Homeroom with Sal & Marta Kosarchyn - Tuesday, June 30

To our daily homeroom live stream, I'm excited about our conversation today with Khan Academy's Head of Engineering, VP of Engineering, Marta Casarchin. Uh, but before we get into that, I will give my standard announcement.

A reminder to everyone that Khan Academy is a not-for-profit. We only exist because of philanthropic donations from folks like yourself. A special thanks to several corporations that stepped up a couple of months ago when they found out that we were running at a deficit even before COVID, and then with all of the things we've been trying to do in response to COVID, our deficit has only increased. Special thanks to Bank of America, Google.org, AT&T, Fastly, and Novartis, and many other foundations and individual donors of all levels who make this possible.

I will say that we still are running at a deficit and digging into reserves. So if at any scale, if you're in a position to help, please think about making a donation. So with that, I am excited to introduce Marta, who is our CTO and VP of Engineering. So, so Marta, thanks for joining in. And I'll remind everyone who's watching on Facebook or YouTube, please put questions you have for myself or Marta on the message boards below. We have team members who are going to be surfacing questions.

They can really be questions about anything and everything, but we're going to be talking a lot about just Marta's journey to how she got to Khan Academy. So it could be about career advice, especially if you're trying to think about going into a technical field or engineering. But it literally could be about anything. It could be life advice. It could be how we do engineering. It kind of really any topic is within bounds.

So, so Marta, maybe a good place to start: you're the CTO, VP of Engineering. What do what do those titles mean? What do you do here at Khan Academy? What do they mean generally in most organizations?

Yeah, I mean, generally most organizations and at Khan Academy, it's leading the engineering team, which is the team that builds our product, our Khan Academy website, and provides the learning experiences that encapsulate the content that we have available for our users and helps them on their learning journey and all of the things that you often talk about on Daily Homeroom. So we build that, and so we have to choose the technology that's appropriate for us to not only build an appropriate learning experience, but build it in a way that provides reasonable performance and stability and reliability because that's our promise, that's our service to the organization, is that we will, we will do the pla— we will take care of the platform. We basically steward the platform and make the choices that will get our product out there.

Yeah, and you know, explain to folk, you know, I think a lot of people have a perception that, you know, it is true Khan Academy was started by me in a walk-in closet. Actually, it was this walk-in closet that I'm in now. So it's still that part is still has held true. There is a salad, a walk-in closet someplace that's a very nice one, as you can tell, has a bookshelf and has some natural lighting.

But, you know, people don't realize that we're over a 200-person organization. We have an over 80-person engineering team. And so people think, "Well, you know, I know Khan Academy has videos; you have some exercises." This is a major organization! What are what what is requiring us to have such a not only a large team, but a deep team? We have some of the world's experts in a lot of the areas of technology and infrastructure. What is the focus of that engineering team that you lead?

Yeah, that's a great question, Sal, for us to talk about because I'll share a story. When I shared with folks that I was coming to Khan Academy, they said, "Well, what kind of engineering do you need at Khan Academy?" Because so many people think, "Oh, well, there are some videos, right, on YouTube that you can go watch." And so I hope I was helpful in kind of getting the word out there to come to our site and our product and to enjoy not only the videos but the articles and the exercises in particular and the mastery mechanics and all of the things that we provide for learners and for teachers and for parents.

So we have, yes, over 80 engineers, and we have a really, really spectacular engineering team. We are so fortunate to have incredibly, incredibly skilled engineers that work here, have come because of the mission that you found, Sal, to provide a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere. And folks come here who are dedicated to it and who do really spectacular work on the product. So we are building, like I said, learning experiences. We're building teaching experiences, and the engineers are building the site.

So yeah, yeah, there's a lot of us, people. They're very good. And what, you know, just to doubly underline or triple underline what you're saying, I don't think people realize that, you know, when a site, when Khan Academy had a few thousand people using it every month, yeah, maybe it could operate on a shoestring. And I would say still operating on a shoestring relative to its scale. Obviously, it's the budget of a large high school and reaches over 100 million students every year. But to your points, you know, we have to keep it up and running 24/7. We have to make sure it's performant, you know, just the data that we're storing.

