While Khan isn’t poor, he falls well short for any list featuring big-money moguls in tech. In Silicon Valley, nerds like Khan - with companies whose users number in the many millions - are often billionaires. The winner of the award will receive a $25,000 grant that can be applied to the cause of his or her choice. “I’m a nerd,” said Khan, who is a nominee for the 2018 Visionary of the Year award sponsored by The Chronicle. “The other thing is you can get hypothermia (and die) in 80-degree water.”

“That’s still my favorite thing to share in conversations,” said the founder of Khan Academy, a free, online learning platform serving 15 million people a month. This was originally published in The 2012 TIME 100: The 100 Most Influential People in the World. He started by posting a math lesson, but his impact on education might truly be incalculable. I’ve used Khan Academy with my kids, and I’m amazed at the breadth of Sal’s subject expertise and his ability to make complicated topics understandable. And there’s a detailed dashboard for teachers who use Khan Academy in their classrooms.Įarly pilot programs in California classrooms show terrific promise. Practice exercises send students back to the pertinent video when they're having trouble. The site has over 3,000 short lessons that allow kids to learn at their own pace. The aspiration of is to give every kid a chance at a free, world-class education.

In the process, he has turned the classroom-and the world of education-on its head. But from a closet turned office in his Silicon Valley apartment, Sal, 35, has produced an amazing library of online lectures on math, science and a host of other subjects. He was just trying to help his teenage cousin with her algebra from across the country. Like a lot of great innovators, Salman Khan didn’t set out to change the world.

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