A playful proverb is quite widespread in Russia: “Learning is light. And ignorance is a little light and to work. ” For the first time this joke sounded in one of the Soviet comedies. She quickly left the screens "in the people" and became a steady colloquial expression.
It seems that the meaning of this phrase is fully true. Education is required to get a good and well-paid job, for a successful career. Oh is it really necessary for business? Two students from Stanford convincingly argue that time to attend classes at universities can not be wasted.
Who are you talking about?
The main characters of the modern world of business are young guys from Brazil, Pedro Francesca and Enrique Dubuigras. A couple of years ago, they decided not to waste time studying and launched a startup. The company they founded is called Brex, and today it is valued at $ 2.6 billion.
However, Brex is not the first business project of two enterprising Brazilians. They started making money much earlier than they became Stanford students, dropped out of school and got rich in a couple of years.
Where did they meet?
The partnership of friends is so harmonious that questions involuntarily arise about how the two were able to meet. After all, the fact that they were born and raised in one country does not at all explain the presence of friendship and business partnership.
Pedro Francesca and Enrique Dubugras met on the Internet, on the social network Twitter, while still teenagers. The same things caught their attention. The common interests, the same occupations and similar life goals became a solid foundation for friendship, which has grown into a business partnership.
What did they do?
The teachers called the two child prodigies. The guys were not interested in football, he did not beg for mopeds from their parents and, in principle, were not interested in anything other than programming. In other words, both of today's millionaires in their school years were considered “nerds”, wore glasses and did not notice cute classmates at all. However, doing the same thing, they did all the same different things.
Pedro was the first Brazilian to jailbreak an iPhone 3G. He also became the first software maker to help Apple's Siri virtual assistant understand and speak Portuguese. And the young man managed all this even before the celebration of the sixteenth birthday.
Enrique preferred to code and program video games. For the first time he did this at the age of 12, having successfully transcoded and modified one of the games for himself.
How did they end up at Stanford?
Despite the fact that young Brazilians were considered child prodigies in their homeland, for European and American universities they were only one of many thousands of gifted young people, nothing more.
Friends perfectly understood this and did not even consider such payment options for education as a special scholarship or a grand scholarship. However, they could get a grand from any of the Brazilian companies without any problems, but that would mean being tied to the company that paid for their studies, having obligations and lack of freedom of choice of employment. This was not their option.
The guys decided to just make money on tuition. Moreover, they chose a university is not simple, nothing but the pathos and dear Stanford, friends were not interested. They wanted to graduate from one of the most prestigious universities in the world and at the same time gain thorough, fundamental knowledge.
Because of this, friends launched their first business project, the success of which allowed them to easily go to Europe and begin training at Stanford.
How it all began?
When friends celebrated their sixteen years, it was time to move from plans to actions and start making money. What he did, organizing the company Pagar.me.
Friends created the first payment processor in Brazil convenient for website developers and Internet business owners. After 30 million dollars passed through their program, the guys sold their business. At that time, more than a hundred people worked in their company.
But the young geeks were not interested, they were waiting for Stanford, and then the whole world. Therefore, they parted with a successful and steady-income business, without hesitation and regret.
What impression did Stanford make on them?
Friends never uttered a single bad word about the university, nor even hinted that Stanford could not give them anything. On the contrary, Pedro and Enrique with great respect and in a very positive way speak about the university.
But if they liked everything, then why did they leave the walls of the school? According to Enrique, friends lacked freedom, practical business in a "live" entrepreneurial environment and the ability to be independent in their judgments.
Pedro explains their decision to leave the university more specifically. He says that in the classroom they explained things that the guys had already learned about when they had problems with monetization, scaling, and much more during the development of Pagar.me. Moreover, theoretical, simulated situations assumed the presence of the only correct solution and often did not correspond to life realities.
It can be assumed that at some point, friends realized that they already knew everything about economics and business that professors could tell them.
How did they decide to leave school?
Without a doubt, the decision to leave the school, within the walls of which friends so wanted to find themselves, was not easy for them. However, very smart people differ from everyone else in that they know how to admit their mistakes and learn from them.
After studying at Stanford for eight months, Enrique and Pedro decided to go for broke and stopped attending classes, fully devoting themselves to the creation and development of a new business project. This was not a gamble, because Brazilian geeks did not know firsthand and not in theory what kind of effort and knowledge a startup would require.
When they were engaged in the Pagar.me project, they studied various issues and found a solution to the problems that arise as they become available. And this method of training in practice worked, once at Stanford they knew about the laws of building a successful business, almost more than teachers. In addition, friends were excellent programmers.
Thus, they really had the necessary knowledge, skills and experience to create a successful company. So why did they need to waste years wasting classes that weren't useful?
What is Brex doing? How did the business develop?
However, friends did not “slam the doors” at all and did not leave the school “in English”. On the contrary, they remained in good relations with both students and teachers. Many of them became Brex's first investors and employees. No doubt, this benefited the business and accelerated its development.
Brex is a fintech company specializing in corporate cards for startups. Paradoxical as it may seem, initially the Brazilian geeks planned to engage in a completely different direction. As it turned out, they completely lost sight of the fact that the virtual business space has an empty niche and completely lacks the software required by a lot of people trying to start their own business.
Companions “matured” only when they themselves needed a corporate card.After examining the state of the market, they learned that many startups registered on the YCombinator platform remain unrealized because they cannot solve the problem with a corporate card, that is, with receiving payments.
So the idea of writing and implementing the appropriate software came up, for the implementation of which the guys raised $ 120,000 in investment. Their largest investor was YCombinator, which provides a platform for startups.
Friends contacted the founders of the PayPal payment system, Peter Thiel and Max Levchin. It was an important moment that determined the future of Brex and ensured its rapid development.
In simple words, companions do not buy or resell anything, they provide others with the opportunity to do this. The guys write computer programs that allow payment systems to work clearly, quickly, simply and without technical failures. Of course, this is very important for all beginner businessmen and is necessary for companies involved in the implementation of electronic money transfers, payment methods and other financial matters.
The urgent need for such software explains the rapid development of Brex. Which in less than a couple of years, from a startup that has nothing but investments and the ideas of the founders, has turned into a successful business worth $ 2.6 billion. One can only be surprised that such a niche in the market turned out to be completely free.