The most recent data is from 2018, when they had an income of about 43M of which about 3.4M goes to the top 10 paid employees and the top two get 0.7M and 0.8M. The total salary budget is 35M, 25M of which are for "program services" (I guess creating content, developing the platform, etc.). This looks more reasonable compared to an organisation like Mozilla. Other things that jump out are half a million in legal fees and 1.8M for fundraising. In total, 43M out of 49M expenses in 2018 went to "program services", and they were running at a slight deficit. Looks pretty OK to me.
Assuming "information technology" means hosting, that's about 5M. Doing that times 2.5 would indeed create quite a problem, and that's assuming they don't need more people working on it to keep up with the new crowd.
Our videos are hosted on YouTube, which definitely reduces our outgoing bandwidth cost.
Compute is actually a big part of our costs, because we do a lot of processing for things like tracking learner progress and connecting students with their classroom assignments. This kind of thing grows linearly with usage.
That's not possible in that particular hosting environment. I believe some people have done experiments with PyPy, but the difference in performance is nothing like that we see with Go.
PyPy might give you a 2-4x speedup, and if it wasn't for App Engine Standard, might be as easy as dropping it in instead of CPython, while Go is a total rewrite. Seems strange you wouldn't at least do a deeper dive on PyPy...
The fundamental reason that we started on this track is the need to get off of Python 2, which has reached EOL and from which the community is moving away. Because of APIs we're using and such, it's not easy to switch to Python 3. Because of API changes in GAE, moving to PyPy on Flex is also still difficult and doesn't solve the problem of still being on Python 2.
Performance is one of several important reasons for the move to Go, and not the top reason.
Ahh.. Khan Academy.. the usefulness this site provided throughout my middle and high school education. Quite frankly, it literally saved my ass. I've gone ahead and donated $1K.
> the usefulness this site provided throughout my middle and high school education
I'm a deal past these periods in my life, and I did quite well via just arbitrary memorization, at the cost of never really developing an intuitive understanding, and therefore a true appreciation, for subjects like math. I've only recently started going through KA's courses, starting all the way back in Algebra.
It was not done gladly or well, my memorization was of a term only long enough to get me through the tests for that unit. I did not hit perfect scores most of the time but I was a solid A- student (unless the class cared about homework, then I would drop to B/C, but thats besides the point). As a result of this at-the-time convenient ability I gleaned nothing from my schooling career besides how to hack tests, which is a dreadful and personally useless ability to have.
Just so you know, I donated some money because they did it fist. Humans work like that, it’s how we think. So now they are responsible for $1000 plus a bit more of server time.
Are you implying I'm not human in some twisted way? Either way enough people disagree with me so my comment is dead and likely any more conversation from me will be down voted so I won't continue this. Stay safe.
If anyone from Khan Academy is reading this: I tried to donate and my transaction was flagged as "suspicious", now my card is blocked. Probably because their PSP doesn't seem to implement 3DSecure. What's grating is that after I tried to donate I had to solve a bunch of reCaptchas before it showed me the failure status.
Very likely Khan Academy can't help. Also your bank probably doesn't know why and neither does their fraud prevention service provider that runs some machine learning/AI system somewhere that decided to flag your transaction. At least that has been my experience in dealing with these things.
I had a similar experience now. Never had to do reCaptcha on a payment form with my phone before. And then the payment was rejected. I am a normal US credit card payer. I ended up using PayPal.
I've been a fan of Khan Academy since they were just some Youtube videos.
You can find Khan Academy's past Form 990 online and I've been archiving them.
Sal Khan made:
2008: ? ($0 revenue)
2009: ?
2010: $70,833
2011: $348,879
2012: $348,529
2013: $348,292
2014: $548,116
2015: $800,000
2016: $815,000
2017: $785,000
2018: $824,000
You can see that, just like a startup, the sacrifice in the beginning as a founder is real. Before 2010 his salary from KA was probably 0 or significantly less. $70K in 2010 was less than my new grad salary. The jump in 2011 to $350K is around how much a senior makes in HCOL areas now. There has been basically no adjustment in his earning for 4 years from 2015 to 2018.
From the 990 forms, you can also get a sense of how much other people in the organization are being paid. I think all of them can command higher compensation elsewhere, but choose to work at KA because leveling the playing field for education is such a great mission.
Sal Khan's compensation as a CEO is only ~3.x times of many senior positions in the organization. Not outrageous at all.
In 2008's Form 990, Sal Khan wrote that KA is being used by 10,000 students daily. I don't know how many accounts, but growing from that to 71 million in 2018 is incredible. The impact to the world is undeniable.
