Knowing What You're Talking About

Henrique Dubugras was twenty-one when he co-founded Brex, a company that offers credit cards to other businesses. He said this in an interview in Ali Tamaseb’s Super Founders (PublicAffairs, 2021), right after saying he doesn’t think running the business is about age.

Jim Barksdale, who ran Netscape, is credited with a joke about rank: when there’s data, look at the data; when there are only opinions, go with the boss’s. The joke assumes that rank decides only when nobody in the room knows the facts. A first impression like being twenty-one can work the same way.

Asked by a journalist whether Intel’s informal dress and “partitions instead of offices” were affectation, Andy Grove answered in High Output Management that they were “a matter of survival,” because Intel’s business meant mixing “knowledge-power people with position-power people daily.”

At Y Combinator, a startup program, Dubugras and his co-founder Pedro Franceschi first tried a virtual reality idea. A few months in, he says, “we realized we had no clue what we were doing.” So they went back to payments, “what we knew a lot about”: as teenagers, they had spent two and a half years running a payments company in Brazil. Brex came from the field they knew, the kind of ground Charlie Munger calls a circle of competence.

Arie Belldegrun, interviewed in the same book, says credibility counts more than what you know, and that things get easier once people know your name. Nobody knew Dubugras’s name when he started. The first time he went to Brazil’s Central Bank, which regulated his teenage payments company, the reaction was “Who are you?”