Ask me anything with Sal Khan: #GivingTuesdayNow | Homeroom with Sal

Hello, welcome to our daily homeroom livestream! For those of y'all that this is your first time coming, this is something that we started doing when we started seeing school closures around the world. Khan Academy, we are a not-for-profit with a mission of providing a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere.

So obviously, a big part of that is we've been creating learning materials, software, videos, all free, all not commercial. As soon as we saw the school closures happening, we said we have to make this as usable as possible for teachers, parents, and students, so that everyone can keep learning.

That's when we started publishing schedules, putting out learning plans, parent and teacher webinars. We also thought, in a time of social distancing, would it be nice if there was a place where we could connect in a, I guess you could say, synchronous way? Well, we could talk, have conversations, answer each other's questions, bring on interesting guests, and that's what this livestream is for.

Now, before we get into the meat of the livestream — and today’s the meat of today’s livestream will be around Giving Tuesday — there are actually a lot of things going on. It's National Teacher Appreciation Week; we'll talk a little bit about that, but it's also Giving Tuesday.

In line with Giving Tuesday, I do want to remind everyone again that we are a not-for-profit, and the only way we're able to do our work for it to be free, for it to be non-commercial. A lot of people come to Khan Academy, and they think there's a catch. There's, like, clearly, there's a lot of resources being put into it. Are they going to try to sell me something at some point?

The reason why we don't, and we never intend to, is because we're supported by philanthropic donations from folks like yourself. We'll talk a lot about that over the course of today's conversation. But I do want to give special thanks to several corporations that have stepped up in recent weeks when they found out that we were already running at a deficit before the COVID crisis.

Now, in the crisis, with our traffic being 2 to 3 times what it typically is, we're trying to accelerate all of these programs to figure out better ways to support parents, teachers, and students. Bank of America, google.org, 18t, Novartis, and Fast C all stepped up literally in a matter of days to make sure that we have less of a gap. But we still need more help.

I want to make it very clear: Khan Academy is much more than just me. There are 200 full-time teachers, researchers, engineers, designers, managers who are bringing Khan Academy to you. Because of that, we're able to serve. We have over a hundred million registered users; there are tens of millions of learners who come on a monthly basis, and that's only possible with financial support, donations.

So, given that today is Giving Tuesday, that's going to be the focus of this, but this will be a two-way exchange. I am going to try to convince you, if you're in a position — I don't want to guilt you if you're not in a position to do so — but every dollar matters. If you're in a position to do so, please think about donating, and in return, well, the main thing in return of all of us at Khan Academy is we're going to be able to do our work and hopefully serve you and many millions of students around the world.

But I'm also happy to answer any questions that you might have about anything, so this is a true ask-me-anything. So whether you're watching on Facebook or on YouTube, put your questions in the message boards. Myself and some team members, we're going to be looking at it, and as long as it's decent, nothing is out of bounds; I'm happy to answer any question.

While we're waiting for questions to come in, I'm just going to — we have some goals with our team; we're hoping to get 20,000 donations. We care about the number of people donating because that shows that, hey, there are other people in this boat with us. There are other people around the world who care about this mission of free world-class education for anyone, anywhere. Even if they're donating $3, that makes a difference, and it's a huge show of support for the work that we're doing.

Our goal is to raise $50,000 on YouTube in the month of May and $25,000 on Facebook this week. If you look, I believe it's on my left — I think I'm pointing in the right place — you will see donate buttons either on Facebook or YouTube where you'll have an opportunity to donate. Once again, if you're in a position to do so, please think about doing that.

I will read some quick testimonials just to get a sense of a flavor of how people are using Khan Academy, right? This is the type of thing that gives us energy, and I hope all of y'all, if you view yourself as part of the Khan Academy community, which I hope you do, especially if you're a supporter, then you take satisfaction in things like this.

