A trustee of Rice University, Doerr had started her career as an engineer, and had held various engineering and management positions at Intel, Silicon Compilers, and Tandem Computers. The lowest moment, though, was the day before he met Ann Doerr. “Those months were incredibly stressful,” he recalls. Khan was alarmingly dipping into his savings, which he had stockpiled for buying a house. Khan listened to his heart, and took the plunge.Ī few months into it, his heart was in his mouth. “Well, you could become the next Harvard, the next Oxford, the next Smithsonian,” came the reply from within. Now, what could a not-for-profit aspire to be, he flipped the question. “You can become the next Google, the next Facebook, or the next Apple,” was the logical reply. What can for-profit organisations aspire to be, he asked. “They thought I am squandering a lot,” he says, alluding to the reactions of his friends, well-wishers and all who mattered and not mattered so much. Khan was attempting to do something audacious, which was perceived by many as outrageous. “But when push comes to shove, very few take a stand,” he underlines. A lot of universities, he lets on, will try to teach students values and ethics.
“I was inspired by MIT OpenCourseWare, a web-based publication of MIT course content,” he says. The biggest trigger to lead a profit-less life was MIT.
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Khan, who pursued his ‘hobby’ of uploading free tutorials till 2009, decided to quit his job and take a plunge into the not-for-profit world of education. The fact that people were benefitting enormously from the free lessons had a message that the venture was making an impact, and could be scaled. “It was incredibly rewarding,” he recalls. “It kept me going and I realised there’s a real value here,” he says. Khan’s appeal now spread much beyond his family, he started amassing users every day, and letters of appreciation were pouring in from all parts of the US. The next year, he got the domain name-Khan Academy-and in 2006 he set up a YouTube channel and started uploading educational videos. It was in 2004 that Khan started making math tutorials for his cousins. “I used to wonder what I had done to myself and to my family,” he says, narrating those haunting moments. “I would wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat,” he recalls. Well, a lot changed after Khan quit his job. “They used to talk very nicely,” he adds. “When I used to go to dinner parties and introduce myself to people, they used to be mighty impressed,” he recalls.
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The biggest pull for the then hedge fund analyst was his professional background and enviable educational pedigree: Bachelor of Science in math and computer science, and master of engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an MBA from Harvard. Until a year ago, Khan was courted by everybody during dinner parties and social gatherings. “It hit my fragile male ego very heavily,” he recounts. The uncharitable comment was devastating. “One of them said, ‘Good thing that his wife is training to be a doctor’,” recalls Khan, who overheard the gossip. It was, however, their hushed conversation that cut like a knife.
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