Hanging On to Your Vision Despite Temptation

Aside from students you have also inspired and mobilized thousands of people around the world to join your cause. But were there certain points though where it was difficult for you to mobilize people? Where it was hard to grow and steer your organization the way you wanted it to?

The simple answer is many times. I mean if you go into the early days of the Khan Academy, even back to when I was tutoring my cousins, in my head that was just a family project. You'd be amazed at how many people, good friends would say why are you doing that? Around 2009, when there's about 50,000 people who were using Khan Academy on a regular basis, and I set it up as a nonprofit. And I said maybe I can quit my job to do this full-time. Even my own brain I was telling myself, is this, am I crazy?

Is this something that, my first child has had been born, we had to rent a slightly larger house. We had a down payment that we were saving up, and we would have to live on that if I quit my job. You fast forward seven or eight months it looked like most of those people were right. We had dug into our savings about 50 - 60,000 dollars, I was waking up in the middle of the night in cold sweats, kind of like you know what have I done? And questioning everything about myself. I would even avoid conversations at dinner parties, when people would ask me what I did for a living. I just didn't even want to be social at certain periods of that.

So when you have those moments of lack of confidence, self doubt about whether the Khan academy would ever succeed, how did you break through all that and keep going?

I think it's a combination, I kept looking back at the logical data points that had made me do it. So I was looking at the usage of Khan Academy. I was looking at, it was growing exponentially. You know 100,000, 150,000 I was looking at the letters I was getting from around the world, and clearly it was creating value for these people. Now there was an open question, would it work as a nonprofit? I did have venture capitalists coming to me and saying we'll write the check right now. You can start taking a salary, support your family. You get a big equity stake and this could be $1 billion company one day.

And it was tempting, but it also felt a little bit disconnected with some of what the letters were You know I was getting letters from kids where they are like this is the tutor that my family couldn't afford. And then when I was talking to the VC's I was just like They wanted some of the stuff to be free but then some of the other stuff would have some costs. But that kid in wherever, in India or in Africa or Europe or even in innner city America, do we want to put that friction on them in order to learn that material?