by Salman Khan
Since no summer camp experience is complete without exhausting both the mind and body, we played a game called “critical mass freeze tag.” In regular freeze tag one student attempts to freeze the others in place by touching them. They can be unfrozen by other students who haven’t been frozen yet. In our variation, we experimented to see the number of freezers and the size of the playing field we needed to be able to freeze everyone. Again, this was stealth learning in action. The kids thought they were playing tag; they didn’t realize until later that they were getting a deeper intuition for how complex systems work.
These summer camps—both Peninsula Bridge and the ones I ran with Aragon—were enriching experiences and had a validity all their own. At the same time, however, I was keenly aware that if Khan Academy was to be seen as a legitimate option for classroom education, it would have to prove its value as part of a formal curriculum during an actual school year. So I was thrilled—though of course nervous as usual—when the opportunity came along to do exactly that.
Taking the Plunge
By early 2009, the Khan Academy was starting to take on a life of its own. Tens of thousands of students were using it every day and I was spending every ounce of my free time to work on it. Actually I was even spending a little of my nonfree time. I tried my best to focus on my day job, but my heart was becoming fully invested with the potential of what the Khan Academy might be.
To make things more difficult for me, I got a random email one day from a gentleman named Jeremiah “Jerry” Hennessy. He was the cofounder of a major restaurant chain—BJ’s Restaurants—who had also become a user of my videos after looking for ways to help his son with chemistry. He wanted to chat with me about what I was doing with the Khan Academy.
By this time I had already been approached by several entrepreneurs trying to convince me to turn my videos into a for-profit business, and I assumed that Jerry was just another one of these. It turned out that his message was just the opposite. He was convinced, even more so than I was at that juncture, that I was wasting my time as a hedge fund guy and that Khan Academy could help change the world as a not-for-profit. I was flattered by his confidence, of course, but tried not to take it too seriously. My son had just been born, my wife was still in training; it seemed irresponsible even to consider quitting my job.
Jerry understood this and didn’t pressure me too much. But he’d sown a seed of possibility in my mind. As the year progressed, I began talking to him more and more frequently. By the summer of 2009, I’d begun to seriously consider the possibility.
By this point, tens of thousands of students were watching the videos on a regular basis. The software I wrote for my cousins had become so popular via word-of-mouth that it was making my $50-a-month web host crash; I actually had to stop new users from signing up just so the old ones could have a barely usable experience. Frankly, the possibilities surrounding the Khan Academy were so exciting that I had trouble doing my day job properly.
So I started to chat with my wife, Umaima, about quitting the hedge fund and doing the Academy full-time. We had enough savings for a solid down payment on a decent house in Silicon Valley, but not much more. My wife was bringing in a little money from her salary as a training rheumatologist. Still, the thought of giving up a regular paycheck was scary. Both Umaima and I had come from single-mother households whose earnings were slightly above the poverty line in a good year; neither of us was eager to revisit the financial austerity of our childhoods. So I was still wavering.
Then, in one week in August, two powerful things happened. The first was that the Khan Academy was chosen to be a finalist for a major award given by the Technology Museum of San Jose. The second was an email I received via YouTube.
It was from a student who wanted to tell me that where he’d come from, “blacks [were] not welcomed with open arms into schools.” As a kid he’d been “force fed medication to keep me from talking [then] chastised for not speaking out when called on.” With sorrow rather than anger, he said that “no teacher has ever done me any good.” Determined to give him a chance at a quality education, his family saved enough money to move to a less prejudiced community, but still, he wrote, “without a real mastery of elementary math I was slow to progress.”
The young man had made it to college, though he was still playing catch-up at the start. He wanted me to know that he’d “spent the entire summer on your YouTube page… and I just wanted to thank you for everything you are doing…. Last week I tested for a math placement exam and I am now in Honors Math 200…. I can say without any doubt that you have changed my life and the lives of everyone in my family.”
Wow. People working at hedge funds are not used to getting letters like that. Between that email, the potential award from the museum, Jerry’s prodding, and my wife’s blessings, I decided to take the plunge. I figured I would be able to convince someone that the Khan Academy was a cause worth supporting and confidently told my wife that I would go back to a regular job if this didn’t happen within a year.
In retrospect, I was unbelievably naïve. Despite already having more views on YouTube than MIT OpenCourseWare and Stanford combined, the Khan Academy was still a one-person operation run out of a closet. I had no experience running or raising money for a not-for-profit. Most discouragingly, the few foundations willing to talk to me were afraid to support something that no one else had. I can’t tell you how many times I heard, “Well this sounds exciting, but how come no one else has given you money?”
The stress began to build by the fourth month—nothing like burning $5,000 a month out of savings while having a toddler in the house to put strain on a marriage. The first sign of hope came when I was invited to meet some folks at Google in January 2010. Apparently many of the senior engineers and executives had been using Khan Academy with their kids and wanted to hear more about it.