And once again, we only store data in service to students to make the learning experience better or to understand efficacy. That by itself is gargantuan. We have, you know, millions of dollars in server costs that we have to keep running as efficiently as possible. To your point, our product is more nuanced and complicated than I think most people realize. We have official SAT practice, we have subjects and grades from pre-K all the way through college. We have multiple modalities. We have teacher aspects, tools to it. We're keeping track of everything we have, students, things. And so you can imagine just even keeping track of the game mechanics and the state for 100 million-plus people; it's no joke. And we're just kind of glazing the surface.

So before we get into, there's actually a lot of good questions are coming in on Facebook and YouTube. Before we get into it, Marta, you know, just share a little bit of your journey of how you got to Khan Academy, you know, and start as far back as you like. I think that's what's unique about Homeroom; I think people are intrigued in knowing folks' paths in life.

Okay, well, we'll go far back. So I grew up in Chicago; my parents were immigrants. I'm a first-generation American, and I think I've shared in two truths and a lie, so you know this, Sal, that one of the things I always kind of use is the fact that I didn't learn to speak English until I went to school. And so that was my very early journey. I, coming to Khan Academy, is something that I've often said is sort of a coming full circle. Because I started off loving math and studying math, and I have a couple of degrees in math.

And as a female in particular, my age going through and being a math major and going to graduate school, the questions that I always got: "Well, why aren't you in math ed? Because, you know, you should be a teacher." And I was very adamant about the fact that I didn't want to be a teacher; I wanted to just study math. And it wasn't until grad school, I was a TA, that I realized that I fell in love with teaching. And I think a big insight for me there, which I know you experience all the time, Sal, given the content that you do, is just because I was learning so much every time I had to just—I really had to talk about the same concept even in classes, and they'd repeat, obviously, for a grad student.

As a TA, I'd learned something new, right? There's something else I'd discover, some physical phenomenon that I could relate it to. So anyway, I did that for a while; I was always in applied mathematics, and I got really interested in coding because I had to do coding to do my work, and I eventually studied computer science as well. And I came out to Silicon Valley for a bit to try it out with HP, and I ended up spending a long time—almost 15 years—at HP, and I worked in the software business. I came in originally doing CAD algorithms still leveraging my math background a lot, and then moved to distributed systems and really worked long term in distributed systems research at HP Labs and working on some of the first products for broadband, distributed systems on the internet.

Obviously, the advent of the internet, which is something that I experienced. And anyway, coming to Khan Academy finally in my software development journey and leading engineering teams has been kind of like a dream come true because it's sort of full circle. I was a big fan of Khan Academy for a long time, and the fact that I could join and help with the engineering experience leadership that I've had and contribute to the mission that way is pretty special to me.

And that leads to a question from YouTube. Az asks, "Why did you choose to work with Khan Academy?" And I'll add to that question because one of the questions I got in the early days of Khan Academy when I wanted to set it up, and I did set it up as a not-for-profit, is I got a lot of skepticism that you will not be able to attract top technical talent, especially in the Bay Area. We're literally a few miles down the road from Google, from Facebook, from Apple. You know, we pay well, but we can't give stock because we don't have any. Everyone watching has as much stock as you and I have in Khan Academy.

So what was, you know, you are someone that could be the CTO at nearly any company in the Valley and, you know, and I don't want to make you tempted, but you could be making millions of dollars every year. Why, I'll just, you know, that's just adding to the question from Az on YouTube: Why Khan Academy?

My Khan Academy, it's a great question. Well, first of all, I was a Khan Academy fan for a long time. And Sal, I know when I think I interviewed with you, I shared my stories about, like, that I said, boy, when I discovered Sal's style site, it was basically people would always ask me to explain math things to them, and I said, you know, there’s this guy online that does so much better job than I ever did; you really should just kind of look at these. And so anyway, I was a big fan and so I feel very privileged to come to contribute to the mission now.

