JOSE FERREIRA

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.

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

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.

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.

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 I had to give one piece of advice to a budding entrepreneur, I would say: 'Aim big.'

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.

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.

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

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 the best and hardest-working.

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.

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.

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.

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

In a crisis, markets always look to see who is the next-worst off and proactively begin shying away from them.

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

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.

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.

Big data in education has huge potential to improve learning materials.

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

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.

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.'

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

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.

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