At Portfolio rather than asking children what they want to be when they grow up, we’ll be asking, “what problem do you want to solve right now?”
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Motivation
How we explain reality to ourselves is a construction with many parts. We gather knowledge and generate meaning through our experiences and traditions; from what we learn in school, at work and at home.
I wouldn’t bring my 19 month-old son, Eli, to a pediatrician who, for some reason, only used medical methods from the late 19th century. So why would I want to enroll him in a school whose methods have pretty much not changed since the late 19th century?
In the 1999 film The Matrix the main character, Neo, is given a choice by Morpheus, an elusive figure for whom Neo has been searching. Embrace reality or don’t.
I’ve spent my career in managing engineering teams in small and large companies. The startup I cofounded grew from just the two founders to ninety five people before it got acquired by Intel in 2013. At Intel, I was managing a team of nearly one hundred and thirty engineers spread globally across four regions.
I’m a technologist by training and experience. I worked in Silicon Valley for a number of years before moving out to the east coast for my PhD. In 2009, after finishing my doctoral work in engineering, a good friend of mine and I started a company, Kno Inc, in education technology (commonly referred to as ed-tech).
The story begins with a conversation I had with my friend’s daughter, Sania (10), who attends the Khan Lab School in Mountain View California. She and her older sister, Aisha (13), both had trouble with math and didn’t enjoy the subject.