This is a thing we got recently; this is — we got this year's a quote from a physician, actually, I'm a resident physician in New York. We've been working long, hard days with COVID patients. I'm writing to say thank you. I used your materials — I used your early materials to get through my undergraduate and medical education. My two-and-a-half-year-old has been home due to school closures, and I haven't had a chance to see her much in the past last few weeks. I came home today, and she said, "let's sing the Khan Academy song" in regards to a song that has helped her learn to count.

Your educational programs carried me through my education and are now teaching my young daughter. Thank you! That's John. And so, first of all, John, if you're listening or maybe you'll watch the recording of this later, thank you so much for that. One, the work you're doing — the medical workers are genuinely on the front line of this war, whatever you want to call it, against COVID.

So thank you for doing that work, and it makes us incredibly happy and incredibly proud that not only were we able to be part of your education, so in our way, by us helping you many years ago, maybe you're going to be able to help that many more people with COVID. But also, in this time of need, and I'm sure your family needs support, and your family's going through a lot of stress, it's our honor to be able to support your daughter through her learning.

For those of you who don't know, Khan Academy Kids — I had Caroline over, who's the founder of Khan Academy Kids, last Friday on the livestream. I can't speak highly enough how cool it is. I have a five-and-a-half-year-old; they just added first-grade content. They also just added teacher tools, so teachers can make assignments and see what students have completed.

It starts as early as ages two; it goes up to ages seven, and I really think that that is — it's in math, reading, writing, social-emotional learning, and you even have stuff on logic. It covers all of the standards that can be covered in that format. I encourage parents or anyone in your family who might have an early learner to check that out.

That's the type of work that we're able to do with this support. And this all costs resources. Whether it's the core Khan Academy that many of y'all are familiar with or Khan Academy Kids, it's your donations that allow us to build that support that supports tens of millions of users every month and to continue to improve on that.

So let's see, we have questions. We have questions here. So one from Instagram: Sarah Helis Lee says, "Sleepy." I think that's an interesting one. What motivated you to build Khan Academy? So I've told the story a little bit, but I'll tell it again in a fast form.

I was tutoring cousins back in 2004. My day job, I was an analyst at an investment firm, and I just saw that maybe there were some tools that I could help build that would help my family. So that's where I started writing the exercise platform—a very early version of it—for my cousins to get practice, feedback from me as their teacher or their tutor to keep track of what they were doing.

A few years later, a friend suggested, "Hey, why don't you make video lessons to supplement this software thing you're making?" and I thought it was a horrible idea. "Cats playing piano? It’s YouTube; it’s not for serious math!" But I got over the idea; it wasn't my idea, and I gave it a shot.

Long story short, I made it for my family, but it soon became clear that people who were not my family were watching. By 2008, I said, "This could be a real thing," and that’s why I incorporated Khan Academy as a not-for-profit. For those of you who don’t know what a not-for-profit is, it means no one owns Khan Academy. It is a public charity. I do not own Khan Academy.

Another way to think about it: you own as much of Khan Academy as I do. I do get a salary from Khan Academy; all of our team members get salaries from Khan Academy, but we are employees of this organization. It's governed by a board and that board, you know, in a for-profit organization, the board is, "How do we maximize shareholder value?"

In a not-for-profit board, the board says, "How do we maximize impact?" Especially impact aligned with our mission, which is a free world-class education for anyone, anywhere. By 2009, you know, I was hoping at first to set up as a not-for-profit; maybe some friends would volunteer to help me out.

But by 2009, I had trouble focusing on my day job, and I saw, you know, my first child was just born; my wife was a medical resident, so we were making a little bit of money. But I decided to quit my job, and we lived off the savings. We were digging into our savings about $5,000 a month, just under the belief that this needed to exist in the world.

Back then, there were about a hundred thousand people using Khan Academy on a monthly basis. I used to say, "Who knows? Maybe one day it would be a million, ten million, a hundred million." At the time, it might have seemed like delusional ideas, but those are now true.

I think the opportunity — and I said, "Maybe one day billions!" I could learn from this and imagine if future generations don't view education as something that only the affluent have or only certain people have, but they say, "As long as I have at least a low-cost smartphone, I can have access to the world’s best material. I have practice and feedback, and eventually, I can learn everything from early learning in math, reading, writing all the way through the core of elementary, middle, high school, college, not just in math, not just in ELA, but the social sciences, the sciences.

