Don’t be Seduced by the “Feel Good”

You have said that in the early days of the Khan Academy you used to make your pitch to people about the efficacy about scaling up and a lot of logic involved. You were making the pitch from the head, from a very intellectual standpoint. But that changed over time, can you describe that whole process?

Well I think when you're creating something, You know it's funny when I was in business school, At Harvard business school they give you a 1 or a 2 or a 3, in a class. And most of us get the 2. The 2 is like you've done you've came you've read the cases etc. Something like 80% get a 2. If you do exceptional you get a 1. And if you don't do exceptional or even OK you get a three. So the one class that I got a three in, was social entrepreneurship. And irony there is, I was actually, my skepticism My skepticism came out because I saw there were a lot of social efforts that felt good, but when I actually thought about their impact and their use of resources, I always said well are they actually using the best use of resources? And look there's many social ventures that are. But I remember many of the ones we've studied I was like, this just feels good but is it actually moving the dial for folks, in a big way, in a scalable way.

And so when Khan Academy was getting off the ground, I kept giving myself a reality check. I was saying hey Sal, this feels good. I'm getting these letters these people are saying it's changing their life. But make sure you're not just being seduced by the feel-good, but that it actually makes sense, that the social return on investment That the scale, that the capitalist being invested can actually justify in big ways the impact. Employees you have to convince to, you know we're at Khan Academy we are a nonprofit, we're in Silicon Valley we can't give people stock options or stock 'cause we don't have stock No one owns the Khan Academy I don't own Khan Academy it's a public good. And so I need to make the case to team members who potentially could make more money in a lot of other places that hey this is going to be a really good use of the time, and your life that you're going to invest, or at least a part of your life.