Many venture capitalists say they're looking for the next big idea. But they aren't, really; they're looking for something derivative, because derivative is safe.
— Jose Ferreira
I started Knewton to do my bit to fix the world's education system.
Big data in education has huge potential to improve learning materials.
We get more data about people than any other data company gets about people, about anything - and it's not even close. We're looking at what you know, what you don't know, how you learn best. The big difference between us and other big data companies is that we're not ever marketing your data to a third party for any reason.
I had started teaching because I love brainteasers. At some point, I had taken every standardized test out there - the SATs, the GREs, the GMATs, the MCATs. I just took them for fun.
Google's real threat to China is not that it will leave the country. It's that it will embarrass China and damage its national reputation as a place to do business.
Jeff Bezos was one of those best and brightest who came to N.Y. to work in finance. He didn't need to know anything about retail bookselling to start Amazon.
If your business had no risk, you could go get a bank loan and call it a day. VCs like risks - without them, venture capital wouldn't exist. But they need to be risks that VCs are good at assessing and managing.
Immigration has defined my entire life. My parents left Mozambique with nothing but their wits in search of a better life for their kids. They moved to England in the 1970s, saw the classism there, and left for America soon after.
Anyone who sincerely wanted to use policy to reduce illegal immigration should start by crafting legislation based on changing actual behavior.
Venture capitalists certainly create value for themselves, but they also singularly create value for the rest of the world.
If I had to give one piece of advice to a budding entrepreneur, I would say: 'Aim big.'
Data adds concrete information to a teacher's observations and intuition, but it will never replace experience, personal relationships, and cultural understanding.
Big data has been used by human beings for a long time - just in bricks-and-mortar applications. Insurance and standardized tests are both examples of big data from before the Internet.
Education has always produced an incredible amount of data; that's always been obvious to me. But technology had to catch up.
The factory model of education is a gargantuan bureaucracy. Some kids are good fits - I wasn't. The system gives you bad grades and tells you you're stupid. You don't think, 'If this kid's not a good fit, it could be the system's fault.'
The San Francisco Bay Area has more VC firms and dollars invested than all East Coast cities combined.
The best programmers and internet entrepreneurs are in the Bay Area. Don't kid yourself about that, not even for a second.
No one cares how valuable your product is if its addressable market is small. The key isn't so much the number of users as it is the dollar size of the market.
Stop pretending there's anything wrong with businesspeople hiring diligent laborers who will work for less. Let employers sponsor any worker and argue for why that worker should be given citizenship. Such a vetting mechanism would naturally promote the best and hardest-working.
In a crisis, markets always look to see who is the next-worst off and proactively begin shying away from them.
It is intellectually dishonest to lump venture investors with hedge fund and buy-out investors.
Education is among the most important problems we face because it's the ultimate 'gateway' problem. That is, it drives virtually every global problem that we face as a species. But there's a flip-side: if we can fix education, then we'll dramatically improve the other problems, too.
Google, Facebook, and other consumer web companies violate our privacy. But that's only because they have an ad-based business model. They can only make money by selling your data - and degrading the product experience with ads.
We know everything about what you know and how you learn best because we get so much data. And education is the highest-stakes media product in your life. It's infinitely more important than your Facebook friends' status updates or your Google search results because it's your future.
I spent most of my career in education and technology. I worked at Kaplan, and I was one of the first people trying to bring innovation into for-profit education.
I found school very boring and frustrating.
What N.Y.C. does attract, year in and year out, is the very best general talent from around the world. The absolute smartest, neurons-just-fire-faster, can-bend-spoons-with-their-mind talent.
It's not enough to have a value-adding product in a big market. You also need the right conditions. Will you be able to scale revenues within a 5-10 year time frame? Is the timing right? YouTube wouldn't have worked pre-broadband.
You need more than just a great idea. Your product or service must add an enormous amount of value to some industry. If the idea isn't completely new, it has to be better, cheaper, or more efficient than what we already have.
If the penalty for hiring illegals is just a fine, it becomes a business decision. But if the penalty is jail time, illegal immigration will come to a screeching halt.
Venture capital today is clustered in just a few locations - Silicon Valley, New York, Boston, and D.C. It's far from efficiently distributed and accessible.
Venture capitalists buy minority positions in young companies they think will grow quickly; buy-out investors buy most or all of companies they think can be turned around by fixing a few basic things.
