Likeonomics: The Unexpected Truth Behind Earning Trust, Influencing Behavior, and Inspiring Action

Khan Academy—Flipping the Rules of Education: Industry: Education

Industry: Education

The Story

When a family member tells you that she prefers watching you on a YouTube video to actually hearing you in person, most people might take that as an insult. But Sal Khan isn’t like most people. After earning three degrees at MIT and an MBA from Harvard, he started a job as an overqualified hedge-fund manager making seven figures a year. He had been a math whiz as well as a gifted student, and so he was also the first one that his younger family members would turn to when they needed someone to help explain their homework.

When his cousin Nadia asked for math help, to save time he started tutoring her over the Internet. He created a series of math videos to explain complex ideas to her in simple ways. Much to his surprise, those videos started getting a lot of views. Could math videos really go viral?

It turned out people need help understanding math—and not just kids either. Adults who go back to school, high schoolers who need a refresher on things they should have learned earlier in school but either forgot or never really learned properly…each was an audience for Khan’s videos. His no-nonsense style of simplifying math problems into shorter lectures that finally allowed people to “get it” were a hit. Pretty soon he started to branch out, creating more videos to simplify other math, science and business topics. His gift was his ability to explain complicated topics step by step.