Eventually, plug it into the world. Imagine if we could create a world like that. That was the hope of Khan Academy; that's why it was a not-for-profit, and that’s why I hope that you're also excited about that type of a vision of what we could do for the world together. I hope one day all of you are able to tell your children or your grandchildren, "Yeah, there was a time where free world-class education wasn't a thing."

That what zip code you were born in, how much your family made — that was the biggest predictor of what you were going to do in your life, which unfortunately it is the case right now. But we think we can change that and empower everyone. Not only level the playing field, but think about how many Marie Curie's or Albert Einstein's for every one that we discover, how many go undiscovered.

Think about all of the work that those kids who might be living in a slum someplace in India right now — if they're able to tap into their potential, what they might be able to do for us. They might find the vaccine for the next pandemic, a cure for a disease, write the next great novel, solve existential problems for humanity. So that's kind of the dream of Khan Academy and how I got started.

Let's see, we got — we have more, we have more questions here. So from Instagram, @SarahGirl2020 is saying, "I'm having trouble staying focused on my online classes. How can I be a little bit better?" Good question, Sarah. So, I'll tell you, well, there are a couple of things that I've been doing.

One is I love to keep moving, so you could imagine I said in a lot of meetings these days, and now they're all over Zoom and Google Meet, whatever else. What I've been doing is actually I've been doing them while walking, and you'll be surprised. I'm surprised, you know, you can be on a phone and look in a Zoom meeting, and you can still see the screen and see what's going on.

But I find if I'm just in a park — ideally, you're in someplace where there's not any traffic so you can't get hit by a car — but I go to my local park and I just keep doing laps while I'm in the meeting, and I find that helps me stay focused. It gives me exercise; I get fresh air, which is especially important in this time of social distancing.

So if you're lucky enough to have a safe environment to walk in, I think that's another thing. I think, you know, a lot of educators are trying to figure things out right now, so I think if you give constructive feedback, saying, "Hey teacher, that was a great session; I really appreciate it; but I would love to see even more interactivity.

I would love ways if there are ways that we can participate, you can ask us questions." I think a lot of educators would welcome that; they want you to participate more. So that's another way to stay really engaged.

In general, whether it’s online or offline or just work you have to do, there’s something called the Pomodoro Technique, which we've talked about before. It's named after a Pomodoro — is a type of tomato — but it's named after a timer that was shaped like a Pomodoro tomato.

The general idea is you give yourself 20 minutes, 30 minutes; you put it on the timer and you say, "Okay, over that time, I'm gonna work on whatever it is." And then when that timer rings, you give yourself a ten-minute break. Ten minutes to take a walk, do some jumping jacks, dance a little bit, whatever, and then get back to work.

By doing it in those sessions, you might think that 10 minutes is kind of a waste of time, where you're taking a break. But it's not; you're rejuvenating, and then it'll give you more energy to then focus and go deep on whatever you're trying to work on.

So, more testimonials, and I actually want to give a shout-out to thank yous on several of the donations: Eliott H, thank you so much for your donation! So, Ethel, if I'm reading your user name correctly, thank you so much! Just donated $100 on YouTube. Thank you so much!

Whittle and Shuttle writes, "Thank you, Sal, and everyone at Khan Academy. It's a noble cause; the more knowledge we all have, the more humane we become." I, Perrantes, if I'm not pronouncing your name correctly, your user name, SJ Ethyl or Shweta, couldn't agree with you more.

I will emphasize I get a disproportionate amount of credit for Khan Academy; there's 200-plus full-time folks — about five or six, seven somewhere — actually behind the scenes right now supporting this livestream. Beyond that, we have thousands of volunteers around the world, and that show of confidence through that donation makes a huge difference.

That donation is going to make a huge difference. There's this framework that this foundation, Robin Hood Foundation, which focuses on New York, but it's a framework that they came up with for calculating something called social benefit to cost ratio.

