![]() YouTube was for cats playing the piano, not serious mathematics! Then I got over the idea that it wasn’t my idea, and I made a couple of videos. Finally, in 2006, a friend suggested that rather than reteach the same points over and over again to different kids, I should make videos of each lesson and put them on YouTube. Other cousins and their schoolmates soon wanted help, too. ![]() At night, I’d call her, and using Yahoo! Doodle as a shared notepad, I’d tutor her in math via computer and telephone. ![]() In 2004, Nadia was living in New Orleans and I was in Boston, working at Wohl Capital, a hedge fund. So how did Nadia’s request launch a juggernaut? Like many great innovations, it all began with a simple question, in this case from Khan’s nine-year-old cousin, Nadia: “Sal,” she asked, “can you please help me with my homework?” Meanwhile, financial backers such as the Gates Foundation, Google, and venture capital’s Ann and John Doerr (MBA 1976) are adding credibility and momentum to what appears to be impending change of global significance. He’s created such a phenomenon of human-capital development that Khan finds himself turning to science fiction to try to make sense of it all. ![]() With millions of grateful student fans, Khan and his not-for-profit, Internet-based Khan Academy, are turning traditional-and, many would say, obsolete-paradigms of public education upside down, as well as recasting learning and extending it to the remotest corners of the earth. As he greets a visitor to his bare-bones office in Mountain View, California, there’s little evidence of this former hedge-fund analyst’s meteoric rise to rock-star status as a kind of online pied piper for the learning dispossessed. He’s unpretentious and unassuming, despite holding three degrees from MIT, where he was president of his class (as he was at HBS) and where he will deliver this spring’s Commencement address. Sal Khan (MBA 2003) is an energetic, amiable young man, with a twinkle in his eye and a fondness for jokes and self-deprecation. ![]()
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