Tag Archives: Jose Ferreira

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. Jose Ferreira

The best programmers and internet entrepreneurs are in the Bay Area. Don't kid yourself about that, not even for a second. Jose Ferreira

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. Jose Ferreira

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. Jose Ferreira

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. Jose Ferreira

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.' Jose Ferreira

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. Jose Ferreira

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

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. Jose Ferreira

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 […]