It's a way, you know, in the for-profit world, you look at something called return on investment where you say, "Hey, if I invest $100 and I get $30 more, I get my $100 back," that's a 30% return on investment. In my hedge fund world, we're all with — you know, back in the hedge fund days, I would always think, "Well, okay, where are we going to get the best financial return?"

Well, in the not-for-profit world, where you gonna get the best impact return? How much impact for your dollar? It's generally good if you're able to get even a two-to-one impact, $2 ratio. So there's a social impact of two, and you say, "How do you measure social impact?" Well, you could say, "Well, if someone's able to improve their academic standing by X amount, how will that affect their lifetime earnings?"

How much will that decrease costs in other parts of society? You know, education is inversely correlated with how much if imprisoned people and crime and all of these other things. And then there are tax revenues that you get, the more educated people get.

Using proxies like that, a very good social return is about a 10-to-1 social benefit to cost ratio. A 10-to-1 is a great one. If you look at Khan Academy, and there’s actually a video — I'm happy to share it — but it’s a video where I do that back-of-the-envelope calculation.

You'll see Khan Academy gets someplace between — actually, pre-COVID, it was someplace between a 250 to 400 to 1 ratio. And post-COVID, now that our usage is about 200 to 300 times what it typically is, those numbers go up by two to three times. So, you're talking about in a world where a good social benefit to cost ratio is 2 to 1 or 3 to 1, we're talking about a social benefit to cost ratio which is like 500 to 1.

For anyone donating, even that dollar, you should feel very good about that. Even that dollar is going to drive learning for someone on the planet, probably someone who doesn't have a dollar to learn for a good amount of time. If I remember the numbers correctly, our cost of delivering learning is around 15 cents per hour. So even that dollar is able to impact a lot of people.

That $100 that you gave, thank you, Ethel; there are going to be a lot of people who are going to be empowered because of that. So thank you so much for it!

So I have more testimonials here. This is from Heather, who's a parent. Heather writes, "I've been using Khan Academy for six of my children since the onset of COVID-19. I would have used it sooner had I known it was available free of charge. Please donate if you can. It's truly beneficial to families, especially now."

Well, thank you, Heather, and we agree with you. One other thing is that, you know, donate; that would be huge, and hopefully, you feel yourself as part of this mission and part of this community. For anyone out there, make sure that there are other parents like Heather who could benefit from this, and their children could benefit.

But there's still an awful lot of people who don't know about Khan Academy, or maybe they've heard about Khan Academy and they think we're a for-profit organization. They say, "Oh, that's just another one of those EdTech companies that's trying to get me on some $5 a month plan," or something like that. That is not who we are. We are here to give you free access to what we genuinely believe are the best materials out there.

One of the logical fallacies or emotional fallacies we sometimes see is people think they get something better when they pay for it. Sometimes some of these for-profit companies are able to take advantage of that. They're like, "Oh, Khan Academy is free, but we charge you $10 a month, so you must think it's better."

But do your research. The number of efficacy studies done on Khan Academy, the level of transparency, and our ability to partner with folks like the College Board around the SAT, if you objectively ask knowledgeable people in the field, you will find that the Khan Academy resources are deeper, more aligned with learning science, and have much more efficacy research on it.

Look at the Khan Academy Kids material; it's free, it's not commercial. I challenge anyone to find anything that costs money that comes close to what the team at Khan Academy Kids — and I brag about them a little bit more because, you know, I can't claim that I did that other than, you know, they kind of joined forces with us.

I obviously help fundraise for them and make sure that we're aligned from a pedagogical and strategy point of view, but they've been doing incredible stuff. Obviously, on the core Khan Academy where I am more involved and many, many other people are involved, I can't tell you how much work is put in to make sure it's aligned with learning science, make sure it's aligned to standards, and then do efficacy research on it to make sure we’re impacting as many students as possible.

So, more questions from AMA questions, Ask Me Anything questions from YouTube. Matias Yamoto says — and I'm reading these, you know, so I don't know what this is about to say, so I'm just gonna — "Hi Sal, I want to thank you and the board for bringing Khan Academy to Brazil. Can you explain why you guys selected our country and your expectations for the future?"

