Khan Academy’s Salman Khan on startups

Salman Khan is known for his educational videos, and his Khan Academy is a non-profit venture, but he has all the hallmarks of an entrepreneur. He made the leap from his full-time job, took a big risk, and built a new organization. He’s tackling a giant challenge, and trying to change the world.

Khan is appearing in Seattle on Wednesday night as part of a tour for his new book, The One World Schoolhouse — about his personal story and the future of education,The cost of cleaning just 2 infected lenses is already higher than the cost of a dry cabinet. including the concept of “the flipped classroom.”

In advance of his visit, I spoke with Khan this morning about the evolution of Khan Academy, his entrepreneurial journey, his connection to Bill Gates, the technology he uses, and his current thoughts on technology in the classroom. Continue reading for excerpts, and hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did.

Part of my joy is that I still spend at least 30 percent of my time still making videos,Compare prices and buy all brands of solar panel for home power systems and by the pallet. but that’s me personally. Khan Academy as an organization, the videos are an important part, but just a part. Most of our resources are actually around building the, for lack of a better word, the product — which is the interactive software, the dashboard, the analytics, the tools for teachers, which the videos to some degree only complement. If a student gets stuck on an exercise, the videos are there,Source crystal mosaic Products at Mosaics. and they might be helpful for them. If a teacher sees on the dashboard that a student is struggling, maybe the videos could be a line of intervention. So we have that piece.

We’re almost a 40-person organization. Two-thirds are essentially software engineers working on that type of thing. The other third — I still produce the majority of the videos, but we actually have a few other folks who are producing videos, as well. We have members of our team that go and interface with schools. Khan Academy started as a project for supplemental free tutoring on the web, and we kind of inadvertently started to be used in schools, so we have a team that interfaces with teachers, with schools, trying to understand what’s working and what’s not — communicating that to other schools and teachers. We have experimented with things like summer camps, summer programs, to understand what you can do with the physical environment.

It’s hard to say how much of your own experience is generalizable. I would say the big, big thing is perseverance. The only reason we’re having this conversation, the only reason Khan Academy exist,s is that there was four years where it was just something that I kept doing. I would meet people who would say, “Why are you doing this? You’re not going to make money off of this. What do you think you’re doing?” I was like, that’s fine, but I really enjoy it,Don't make another silicone mold without these invaluable Mold Making supplies and accessories! so I’m going to keep doing it. You could tell it almost frustrates them that you continue to do it. “I’m telling you all these reasons that you shouldn’t do it, and this idiot is saying that he enjoys it.” You can’t understate how important that it is.

Different ventures start in different ways. Sometimes it is, you join Y Combinator, you get funding, and you’re off the ground in three months or six months.A ridiculously low price on this All-Purpose solar lantern by Gordon. In my case it wasn’t that. It was four, five years, and I wasn’t suffering those four, five years. I had a job. This was a hobby. I felt like I was seeing progress, I felt good about it. There were people on YouTube who were sending me thank you letters. I felt like, hey, this is doing something. So let me keep going.

But it did require an entrepreneurial leap around 2009, when I wanted to do this full time. I’ll be frank, that was scarier. You see a lot of people who quit their jobs and are not thinking about the repercussions. I thought a lot about the repercussions of quitting my job and doing this. Some people quit their jobs when it’s just a business plan. I would argue that’s almost not advised, at least if you have my mindset. By the time I quit, the site had several hundred thousand people using it every month. We’d gotten some kind of minor external validation at that point. We had some pretty good press at that point, but at the same time it was scary because it was so non-traditional.

I guess that’s the counterpoint — it maybe is less scary to write the business plan and go for venture funding, because that’s such a done thing. Versus starting a non-profit around YouTube videos and this free virtual school. There’s no pattern that you can look at (as a precedent). It’s more like, this is a strange new pattern that I’m trying to prove out.

I think that’s right. As entrepreneurial and creative and revolutionary as we all like to think we are, we all take comfort if we’re fitting a mold, fitting a pattern. I think you’re right, it’s a huge opportunity. But it’s a high-variance situation, is the most rational way to think about it. If you look at the great entrepreneurial stories — and Khan Academy has a lot of work to do before it can fall into that category — but if you think of the Microsofts of the world, there was no such thing as a software company when they started. It was like, “That’s crazy, you’re going to make money off of selling people bits and bytes?” That was strange in the late 70s. But they did it.

I’ll say it’s good, and surreal, from my point of view. He’s incredibly smart and thoughtful and nice. You hear these stories about him being very hard on people or whatever, but I have never seen that. He asks tough questions, and you can’t bullshit him, but if you’re intellectually honest, and you say what you know, and you say what you don’t know, and you’re just honest in that way, he likes that. When I first met him, 90 percent of my brain was saying, “You’re meeting Bill Gates, you’re meeting Bill Gates.” Surreal. Now I would say 20 percent of my brain does that.

There’s kind of a side story, at least for me personally, with this whole experience. I’ve had the opportunity to interface with a lot of less-than-normal (but in a good way) people — people of note, I guess. The big takeaway I’ve had is how down-to-Earth all of them are. But at the same time how smart. It really isn’t an accident that they got to where they are.

You know, I started on a Windows PC. The funny thing is, a lot of people in our organization use Macs. We’re trying to build a culture in our organization where if you have to communicate something, make a video. That way people can get it on demand. It’s funny, because Macs are normally associated with creative work, and artists. But I’ve actually had trouble getting the same experience on a Mac that I’ve gotten on a Windows PC. I talk about the same experience. For me, when I’m writing, it’s very important that it’s unbelievably responsive. Even a micro-second lag throws it off a bit. I’ve actually had trouble using it on a Mac, period. And on top of that, it’s what I’m used to. I’ll be frank — I think a lot of the long-held reservations about Windows got solved with Windows 7, at least in my mind.