That first meeting had about ten people in it. I had prepared some laminated slides (I called them my presentation placemats) that showed them screenshots of what I had built, testimonials from users, and data from the Peninsula Bridge Program. I told them that I thought we could build a free virtual school for the world, one with instruction, practice, feedback. We also talked about how we could use the data I was collecting to fine-tune the experience. Everyone seemed very sympathetic to what I was doing, but I still didn’t have any real indication that this would lead to anything.
After a few weeks, they invited me for a second meeting. Now things became interesting. They asked me to write a proposal for what I would do with $2 million; nothing too involved; two pages would do. A million dollars per page; not bad. Keep in mind that up to this point I had spent a grand total of about $2,000 on the Khan Academy.
I spent the night writing and rewriting an outline of how I would go about hiring an engineering team to build out the software, how many videos I could produce in a year, and how many students we could reach in five or ten years. I sent it in and waited. I got a few assurances over the next few months that they were seriously looking at my proposal, but by this time I had become too cynical about the foundation world to expect anything.
Within a few months, I began updating my résumé; I’d realized I had less tolerance for digging into my savings than I thought. I wasn’t even sure if I could find a job in finance anymore—after all, most employers weren’t used to hiring people who’d quit their jobs to make YouTube videos for a year.
Then in April, I got another unexpected and providential email. The subject line was “I am a big fan,” so of course I opened it at once! A woman whose name I did not immediately recognize was asking for an address where she could send the Academy a donation.
In itself this was not so unusual. Many people had already donated $5, $10, and even $100 at a time over PayPal. But this time a check for $10,000 arrived in the mail. The sender was named Ann Doerr. After a little frantic web research, I realized that Ann was the wife of famed venture capitalist John Doerr. I sent her an email thanking her fo
r her generous support, and she wrote back suggesting we have lunch.
We agreed to meet in May in downtown Palo Alto. Ann arrived on a green-blue bicycle. We talked about what Khan Academy could be. When Ann asked how I was supporting myself and my family, I answered, trying not to sound too desperate, “I’m not; we’re living off of savings.” She nodded and we each went our way.
About twenty minutes later, I got a text message as I was parking in my driveway. It was from Ann: You need to support yourself. I am sending a check for $100,000 right now.
I almost crashed into the garage door.
Ann’s text message was the beginning of a surreal series of events. Two months later, Aragon and I were running our little one-week summer camp for the second year. One afternoon, while I had twenty kids working on one of our crazy projects, I got a text message from Ann. Actually I got several from her in a row. They read something like:
At Aspen… hundreds of people in audience
Bill Gates onstage, talking about you
Good day wife let you quit job
What were these haiku really saying? Maybe these messages were meant for someone else? Maybe they were some type of prank? I booted a student off the computer nearest me and began to search for confirmation.
Sure enough, people were already blogging and tweeting about it. Bill Gates was onstage at the Aspen Ideas Festival talking about how he was a fan of Khan Academy and was using it for his own learning and for his kids. My mind immediately pictured all the half-ass videos I had made for my cousins, where my son is screaming in the background or I’m trying to cram in a concept before my wife comes home from work. Did Bill Gates really watch those?
The next few days were strange. I had eventually found video footage of the event; I knew it had really happened. But what was I to do next? Call him? It’s not like Bill Gates was listed in the phone book.
After about a week, I got an email followed by a phone call from Gates’s chief of staff. He told me that if I had some time available, Bill would like to fly me to Seattle to meet and see how he could support the Khan Academy. I was staring at my calendar as he was asking my availability; it was completely blank for the next month. Sitting in my closet and trying to sound as cool as possible, I said, “Sure, I think I could squeeze something in.”
The meeting happened on August 22 at Bill’s offices in Kirkland, Washington; they overlooked the water and were somewhat nicer than my closet. I was waiting in a conference room—with the now overused presentation placemats in hand—with several other people from the Gates Foundation. I think I was visibly nervous, so they reassured me that “Bill is just another human being; he’s completely cool.” This relaxed me a bit and I started to get a little chatty. After a few minutes, all of a sudden, everyone in the room began to look a bit more serious than they had thirty seconds before. Bill Gates had walked in and was standing behind me. Yeah, just another human being.
I jolted up, shook his hand, and said, “Um… nice to meet you.” He sat down and then everyone kind of just waited. Realizing that this was my cue, I spent the next fifteen minutes talking about what I thought the Khan Academy could do and how we would do it. Bill politely nodded throughout. I frankly didn’t even know what I was saying. Twenty percent of my brain was doing the talking. The other 80 percent kept thinking, “Do you realize that you are talking to Bill Gates? Right there next to you at the table! BILL GATES! Look, it’s Bill Gates! You better not screw this up! Don’t even THINK about cracking any of your stupid jokes!”
He asked me a few questions and then said simply, “This is great.”
Two days later, an article about the Khan Academy came out in Fortune magazine. It was titled “Bill Gates’ Favorite Teacher.” I had talked to the author, David Kaplan, a few weeks prior and knew that he had also talked to Gates, but still, that headline was unreal. The article made my mother cry—I think it was the first time she wasn’t completely annoyed that I hadn’t gone to medical school.