I had some trepidation about building an engineering team, especially when I came; we've scaled very quickly in the three years that I've been here. The team was less than half the size that it is today, and our growth has been major. I mean, just this spring, because of the COVID-19 situation, of course, in schools closing, our usage grew, as you've talked about quite a bit—250% very quickly—which, as an aside, is something I'm very, very proud of our team about the fact that we were able to sustain that kind of growth and not cause hiccups for our learners when they desperately needed us and when we had all of those amazing schedules and materials to serve up for families and students who were just all of a sudden at home and everybody was scrambling to adjust.

But anyway, I did have some trepidation about hiring at a nonprofit. And I can say that this is the strongest team that I have ever had anywhere. Not making this up; this is absolutely the truth. We have amazing folks here who came for the mission, who come for the mission every day and are also spectacularly talented and focused on this mission. And the lever that we have in today's world with all of the events that are going on today to be able to work somewhere right now—and we're all working very hard, long hours—we can talk about some of our projects; I don't know that I could do it if I wasn't working on this mission, to be honest.

And really thinking about the impact that we have every single day on so many people. You know, as you know, when we started exploding, I was working very long days, and I said to a bunch of my friends: "You know, I just—I couldn't do this anymore if I was like in the corporate world." But at Khan Academy, it's—the reward is pretty major.

Yeah, no, no, you know, I think you're an example of it, and everyone on the engineering team, everyone on the team broadly at Khan Academy. I remember when I was working as an analyst at a hedge fund, which is a very, I guess you could say, money-driven industry by definition—that's all it's driven by, really. I remember reading a research study that said that actually the top performers in a field, they aren't motivated by money. They do need enough money to live and support their family and buy a house and go on vacations and send their kids to college and that type of thing, but beyond that kind of sufficient level, they care much more about impact, challenging work, and being able to work with other aligned people.

And you know, the fact that folks like yourself and the entire team at Khan Academy have joined, I think is evidence. I was skeptical about when I read that paper when I was—I was very coin-operated back then. But I think it's absolutely true.

So from YouTube, Lorena says, "Marta, what are your passions, your true passions at work and out of it?"

My true passions at work—my true passions at work are, first of all, it is my team. So leading the team, which is more than just the technical work that we have, but really the work that we do on creating a cohesive organization. We updated our engineering principles about a year ago and the team worked on them—and we're very proud of those too because it says a lot about the kind of people that we are and the way that we want to treat each other as an org at the organization at work always and the way that we want to focus on the quality of what we deliver to our users is a very impact—I'm very passionate about that: building the team and having a strong team of folks who are happy.

And I really miss being in the office during shelter-in-place. I really, really miss being in the office because I'm somebody who long ago learned back at HP about management by wandering around. And I'm a wander-around-er and loved to stop and chat with everybody, and I do, and that's an important part of my day. So I'm very passionate about that. And the other thing I'm very, very passionate about is delivering for our users. So I can be very driven by the results, execution, which for us means quickly and with high quality delivering new learning experiences, new teaching experiences, and things for parents. Sal, you talked about the test prep—so many experiences that are big levers in today's world.

And what—just to, you know, ask Lorena's question again because, and you know Marta isn't just giving a diplomatic answer, just knowing her and having the—I love it. You know you said everything about work and obviously that sounds good to me, but obviously, you know, we pride ourselves on making sure people here have full lives. And I mean, I also have trouble sometimes extracting myself from work because it's a passion. But you know, what other things—what other things?

Yes, and my family will be very disappointed if they ever want to know that I started with the work response. But obviously, my family is important to me. My husband and my daughter—I have a daughter that I’m very proud of—she is clerking on the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C. right now and is a big part of my life and teaches me a lot about the culture of today and the culture of her age, which is very helpful for me in terms of my organizational knowledge.

And my husband, who’s a biochemist—we are all kind of systems people; we think a lot of abstract kind of system stuff—and, you know, do nerdy things. My husband and I are doing a lot of jigsaw puzzles, playing cribbage, you know, stuff like that. Up until a few years ago, I was very passionate—I have to say this because all of my friends, if they ever see this, will say, "What about beach volleyball?" Because I played beach volleyball for many, many years and that was my biggest passion outside of work. But my knees aren't really loving it anymore, so not so much.

