Jose Ferreira Quotes

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.

Venture capitalists certainly create value for themselves, but they also singularly create value for the rest of the world.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Anyone who sincerely wanted to use policy to reduce illegal immigration should start by crafting legislation based on changing actual behavior.

Data adds concrete information to a teacher's observations and intuition, but it will never replace experience, personal relationships, and cultural understanding.

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.

Education has always produced an incredible amount of data; that's always been obvious to me. But technology had to catch up.

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.

The San Francisco Bay Area has more VC firms and dollars invested than all East Coast cities combined.

I started Knewton to do my bit to fix the world's education system.

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.

It is intellectually dishonest to lump venture investors with hedge fund and buy-out investors.

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.

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.