Knowledge 100% of the time.
Fact of the matter is that credit is very easy to access these days and it's not too difficult if you start something without any capital. The fixed costs to business have been totally eliminated with the popularity of online business these days.
You need the right expertise and skills more than ever. Capital is the easy part to secure once you've gotten around to formulating a legitimately good idea.
I totally agree with you! Knowledge is the most important thing today. Because capital is sufficiently available. Maybe not in every part of the world but in a large part of it. You can see that just by looking at all the startups these days. They are flooded with capital, so that they sometimes do things that they didn't really want to do and that often fail. In order to be successful, the key is no longer capital, but the idea and thus also the knowledge to implement the idea correctly.
They go hand in hand most of the time (rarely it doesn't) but experience matters as well which is connected to knowledge of course. Sometimes people just learn something, be good at it, even great at it, then get to a position that they stop learning anything new and just manage over other people, many high level managers do not know the job as well as their few year veteran workers because those workers keep on learning, so there are those situations when the initial idea is wrong.
However in most cases if you learn something well, and keep improving and also have a good experience, then making money becomes so much easier. I know it is unfair for me to say this but on my early days of my current work I wasn't good, I mean I still didn't suck, but compared to how I am today? I am much much better these days and that is why I make more money as well.