By September, it became clear that the Gates Foundation would fund the Khan Academy with a $1.5 million grant so that we could get office space and hire a team of five people; they later gave another $4 million to support other projects. Google also announced that it was awarding $2 million to the Khan Academy to further build out our exercise library and to translate our content into the ten most spoken world languages. This was part of their Project 10^100, whose goal was to fund five ideas to change the world, selected from 150,000 submissions. It seemed that it was time for me to come out of the closet.
The Los Altos Experiment
With some of the funding in place and some of the immediate financial pressures laid to rest, I was finally free to return to job one: education.
In September 2010, I’d been introduced to a man named Mark Goines, a prominent “angel investor” in Silicon Valley start-ups, and, more to the point as things turned out, a member of the Los Altos School Board. Los Altos is a wealthy town with one of the top school systems in California. It is also right next door to my own adopted home, Mountain View—if my house fell into the Los Altos School District, it would immediately be worth $100,000 more because of the schools. Mark and I decided to meet at a local coffee shop one afternoon.
We immediately hit it off. Mark was the type of person who made Silicon Valley what it is. He was super successful, super smart, and, most importantly, unassuming and down-to-earth. We talked a good bit about what the Khan Academy could do and the people it could reach. Half an hour into our conversation, Mark asked what I would do if I could totally reinvent the dynamics of a fifth-grade math class. Assuming this was a purely hypothetical question, I laid out my ideas.
Mark seemed to like what he had heard, but as we stood up after coffee, my assumption was that we’d had a pleasant chat and that was the end of it. Then he said that if I didn’t mind, he’d like to discuss my ideas with some other members of the school board.
I should mention in passing that at this juncture things were moving dizzyingly fast for the Khan Academy. It was already clear that Google and the Gates Foundation were going to support us in a big way, and it was making waves in the press. I was getting overwhelmed with meeting requests and the day-to-day of trying to get a real office up and running. I was also getting a bit worried that the whole reason for all of this attention—the videos—was taking a backseat to the nascent operations of the Khan Academy. I clearly needed help, and fast.
I convinced an old friend of mine from Louisiana and then from MIT, Shantanu Sinha, to formally sign on as president and chief operating officer. A brilliant guy who’d been shaming me in academic competitions since we were teenagers, Shantanu gave up a half-million-dollar-a-year, partner track position at McKinsey and Company to come aboard. I found it very reassuring to know that I wasn’t the only person crazy enough to give up a relatively safe and remunerative career in exchange for a long-shot chance at helping to rethink education on a global scale.
In early October, Shantanu and I met with Jeff Baier and Alyssa Gallagher, the superintendent and assistant superintendent for Los Altos schools. They listened to our presentation and realized we were proposing the kind of differentiated education—that is, teaching geared and nuanced to the needs of each individual student—that educators were always striving for but not quite knowing how to implement. They asked for some time to discuss our ideas with colleagues, principals, and teachers, and then suggested we meet again.
Five days later we got an email from Alyssa saying that they wanted to move forward and start a pilot program in four classrooms after Thanksgiving break—which happened to be a mere five weeks away. So Shantanu and I found ourselves in crunch mode—hiring first-rate designers and engineers, upgrading software, refining ideas. Let me emphasize why we were so passionate about this Los Altos opportunity. Khan Academy had been founded with the goal of reaching students outside of any formal setting, and we were already reaching a million students per month even before getting that first funding from
Gates and Google. To a large degree, we were successful because we had the luxury of focusing 100 percent on end users rather than having to cater to school districts as some type of software vendor. Based on this, it could have been argued that the Los Altos project was a diversion or even a detour away from our student-focused mission.
But I, and eventually the rest of the team, always dreamt of being more than just a powerful online resource. We felt that we were at a point in history where education could be rethought altogether. We didn’t know all the answers—and still don’t—but the feeling was that we had to start experimenting in real settings so that we could at least be confident we were asking the right questions. We wanted to learn from real teachers and real students how our technology could be used or be made better. Los Altos was ideal because they were nonbureaucratic, open-minded, and located in the very heart of Silicon Valley. The fact that one of the best school districts in America felt that they could become even more effective by working with us was a huge sign of confidence that we took very seriously.
By the end of November 2010 the pilot program was up and running. Two fifth-grade classes and two seventh-grade classes were being taught math through the Khan Academy. No one, either teachers or students, had been compelled to participate in the program; we worked with the teachers who wanted to work with us. We’d held informational meetings with families and given them the chance to opt out; none did.
There were quite significant differences between the fifth-grade and seventh-grade classes. The fifth graders hadn’t been separated into “tracks” yet, and so were probably representative of Los Altos demographics—mainly English-speaking, with college-educated, affluent parents. By seventh grade, however, the students had been tracked, and our program was working with the “developmental” classes, the kids who had fallen behind. Some had learning disabilities; some struggled with English; few had college-educated parents. These students disproportionately came from the “other,” much poorer side of El Camino Real (the main avenue in Silicon Valley) that just happened to fall into the Los Altos School District.
