Thankful and lucky to have helped build Khan Academy | Hacker News Reader

Thankful and lucky to have helped build Khan Academy

bjk5.com

141 pointsDanielRibeiro20 comments

I worked at Khan Academy for two internships and then just under 2 years fulltime, and don't know anyone that has anything less than positive to say about Kamens (nobody called him Ben because there were no less than 5 Bens at Khan Academy when I left).

One of his most memorable habits to me was coming into a meeting room where his words obviously had a lot of sway, then sitting on the ground when we were short on chairs.

He was an inspiration to many, first as an engineer, and later as a manager, and I'm excited to see what he takes on next.

> One of his most memorable habits to me was coming into a meeting room where his words obviously had a lot of sway, then sitting on the ground when we were short on chairs.

I love hearing stories like this. "Servant leadership" means so much to me. Being humble, realizing that people closest to the problem have the most knowledge, hiring folks smarter/stronger than you are--all key aspects of a leader I want to work for. (Of course, you still have to have the "leadership" component too.)

Education: I have been fortunate over the years in having managers who see their role as supporting me (and my tribe of colleagues) to teach students. That includes; going over the shop to get yellow paper to make copies for the student who needs handouts on yellow and who turned up in my class without warning (not the students fault); sorting out the student who is being totally unreasonable and rude (phone call to Mum, one day suspension); staying late to sort out class groups and exam registration when they get scrambled.

You get the picture.

A quote from Steve Reich...

http://sohcahtoa.org.uk/pages/files/quotes.pdf

and the good managers support us in that.

Back in 2010 when I first heard about Khan Academy and started using it the videos were incredible but the exercises were limited at best.

Over the past six years I've seen the quality of the videos, the exercises, and the tracking of student progress improve at least 10x on the whole.

Ben has played an massive role in the development of Khan Academy and though it, has effected the lives of millions of students myself included.

If you are reading this, thank you so much for all of your hard work.

I used Khan Academy over the years...and I have some questions.

1) Why do they keep redoing the exercise system? It seemed that they are changing for the sake of changing.

2) How do I know if there are new math problems and exercises that show up? I am interested in advanced math and learning how to do math proofs, not simply compute an answer.

Khan Academy is focused on K-12 (I think it's called. First grade through high school) math, so I'm not sure it's the right place if you want to do advanced math.

One year ago you could answer all exercises using only the keyboard and now you can't. That is a shame, but I think most young students (the main focus) weren't using this feature, so it was kept alive as more and more types of exercises were added. And these new ones are a great addition.

Just to note, our eventual goal is to have toddlers through what I think we call C-2 internally (sophomore year of college in the American system). We do actually have content at all of those levels, and expanded really nicely to the younger crowd when we "bought" Duck Duck Moose, but we're definitely not covering all of those areas consistently across subjects. Some stuff (e.g. art history) is only at high school level, other stuff (e.g. English) covers the gamut but amazingly randomly in terms of actual content, etc.

So, I don't think we'll have "advanced" math (for some values of "advanced") any time soon, but we're definitely aiming to get solidly into general college-level stuff, so things like stats/linear algebra/etc. should all be covered nicely eventually.

I hope you achieve your goal. Not long ago I saw a posting for a mechanical engineer content creator. By the time I had a moment to prepare an application, it was (presumably) filled.

I hope Khan Academy continues to create content in areas for young adults and up.

> Why do they keep redoing the exercise system? It seemed that they are changing for the sake of changing.

Most of the recent changes have been focused on two axes, very tightly related:

  1. The old exercise system did not work sanely on mobile. Supporting
     mobile required both front- and backend changes.
  2. As part of that, we wanted to extend the kinds of things we could do
     in exercises so that they'd be usable for more than just the simple
     math problems they've been focused on until now.

We all know there were some minor regressions in the process of getting there, but we're basically done with the tear-it-down-and-rebuild-it part of the process, so the churn should be a lot saner now.

Just to point out, this was back in July

What's Ben doing next?

His LinkedIn says "Pointing engineering and leadership skills at healthcare."

Where do they get their revenue from?

I found what appears to be a good and reasonably recent answers here (I would never just give a Quora link without checking it out first, somehow I don't trust all answers on that site): https://www.quora.com/How-does-Khan-Academy-make-money

I would say the vast majority of their money comes from grants (I'm guessing here). I got an email from them at the end of 2015 asking me to donate $3 but when I saw that Sal Khan was pulling down a salary of $550k+ I was completely turned off by it. In fact, I actually emailed Sal and asked him (the email appeared to come from Sal himself) but never got a response.

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate what organizations like Khan Academy do, but I find emails like this a little misleading, "there are only hours left in 2015, and we need your help to raise the money that we need to keep innovating and offering new learning experiences in 2016 and beyond. If you’re able to pitch in, we’d really appreciate your support before 2015 is over."

Granted I am picking on Khan Academy a bit here, this is how most nonprofits function.

Isn't 550k really low?

I think sal khan is a good example to follow for non-profit startups. non profits are a sizable portion of the economy and are a nice option between government and for profit corporations for executing an idea.

In some ways, nonprofits maximize surplus for workers and customers at the expense of owners and government.

Sure, Sal Khan is a great example that you can do a start up, get on that sweet grant gravy train and still make a respectable Silicon Valley salary. What's not to like? I just wish non-profits like this would drop the BS facade of acting like my $3 is going to make or break the organization. The only thing that will wreck an organization like Khan Academy is if/when they stop receiving grants which will likely never happen.

Also, here's some info regarding their revenues, take it for what it's worth: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/261...

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