He's the founder of Khanacademy.org.

He provides 10-minute tutorials on the web

on everything from math to science to finance.

The Harvard MBA and former hedge fund manager

has become an online teaching sensation.

His videos have been viewed

more than 50 million times worldwide.

They have been translated to more than 7 different languages.

Here is a look.

Sal: So the hypotenuse is now going to be 5.

This animal's fossils are only found

in this are of South America,

a nice clean band here,

and this part of Africa.

We could integrate over the surface.

The notation usually is a capital sigma.

National assembly, they create the

Committee of Public Safety,

which sounds like a very nice committee.

Some cells have a membrane around the DNA.

This is called a nucleus.

Notice, this is an aldehyde and it's an alcohol.

Start differentiating into effector and memory cells.

A galaxy!

Hey, there's another galaxy!

And for dollars is their 30 million

plus the 20 million dollars from

the American manufacturer.

If these things end up being worth 30 cents on the dollar,

let's say that we go to some future state

and these really are worth only 30 cents,

the most that the private investor loses

in this situation is his 7 dollars.

If this does not blow your mind, then you have no emotion.

Charlie: I am please to have Sal Khan

at this table for the first time.

Welcome.

Sal: Thanks for having me.

Charlie: So what am I just looking at?

Am I looking at someone who's interested in everything

and has a passion to tell others?

Sal: I think so.

Yeah, that's what I've turned into. (laughing)

Charlie: What have you turned into?

Sal: I've turned into someone, I guess from my point of view,

who gets to, I started off with the math

and the physics and the science and the economics,

stuff that I knew fairly well from my background.

Now I've turned into someone who gets to learn

pretty much anything and distill it down and teach it.

Charlie: You're learning new things,

assimilating them, distilling them,

and then teaching them.

Sal: Yeah.

Charlie: So give me the background that you have.

Sal: As you mentioned, 5-6 years ago

I was an analyst at a hedge fund.

Before that my background was in software

then I went to business school, did the hedge fund thing.

I started in Boston, and while I was in Boston

I had family visiting me from New Orleans.

This was right after my wedding.

This was in 2004.

My cousin, Nadia, I remember we were waiting

for the fireworks over the Charles River

and we were just killing time

and I started giving her these brain teasers,

the type of brain teasers you'd give

at a software interview for like 25-year-old engineerings.

Most people just disengage,

"I don't want to deal with that.

"I don't want to think right now."

But Nadia, here's a 12-year-old, she was like,

"Don't tell me the answer.

"I need to figure it out.

"Okay, can they see each other?"

All these type of things about the brain teaser.

I was pretty impressed.

I started telling her and her mother,

"Hey, you should think about

"becoming an engineer" or whatever.

The next morning, her mom, [Noshradandie]

told me, thanks for believing in Nadia

but she's actually being tracked into

a slower math class, the non-advanced track.

I said that's impossible, the stuff she was doing

yesterday is way beyond her.

She's clearly a bright girl.

She's like no, I think she did bad on a placement exam.

So when Nadia woke up, I said, "What's going on?"

She said, no I ...

Apparently she had bombed units,

converting gallons to quarts and all that.

I said, Nadia, I understand how that can be confusing,

but the stuff you were doing last night

was way deeper and way harder than units.

If you're willing to work with me,

when you go back to New Orleans

and I'll stay here in Boston,

I think we can get you past whatever hurdles you have.

She agreed and they went back to New Orleans.

Every day after work I would come home

and we'd get on the speakerphone

for about half an hour, an hour,

and I'd start working with her.

It worked out.

Two or three months, she got up to speed,

went ahead of the curve.

Then I started tutoring her brothers,

other family members.

Then you fast forward to 2006.

About 18 months have gone by.

I was venting to a buddy,

I was like, "This is a lot of fun I'm having."

By this time I had moved out to California.

I was like, "This is a lot of fun.

"It's really satisfying, but ..."

The first time you give a lecture

on least common multiples, it's kind of fun.

The second time, it's still fun; a little more polished.

The third time it starts to get a little bit tiring to do!

He said ...

Charlie: Do it one time.

Sal: Do it one time.

Why don't you put it on YouTube?

I said, "No, YouTube's for dogs on scateboards.

"It's not for serious learning."

Charlie: (laughing) That's true.

Sal: Once I got over the fact that it wasn't my idea,

I decided to give it a shot.

