EDUCATION

The best thing a human being can do is to help another human being know more.

Day trading is a skill like any other. You can learn it. But most people give up during the learning curve, right before it clicks.

Most people want a get-rich-quick shortcut. Trading is the opposite. It rewards patience, study, and discipline — all things most people do not want to practice.

Retail investors have been sold a lie: that passive investing is the only option. It is not. With the right tools, you can actively manage risk and outperform.

The problem with school is it teaches you to be an employee. Nobody teaches you to be a business owner or investor.

In school we learn that mistakes are bad. In the real world, I pay people for their mistakes. That is where the experience lives.

I skipped college and got my real estate license at 18. That decision had more impact on my financial life than any other single choice I made.

If you are buying options on Robinhood without understanding how they work, you are not investing. You are gambling with extra steps.

Invest in yourself first. Your brain is your most valuable asset.

Most people invest money they do not have in education they do not use to impress people they do not like.

I got straight D's and F's in school. My teacher told me I would never amount to anything. She was wrong.

The best investment you can make is in yourself.

Information changes situations.

Financial education shouldn't be a privilege. It should be a right.

The best way to understand something deeply is to explain it to someone else.

Financial literacy is the most valuable skill that schools don't teach.

The single most important thing you can do is invest in your own financial education.

Read everything. The person who reads the most wins.

Financial education shouldn't cost $200,000 in tuition. A podcast and a library card can change your life.

The best investing education in the world is free. Read Buffett's shareholder letters. They're all online.

We started this podcast because the best investing books shouldn't require an MBA to understand.

The more complicated a financial product sounds, the more someone is making money from your confusion.

The best hedge against bad investments is understanding what you actually own.

I was the worst student in my school. Then I learned that success is a skill, not a talent.

Most investing courses in Asia teach you how to trade. I want to teach you how to build wealth.

If a finance educator won't show you their own portfolio performance, ask yourself why.

Invest three percent of your income in yourself in order to guarantee your future.

I went from washing dishes to consulting Fortune 500 companies. The only thing that changed was what I put in my head.

The biggest risk in investing isn't volatility. It's never getting started.

We made investing accessible. But accessible doesn't mean risk-free. Those are very different things.

We trained 500,000 developers for free through UiPath Academy before most of them even worked at companies that paid us. That's how you build a market.

I was not a great student in terms of grade point average, but I was a good student in terms of learning what I needed to learn to succeed in life.

We dropped out of Stanford after one semester. Our professor said we were making a mistake. Our bank account disagreed.

I dropped out of Harvard Business School to start a company in South Korea. My professors thought I was throwing away my career. I was just picking a different one.

I wrote my Stanford MBA thesis on building an eBay for Latin America. My professor gave me a B. The market gave me $80 billion. I'll take the B.

I dropped out of MIT at 19 to start Scale AI. My parents are both physicists. They understood probability well enough to know this was a bad bet. But they let me do it.

I gave $378 million to the University of Michigan because that school changed my life. I was a kid from Detroit who did not know what he wanted to do. Michigan showed me what was possible.

I bought my first duplex for $40,000 at 21 years old. I had no idea what I was doing. That duplex taught me more about money than any college class ever could.

If you've never tried, how will you ever know if there's any chance? I failed the college exam twice, but here I am. You are not defined by your failures — you're defined by what you do after them.

I finished college in two years because I had something to prove. Everyone told me I wasn't smart enough. So I decided to prove them wrong as fast as possible.

We launched Alchemy University to teach blockchain development for free. If we grow the developer pie, everyone wins — including us. Education is the cheapest customer acquisition strategy in the world.

I created 42 because the education system produces employees, not entrepreneurs. No teachers, no tuition, no diploma — just problems to solve and people to solve them with. If you can survive 42, you can survive anything.

I never went to university. I taught myself to code as a teenager by hacking phone systems. Some people learn from professors. I learned from dial tones and error messages.

Money is the number one cause of stress in America, and nobody teaches you about it in school. That's not an accident — it's a system designed to keep you confused and compliant. Financial literacy is self-defense.

You do not need an economics degree to understand the economy. You need curiosity and someone who will explain it without jargon.

A kid in a village in India deserves the same quality education as a kid at Stanford. The internet makes that possible. We just had to build the platform.

The traditional university model — pay $200,000 for four years in a classroom — is not the only way to learn. It never should have been.

We partnered with the best universities in the world because credibility matters. A certificate from Stanford or Google means something. That is what gets people hired.