I quite enjoyed khan academy when it was just Khan doing lectures. They were terrific.
I can't imagine, though, that servers should account for any sizable amount of overall expense. Is this really an issue for them? The linked page didn't seem to talk about it.
Khan Academy isn't just composed of only youtube lectures, but a sophisticated platform for doing math problems, computer programming education, and so forth.
Why do you say that? In my company our cloud bill is the largest expense after salaries. We're constantly watching those costs as they can get out of control quite quickly
It's a nonprofit organization. I'm not that educated on the topic but I think that means it's possible to find a breakdown of their expenses somewhere.
A unique string to find this line item in the linked filing is "Information technology"
This was their second-largest functional expense area for 2018, behind "Other salaries and wages".
Although I'm not an accountant it also seemed noteworthy to me that their "Revenue less expenses" was negative for 2018 (not overwhelmingly in relation to their assets, but still by a sizable amount).
I'm not really qualified to comment on what that means, but naively it does seem to imply to me that they can continue to benefit from donations and external funding.
Here's the video of Sal Khan talking about the donations [0]. Not much additional information, aside that he said they were already running on deficit before this crisis.
I was hoping to find more info on the "250% nominal load" mentioned in the title. However, I didn't see anything about load on the linked page, just a generic looking donation page.
I'm a bit biased, because I focus on CPU efficiency for a major CDN, but I'd be super curious what exactly is at 250%? Network bandwidth? CPU? IOPS? Are there big hammers that they can use to get things back under control without adding servers, like reducing bitrate, or turning off "fancy" features?
Features which use a lot of CPU are tracking learner progress, managing classrooms, and the like. These features are really important right now as teachers have moved classes online.
We are in the process of moving this code to Go, which should still be very productive for us but also reduce how much CPU is required.
Python3 has pretty good built in modules for asyncio, multiprocessing, and multithreading. Maybe port to py3 and utilize these features as an intermediate step while you are working on the jump to Go. I like to take a function for a single work unit "do a single thing" and then call it from a function utilizing asyncio and multithreading, this link shows a great examples.
For reasons I touch on in our blog post[1], porting to Python 3 would still be a huge amount of work (not quite as large as the port to Go, but still very large and without other benefits we get from Go).
I’m a bit surprised it’s so little. Our servers are at something like 1000% of normal load. We’re a data visualisation company: naively I would have expected online education to be affected more than us, rather than less.
I’m curious how much internet usage is up in general. My site that people use to map running and walking routes is up about 2.5x as well since around March 16.
Note that Wikimedia has a huge income already. They're important and valuable, but if we're talking about who doesn't get enough publicity and donations, it's not Wikipedia/Wikimedia.
"The Public Domain Review is dedicated to the exploration of curious and compelling works from the history of art, literature, and ideas – focusing on works now fallen into the public domain, the vast commons of out-of-copyright material that everyone is free to enjoy, share, and build upon without restrictions."
Instead of link to vid replace it (or place side by side) with link to torrent (probably with a note about torrent clients the same way Kiwix does). The rest of the platform can still be used as is.
Most people will just click and download will be pretty quick (most vids are quite small).
Agreed. I wish more companies/nonprofits/whatever would make better decisions early on about their infrastructure, or at least gradually graft in better tooling over time.
As an educator, this service is an invaluable supplemental resource for my kids. Especially now. Just donated without hesitation. I hope you all consider doing the same if you have the means.
He spent a decade of nights-and-weekends effort on making kids better at math and science, taking what I understand to be startup level risks in the beginning. How much do you think he should make? Mr. Rogers was paid more than $800k/year if you adjust for inflation[1][2].
If he thinks other people should donate a whole bunch of money, shouldn't he donate a whole bunch of money if he has it? Maybe he already does this, I don't know. If he took a lower salary he would effectively be doing this -- in a publicly verifiable way. It's a matter of "skin in the game".
I'd be curious to know Sal's response to this. From what I remember, he left a lucrative position at a hedge fund for an uncertain position at his newly founded non-profit. He doesn't seem like the money driven type. With absolutely no evidence, I would guess that:
1. Someone probably had to convince him it was okay to take that salary.
2. The level of his salary is probably just above what it took to hire their top talent, as a technology focused non-profit.
Yeah I don't know. I guess I'd just prefer to give to the worthy causes out there that don't spend as much of the donations on the leader's salary.
