero has described seeing Apple’s iBooks shelves and wondering whether groceries could be handled with a similar visual familiarity. Shelves, baskets and gestures were already understood. Why make customers learn a laborious new ritual simply because the shop had moved onto a phone?

The product found retail customers including Walmart México and El Corte Inglés. But a convincing screen could solve only part of the problem. The purchase still needed to leave a store and reach a doorstep. That physical journey would become the center of Borrero’s next company.

The doughnut distribution strategy

Rappi began in Bogotá in 2015, co-founded by Borrero, Mejía and Felipe Villamarín. Its early customer acquisition campaign was pleasingly literal. The founders stood on a street corner offering free doughnuts in exchange for app downloads. Before the investment rounds came a transaction almost anyone could understand: install this, eat that.

The business brought shops, restaurants, customers and delivery workers into the same marketplace. People could ask for a broader range of services than a conventional grocery storefront allowed. Rappi’s orange-clad couriers, known as rappitenderos, made the digital service visible on actual streets. A successful order involved several people keeping their part of a bargain.

That made Borrero’s work more complicated than designing a pleasant basket. A customer experiences one order. Behind it are a merchant, a payment, an available courier and a route. Each extra choice adds another coordination problem. The simplicity on the screen has to be earned elsewhere.

In 2016, Rappi joined Y Combinator’s Winter batch. Borrero was also recognized among MIT Technology Review’s Innovators Under 35 in Colombia that year. His explanation of the product remained grounded in shopping behavior: familiar aisles and shelves, products added with a swipe, and delivery that completed the purchase.

“All mistakes and errors, combined with determination, lead to success.”

Simón Borrero, reflecting on his career in 2017

It is an optimistic formula. His own history supplies the qualification: errors had already closed businesses. Determination became useful when it produced a different attempt, a workable service or a better team. Simply keeping the modeling agency open would not have conjured a customer for its thousands of models.

A billion dollars does not finish the job

Rappi reached unicorn status in 2018, crossing the billion-dollar valuation threshold. In 2019, SoftBank committed $1 billion. Those milestones changed the scale of the enterprise and the attention paid to it. A company that had handed out doughnuts in Bogotá was now a reference point for what a Colombian technology business might become.

The founder’s version of that ascent is less comfortable than the funding announcements suggest. At MoneyCon in February 2025, Borrero said Rappi had come close to going under seven times. He connected his decision to keep going with the people whose livelihoods depended on the company. Success, as he described it, had included repeated episodes of wondering whether the business would survive.

There is something bracing about putting that admission beside the valuations. Outside money can buy time, recruit people and fund expansion. The next order still needs to work. A founder can celebrate a financing round on Tuesday and face an unappealing operational problem on Wednesday. The newspaper photograph rarely captures Wednesday.

The consequences of the model extend beyond its founders. Delivery platforms have prompted disputes about working conditions and the position of couriers. Rappi’s scale gives those questions weight. Borrero speaks about opportunity; the people doing the deliveries have their own interests in how that opportunity is organized. Both belong in any serious account of the company he leads.

His own measure of influence has grown broader. At MoneyCon, he said he hoped that, within a decade, other entrepreneurs would be building projects larger than Rappi. A founder who once needed customers for one small business was talking about the productive capacity of a country.

Fast deliveries, a patient listing

By June 2025, Borrero was describing a new operating phase. He said Rappi had completed four consecutive profitable quarters, including positive EBITDA, and was reinvesting in growth. He also discussed extending Turbo, its rapid delivery offering, across more of what customers buy. These were his descriptions of the company’s progress and intentions.

The ambition had a recognizable ancestor. Grability had tried to make shopping feel easier. Rappi had tried to make the purchase arrive. Turbo compressed the wait. Each attempt examined another part of the same ordinary transaction, searching for time the customer might prefer to spend elsewhere.

In November 2025, Amazon announced Amazon Now in Mexico in collaboration with Rappi. The launch covered ten cities and promised delivery of everyday essentials in about 15 minutes. Customers could access the service through Amazon. It was a concrete example of Rappi’s delivery capabilities being used inside another company’s shopping experience.

Speed has a different meaning when the subject is a stock market listing. In a 2025 interview, Borrero said an IPO depended on favorable conditions and suggested late 2026 as a possibility. That was a conditional ambition. A delivery estimate and a listing window answer to very different clocks.

He also kept his geographical priorities clear: Latin America remained the bet. Recruiting people from companies such as DoorDash and Amazon could bring experience into that project without requiring Rappi to become an American consumer business. For Borrero, international talent and a regional purpose could occupy the same organization.

The telephone cards, the unbooked models and the digital shelves make a useful company for those later ambitions. They keep the story at human scale. Borrero has spent years working on transactions that appear small to everyone except the person waiting for them. A party needs its drinks. A model needs a booking. A customer needs a bag to reach the door. His career keeps circling back to the unfinished journey between a promise and its arrival.