Don’t Settle for a Narrow Vision

You teach world history on the Khan Academy site, but you've also branched into teaching science, history, economics. There's an SAT prep course now. And you've also partnered with institutions like NASA and MIT to offer specialized education. What needs did you see, that led to this prolific expansion of what the Khan academy does?

Well, I think this all goes back to what we were talking about before about the vision. I think there could have very easily been an alternate reality. Where 2010 Sal says oh wow, you know I wrote some software, I'm getting some traction with the videos. I could become a, I could be a for-profit ed tech company. And that might have been okay, but that would have been a very narrow vision where you are just trying to make a product and sell it and whatever else. I could have said hey, I could become a YouTube personality, and become an influencer and all that and that's actually a lot of fun. You can do a lot of really interesting, and nothing's wrong with either of these, but once again that would've been a narrower vision. I've always been on the lookout, you can't predict these things fully, but I've always been on the lookout for how can Khan Academy become more systemically relevant? How can it become not just something on the periphery of the system, but become something on the core of the system, which will allow us as to help reimagine the system.

And so when folks at the College Board who run the SAT came to us and said hey, we would want to partner with you to make the world's best test prep that happens to be free. We said absolutely. This is what our mission is to serve as many students as possible, but then I also recognized well, this makes Khan Academy not just on the periphery, this makes it pretty central. Now when kids take the PSAT, when they get their scores, this is 70% of kids in America, they can sync that score with Khan Academy and it's become the world's largest diagnostic for personalized learning. And then we can see how that works with two or three hundred thousand kids every year, and see how that results in their SAT work. We're partnering with the LSAT where we are the official practice there. Hopefully we can change, broaden the pipeline of who could become our future Supreme Court justices and lawyers and politicians.