Also, there's an abundance of free educational resources on the web, it's not clear that a marginal dollar is best spent on Khan Academy at this point.
You have a point, maybe he's in the job he's best at, he's worth double that to the organization so he's effectively donating $800k/yr, and that's the optimal amount to give to charity given his preferences. If so, no foul.
When I was a student I gave on the order of $100 per year.
Anyway I feel sorry for you because you attack people instead of ideas, that must be really draining.
Donating or not is up to you, and absolutely your choice.
But that link shows that they did listen, they understood, they debated, and they decided that they don't want that functionality. They think it's counter-productive for how they're trying to educate their students.
Right or wrong, you can't say they don't care. Merely that they don't agree with you.
Their answer seemed legit. The purpose of a test is to improve. How else do you baseline? You actually need a score that represents a snapshot of your performance at a specific moment in time. Otherwise if you're constantly editing there's no snapshot - just a blur.
In gaming we call this "git gud". You obviously need more practice because you haven't moved on from a specific failure. Learn from it then beat it next time. Owning failure is part of how you accelerate learning.
This is an odd reason to not donate. Not that I'm donating either... but I've already donated to plenty other organisations this year.
The IT staff also get paid... How very dare them. Go to work and earn a living... It’s disgusting I say. They should do it completely for the love of it. Same goes for those pesky YouTubers.
Long story short. If you don’t offer a decent incentive package, you won’t incentivise people to come and take a CEO roll.
If you look around you will find that CEO at other charity’s also get paid well.
I worked for a not-for-profit where, 3 years in, we learned the CEO was making as much as everyone else combined for the first year. Guy was also doing minimal work.
I got fed up with these things.
If Khan either open-licenses the platform, or takes a pay cut to $200,000, I'll donate. If he does neither of those, I'm treating this as a 501(c)3-by-technicality only. It's a good for-profit, mind you, but still a for-profit by any definition I (rather than the IRS) would use.
Not OP, but here's a possibility: In the last month I've spoken with numerous people who earn $200k/yr. I'm not sure I've spoken with someone who earns Khan's salary in the last year. (There is one guy who probably earns that in good years, but I'm not sure the last year has been a "good" one.)
That is, regardless of whatever rarefied Silicon Valley filter bubble we're pretending exists here on HN, Khan is not raising money from Silicon Valley. He is raising it from the world, and a very low percentage of humans earn $800k/yr.
Granted, however, this is not just a problem with Khan Academy. Many "non-profits" pay their executives unreasonable salaries.
$200k is about the threshold needed to qualify for a mortgage in the area he's living for a comfortable, but not luxurious single-family home.
That's also a good baseline for a standard-of-living where all necessities are met, without worrying about them, and where there isn't financial stress. However, it's not enough to get rich.
It's also a point where I don't feel like I'm making a significantly greater sacrifice than Khan would if he paid out of his own pocket (in other words, a signal that I care more about the organization than he does).
$100k would be okay in the midwest or rural America.
Yes I know and it does disgust me. I wasn't talking about IT staff and regular employees. The CEO founded the "company", does he really need to incentivise himself with a near million dollars a year? I thought NPOs were created by people who want to change the world, but with this salary it seriously skews my perception of his true intentions.
Since it’s a non-profit there are no shares or shareholders and he has no equity, ie the salary is the only way he financially benefits from the success of the organization. 800k is a lot of money but it doesn’t seem outlandish to me, considering the impact and popularity. Why should you need to choose between doing good and doing well?
That's all well and good until you start asking for extra donations during a pandemic that will be followed by a major recession. If you are going to do that, you should probably make a gesture as well. CEOs of various companies have been cutting their pay as a gesture for the duration of the pandemic.
But why not talk about the IT staff? You want their site to run to well right? You want some decent site reliability engineers right? Well you might find some that will do the job for less then they can earn for the same role in the for-profit world, you are still going to have to pay a decent wage for their skill and let’s be honest here so they can continue to live in a comfort they have become accustomed too.
Edit: You can “change the world” (even if it’s a very small change, in a small part of the world) and still earn a fair living for your actions. You are completely free to feel that 800k isn’t fair payment. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. I’m not embedded into khan to know if he is really worth that paycheque. But I know the charity hasn’t been run into the ground.
Then let's talk about the IT staff. What is their salary? How many of them the "non-profits" could hire if their CEO had a more decent salary?
The organizations we are speaking about are very loud to beg for money yet they spend a large part of it on overpaying a few execs. This is very different from companies that earn their money without asking the public for money.
So not that much different to those in similar fields in the similar area.
