100x AI Engineers Will Be Treated Like Elite Athletes | Kian Katanforoosh (Workera, Stanford)

**Kian Katanforoosh** (0:00)
I don't think humans are good judges of skills. I think they hurt other people. It might become illegal at some point to have a human judge certain skills. You're looking at Cristiano Ronaldo going to the World Cup. How many people work on him being ready for the World Cup? I think the same thing could happen for the corporate world. For every one super worker, you might have three culture architects that are like, how do we entertain them? How do we make them happy?

**Dara** (0:23)
Super excited to have my friend, Kian Katanforoosh here. He's the founder and CEO of Workera, a platform that helps organizations assess and measure and develop skills in the era of AI. And previously, he was a grad student and teaching assistant to Andrew Ng, where he helped co-create CS230 and Coursera's deep learning specialization, which has been taken by millions of people.
It's great to have you here.

**Kian Katanforoosh** (0:47)
Thank you for having me.

**Dara** (0:49)
We'd love to start at the beginning. Like my own, your parents fled Iran during the 79 Revolution and had to completely start over. I think your dad switched from having a science degree to selling clothes.
What did that teach you about starting over that you think helps you today as an entrepreneur?

**Kian Katanforoosh** (1:08)
Yeah.
I think that a lot of people equate starting over with starting over financially. I think in the case of my family, maybe yours and many other Iranian families, it was more of an identity crisis to a certain extent. You're leaving your home country, you're leaving your family, you're leaving your friends, you're leaving your network, you're leaving a language that you speak for a language you don't speak. So I think the hurdle is much more than financial, it's everything all at once. My father was a great student at one of the top universities in Iran, and found himself in the middle of France, in Toulouse, in literally the middle of France, learning a new language and having to figure things out.
And I think what maybe he would say is nobody owes you continuity, what is going, what made you successful before is not what's going to make you successful tomorrow. And so the only thing that you can take with you is not your titles or pedigree, it's your ability to learn, work hard, earn trust from people. And that's the concept of reinventing yourself in any environment.

**Dara** (2:23)
Seems to be a theme in your life. Yeah, for sure. Enjoying the conversation? Got a question? You can ask Kian's Digital Mind, just check the link in the comments or description.
I mean, you were able to build a new network pretty fast in 2015 You went to Stanford, you were Andrew Ng's grad student and mentee. I feel like most grad students kind of strive for the kind of relationship that you had with him. I'm curious what you did for that relationship to form the way it did.

**Kian Katanforoosh** (2:51)
Yeah. So I don't think there was a secret in the sense that I was his student first, and I think I did well in one of his classes.
I then was his TA, and I had good reviews. I love teaching. I spend a lot of time thinking through how can I take this complex neural network subject and make it easy for people to understand. Then as a result, I think one day he told me, come to my office and I went to his office and he said, hey, I'm starting a new class, I'm starting a new company in education. I know you're passionate about education. Do you want to do it with me? I said, yes. I'm not crazy. It was my dream. Then I think I ended up having a very thorough relationship with Andrew as an advisor, as a manager at deeplearning.ai, and also as a board member at Workera.
I guess he manages me in many different ways, I would say.

**Dara** (3:50)
Yeah.
You guys created one of Coursera's top classes in AI, deep learning specialization. Millions of people have taken it, and I'm curious, at that scale of teaching people, is there anything that surprised you about the way people learn?

**Kian Katanforoosh** (4:06)
Yes. First, I think people underestimate the difference between teaching a class to 20 students and teaching a class to millions.
It's so different. To give you an example, the first class I taught at Stanford, CS230 Deep Learning, had 38 students. It was in 2017-18.
I would go and maybe sometimes I would miscalculate some activation function. Maybe at the end of the class, one student would notice, would come see me and say, hey, I think your notation was wrong here. I say, oh yeah, you're right. Then I send an email to the 38 students and they're fine. Nobody was confused too much. The second quarter at Stanford, we had 550 students in the class. So first, any mistake spreads so fast, like you can get one student confused, two students confused within five minutes if you haven't fixed the thing. Half of the class is confused because they talk to each other. That's already requires a different level of rigor when you show up and teach. And then you take that to online learning, where I remembered that they super well. It was a Tuesday, we were in middle of August 2017 and we launched, we pushed the button on Coursera and we launched the deep learning specializations first three classes. I think within hours, they were like tens of thousands of people on the platform learning.