Andrew: I actually went to the way back machine to see what you were up to before you did this, to see who you were. And you had your resume up and I looked at it and it’s pretty freaking impressive. In addition to three degrees from MIT which a lot of us have seen in news stories about you and the one from Harvard, you worked at Oracle. You worked at a venture capital firm. You were on a path to be one of these rich people of Silicon Valley. You’re not going to be that now, right? Not with this.

Sal: Unless they make a movie about the Khan Academy. Yeah, you know, it’s funny. When I was working at a hedge fund, the six years after business school, I was the senior analyst at a hedge fund, and it was doing well. And then, my manager retired. He encouraged me to start my own fund. So, I was on that track to kind of be a hedge fund manager and all of that. But, the whole time I kind of rationalized that the only reason that I’m doing this is because I want to, one day, start a school.  In my mind, I didn’t want to start a school, write grants and go to the Department of Education and get a charter and all of that. I felt the constraints. I just want to become really rich and just do it on my own terms. So, that was my rationalization for just trying to generate alpha day and night.

From Andrew Warner’s Mixergy interview with Salman “Sal” Khan, who has created more than 1,500 free educational videos on YouTube, which you can check out here.

Every system has two sets of rules: The rules as they are intended or commonly perceived, and the actual rules (“reality”). In most complex systems, the gap between these two sets of rules is huge.

Sometimes we catch a glimpse of the truth, and discover the actual rules of a system. Once the actual rules are known, it may be possible to perform “miracles” — things which violate the perceived rules.

Read more on Paul Buchheit’s recent blog post, Applied Philosophy, aka ‘Hacking’.

Paul is also speaking at Startup School–I can’t wait.

Really good presentation by Stephen Anderson on design:

“Determine never to be idle.  No person will have occasion to complain of the want of time who never loses any. It is wonderful how much can be done if we are always doing.”

– Thomas Jefferson

“Only programmers, customer service reps, and accounting staff work at Craigslist. There is no business development, no human resources, no sales. As a result, there are no meetings.”

– Wired

“If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”

– Maslow

“By inverting this list, we can get a portrait of the “normal” world. It’s populated by people who talk a lot with one another as they work slowly but harmoniously on conservative, expensive projects whose destinations are decided in advance, and who carefully adjust their manner to reflect their position in the hierarchy.”

– Paul Graham

“So many of my friends see their jobs in terms of an “annual salary” or an “hourly wage.” The security they crave turns quickly to complacency, and they wind up dissatisfied with a job they’re afraid to leave. Why? Because they are not rewarded for their efforts, a productive day is no more lucrative than an unproductive day. They get paid the same, regardless.”

– Mike Rowe

“I think it’s in everyone’s DNA to want to be a builder.”

– Dan Phillips

“The real company values, as opposed to the nice-sounding values, are shown by who gets rewarded, promoted, or let go.”

– Netflix

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the people to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders.  Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”

– Antoine De Saint-Exupery

“I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.”

– John Cage

“We live in a culture that has begun to prize the appearance of accomplishment over actual accomplishment–it continues to amaze me that private enterprise and venture capital spend so much time and energy (not to mention cash) on “innovations” like Twitter and other forms of social blathering rather than marshaling the energies and talents of our engineers to create new industries to replace the ones that enabled the American Century.”

– David Granger, Esquire Editor in Chief, October 2009 issue

Last updated 16 September 2009