Every big bet looks obvious once it pays off. The one Alejandro Betancourt López made on Spanish ride-hailing permits didn’t look obvious at all back in 2015, which is rather the point.

He saw the gap between what VTC licences were worth then and what they’d be worth once ride-hailing arrived. His reasoning was plain, even if the execution wasn’t. Platforms would need licences, the supply was finite, and whoever moved first would be rewarded when the shift came.

Gamble Versus Calculated Gamble

“When we started the travelling business in Spain, Auro, we knew that Uber was going to come to Spain and we started accumulating all the licences,” Betancourt López has said. “It was a gamble, but it was a calculated gamble because we knew that the market was going to shift to the private riding industry instead of taxis.”

The difference matters. A pure gamble leans on chance. A calculated one rests on reading the odds, the regulatory drift, and a global trend that pointed hard toward ride-hailing. His bet was placed on direction, not luck.

Find the Chokepoint

The move drew on a principle Betancourt López has used elsewhere: find the chokepoint in the value chain before anyone else clocks it. He reaches for history to explain it. Standard Oil didn’t try to own every well; it owned the refineries every barrel had to pass through. Aristotle Onassis didn’t own the oil; he owned the ships that carried it.

VTC licences sat in the same spot in Spanish ride-hailing. Every car a platform wanted on the road needed one. Control the permits, and you control the doorway to the whole market. That reading is what turned a few million euros of unwanted paperwork into the base of the Auro story Alejandro Betancourt López would ride for nearly a decade.