Long story short. If you don’t offer a decent incentive package, you won’t incentivise people to come and take a CEO roll.
If you look around you will find that CEO at other charity’s also get paid well.
I got fed up with these things.
If Khan either open-licenses the platform, or takes a pay cut to $200,000, I'll donate. If he does neither of those, I'm treating this as a 501(c)3-by-technicality only. It's a good for-profit, mind you, but still a for-profit by any definition I (rather than the IRS) would use.
Why $200,000, why not $100,000?
That is, regardless of whatever rarefied Silicon Valley filter bubble we're pretending exists here on HN, Khan is not raising money from Silicon Valley. He is raising it from the world, and a very low percentage of humans earn $800k/yr.
Granted, however, this is not just a problem with Khan Academy. Many "non-profits" pay their executives unreasonable salaries.
That's also a good baseline for a standard-of-living where all necessities are met, without worrying about them, and where there isn't financial stress. However, it's not enough to get rich.
It's also a point where I don't feel like I'm making a significantly greater sacrifice than Khan would if he paid out of his own pocket (in other words, a signal that I care more about the organization than he does).
$100k would be okay in the midwest or rural America.
That’s less than new grad money at tech companies. It shows you are not serious about your suggestions
levels.fyi seems to corroborate this too:
Or to put it another way: the government is also a nonprofit organization, but it needs good workers to fulfill its goals and those workers should be fairly compensated. We wouldn't get anywhere if the government paid everyone minimum wage.
That said, compared to other ceo salaries I've seen in the USA... This isn't that ridiculous indeed, it gets much worse (and I'm talking only about non-profits).
If you want skilled people you need to pay a good amount.
Trump doesn't care about salary because that's an irrelevant portion of the income generated from his presidency.
He wouldn't even make the list.
https://www.ocregister.com/2017/08/22/top-california-public-...
The CEO doesn’t earn no where near the CEO’s for other charities in the US go have a look over here https://www.charitywatch.org/top-charity-salaries
Edit: You can “change the world” (even if it’s a very small change, in a small part of the world) and still earn a fair living for your actions. You are completely free to feel that 800k isn’t fair payment. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. I’m not embedded into khan to know if he is really worth that paycheque. But I know the charity hasn’t been run into the ground.
The organizations we are speaking about are very loud to beg for money yet they spend a large part of it on overpaying a few execs. This is very different from companies that earn their money without asking the public for money.
Software engineer Google - Average total compensation: $144,652 (ok written in 2014, like I said it was a quick google search - https://www.infoworld.com/article/3304439/man-or-myth-the-3-... ) Software engineer Khan - Average total compensation: $119,140/yr - https://www.glassdoor.co.uk/Salary/Khan-Academy-Salaries-E45...
So not that much different to those in similar fields in the similar area.
So if the CEO took a 50% pay cut they could hire and extra 3-4 engineers a year. But that’s just straight salary costs and the cost of staff isn’t just the salary cost.
But that argument can be said of any charity, non-profit, business, school, hospital. “If only the top surgeon took a 50% pay cut, think of all the extra nurses we could hire...”