Summary:
Sal talks about some of the challenges he’s faced as the Khan Academy has grown from a startup to an organization with more than 200 employees — getting help from people who’ve been there before is essential.
Sal Khan is quick to admit he’s not an expert. When he heeds help, he gets it from others who’ve already been there.
Clearly the Khan Academy is growing by leaps and bounds. What are some of the biggest hurdles you're encountering as you're growing, and how are you dealing with that?
I think as an organization grows, every year or two you face these new, almost existential challenges. You know when you're a startup, everyone knows each other it's very informal, etc. etc. but then once you start to get to 20, 30, 40 people, you start to realize that just because something is obvious to you or just because you said it to one person, that the whole team isn't necessarily aligned, and moving in the same direction. And so I've learned oftentimes the hard way, that you can't over communicate, and I'm probably still not communicating enough, especially as the team gets larger and larger and larger.
Khan Academy now has over 200 folks, so you have to be very careful about communicating enough, not distracting folks. If you have a random thought, and there's a lot of random thoughts in here, you have to ensure that those random thoughts don't confuse people about what is the very clear thing that we are trying to solve in the immediate term, in the medium term and then potentially in the long term. This is my first time running an organization of this scale, an organization that's growing this way. And so it's really important to bring other people on board, that have seen around those corners before. Khan Academy right now, our President and COO Ginny Lee, she used to run Intuit's payroll business, she used to be their CIO, she's managed teams of thousands of people. She could be the CEO at any company in Silicon Valley. To have her here, that really helps me.
