I worked with pc a little (and observed him make lots of decisions). His biggest strength IMO is entering a domain where he has no experience whatsoever, and very rapidly building up correct intuition on how to operate in that domain. There are very, very few people who can do it as well as he can.

I think being "mastercard middleman" is disingenuous. Firstly, because doing that well breaks down into getting good at many domains (software, finance, management, regulatory, sales, recruiting, fundraising, etc. etc. etc.), and secondly because Stripe is far more than that.

At the very least, his intuition on these issues is very likely to be much, much better than random chance.