So if the CEO took a 50% pay cut they could hire and extra 3-4 engineers a year. But that’s just straight salary costs and the cost of staff isn’t just the salary cost.
But that argument can be said of any charity, non-profit, business, school, hospital. “If only the top surgeon took a 50% pay cut, think of all the extra nurses we could hire...”
This 1m/yr is nothing compared to the impact KA has. It's no longer just a site with videos; it is a huge e-learning platform that is widely used and integrated in schools across the world. Being the CEO of KA must be a lot of work and I think most people would agree is worthy of that level of compensation.
Or to put it another way: the government is also a nonprofit organization, but it needs good workers to fulfill its goals and those workers should be fairly compensated. We wouldn't get anywhere if the government paid everyone minimum wage.
This is just wrong, here's a quick search and article from Orange County Register listing top paid government workers in California (Since Khan is in CA).
Who gets to fly around on a taxpayer funded private airplane and spends over 249 days on a golf course costing >130M, 1/2 of which is spent at his Mar-a-Lago resort, but that's totally fine because his salary is less than a Non Profits CEO.
Trump doesn't care about salary because that's an irrelevant portion of the income generated from his presidency.
Add to that the extra income from illegal such as bribes or the income Trump's orgs like his hotels do, to the legal avenues after the term such as book deals, speaker fees, corporate board memberships, lobbyism deals... the president nominally gets 400k but in reality way, way more than that.
But not out of the pockets of tax payers (or in Khan's case, donations). If people pay for Trump hotels, Trump speaking at their party, Trump endorsing their book, that's not the elected government's choice. Similarly, non-profit CEOs are free to have a hotel chain on the side, but I'm not sure it should come from donations that people gave to the platform.
That said, compared to other ceo salaries I've seen in the USA... This isn't that ridiculous indeed, it gets much worse (and I'm talking only about non-profits).
I have to say that I agree with this sentiment. The CEO of a non-profit organization with a revenue of 52 million dollars should not be compensated with 824.000 dollars.
Google given them $10m per year. Are they on GCP? Are they pissing money away on MemoryStore instances? Turn off load balancer logs. Are their servers running javascript?
Khan Academy is a $40m/yr non-profit that provides better lessons than the multi billion $ government enforced Prussian-pedagogy propaganda centers (at infinite scale and for close to zero charge for the end user)
(Replying to a trollish comment, but don't want to push it to the top).
There was a comment about the salary that CEO Sal Khan takes, with is over $800,0000 per year.
I think Khan Academy is fantastic, and was going to donate until I saw this figure (verified). I think that it's entirely inappropriate to extract that much from the donations.
The year is 2050, Khan Academy has raised 2 billion in funding, restructured as a for-profit corporation, and has vendor lock-in with nearly every school and child in the world. Khan academy charges a minimum of $800/yr/student. The CEO takes home $56 million a year. Which do you prefer, 800k, or 50 mil? Do we really want to a world where a brilliant mind, Sal Khan, is not rewarded at all for leaving his hedge fund career to make YouTube videos for next to nothing for many months, if not years? On top of that, he likely had a very real opportunity to turn Khan academy into a huge company, but instead went the non hockey stick, nonprofit route. Being a part of a successful non profit doesn’t mean you need to dip into your employees and your own salary to pay bills. Some of this might just be publicity to show that Khan academy is growing rapidly with remote learning.
This whole startup scenario is likely to end badly for Khan Academy, or that the drive for money at all cost is killing Khan Academy's value as an education platform.
Yes, truly terrible that non-profit organisations serving the common good should provide high salaries. Founder and employees should just go into banking, because those guys absolutely deserve their high pay.
Imagine, just imagine a society, where doing non-profit could be a valid career option without a disadvantage in the income department. The horror.
Every comment like yours attacks the strawman that the CEO and employees should not get paid. Nobody is saying that. But I'm absolutely not going to donate anything while the CEO takes out over 800000 dollars in pay, and it looks distasteful to me to go around begging for donations.
There is nothing distasteful about non-profit CEOs wanting high pay. We're speaking about the founder of something that has and is helping millions of people around the world with arguably one of the most difficult and important educational needs. Khan Academy wouldn't be here without Khan himself and the world would be lesser for it. I see absolutely no reason why the CEO of such an organizations shouldn't paid in the same manner as for-profits.
I'm snarky, because the implied notion of "people doing good instead of chasing profits don't deserve the same pay/good life" is nothing short of crazy to me.