I put it up there.

Charlie: Now, which one did you put up there?

Sal: It was either Least Common Multiple

or Greatest Common Divisor, I forget.

I think I did them on the same day, that first day.

The cool thing about YouTube is you an sort by upload time.

So that first video you'd shown,

that was literally, that was one of the early videos.

I kind of cringed.

I was like, "Oh, that's when I wasn't using

"the fancy HD stuff."

Yeah, it was on one of those topics.

Charlie: And the reaction?

Sal: You know what?

I had about 20-30 up there, my cousins' initial reaction,

and I joke about this but it's true,

is that they preferred me on YouTube than in person!

Charlie: (laughing)

Sal: I'll take that for what it's worth.

It made sense.

Charlie: You need not come to the next family gathering.

Just send us ...

Sal: (laughs) Yeah, Sal can be annoying sometimes.

Charlie: When did it become Khan Academy?

Sal: You fast forward, it soon became clear,

maybe in 6 months, even from the beginning

random people started watching it,

but then fast forward 6 months,

I probably had 50 or 100 videos,

and I started getting these random letters

from people, just on YouTube.

If you look on YouTube, people aren't always

that civil on YouTube in terms of what they write.

For the most part, everyone was writing,

"Hey, thanks a bunch, this helped me."

Some people would write,

"I was going to flunk calculus until I got this video."

Or "I wasn't going to become an engineer

"because I couldn't handle the course load

"until I saw that video on vectors"

or whatever it might be.

It started to dawn on me that this could be

more than a hobby, although it stayed a hobby right then.

I think the first time Khan Academy came about,

I think it was 2007, I had decided to set up

my own domain name, and so have another way

of viewing the videos.

I also started working on the software

for my cousins so I could give them problems

and give them exercises, and I put it all on that site.

I was working for a hedge fund

called Wohl Capital and my boss was Dan Wohl

and I said, "Well, I'm Sal Khan

"so I'll call it Khan Academy." (laughs)

Charlie: (laughs) What are your dreams?

What do you want it to be?

Sal: I used to be kind of quiet about this dream

because it seemed kind of like a crazy thing.

Even last year it would have seemed crazy

for me to say what I'm about to say,

but now, I think there's a potential for-

Online learning, no one takes it ser-,

They take it seriously, they think it has value,

but online learning is here

and your prestigious universities are over here.

They're not in the same conversation.

I'm hoping Khan Academy can turn into an institution

that, I don't want to say rivals, but it's

talked in the same conversation as some of these things

that have been around for hundreds of years.

Charlie: In the places where you can learn.

Sal: In the places where you can learn

at a very high level.

So you can start at arithmetic but you can go deep

and it's a real learning experience,

it's not something superficial.

Charlie: So how many people work for you now?

Sal: We have 8 people.

We just have 8, we had 6 if you'd asked last week.

Charlie: So eventually you will give diplomas?

Sal: That's an open question.

If you focus just on K through 12,

and our video content goes well beyond K through 12,

but just on K through 12, right now what really matters

is some of these standardized tests,

the SATs, the AP tests, high school diplomas,

kids are getting into Harvard based

on just being home schooled right now.

We see our real niche right now on the learning side.

Standard education's really learning and credentialing.

We're going to tackle the learning as well as we can.

In the future, we'll see what we can do

on the credentialing side.

Charlie: You've got a remarkable group of people

who believe what you're doing; people from Google,

Bill Gates and a lot of others have cited you

for what you have done and what you are doing.

Is there any pushback from what you have accomplished?

Does anybody say, "Yes, but"?

Sal: My sense of the pushback is

sometimes these articles get written where

the article itself is fairly balanced and reasonable,

but they'll title it like "Will Khan Academy

"Demolish Traditional Education?"

Charlie: Where was this?

Sal: Oh, I don't know, I'm exaggerating.

There was one that recently came out,

will it flip the classroom, or turn education upside down

or something like that.

There are these headlines that are very

attention-grabbing.

I think when someone reads that, they've become

cynical about these panacea solutions

to a big problem, so they might say oh, no,

there's no way that something like this

could solve all of our problems.

For the most part, I think, when people

understand what they're doing,

we haven't gotten a lot of resistance.

Charlie: Who are the people who are watching?

Sal: That's the surprising thing, who's watching.

When I started off, it was for my cousins.

I kind of just made them for my cousins,