No, that's a little known fact about Khan Academy that we could probably field a pretty mean beach volleyball or volleyball team between you and then Ginny Lee, who's our president and CEO. Y'all would be the core of the team, I suspect; there's a few others that could contribute as well.

So there's a couple questions here that I think are pretty interesting and maybe related. So Prasad Tota asks from YouTube, "What is the hardest part about being at Khan Academy?" I haven't gotten that question before, but it's an interesting one. And then there's another—he also asked a simpler question: "How does the pandemic affect Khan Academy?" And that could be internally or externally. I'd love your take on what's hard about this job and how has it changed with the pandemic?

Yeah, that's a really interesting question. What's hard about this job? I don't want to sound like a Pollyanna, but honestly, this is like the funnest job I've ever had. So I'm just going to say that. I love what I do. I love the people that I work with. And I believe every day, it's so reinforced for me about the impact that we're having on the world. So it's really hard to say what's hard.

What's hard is that there's a lot to do. What's hard is that we are at a stage of our growth where we are working on a project that we have code-named Goliath, which we have posted about in our blogs. And it's called Goliath because we are basically moving our backend server monolith of about 800,000 lines of code from Python 2 to a services-based architecture written in Go. So it's big, and it's going in to Go. So Goliath is hard. We have a fantastic team who's doing a great job on it, but it is a hard thing to do.

As one of my leaders on the team that manages the platform says, it’s like we're still flying the plane, and it's kind of all in pieces, but we're still keeping everybody—all the passengers on the plane—and flying the plane. Or I say it’s kind of like switching out the foundation from under your house—the entire foundation—while you're living in the house and using all the functions. So that's—while there's a party in the house and a pandemic, by the way, so everybody's in the house all the time!

No, that's right. And how has that, I mean—no, exactly! I mean, and I, you know, just to add to that, I think one of the things just that I found difficult sometimes about this job is almost any other job when you're kind of really worked up about something or you want something to be done right, you can kind of go home. It's like, well, it doesn't really matter, you know, if I lose this argument or, you know, company will sell databases or whatever. You know, I used to work at Oracle, a great company, but that's how I felt about it sometimes, and that would make me—but at Khan Academy, whenever I feel like, well, what's the big deal—oh, the big deal is tens of millions of people might not be able to learn!

And so then you lose!

That's right!

And how has the pandemic affected, you know, you and how we've been able to work and, you know, and the things we're working on from your point of view?

Yeah, that's a great question too. I alluded to part of the answer earlier when I talked about missing being in the office because we're sheltering in place in Santa Clara County, and we're all working from home. And so that has been hard for me because I am a wander-around-er and a people person. And even though we have a large remote set of workers in and engineers in particular, and so we're very good at remote working, actually, at Khan Academy, it's hard for me because it's nice to see at least part of my team every day and other folks in other functions at Khan Academy every day, so that's hard.

Some things have been easier—some things have been easier. So instead of in the morning, instead of having to rush and get in the shower and get dressed and then spend 35 or 40 minutes in the car driving to the office, I can now enjoy my morning meditation, sitting and kind of be a lot more focused and attuned when I sit down at my desk.

So, for me personally, I'm very fortunate because I'm continuing to work, and we are able to get our groceries. Yep! So I—we've been very fortunate and I'm very cognizant of that. So a lot of what my family has been doing during the pandemic is, in fact, trying to look out for where we can have a positive impact even outside of Khan Academy but where we can contribute and volunteer and help folks because the pandemic's much harder for a lot of people than it is for us.

Yeah, and you mentioned you do meditate. I'm curious, you do meditate? What got you started with that, and what do you feel it does for you?

Yeah, well, what got me started for it was a tough time that I went through with a health situation and a really tough anxiety time. And so it really was more instrumental at the time, like, this is a tool that can help me because this is so incredibly difficult to go through.

And then it's really been kind of a key part of something that I've done a lot of personal growth through, frankly. And yes, I meditate in the morning during shelter in place. I'll give a plug to the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City and I've been sitting with Gil, as I say, every morning, and that's my morning meditation.