And you know already that Khan is going to take the same salary this year? This is just rationalization, be honest with yourself, you simply dislike the idea of Khan getting this much for himself, no matter what.
This feels like somebody setting up a GoFundMe to pay off their credit card debt. They paid their CEO an absurd salary, and now they need more money. That sounds like a you-problem.
This is not even close to the same thing. If you don't want to donate, then don't. But this is a red herring.
What you should be thinking about is the value he provides, not the absolute amount he is paid. The net positive effect of him running it and getting paid $800k is much higher than someone else who can't run things as well getting paid $100k. The goal is to maximize the output of the non-profit, not to keep salaries low. What you should care about is ROI on your dollars donated.
I think it's a false statement to say someone less expensive will run things less well. I've been at a number of not-for-profits, and that does not match my experience at all.
Compensation should be set at a level where people don't need to worry about money, with a reasonable but basic standard of living. In the Bay, unfortunately, that's around $200k. On the other hand, compensation should not be set at a level where people are there for the money. You want people to be there because they are passionate and care.
$200 will bring people just as competent as $800k, but (1) your burn rate is lower (2) people are there for the mission (3) you can ask for donations in good faith.
Depending on part of the country, you can step that down significantly, in turn.
If you do want to invest extra money on people, a better place to spend that is stability and benefits (in the way universities do). I'd gladly take a job for $200k with a lifetime guarantee of doing meaningful work over one at $800k without that guarantee.
I actually think a lot of the bad decisions by Khan Academy are related to misaligned incentive structures. Khan tries to keep a pretty deep moat protecting business models. The platform isn't open source. Partnerships are hard to come by. Research partnerships are exceptionally difficult (Khan data is a proprietary resources). There's a cult personality. Etc.
> Compensation should be set at a level where people don't need to worry about money, with a reasonable but basic standard of living. In the Bay, unfortunately, that's around $200k. On the other hand, compensation should not be set at a level where people are there for the money. You want people to be there because they are passionate and care.
This is not realistic based on my experience with what motivates people.
> I'd gladly take a job for $200k with a lifetime guarantee of doing meaningful work over one at $800k without that guarantee.
Nature doesn’t offer guarantees on a lifetime timescale.
You're joking if you think 200k will get you someone who manages an entire group like Khan Academy. That's the amount of money new graduates make out of their college in FANG, and in no way is what Khan does comparable to a generic software developer.
Most of what you're saying is nonsense and unsubstantiated.
> I think it's a false statement to say someone less expensive will run things less well. I've been at a number of not-for-profits, and that does not match my experience at all.
This is a favorite of people trying to disprove something. Just because it doesn't apply all of the time doesn't mean it's incorrect. It applies most of the time. And your experience is anecdotal and thus low value. In the majority of cases, people who get paid more are more skilled at getting the desired results. This is how capitalism works.
> Compensation should be set at a level where people don't need to worry about money, with a reasonable but basic standard of living. In the Bay, unfortunately, that's around $200k. On the other hand, compensation should not be set at a level where people are there for the money. You want people to be there because they are passionate and care.
This is fairyland non-sense. Let's stick to reality and not your idealizations. Notice how many times you use "should". According to who? Why?
> $200 will bring people just as competent as $800k, but (1) your burn rate is lower (2) people are there for the mission (3) you can ask for donations in good faith.
Unsubstantiated nonsense. Again, let's stick to reality.
> If you do want to invest extra money on people, a better place to spend that is stability and benefits (in the way universities do). I'd gladly take a job for $200k with a lifetime guarantee of doing meaningful work over one at $800k without that guarantee.
Again, nonsense. What is this based on? No one cares about your personal preferences. It's irrelevant. As I said, your logic is weak. You can't hear something and say "that's not true for me"! And think that disproves anything. You're over-indexing on your own beliefs and it's clouding your thinking.
> I actually think a lot of the bad decisions by Khan Academy are related to misaligned incentive structures. Khan tries to keep a pretty deep moat protecting business models. The platform isn't open source. Partnerships are hard to come by. Research partnerships are exceptionally difficult (Khan data is a proprietary resources). There's a cult personality. Etc.
Again, nonsense. Please provide some facts, from the real world, that substantiate these claims. You're living in a dream where all that matters is what you personally think and how you want things to be and are completely disconnected from reality and facts. You're just finding made up points to confirm the bias you already have. E.g. "There's a cult personality". What does that even mean? It's a made-up statement because you feel the longer your list of things is the more evidence you have.
With a more revenue driven model (aka stop giving anything away for free), Kahn Academy would be deriving a lot more revenue from the added traffic. They are still giving away a significant amount of value away for free and asking for donations back.
