Their namesake company, co-founded by billionaire banker Jorge Paulo Lemann, made news when it acquired Heinz with Berkshire Hathaway. While the full form of Lemann’s 3G is a mystery, for Pavel Begun, 34, and Cory Bailey, 35, co-founders of 3G Capital Management, 3G stands for good business, good management and good price. Begun’s business streak as a child led him to own multiple businesses in his teenage years They, too, like their icons — Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger — want to keep working harder and harder at becoming better investors and keep making bold high-conviction investments.
Pavel, you have always been very enterprising and had started a few businesses in Belarus before you were even 20 years old. How did the move from Belarus to the United States come about?
PB: I initially came to the US back in the early 1990s to attend high school as an exchange student, but returned to Belarus once the term of the program ended. In 1998 I won a scholarship awarded to top students in Belarus to attend a university in the United States (in my case it happened to be Western Kentucky University). At first I was somewhat reluctant to move — in Belarus I ran a couple of businesses that I thought had a very promising future (a newspaper business and a packaging business). At the same time, I realised that both of these businesses, while exciting, weren’t the businesses that I’d want to be actively involved in until the last day of my life. The business that possessed such a characteristic was the business of investing, and it was my long-standing dream to be involved in it. And that meant moving to the US, the most developed investing market on the planet, teeming with the world’s greatest investors. So, I made the move.