So, great question, Matias. It's interesting; in the early days of Khan Academy, obviously, we've always had this mission statement: free world-class education for anyone, anywhere. Part of that vision is we want to make this available to everyone on the planet, localized not just the videos, but the software platform, the teacher tools.

When we got our first funding in 2010, it was from the Gates Foundation and Google.org. The Google aspect of the funds — they said they wanted us to start translating this into the language of the world; so that’s what we started back in 2010.

Then, I believe it was 2012, we had this gentleman visit our offices out here in Mountain View from Brazil named Jorge Paulo Lemann. Our offices, even now, aren’t fancy by any stretch of the imagination, but back then my office was above a tea shop in downtown Mountain View.

One of our first funders walked in and said, "Sal, this is not a healthy working environment." So she sent some painters and a handyman to just make it a vaguely decent environment. Jorge Paulo visited that office, and you know, if you're from Brazil, you might have heard of Jorge Paulo.

I'm ashamed to say that I didn't know about Jorge Paulo, but he's actually one of the biggest philanthropists in Brazil. He and his team came and said, "We need to bring Khan Academy to Brazil as soon as possible." We were like a five-person organization at the time. They were like, "Oh, well, we don't know how we're going to be able to do that."

They said, "Well, we can support Khan Academy. We can help support the efforts in Brazil." The Lemann Foundation, named after Jorge Paulo Lemann, helped support Khan Academy proper. Since then, they've been great donors and supporters of us.

We've been able to partner with them in Brazil to align our work, localize it into Brazilian Portuguese, align it with the Brazilian national Common Core, and do efficacy research studies in Brazilian schools. There was even a soap opera episode in Brazil I heard where the protagonist ran a fundraiser for Khan Academy.

So we have a lot of good connections to Brazil; I visited there and had a wonderful time. I actually brought my whole family there and worked with the Lemann folks. That's what really pulled us into Brazil. We have 45 translation projects around the world; most of it is volunteers who are able to do it in their own languages and are unpaid.

Your donations are allowing us to build a platform so that they can do it. There are multiple geographies that we're able to go deeper. Brazil is one of them; India is another, and then Spanish-speaking Latin America, especially places like Peru and Mexico.

We have partners, Carlos Slim Foundation in Mexico and Carlos Rodriguez Pastor and his foundation in Peru, and Tata Trust in India. These are all foundations that have allowed us to go deeper. But I do want to make it clear that all of these groups have each been donating a lot of resources to make this happen.

For all of us to reach, literally, the hundreds of millions and billions, we need more resources. It’s a real partnership with both large philanthropy and foundations as well as small philanthropists — oh, and people who can give even that $20, that $10, or even those $3. It all makes a huge difference.

So a question from YouTube: Emanuel asks, "How important do you think coding will be for children’s education in the future?" So, I’m a big coding fan. My background — my undergrad — I was a computer science major. I always got a lot of joy out of coding. Coding empowered me to build the first versions of Khan Academy; Khan Academy wouldn’t exist if I didn't have some of those early desires to prototype with coding.

I view it as a very, very valuable skill. That's why we've invested in Khan Academy on our coding platform for kids, and I encourage anyone, anyone who thinks that coding is not for them, go to Khan Academy and try our coding platform. You're going to see that it focuses on the creative side of coding.

You get to make pictures and animations literally within minutes, but it takes you all the way down the path so that you can actually understand fairly sophisticated ideas in computer programming and computer science. So I think there are two tracks: I think there's a lot of — you know the need for software engineers, computer programmers, it's only going to increase.

There are so many industries that are going to leverage things like computing and data analytics and data science and artificial intelligence more than they are today. So, there are just going to be more and more jobs there, and it's valuable for that.

But even if someone isn’t going to become a computer programmer, if you're going to become a doctor, if you're going to become a lawyer, whatever — accountant, whatever field someone goes into — almost every one of those industries is going to be affected by computing going forward.