Someone set-up a GoFundMe for their credit card bill, which they ran up buying supplies to make masks for doctors in need. You are saying that, because they treated themselves to Olive Garden once for dinner, instead of only ever eating the cheapest thing off the McDonald's menu, that they need to repent. Meanwhile, actual fat cat CEOs are eating at $250/person steakhouses while raping the Earth.
800k is a lot of money, but it's really not for that sort of position. CEOs regularly make tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. The ones that famously don't, like Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg, are able to do so because they are already obscenely wealthy.
Have you heard of the phrase "throwing the baby out with the bathwater?" Because that's what you're proposing here.
“They” would be fine getting even higher pay elsewhere working for private interests. The losers would be the general public who benefit from the education.
> it looks distasteful to me to go around begging for donations.
Where do you think the money comes from to run the organization? They don't monetize their users. Asking for donations is a significant part of Sal Khan's job.
It's not about paying a salary. I've worked in non-profits before, all of the employees themselves are taking pay cuts to work for the greater good. He's asking people to give up their money in order to provide this service. A salary half that size provides an extravagant lifestyle, what he's taking is exorbitant.
What CEO's and many other people in for-profit industries are getting, is also quit exorbitant. But that's generally accepted.
Why do some people go nuts if they see non-profits demanding high pay? Khan Academy has done something unique, helpful and truly excellent, but how dare Salman Khan wanting a cut similar to for-profits. (If it is similar, properly still less).
I think the key here is that most people equate "non-profit" with "charity". The idea is that as much money as possible is used to fund the services provided by the entity. However, there are many businesses run as non-profit entities that are not in it to provide a charity. It's just that the entity of the company is designed to take no profit. Often these entities invest heavily into growth as opposed to taking profit (and often this is even the stated goal of the organization).
If you take donations, it sounds like you should be a charity, but there are lots of examples of organizations that rely on donations, but are not charities. Basically anybody living off Patreon, for example.
Having said that, I don't think it is wrong for a donator to decide that they don't want to donate because one person is taking the lion's share of the wealth. In fact, there are for profit organisations that I will avoid simply because they don't seem to provide a service other than to line some fat cat executives' pockets. People are free to choose how they want to spend their money.
Some economists show in the paper linked below that being not for profit can be seen as a commitment for quality since you have removed from the company the incentives to exploit your consumers.
Abstract :
Entrepreneurs who start new firms may choose not-for-profit status as a means of committing to soft incentives. Such incentives protect donors, volunteers, consumers and employees from ex post expropriation of profits by the entrepreneur.
While absolutely true, a good counter example are various co-ops that are run as non-profits. Often they can not only be the best place to get high quality good, but also the only place, since they are driven by what their members want rather than trying to make the highest possible profit. However, wherever there is a lot of money, you will find people who are trying desperately to shove that money into their pockets.
But Khan Academy is a non-profit. In a business, the relationships between various parties are structured in a locally rational manner. When someone offers $1000 to a business they expect value back.
Khan Academy is soliciting donations, an avenue of human interaction which asks us to suspend this local rationality and instead transact on hope and trust. That's the difference to me between a business transaction and a donation.
But Khan Academy is already providing immense value to students — actually now they're (arguably) providing 150% more value than normally.
Hence, you're not being asked to "transact on hope and trust".
The main difference between donating to KA and a typical business transaction, is that the value of the goods/services provided does not necessarily go to the person providing the payment.
There is an understandable worry about over-payment of executives, but I don't think that the "threat model" is significantly different between for-profits and non-profits. You could argue that in the case of for-profits, competition will weed out companies that over-pay their executives, but internal, corporate politics is likely to trump the market mechanism — at least that's what seems to be happening. As a result, I don't think that it makes sense to excessively harp on executive pay at non-profits you donate to, or at least not more so than you care about the pay of the CEO at a company whose products you buy.
> When someone offers $1000 to a business they expect [...]
> [...] transact on hope and trust.
These two things are not as dissimilar as you seem to think.
There is nothing irrational about donating to a non-profit, and nothing irrational about paying high salaries to irreplaceable employees or executives.
> Imagine, just imagine a society, where doing non-profit could be a valid career option without a disadvantage in the income department. The horror.
I don't feel like I should have to explain this, but the difference between a non-profit and a profit driven corporation is that:
1) The NPO is likely doing some kind of activity for the greater good, which means that the more money you take out for administration and profit, the less good you can do.
