But while attending Stanford University, where Moraes received a master’s degree in business administration and healthcare policy, he realized that instead of investing in impactful companies, he wanted to start his own.
As a part of an entrepreneurship class, Moraes and his co-founder, an engineering grad student, James Wong, visited multiple eyeglass manufacturing factories in China. They discovered that designer frames that sell for as much as $600 in the U.S. cost only about $10 to produce. “We thought there’s something very wrong with these markups,” Moraes told TechCrunch.