So it's valuable to have at least a baseline understanding of what computers can do, how computing logic works so that you can navigate whatever field you go into in the future. I'll also add that, you know, what's fun about programming and computing is it helps build a certain form of critical thinking and logic, which I think is valuable in every field.

So, big picture, you know, I'm still a big — you know, you're reading — you're reading — you're three R's, so to speak, which were never R's, three R's: reading, writing, and arithmetic. Those are always going to be super core and will be super core for the 21st century. But, you know, I think computing builds a lot of those same skills that mathematics does in terms of critical thinking, and there's a whole — there's a creation side to it too in this engineering side, which is super valuable.

So if kids can get exposed to it, I would love to see it. And that’s why we have that on Khan Academy. We also have AP Computer Science Principles, which is an Advanced Placement course which is designed to be broad so that a lot of people might want to take it. You could go on Khan Academy right now, and you could either learn to program on our coding platform or go to AP Computer Science Principles, and I think almost anyone watching this could engage on it.

It not only does the basics of coding; it teaches how computers work, how the Internet works, what is Internet security—all of these things you are always hearing about. We make it available on Khan Academy, so I definitely recommend taking a look at some of that work as well.

Let’s see, there’s a question; there’s a testimonial from AJ, who’s a student. AJ wrote to us and says, "No joke, the only reason I graduated college was because of Khan Academy. I pledged to myself that if I graduated, I would give every year after I graduated. I have kept that promise and I am giving a little bit more during the COVID pandemic because I want to make sure that everyone has the opportunity to learn."

Well, AJ, thank you so much. That means a ton to us! I know, especially for a young professional, you're out of college, you probably don’t have a lot of money. But whatever you can donate makes a big difference. It makes a difference on two levels, though: the money obviously allows us to do work, allows us to hire people, pay our server costs. Our server costs run several million dollars a year.

But also just that show of confidence, you know? I can’t tell you, you know, that positive energy that you send our way by supporting this makes a big difference to us as well. It energizes me, and I know it energizes the team, and it's a very powerful example for hopefully other people to help donate to this cause that we think can empower billions of folks over generations.

So from YouTube Live, an ask: Sal, if you have $1 million, what will you do with it? I'm assuming the question is if Khan Academy had a million dollars. If I had a million dollars, I might think about donating it to Khan Academy.

You know, I'll answer your question; I’ll go on a little tangent. A lot of people said, "Sal, how come Khan Academy isn’t a for-profit company?" I went through that thought process in the early days because before I actually even talked to any philanthropists, I live in the middle of Silicon Valley. Some of my friends are venture capitalists; they offered, "Hey, I’ll write a $100,000 check right now; you give me X percent, and you can quit your day job, and we can turn Khan Academy into the next billion-dollar company."

You can imagine that was very tempting. But you know what? I went through the thought process, and I was getting so much psychic reward from folks like AJ saying how it helped them. I said, "Well, what if we get to put a paywall behind it, or what if when someone wants to learn algebra, they have to watch an ad?"

There’s something that just doesn’t feel good about it, and I imagine what a home run would look like in the for-profit world. If it's a home run, it would be a Google or a Facebook or an Apple, and that’s great. I think all three of those organizations do amazing work; they all innovate in the world in amazing ways.

But then I thought, "What would a home run be in the not-for-profit world?" Well, what if Khan Academy could be that next great institution like the Smithsonian or the Library System or the great universities? It could be accessible by literally billions of people.

I thought about, you know, when I started this, I didn’t have kids; now I have three kids. But I thought about my grandkids and their kids. What would they be more proud of, Khan Academy? And what could keep Khan Academy sticking to its vision and its mission?

In my old career as a hedge fund analyst, I saw how much the actions of a company are dictated by who owns the company. You could have a founder who wants to do very altruistic things, but as soon as the ownership changes, it might go in a completely different way, especially if it’s owned by firms that are just out there to maximize the buck.

So I said, "Okay, if I want Khan Academy to last multiple generations and stay true to that mission, and that mission is its true bottom line, it’s got to be a not-for-profit." I went through the thought process even if I were to start the next Google and become a billionaire. I would just want to donate that money to the effort of education anyway.

