Speakers
Sal Khan
Founder and executive director, Khan Academy
Sal Khan is founder of Khan Academy. In August 2004, Mr. Kahn began tutoring his cousin Nadia online. He was a hedge fund manager in Boston; she was a seventh grade student in New Orleans. As more cousins and friends requested tutoring, Mr. Khan began uploading his math and science lessons to YouTube. Since 2006, his videos have generated a large following, attracting on average 20,000 views each. In 2009, Mr. Khan left his career in finance to found Khan Academy. Its mission: to provide a world-class education to anyone, anywhere—absolutely free of charge. Khan Academy currently provides more than more than 2,200 daily tutorials to some 100,000 students and educators. The Harvard Business Review recently concluded that Mr. Khan’s innovative approach to teaching will “successfully educate more people in math and science over the next decade than Harvard has over its entire history.” Bill Gates calls him an educational “pioneer.” Mr. Khan’s intends to harness technology to shift learning away from lecturing, testing, and grading and toward using better mentoring and coaching techniques. Mr. Khan holds three degrees from MIT—a B.S. in mathematics as well as a B.S. and M.S. in electrical engineering and computer science. He has also earned an MBA from Harvard Business School.