And I was saying to my husband, Rob, earlier today my little story about meditation as I was getting all frazzled and kind of grumped at him and said, "You know, I'm just trying to grab this because I have to go sit." So I feel, you know, live at seven o'clock, I can't—I’ve got to be there. So it was a moment of growth for me when I realized, okay, I've already had my teaching sort of for this morning and that I was, you know, having all that anxiety about sitting to get my teaching—if I just paused, I got— I already had my teaching there. So that's my little vignette for this morning session.

No, that's great! I've been dreaming maybe we could still do it in COVID, creating like a meditation club in the organization. We can be two of the starting together!

Yeah, that'd be nice! That'd be nice! So actually, there's a question for me about you—this is interesting—from YouTube. Such and Sile says, "Sal, why do you find Marta to be an asset?" So that's a great question.

This is, well, you know, such a great question. I, you know, let me just put it step—take a step back. I think, you know, a lot of times when you imagine—actually, my brain works. We've taken like these personality tests, and I'm oftentimes skeptical of personality tests because, you know, we can be different in different cases or—but, you know, in this case, I think the personality test was quite accurate where it said that, you know, it mapped them to colors, is the one we used, but it essentially—I’m red and blue.

And that personality test, red means someone who just likes to like get stuff done like yesterday as fast as possible, and then blue is someone who likes to think, you know, very big picture, maybe out of the box, and think about what could the world be like and dream about a little bit. And in a lot of ways, those are somewhat stereotypical traits for people who are entrepreneurial; they think of these big ideas and they say, "Okay, and I need to try to build it or prototype it or work on it tomorrow."

And that was great in the early days of Khan Academy. You know, the first four or five years, it was literally just me in this walk-in closet having big, big ideas but then also saying, "Let me start hacking this thing together. Let me code it together." You know, I didn’t have a background in computer science. But as you grow an organization, you know, one of the things to really appreciate is where are your strengths and where do you get energy and what are your weaknesses and where do you not get energy.

And there could be weaknesses that you just don't have the skills; you don't have the experience. And so as Khan Academy has grown, I have gained ever-increasing appreciation for bringing in people who have the depth and the experience to know how to lead teams, scale teams, have technical depth that I didn't have. And Marta, I think, exemplifies that. And you know, great people bring in other great people.

So three, four years ago, Ginny Lee joined as the president and CEO of Khan Academy. We'll get Ginny on this; I think she's being shy. We'll get Ginny on the live stream soon. But Ginny, you know, just as Marta could be a leader at pretty much any organization in Silicon Valley or beyond, Ginny as well could, and then Ginny has helped kind of provide that consistency, that process, bringing people along.

If you have 200 folks, you can't just, you know, my instinct is kind of like, oh, let's get this done by this afternoon, that done. But if 200 folks, they'll just get—you know, we'll be moving in different directions. So Ginny's provided that leadership, and one of the best things about leadership is to bring other really amazing people in. So Marta was one of the first people that Ginny brought in, and Ginny knows how to hire and then Marta knows how to hire and develop and build teams.

We already had a really good team when it was small, and Marta's been able to get them to the next level but then also put in the processes and the institutional knowledge so that people can really make a career out of being at Khan Academy. So, you know, to answer the question, what Marta brings, you know, these projects, if Marta wasn't here and if she wasn't able to lead the team that she's leading in the way that she's doing it, I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say when COVID hit you, a lot of y'all might not have been able to access Khan Academy.

I mean, that's just in plain, you know, and there would have been millions of people who would have not been able to learn. So, because our site probably wouldn't have been able to scale, or even if it was working, it would probably take 20 seconds for you to access certain pages, which would have been very frustrating for millions of people. So I think that's one level.

And the other thing which Marta does is, you know, I have so much confidence in Marta and her team that it allows me to focus more energy on where I think I might have value, you know, of, you know, what's the future of Khan Academy going to be? Where are we going to be in five years? You know, I've spent a lot of time fundraising. I still make a lot of content. And it's not that I'm detached; I'm deeply interested and I want to support Marta and the team wherever I can.

But when you have really amazing leaders, leaders that you can learn from, you know, I learn from Marta, I learn from Ginny and many others every day about their craft, about how to lead people, about how to lead an org. That just takes a lot off of my plate. So, yeah, I consider myself very, very fortunate to have Marta on this team.