Completion rates for online courses are low because we are comparing them to the wrong thing. Compare them to a textbook sitting on a shelf. Our rates are incredible.

When 100,000 people signed up for my Stanford machine learning course online, I realized education was about to change forever.

On behalf of the eight generations of my family who have been in this country, we are going to put a little fuel in your bus. This is my class, 2019. And my family is making a grant to eliminate your student loans.

We built Brilliant because the way math is taught — lectures, memorization, rote problems — kills curiosity. We wanted to bring the curiosity back.

I grew up in Guatemala where access to quality education costs money most families do not have. Duolingo exists so that zip code does not determine what you can learn.

I taught myself math on the internet and won a Math Olympiad silver medal. Then I moved to Silicon Valley to make sure every kid in every village could do the same.

We have 200,000 courses because we believe the best teacher for any topic is someone who just mastered it, not someone with a PhD who forgot what it is like to be confused.

I grew up in a village in Turkey with no teachers. The internet was my classroom. Udemy exists so no one has to learn alone like I did.

Every student in India deserves a chance at IIT. Not just the ones whose parents can afford a $3,000 coaching center in Kota.

Eight million students were paying us for answers. The question now is whether they will pay us for understanding. That is a harder sell but a better product.

Education is the most powerful tool for changing someone's life trajectory. Everything I do through Emerson Collective starts from that belief.

I dropped out of MIT at 19. My parents were not thrilled. But I had seen enough to know that the idea was better than the degree.

I have no university degree. I learned to code in Germany as an apprentice. The best education is building things.

I never went to business school. I went to the mailroom. That was my MBA.

I learned more about probabilities and risk from playing blackjack in Las Vegas than I ever did in an MBA classroom.

I learned more about business at Stanford in two years than in any job. But I learned more about survival running Sea Group than at Stanford.

The skills you have today will not be the skills you need tomorrow. Continuous learning is not optional. It is survival.

I was the first in my family to go to college. I paid for it with scholarships and part-time jobs. That shapes how you see the world.

Stanford taught me how to think. India taught me how to build. I dropped out of one to focus on the other.

I did not go to business school. I went to art school. That is why my vacuums look different from everyone else's.

Princeton taught us to think rigorously about cryptographic systems. That rigor is why Arbitrum works.

I studied photography in Florence. That semester shaped Instagram more than any computer science class ever could.

I started as a math teacher in Kerala. Ten years later I was running the most valuable edtech company in the world.

I dropped out of UT Austin because the business was growing too fast. The professors understood. My parents less so.

I wrote two books on investing. The best compliment I ever received was from a reader who said they actually made money from them.

My mom told me to get three things: a business degree, a master's degree, and a doctorate. Two out of three ain't bad, Mama, but I got all three.

I built a library dedicated to financial mistakes because if investors studied history, they'd stop repeating it.

Poker taught me more about risk management than any finance textbook ever could.

I learned everything I needed to know about markets at Drexel Burnham Lambert.

Giving $200 million to make medical school free was easy. The decision was easy. Writing the check was easy. Knowing it would change thousands of lives — that's what matters.

Equity is the most powerful tool in capitalism. Most people don't understand it. That has to change.

Education is not preparation for life. Education is life itself.

Mastery-based learning means no student moves on until they actually understand. That single change would transform education.

Every student deserves a personal tutor. AI might finally make that possible.

You can educate at scale for free if you're willing to think differently about the business model.

I failed the bar exam three times. The fourth time, I passed. That's the only one anyone remembers.

Education is the most powerful lever for changing a nation. Everything else follows from it.

I have both an engineering degree and a medical degree from MIT and Harvard. The future needs people who bridge disciplines.

Three MIT PhDs walked into a chip company. That's not a joke — that's our founding story.

Financial education isn't a feature. It's the product. If people understand money, they invest more.

IIT-JEE and NEET are life-determining exams. Parents will pay any price for quality preparation.

India's best teachers are in Delhi. The students who need them are in tier-3 cities. We bridge that gap.

Philanthropy isn't giving back. It's investing forward. Education returns compound the same way financial returns do.

The Rich Dad team taught me to teach. The properties taught me to invest. Both matter.

I dropped out of college six times. At some point, the universe was telling me something.

India needs education that leads to jobs, not degrees that lead to nowhere. That's why I built upGrad.

IIT Delhi and IIM Ahmedabad taught me how to think. Building a company taught me everything else.

