I started Knewton to do my bit to fix the world's education system.
Copied to Clipboard
Copied to Clipboard
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.
Copied to Clipboard
Copied to Clipboard
Education has always produced an incredible amount of data; that's always been obvious to me. But technology had to catch up.
Copied to Clipboard
Copied to Clipboard
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.
Copied to Clipboard
Copied to Clipboard
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.
Copied to Clipboard
Copied to Clipboard
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.
Copied to Clipboard
Copied to Clipboard
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.
Copied to Clipboard
Copied to Clipboard
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.
Copied to Clipboard
Copied to Clipboard
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.