So let me just cut out the middleman. And the benefit of a non-for-profit is it’s not taxed, and it would go toward a reserve. So I said, "Why just cut to the chase? Let me just, you know, if I can make a decent living as a professor, and I have to say Khan Academy's board pays me more than generously, I feel like I'm the luckiest person on the planet that I get to be paid to do what I love."

Anything above what I need for that — what those billions that could have been, I'm much happier that we're able to create an organization that has impact for the broader world. I know many of the employees of Khan Academy — many of them are supporting this. They could go — you know Google is in the same town as we are; Facebook is down the street; Apple is a couple of miles away. Pretty much all of them, if they were just optimizing for money, could go to those places and get stock and probably double their total comp or whatever we're looking at.

But they’ve all made the decision that they want to work on this mission. In a lot of ways, they’re also major donors to this organization. Anyway, that was me going on a tangent, but that's where I, you know, I obviously feel quite passionately about the world needing something like this.

I can't imagine something more — I don't — there's — I can't imagine being luckier than to be able to work on a mission like this. Now, if the question is, "What would Khan Academy do with that incremental million dollars?" It is, you know, we want to make sure that our servers stay performant, that when you go there, you know, it doesn’t take seconds to load up, that it's a fast, great experience.

We're always looking at how do we improve the user experience for this coming back to school. We're looking at ways to maybe do some quick diagnostics and ways for students to build their foundations quickly because we know with a lot of kids out of school, they're going to have a huge variance in preparedness.

As you know, every dollar, much less every million dollars, allows us to think about adding more subject areas or improving the subject areas that we already have. Those are just a sample of the things that we would do with every incremental million dollars.

So, more donors: I just want to thank so — so there are three people who donated anonymously at $140. So thank you, three anonymous people; you know who you are! Thank you for that! Petco Karamocesv donated on Facebook; thank you so much, Petco!

Sathi Mehta on Facebook wrote, "Thank you for making this available. It's amazing, and my eight-year-old loves it." Well, tell your eight-year-old to keep going, and thank you, Sathi, for that donation. From YouTube, Michelle Polly, Aloha!

I'm assuming you're in Hawaii — just donated on our website. Thank you so much. I am a teacher and use it religiously for students and myself. Well, Michelle, two things: thank you for your donation, and I would say this no matter what because I love the work. I mean, the work that educators do is the ultimate work.

But especially given this is Teacher Appreciation Week, thank you, Michelle, for the work you do! Aloha! I've actually was in Florida speaking at a teacher’s conference last year, and I learned a lot about, you know, all of us not Hawaiians know about the term Aloha—hello, goodbye—but there's this whole notion of Aloha culture, which is just like, you know, how do you project love toward others, and that really touched me. So, Aloha to you as well!

Another anonymous donation: $50; you know who you are! Thank you! Nashua Talabi on Facebook: thank you for your donation, and Nashua wrote, "Thank you for all your efforts. I use Khan Academy to teach my three children." You are a pride in hope!

Well, thank you so much! That means a lot; keep up the great work! A Sour Holderman, thank you for your donation! Every dollar matters, and it means a ton to all of us at Khan Academy that you're taking the trouble to donate. I know a lot of y'all, you know, there’s financial stress in the world; there are a lot of causes that need help and they're all good, noble causes.

But I thank all of y'all for appreciating that in this world right now education is very, very central, and it's very — the access to it is very unequal. I think hopefully those of you all are watching realize how powerful a lever Khan Academy can be and how much scale it has that, you know, as I said, we're the budget of a large high school, but we're able to reach a good chunk of humanity, not just for this year but for generations to come.

So, you know, it's almost hard for the mind to grasp, but that's what gets us excited and that's what gets us energized to do the work that we need to do.

So, let's see, we have another donation just come on Facebook. Thank you so much from anonymous; you know who you are. Maybe it's the same anonymous; maybe it's a different anon? Anonymous, I guess.

