The San Francisco Bay Area has more VC firms and dollars invested than all East Coast cities combined.
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.
Education has always produced an incredible amount of data; that's always been obvious to me. But technology had to catch up.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.'
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.
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.
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.
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.