After graduation, I took a job with Manufacturers Hanover Trust in software development. I don't think I was there more than a month.

I'd never taken an SAT prep course. They were for weaker students.

Exciting discoveries in neuroscience are allowing us to fit educational methods to new understandings of how the brain develops.

When I was a student at Princeton University, I was working part time in a grocery store. I saw an ad for teachers of a prep course. I don't remember what it paid, but it was easily double or triple the minimum wage.

The Internet is the first technology since the printing press which could lower the cost of a great education and, in doing so, make that cost-benefit analysis much easier for most students. It could allow American schools to service twice as many students as they do now, and in ways that are both effective and cost-effective.

The thing about startups is you can make it, and if it's wrong you can remake it, and you can build a team that you want to have, a product that you want to have. You're utterly focused on your users or your customers and their needs, and trying to figure out how to meet those needs.

Almost everyone who has claimed to know what kids need to learn or how they learn has turned out to be wrong.