For the past 10 years, I’ve worked alongside founders navigating the real challenges that come with growth.   Not the highlight-reel kind but the messy middle:  •⁠  ⁠co-founder tensions  •⁠  ⁠delegation struggles  •⁠  ⁠scaling teams without losing control  •⁠  ⁠investment pressure  •⁠  ⁠leadership misalignment  •⁠  ⁠burnout creeping in while the business is “doing well”   My work focuses on helping scaling founders step out of daily operations and back into their true role:  **Architect of the business.**      Because growth often creates a paradox: the company expands, but the founder becomes the bottleneck.     I support leaders who are too central to everything:  decision-maker, fixer, fire-fighter, emotional anchor.     Together, we recalibrate:   → what only you should own   → what must be delegated   → how leadership evolves beyond execution   → how to build a business that moves without your constant presence     The goal is not just more revenue (while it definitely happens): It’s more headspace, stronger leadership, better collaboration, and a company that can scale without consuming its founder.  Giving him or her what they deserve: quality of life, satisfaction, time and much more.

Rachelle Leerling

This morning I hosted a test round of a new live mastermind!

It's about why many scaling businesses plateau; even when the founder is working harder than ever.

And more importantly:

What actually needs to shift if a company is to grow beyond the founder.

The conversation confirmed something I’ve been seeing for years inside startups and scale-ups:

Growth doesn’t stall because of a lack of effort.

It stalls when the way the founder leads no longer matches the stage the business is in.

More doing doesn’t fix that... but different leadership does.

So I’m opening up a new group program for scaling founders who feel:
• stuck at their own capacity
 • pulled back into operations
 • unsure where the real constraint is
 • hungry for more clarity, ownership over their output, and renewed growth

This is for founders who know the next level won’t come from pushing harder, but from repositioning how they lead.

I’ll be hosting another live masterind on *Friday 13 March* to discuss the three shifts that allow a business to scale beyond its founder.

If you're in that scaling phase and something in this resonates, send me a DM and I’ll share the details!

Happy Friyay 🌞

Advisor and Co-Pilot to Established Founders & Leaders | Next live mastermind: 25 March

Yesterday, I had the chance to work with a group of internal changemakers 

People who don’t necessarily lead teams, but are stepping up to drive meaningful change from where they are.

We explored what it really takes to create impact in complex organizations: 

- moving from silo thinking to system thinking
- making the right work visible
- focusing energy where it truly moves the needle

It was a practical, honest session, grounded in real situations they’re navigating today. 

Thanks all, for the sharp reflections and a strong willingness to challenge assumptions and think beyond “my part” toward “our impact.”

Born into a family of entrepreneurs and engineers in Colombia during the turbulent Escobar's 90s, I left home at 17 to forge my own path. What followed was an unconventional journey across continents —studying Civil Engineering while working as a housekeeper and pool cleaner in Vermont, learning Mandarin in Tianjin, berry-picking in Herzogenaurach, and working on projects at Yale and the World Trade Center.

After Stanford Business School and a Master's in Business in Europe, I worked at Philips and L'Oréal. But the entrepreneurial bug won. 

In 2013, I quit to launch a social enterprise connecting street artists with opportunities—transforming regulatory frameworks and winning Europe's largest social entrepreneurship competition. We scaled a marketplace from a Lisbon kitchen to a marketplace operating across 10+ markets, facilitating 120,000+ deals with brands like Tesla, BMW, Google, and Netflix. 

Alongside this, we launched PANTA Magazine, which reached 5M views within a year. Raised Private Equity funding in Germany, managing PnL operations, investors relations, and multi-currency expansion— later pitching 80+ investors for additional growth capital (including one memorable Arctic ice hole pitch) before returning to bootstrap mode. 

Most recently, through the Mizter Rad Show podcast, I've built a network of 1,000+ deep tech pioneers—AI researchers from Stanford, synthetic biology leaders from Harvard, and frontier technology founders—exploring humanity's future through deep conversations with global visionaries.

I thrive in environments where visionary companies need the relentless determination of an entrepreneur, the systematic rigor of an engineer, and the cross-cultural fluency of someone who's lived the world. That's where I do my best work.

Mario Rueda

Your phone is backed up. Your laptop is backed up. You are not.
Andrew Hessel is working on fixing that.

His company Chromosome 24 wants to bank your cells, your data, and yes: your money. So that one day, when cloning is legal and safe, you get another shot.

Not a copy. A twin. Born in a different time, with everything you built waiting for them.

Wild? Maybe. Inevitable? He thinks so.

🎙️ Episode 51 with Andrew: https://lnkd.in/d52dbMch


#MizterRadShow #SyntheticBiology #FutureOfHumanity

Photo by: By Saul Kaplan, founder of the BIF conference.

Entrepreneur. Podcaster. Building in KSA 🇸🇦.

A lot of entrepreneurs and C-people I speak to about Saudi have the same fantasy:
Money is lying on the floor. Fly in. Scoop it up. Fly out. One, two years max.

Buena suerte with that.

Saudi Arabia, like any relationship worth having, rewards those who show up with patience and genuine curiosity. Not those chasing a quick bounce.

What I enjoy most is learning how people here see the world. How they do business. How they build trust. How time works differently.

It's so foreign that it becomes the most enjoyable part.
What feeds my soul is the learning, not the check.

Every new guest is a new world.

Five minutes before hitting record with Andrew Hessel, I was still going over my last notes.

One hour later, we had covered DNA programming, personalized cancer drugs, human cloning, and what happens after you die.

We talked about Ramez Naam's work - author of the Nexus trilogy (three sci-fi novels about a future where a drug lets humans connect their minds directly to each other).

We also touched on Noland Arbaugh's experience as the first patient using Neuralink and the wild concept of "bodyoids" - headless human bodies grown in a lab for medical research, a term brought into the conversation by Stanford University School of Medicine' geneticist and bioethicist Hank Greely.

Weird + exciting + forward-thinking + hopeful stuff.

That's why I do this.

🎙️ Episode 51 is here: https://lnkd.in/dzyPgyyc

#MizterRadShow #FutureOfHumanity #Podcast

taplio

The Battle

Rachelle Leerling

Mario Rueda

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance ScoreRachelle Leerling's LinkedIn Performance

Performance ScoreMario Rueda's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

taplio

The Battle

Rachelle Leerling

Mario Rueda

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Rachelle Leerling's LinkedIn Performance

Performance ScoreMario Rueda's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

Performance ScoreRachelle Leerling's LinkedIn Performance