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recent interview in his sun-filled office above a shop on Castro Street. “She’s majoring in writing and pre-med, but I say that’s by choice, because she was a rock star at math.” Fresh out of MIT Born and raised in Louisiana, Khan first came to the Bay Area in 1998 fresh out of MIT, to work in high tech. After a year at Oracle, he had moved to MeVC — a startup that aimed to make venture capital available to the public — when the tech market crumbled in 2000 and he decided to go back to school. At Harvard Business School from 2001 to 2003, Khan got acquainted with the world of hedge funds. “It seemed both intellectually interesting and like a good way to make a living,” he said, explaining his decision to go to work for Wohl Capital, then based in Boston. When the boss’s wife took a job at Stanford Law School, the venture relocated to Sand Hill Road and Khan and his wife followed. Better than in-person Talking with his cousins in New Orleans, Khan realized he might have stumbled on something important when they told him they liked his tutoring on YouTube better than in-person. “Once you get over the backhanded nature of that, there was actually something very profound there,” he told an audience in March. He was speaking at a Long Beach conference sponsored by TED (Technology Entertainment and Design). “They were saying they preferred the automated version of their cousin to their cousin, because now they can pause and repeat their cousin without feeling like they’re wasting my time. If they need to review something they should have learned a couple weeks ago or years ago, they don’t have to embarrass themselves and ask their cousin. “The very first time you’re trying to get your brain around something, the very last thing you need is a person asking you, ‘Do you understand this?’ From the start, Khan saw no reason to keep his math videos private, and others began watching them. He was rewarded with feedback from “random people around the world.” One user commented that, for the first time, he had smiled after doing a derivative. Parents of a 12-year-old with autism said their son had found success with Khan’s videos after other pro-
grams had failed. “Here I was, an analyst at a hedge fund. It was very strange for me to do something of social value,” Khan told the appreciative TED audience. But he was excited by the feedback, so he kept going. “I kept making videos and hoping someone would notice,” he said. In September 2009 he quit his day job to focus full time on the academy, digging into savings for the first eight months. Thanks to donations, the Khan Academy can now pay salaries to him and his small staff. The academy’s mission — “providing a free world-class education to anyone anywhere” — has attracted, in the founder’s words, “talent that money can’t buy.” The staff today numbers about a dozen, plus six interns. To date Khan has produced every single one of the videos himself. The popularity of the videos is due to their digestible chunks — each one is 10 to 20 minutes — and a tight focus on the individual user, Khan believes. “My focus was to build a useful tool for my cousins and then, once it grew, to build something useful for the stand-alone learner,” he said. “People like the style I teach in. It’s very conversational. They appreciate that there’s a human on the other side.” It doesn’t hurt that the human is friendly, engaging and articulate. The offerings are so basic that Khan says “it’s shocking for me that this didn’t exist 30 years ago. The videos were embraced by parents, home schoolers and users around the world. About a third of the visits are from outside the United States, he said. But Khan was surprised to get a query last year from a board member of the Los Altos School District. “We just assumed they wouldn’t want to work with us, but they asked all the right questions. “As soon as we started working with them, we found they were better run than most for-profit companies. (Bureaucratic) issues with the firewall were changed in half a day.” Los Altos uses Khan in what it calls a “hybrid learning model” in which students spend part of every math class working through new material at their own pace. Khan generates a data “dashboard,” so at any moment the teacher can see how each student is progressing, or where some are stuck. “Los Altos was willing to do something fairly radical,” Khan said. “We didn’t have to change what we were doing for that. I’ve got to give them a lot of credit.” Khan’s finance and computerSee KAHN, page 12
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