Alejandro Betancourt López’s Rule for Learning New Industries

A sunglasses factory, a fleet of private-hire licenses and a payments gateway share almost nothing, from their regulators to their customers. Alejandro Betancourt López has backed all three, and he says the trick is knowing how deep to go into each.

He calls himself “a very fast learner,” and he was careful about the limits of that claim. “I understand the basics of not everything in the world but of my investments, let’s put it this way,” he said in an interview.

Three Rulebooks

Barcelona’s metropolitan authority limited private-hire permits to one for each 30 taxi licenses. The EU’s top court found in June 2023 that the authority had never proved the ratio helped manage local transport or the environment, law firm Cuatrecasas noted. Cities may still demand a separate permit for such cars if the rule treats applicants equally, the judges said, but keeping taxi businesses profitable cannot justify a cap by itself.

Auro was built around those caps. “In Spain specifically, transportation is highly-regulated,” he said in 2020. Licenses “were already capped in the markets,” so only a set number could ever be bought.

Easy Payment Gateway, which he helped fund in 2017, worked with card networks, fraud tools and local payment habits. It combined more than 200 international solutions in one interface from bases in Spain, the U.K. and Gibraltar, Baker Tilly reported, and its commercial teams sat in London and Madrid.

Hawkers makes frames on injection machines in Elche, where each cycle takes about 50 seconds. Lenses still arrived from Asia when the plant opened in 2021. Its early sales pitch was simple. Sunglasses were “one size, one type,” he said in another interview, and “cheap enough for you to take a chance.”

Where Alejandro Betancourt López Draws the Line

“I surround myself with good talent and people that I think can run it efficiently,” he said. He knows enough about their work “to be able to guide them or let them do their own thing.”

Alejandro Betancourt said he listens to the specialists, takes in their input and checks that he trusts the decisions they are making.

Hawkers has its own chief executive, Pedro Beneyto, who spent more than 12 years as finance chief of Alain Afflelou in Spain. Its factory has had its own technical director, while Alejandro Betancourt López holds the chairman’s seat.