$5 Million for Khan
By Bala Shah

USA-based  Salman Khan graduated from Harvard Business School and has had successful stints as a Technical Architect at Scient and as a Senior Product Manager at software giant Oracle.  He has also held key roles in the VC sector. Salman is also an internet phenomenon and icon having launched the online Khan Academy which is a not for profit online NGO that provides free education.

Salman Khan’s mother hails from India and he loves Bollywood movies.  Techgoss was intrigued on how a Harvard MBA who once used to earn approximately $1 Million a year walked away from a lucrative career to pursue his dream of educating people without charging for his services.  To this end, Techgoss did his first in-depth India interview in July, 2010.

As they say, good karma attracts good people. His non profit received donations worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in mid 2010.

In Aug, 2010, Bill Gates publicly praised Mr. Khan. The Microsoft co-founder and billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates had tweeted on how much he loves Salman Khan’s work.  And that his own children use the Khan NGO videos uploaded to YouTube.

On Sept 24, 2010, Google gave $2 Million to enable the Khan Academy to create more courses and to translate their core library into the world’s most widely spoken languages.

Even in 2010, Salman Khan operated from a small room in his home to educate people via YouTube.

The O'Sullivan Foundation has just announced a grant of $5 million to the Khan Academy to accelerate the development and deployment of the non-profit's revolutionary approach to education. The O'Sullivan Foundation's support will be used to lay the foundation for three major initiatives:- growing the faculty of the Khan Academy;- extending the content to include crowd-sourced contributions; and- developing curricula for a blended physical and virtual academic experience.