If You Want To Change the World, Educate the World | Sal Khan

Sal Khan (0:00)

You look at the world, you try to say, oh, wow, there's so many problems in the world. How do you solve it? And you think about climate, you think about inequality, you think about whatever. You pick the issue, conflicts.

When you really keep peeling the onion, it's just what's going on in people's heads.

Everything else is almost just a side effect of what's going on in people's heads. And okay, so then we got to change what goes on in people's heads, or improve or remodel it. Well, what does that? That's called education.

Michael Gervais (0:35)

Okay, welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Michael Gervais, and I am excited to welcome Sal Khan as our guest on this week's episode. So if you were in school, or if you have a kid in school, anytime in the last 14 years, chances are that you recognize Sal's name. He's the founder and CEO of Khan Academy. It's a nonprofit organization on a mission to provide free world-class education for anyone, anywhere.

And since their inception in 2008, they have helped hundreds of millions of students around the world through their adaptive online learning platform. I mean, how good is that? Hundreds of millions. Sal has three degrees from MIT, an MBA from Harvard Business School, and most recently founded the Khan Lab School, a nonprofit brick and mortar private school in Mountain View, California. And that is in an effort to bring his vision of mastery-based blended learning system to life.

Sal, super excited to sit with you. How are you?

Sal Khan (1:39)

I'm great. Thanks for having me.

Michael Gervais (1:40)

Oh, awesome. What a body of work that you bring into this conversation.

And I was hoping if we could get into the origin story just a bit, and maybe we can zoom in by, there was this moment that you shared. In 2010, you had recently quit your job as a hedge fund analyst, and then you're at dinner with your wife, and you bump into a couple and they ask, what do you do? Can you tell us the rest of that story?

Sal Khan (2:09)

Oh, yeah.

You know, that's kind of like halfway into the origin story.

You know, it all started in 2004, I was tutoring cousins.

2005, 2006, I started making software for them so that they had a chance to practice. 2006 is when I made the first videos. 2009 was frankly where all of the stuff that I had created, including the videos, were now reaching 50 to 100,000 folks. And it felt like there was a there there. And I, you know, my wife and I looked at our finances. She was still in training to become a rheumatologist. But we're like, OK, maybe we could live on savings for a year. And that's when I quit my day job. And you could imagine I quit in fall of 2009

And anytime you do anything entrepreneurial, whether for profit or not for profit, you have to start with a little bit of optimism. Some would say delusional optimism. You think, OK, surely people will support this. This is going to get off the ground. But like a lot of entrepreneurs or social entrepreneurs, those first few months were really hard. I started getting a lot of rejections. People didn't really know what to make of Khan Academy as a not-for-profit. We looked like a tech startup, but we were not-for-profit, and we had the social mission.

And I was probably six, seven, eight months into it. It's now early 2010 And this situation that you're alluding to did happen where I was at a dinner party. And I'm sure it probably happened more times than I didn't notice. I remember when I was a hedge fund analyst, and people say, oh, what do you do? I'm like, I work at a hedge fund. You can tell there's a little bit like, oh, that's a good career, and he's probably making good money and all that type of thing. And I remember now, there was a couple that asked each of my wife and I, what do we do? My wife's training to be a rheumatologist, so what do you do? And I was like, well, I used to be in finance, and before that, I used to be an engineer. I used to work in tech, but now, essentially, I quit my job to start this not-for-profit, and I make videos on YouTube, and I'm hacking away at some software.

And as they were walking away and they thought they were out of my earshot, they said, well, lucky for him, his wife's studying to be a doctor. And that hit your fragile male ego a little bit.