So, I see it looks like unfortunately we're all out of time. Actually, I'll take one more question because I think this is very relevant. From Facebook, Gary Wilmot asks, "How would you describe the company culture at Khan Academy? How has COVID-19 affected it?"

Well, Gary, you know, I'll tell you something that I told the team. We now have our company meetings now, as you can imagine, on Zoom, and you know, one thing that the leadership at Khan Academy has been telling all the team members is this is a time that you always have to take care of yourself and your family before you take care of others.

We have team members — I mean, myself included, but I'm lucky; I have my wife and my mother-in-law; we're all in the same house so we're able to tag-team with the kids. But there are team members who might be a single parent; they have young children at home, it's incredibly hard.

In a time like that, the last thing you need is for your employer to say, "Hey, I thought that thing that you were going to get done was going to get done by this afternoon. Where is it?" So we've made it very clear, some of our team members are able to step up; they maybe have a little more time, and a lot of us are getting pulled in a lot of directions.

So we're saying, "Hey, this is not a time that we're judging you. We know that the people who are drawn to this mission are drawn to do the right thing, and we want to figure out how we can support you in any way, shape, or form that we can."

What I've told — I told this to the team at Khan Academy yesterday; so many times, you know, we have these aspirations, very ambitious aspirations for what we can do in the broader world. You know, let's educate a billion people; let's create an institution so that parents, teachers, and students feel empowered for hundreds of years to come.

But in order for that to feel right for the users, we have to have the right energy inside of our organization. If we're not energized, if we're not passionate about what we do, that lack of passion is going to be carried on to the learners. We shouldn't do anything unless we genuinely care about it.

So, you know, I emphasize with our team members, work should not be work the way that a lot of people think about it. A lot of people think about, "Oh, I got — it's Monday morning; I guess I've got to go to work. I guess I've got to pay the bills."

Work is where you spend eight hours, nine hours, ten hours, or more per day for a good chunk of your life. It should be a place that fills your soul! It should be a place that gives you meaning; it should be a place that makes you feel connected with other people who are like-minded!

You know, that’s my aspiration for Khan Academy. Not only can we be, in some ways, pioneers on what could happen for the world, but we can also show examples of organizations that believe in people, that are human; that are about filling your soul, that, you know, aren’t political and all of the, you know, kind of notions that you might be used to or might see typical in some corporate settings, that can be a place where you get the best out of people.

Because every human being has a natural desire to want to help other people and a natural desire to have an impact on the world and tackle challenging intellectual issues. And I think, you know, that's what we hope to do at Khan Academy.

So the culture, I hope, is, you know, to be very collaborative. I don't sense really politics, which I've sensed in other places that I've worked in my life. Because as I said, people could go other places if they wanted to optimize for income or, you know, titles.

But people are coming here to optimize for impact, and I think that just creates a really, really positive culture inside of an organization. So, I will now read — let's see, there's a last few folks who’ve donated.

Neela, another anonymous donation on YouTube for $5. Thank you! As I said, every donation matters. Aniela Mukerji locally donated — thank you on Facebook! Thank you so much, Neela; I really appreciate that!

Time went by fast; I guess time goes by fast when you’re — I guess maybe I’m talking too much. But I just want to say again thank you so much for all of you who donated in the past. Thank you so much for all of you who donated now; this really makes a huge, huge difference for so many learners around the world.

It makes a huge difference for our team and our capacity to do the work that we want to do! This is especially true now that we're in this COVID crisis, and the world needs things like Khan Academy that much more.

So thank you for being on this journey with us! Tell everyone you know that we exist! We want to be used by more people so that we can grow our impact even more. Stay safe, stay healthy, and I will see you tomorrow where we're going to have, actually, Angela Duckworth, a famous education researcher on things like grit and resilience and perseverance, and a close friend of mine as well on our homeroom livestream. See you tomorrow!

Hello! During school closures, I like to use the schedule provided by Khan Academy. My day includes doing the math lesson on Khan Academy, doing my homework on Google Classroom, and doing a guided meditation on YouTube. Thank you, Khan Academy!