The best financial advice is free on YouTube. The worst financial advice is also free on YouTube. Learning to tell the difference is the real skill.

I don't have a finance degree. I taught myself about index funds and then taught a million others. The information is free — the discipline is what costs you.

Understanding the plumbing is more important than any individual trade. If you know how dollars flow, everything else makes sense.

My audience is 18-35 year olds who never got financial education in school. I'm the teacher they never had.

When a child asks why, that is the beginning of learning. Our platform exists to answer that why.

The best investment any country can make is in the education of its children. Everything else is secondary.

A student who loves learning will never stop learning. Our job is just to make them fall in love with it.

I never thought of myself as an entrepreneur. I just wanted to teach in a way that made sense.

Scale and quality are not opposites. The best teachers can reach millions if you build the right platform.

We tell girls to play it safe and do everything right. We tell boys to be brave and try things. Then we are surprised that men dominate every risk-taking field.

Every major crisis in history has been solved by the generation that learned to code. Climate change, healthcare, democracy — all of it runs on software.

Teach girls to be brave, not perfect. Perfectionism kills more ambition than failure ever could.

The music business will eat your lunch if you don't understand the business side as well as the creative side.

I didn’t go to college. I went to the futures pit. Turns out, one of those teaches you more about risk.

We are the only platform where a first-generation college student at a state school can get discovered by the same employers that recruit at the Ivy League.

I never went to college. I went to a punk rock show and started a business the next day.

I learned business not in any school, but in my family's seed shop. The best MBA program is real work.

The university system is broken. We train people for four years and they come out unable to do practical work. That is a failure of education, not of students.

Technology is the greatest equalizer. A child in a village with a laptop can learn the same things as a child in Manhattan.

India does not need more software companies. India needs better education. The companies will follow.

I did not go to business school. The timber yard was my business school.

The best investment I ever made was not in a company. It was in education. Knowledge compounds faster than money.

The packaging business taught me more than Harvard Business School ever did.

Trading is a learnable skill. The idea that great traders are born, not made, is just wrong.

I learned more from watching customers choose between two tomato brands than from any business school.

The most important form of capital is not financial capital. It is human capital.

I went to primary school. The factory was my university.

We made a one billion dollar commitment to education because talent is the Arab world's most underdeveloped asset. The return on that investment will outlast anything else we build.

Financial literacy is not a luxury. It is a survival skill. And we are failing to teach it.

The school system rewards memorization. Real life rewards the ability to think differently under pressure.

The Arab world does not lack talent. It lacks systems that trust and empower that talent. That is what education reform must fix.

The IIT taught me to solve hard problems with limited resources. That is exactly what building a financial company from scratch requires.

Philosophy teaches you to sit with uncertainty. Most of the important decisions you face in business are uncertain decisions. That training has mattered more than I expected.

I am not interested in giving people fish. I want to help them build fisheries.

Education is the only inheritance worth leaving a child. Everything else can be taken away.

The real indicators of a country's progress are not the buildings it builds but the quality of its libraries and toilets.

I learned more from being on the bench at Michigan State than I ever learned from being on the court. You watch everything. You learn how teams actually work.

I left Harvard Business School in my first year to start Yelp. That was the best educational decision of my life.

My parents came to this country with almost nothing. The one thing they believed in was that education is the door that opens everything. I've spent my career trying to hold that door open for more people.

Every child deserves a brilliant friend who has the knowledge of a doctor, lawyer, and financial advisor. AI can be that friend.

I went to school to study the environment, not business. That was not an accident.

Education is the single best investment a community can make in its own future.

My father worked hard so I could study. I studied hard so my children could build. That is how it works in families that succeed over generations.

We need to provide more training and educational opportunities for the youth of Africa as a whole. My companies and I have always supported training and education for all Ethiopians and for all Africans.

Innovation and entrepreneurship must be inculcated at universities, as they are the driving forces of national progress.

A degree tells people you can finish things. Building a company tells them more.

I believe that the study of the core institutions, ideas, and traditions of Western civilization is essential and valuable, and ought to be an integral part of education at Yale.

There are many legal issues in the bankruptcy process and restructurings, and understanding the different legal systems in Europe and Asia.

It teaches you to think logically, evaluate arguments, to be critical, and open to new ideas.

Talent is distributed equally around the world, opportunity is not.

Wealth that is not shared has little meaning. I would rather it educate the next generation.

I had about 18 months in the industry. That is why I stick to explaining the basics instead of telling anyone what to buy.