Well, that's very, very nice of you to say, and we're very fortunate to be here.

Oh, thank you! So this is from—oh, time always runs out fast when we're having fun, but I think we have time for maybe a few more. And this is a good question, and maybe we could both take a shot at this one. From YouTube, Nikuraj asks, "How do you face criticism after having failed at something? Have you ever failed at anything?"

I fail at something every day! So, so how do you deal with it? Like tell me something that you failed at that kind of hit you, and maybe even you got criticism. How did you, how did you cope?

Yeah, that's a great question. I'll think of one, and you think of one at the same time. See if we don't have much time left what would be a good one to talk about. I certainly have an abundance of choices of mistakes that I make. I mean, I'm serious when I say that I make mistakes all the time and I learn from my team all the time—literally every day—and gain insights from what folks that are doing.

And let me think of a spectacular failure if I can because that's probably a better story. [Music] We can compete for largest failures!

Yeah, do you have one you have ready to share? I'm still—

Oh, well I have many! I mean from an economic point of view, people don’t know, so I was working at a hedge fund, and then my boss wanted to retire, and he wanted me to essentially start my own hedge fund. This was pre-Khan Academy, and I essentially took over his cost structure, and I lost a person—and this is, you know, I didn't own a house; the only money me and my family had was essentially a down payment we were saving up for a house, and I lost almost $200,000.

And so you can imagine our down payment for our house quickly became not sufficient to buy a house. And so I took long walks in the hills out here in Silicon Valley trying to save my ego. And, you know, I would look at squirrels and I said, you know, that squirrel doesn't know I just lost $200,000; maybe we can be friends. And that kind of gave me, because it affects you in very deep ways.

I think we're oftentimes our biggest critics, and we start saying, you know, what will my family think of me? What will my friends think of me? I've been such a massive failure. Will I ever be able to recover from this? Will people ever want to work with me when they've seen this failure? Will they hire me? You know, I mean there's really big questions.

And you know, in terms of how do you cope with it, you realize when you go through these things over and over again in your life that they pass and things do get better as long as you put one foot in front of the other. And so now that I've had, you know, I've had probably four or five of these big failures in my life, and I've had probably four or five hundred of lesser failures in my life that in that days also seemed fairly catastrophic, I realized that as long as I put one foot in front of the other, have a positive attitude, keep meditating, a month later I don’t even remember what that was or a year later I can kind of talk about it on a live stream like I'm a, you know, a wise soul.

You have to get back to our meditation kind of, you know, Buddhist philosophy roots. I mean, a big part of it is just, you know, the stories we tell ourselves and so, you know, not berating yourself. It’s true; I mean the most important thing is we are ourselves. We're all born as pretty perfect little beings, and we do get screwed up along the way with various things, but we are, you know, that's still there, right? We all have, you know, the bad and the good and we all can get better every day, and so not calling yourself a screw-up or thinking that you screwed up so badly that no one should love you is a really important—a really important way to lead your life, I think.

No, that's exactly right! I mean, you know, bringing up the Buddhist or Eastern or Vedic philosophy, there's all this notion of non-attachment, that it's only when we get attached to our personas or these narratives around our personas or attached to materiality that that's actually the cause of suffering—true suffering! You know, there's pain, which is you're getting, you know, there's a needle in your arm; there's suffering, which is the mental state where it, you know, it kind of catastrophizes things and it causes anxiety.

And but when you realize that, you know, there's a part of you that's purer than that, that is not your persona, that is not your identity, that is not your role, that is not your name, that it's actually very peace-inducing and liberating and actually helps you get out of your rut many times.

So not to preach too much, but Marta, thanks so much. I mean there are so many more questions. I think we will do this again if this wasn't a horrible event for you. But thank you so much for joining. We will do this again.

And thanks everyone for asking questions. So once again, you know, this is always fun; we have these great conversations. I encourage everyone to join us tomorrow for ongoing conversations, and we're going to be talking about kind of child development and how we raise our children and generational changes. So thanks everyone for joining today's live stream!