2) The Corporation is likely doing some kind of profit-driven activity for the primary benefit of increasing the value of the company. Corporations generate profit by their very nature since their purpose is not primarily to solve (profit-wise) unattractive problems or to perform charitable work: the purpose is primarily to generate profit.
Anyone that understands the difference between these two should be able to draw the conclusion that:
1) If an NPO is burdened by excessive expenses, such as administrative cost, it will have less money to spend against the objective of "greater good".
2) If a Corporation is burdened by excessive expenses, such as bonuses, salaries or is otherwise mismanaged financially, this only affects the corporations capability of making a profit.
It should be plain to see that the complaint against NPO salaries is not equivalent to a complaint of a for-profit corporate counterpart.
Since I was immediately downvoted I'd also like to add that this logic also applies to questioning public expenses. Taxes are allegedly levied to supply common services and serve the "common good", would you also argue that politicians should be salaried on par with profit driven corporations, in the name of ensuring competence of public officials, even if that means less common good can be taken out from your taxes?
Strongly disagree. The more money is in being part of a NPO, the more talent will go into NPOs. Hence, your first point 1) isn't as clear-cut as you make it out to be.
Right now, if I'd want to work for a NPO, it would only come with a severe pay cut. So I stay with FPOs, although I believe that many NPOs are way more important in what they are doing.
Right, but this mentality leads to greater good type causes to require martyrs amongst other types of people. A failure mode of this is brain drain - see most civil service jobs in the west or NHS doctors in the UK. Additionally can create brain drain which the beleaguers the original cause.
I guess you can see personnel as an investment towards the cause too
From what I gathered, while his salary is 800,000, the costs of IT are about 5M. With 250% of the regular load, while it probably won't go up to 12.5M, the costs likely increase by so much than his salary is still pretty much insignificant.
From the other perspective: they provide, apparently, an invaluable service. While the entire world struggles with keeping the education going, people apparently need Khan Academy 2.5 times as much as they did before. And you think the CEO now deserves less pay than he gets, at the time when we need him more than we ever did before?
I think he is being underpaid by at least a multiple. I wish we valued teachers like him more. He should be making athlete level money.
I support Math for America that provides stipends to smart teachers. It has the same premise: good teachers are rare and it’s good for everyone if they stay in education instead of being lured to Google or Goldman Sachs.
...good teachers are rare and it’s good for everyone if they stay in education instead of being lured to Google or Goldman Sachs.
Is this a common Goldman pipeline? Do they have recruiters hanging around teachers' lounges? The teachers I know who have gotten fed up with all of it have become insurance agents, agricultural extension people, etc. b^)
> After your stint at Teach for America, a two-year post-undergraduate teaching program, you decided to leave the academic world behind and work in New York City. Where are you most likely to be employed? Goldman Sachs.
Offered without comment, I'm not sure what this link to an opinion column is supposed to mean. The quote is a hypothetical example. It seems that T4A is more of a temporary diversion program than a recruitment program anyway. Harvard students, who in a just universe would all become wealthy investment bankers, are encouraged to teach in urban schools for a couple of years. This despite the fact that their Economics and Philosophy concentration probably included very little on pedagogy. This despite the nearly universal (although not necessarily justified) opinion among teachers and administrators that first-year teachers are pretty much useless. This despite the writer's apparent suggestion that the point of the whole thing should be an easier "in" to Goldman.
> This despite the fact that their Economics and Philosophy concentration probably included very little on pedagogy.
This is irrelevant since the effects of a degree in education on measures of student learning is not reliably distinguishable from zero. Training in pedagogy either doesn’t matter at all or matters very, very little.
> This despite the nearly universal (although not necessarily justified) opinion among teachers and administrators that first-year teachers are pretty much useless.
That’s a bit harsh but the only reliable correlate of teacher quality I’m aware of is years of experience up to six years. First years probably aren’t “pretty much useless” but you’d prefer more seasoned instructors.
Do you treat other organizations the same? Neflix pays Reed Hastings 10s of millions. Does that stop you from subscribing?
I still think "donating" is appropriate regardless of what they pay their executives. Just don't treat it as an altruistic charity.
Think of the donation as a pay-what-you-can/want for the service. If you have the means, pay $10 per month and treat it like a subscription while you're using the service.
Khan Academy's budget is the same as a large high school but has the impact at least 500x. Him making 4x a principal's salary I have absolutely no problem with.
His opportunity cost is also very high. Salman Khan could get a job tomorrow making millions in annual comp.
