About Jose Ferreira: Jose Ferreira is an American entrepreneur and Founder and CEO of Knewton.
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 t...
The best programmers and internet entrepreneurs are in the Bay Area. Don't kid yourself about that, not even for a second.
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.
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...
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.
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...
Data adds concrete information to a teacher's observations and intuition, but it will never replace experience, personal relationships, and cultural understanding.
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.
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.
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.
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.'
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.
Education has always produced an incredible amount of data; that's always been obvious to me. But technology had to catch up.
Big data in education has huge potential to improve learning materials.
I started Knewton to do my bit to fix the world's education system.
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...
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.
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.
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.