> I think that it's entirely inappropriate to extract that much from the donations.
You know, that Stallman lived for years out of donations? And no one was opposite of that. It also worked for WikiMedia etc. It's great business model but people need to stop looking on non-profits like that next corporation. They require far more work and I think leaders of such projects should be compensated well. :)
To be even more fair, RMS received hundreds of thousands of dollars in prizes (MacArthur and Takeda awards just to name 2) for the work he did and as far as I can tell he plowed it all back into the FSF. I couldn't quite figure out what he was paid for his work at the FSF, but I'd be fairly surprised if it was substantially more than what he donated himself.
There's something to this. Maybe you won't get the most altruistic people, but you'll absolutely get a higher quality cut of the workforce.
I've heard that the Singaporean government has a similar philosophy. Their prime minister is one of the (if not, the) highest paid PM in the world at circa SGD $2m/year.
Looking purely at the stats,I'd say they deserve it.Also,the PM and the cabinet had substantial cuts to their salaries some years ago,which was initiated by the PM himself.
Adding my 2c: his salary has nothing to do with "fairness" or an arbitrary upper limit on non-profit compensation, but a negotiation based on supply and demand.
For the sake, of argument, let's take it as a given that 1) he could easily earn the same amount or more somewhere else, and 2) if offered $1 less than $800k, he would walk. The question then becomes whether the organization could replace his value for the same or less money. i.e. could they hire someone else for $800k, much less a more "appropriate" salary, who would run things as effectively?
Maybe; I don't know enough to say. I might consider doing some research and putting more thought into the question before donating, but it doesn't seem out of the question for me that keeping on both the founder and someone with his level of experience would be worth that much or more.
If Khan Academy did the same thing without Khan, I think it would work better, rather than worse. The personality-cult model is less scalable than the best-and-brightest model.
Looks like most people here think the salary is reasonable. I'd be curious to see the reaction if he were making 8m / year instead of 800k. At what point would it seem like "too much"?
Think about this: Khan Academy is asking for increased donations right now because of their success. Any other for-profit company in their predicament is benefiting very naturally from revenues increasing with higher demand for their product. That is not true for a non profit structured at aiming to provide a free service.
Should a ceo reduce his income because his company is succeeding? The unfortunate element here is that their fundraising does not scale (or scale well enough) as a function of additional reach.
Jimmy Wales takes $0. I know they're not in the same situation, but even half that salary provides an extravagant lifestyle. I don't think he should be poor, I just think that if he's asking people to give up their money to pay him to do what he's doing, than he should be more frugal with the money he's asking for
He may ask for the money, you may consider his salary and decide not to donate and everybody goes his way. The comments here smell like there is a lot of acute jealousy floating around...
I don't think its jealousy. Millions of people became unemployed in the last 2-3 weeks, so it feels disingenuous to ask for money when he's making $800k when people are living off their savings.
It might be better to donate to a local school, food bank, or neighbors who are having a hard time instead.
Khan Academy is the “local school” right now. Many classrooms are completely unprepared for remote teaching, and Khan Academy is providing relief to the millions of students and teachers having a hard time.
Reread what you replied to,the same still applies.
It isn't like Khan is some religious cult and those unemployed people think they're now going to "hell" if they don't donate. Unemployed individuals will make a decision to donate or not.
There are also millions who are not unemployed and are WFH making good money, FAANG.
Yeah, it may seem high, but at the same time a lot of the content is still content he created. In that context, I think the number is reasonable. We use it as a huge part of the our home schooling at the house.
To me that speaks more about the wage disparity between normal folks and those working on Wall Street, etc. No one needs that much money, and someone willing to take such a pay cut yet still be well above the average only exposes that truth.
It’s not a mystery that “normal folks’” work output doesn’t scale and is limited by time, whereas tech/math/science related work output scales with almost no marginal costs so it’s worth much more money per hour of labor.
The most recent data is from 2018, when they had an income of about 43M of which about 3.4M goes to the top 10 paid employees and the top two get 0.7M and 0.8M. The total salary budget is 35M, 25M of which are for "program services" (I guess creating content, developing the platform, etc.). This looks more reasonable compared to an organisation like Mozilla. Other things that jump out are half a million in legal fees and 1.8M for fundraising. In total, 43M out of 49M expenses in 2018 went to "program services", and they were running at a slight deficit. Looks pretty OK to me.
Assuming "information technology" means hosting, that's about 5M. Doing that times 2.5 would indeed create quite a problem, and that's assuming they don't need more people working on it to keep up with the new crowd.