I left Khan Academy partway through 2020, to breathe and refocus.
You know, there's always a lot of different reasons for leaving somewhere after five years. There's always a lot of stories and details, and I'm not going to share them all 😅 Mostly just… over five years, the org changed a lot, and so did I 💜
💭 One big lesson for me was: the value of Small Bold Ambition.
From my point of view, Khan Academy's defining ambition was to use tech to deliver more learning: automated lessons and AI guidance, so students can learn more without taking time from human teachers. This helps make modern education more efficient, and it scales well.
Whereas, to my mind, Khan Academy's big opportunity was to use tech to deliver better learning: charting a path toward your own needs and passions, taught with stronger ethical values, and empowering new ways of teaching, learning, and collaborating. This helps make education more equitable, but it's hard to do at all, and even harder to scale.
When I think back to ~2013–2015, I feel like Khan Academy had a big cultural opportunity. Sal was a household name in a lot of different places around the world, with a lot of global trust, excitement, and goodwill. The internet was growing in power, and hadn't finished consolidating into walled gardens yet. There was a real spark, a real moment—and Khan Academy found itself right in the middle of it.
Personally, I wish we had leveraged that momentum toward revolutionary outside-the-system work: taken some bold risks to teach people in new ways, and pushed back against the centralization of digital and educational power during this vulnerable moment. And, well, there were some cool efforts in that direction!
But overall, we mostly focused that energy toward growth and safe bets, instead. Which is a decision that makes sense, and has some important value—but isn't quite the same as what my friends in the company and I would have made 😅
It's good to help lots of people, of course! But personally, I wish we'd been much slower to scale up. Now, our large product surface area, tightly coupled to major educational standards, has made us large and stable and successful! But it's also made it very difficult to try new things in our product, which means it's pretty much gonna stay the way it is today—whereas my personal passion is to make change that pushes even further beyond the social status quo 💜
So the learning for me was: Bigness makes things hard to change. Doing something new and better, often means choosing not to scale up yet. And I think that's the energy I'm going to take into whatever I do next.
🌴 And so my next Small Bold Ambition is to help my family thrive.
The year 2020 hit a lot of people hard for a lot of different reasons, and I particularly saw my queer friends, family, and community get worn down to the bone.
And personally, with this new chance to breathe, I'm learning a lot about my own needs, and the basics of life that I'm simply not taking care of.
So, thankfully, I have the financial privilege to take some time off from work, and focus on healing myself and the people closest to me. I'm building a life I can be happy with and proud of—and then I'll see about layering a new job into it 😅
✨ But that next job day will come! And I'm excited for it.
I don't know what I'll do next! I'm not even entirely sure it'll be in tech! But probably I'll just be looking for… a small team with a small product, helping their users in some small but powerful way, and helping each other live happily and healthily.
I'm grateful for the time I got to spend at Khan Academy, though! I met so many of my dearest friends, gained lots of practice, grew my career, and did some good for people while I was there.
I'm glad I had the chance—and I hope I can help find that same spark of hope and love in whatever comes next, and work together with good people to nurture it into something beautiful 💖
📝 In the meantime, I'm doing some coaching and advising work, to stay engaged and help how I can!
If you're an engineer trying to un-stick their career and find joy, reach out and we can talk about it! I love to help find the sticking points, and walk through some frameworks for what real human-first progress can be 💖
Or, if you're a new leader trying to navigate the tension between business strategy and ethics, and wondering whether you're scaling in the right and responsible ways… I'd love to talk about that, too! It's not something the industry seems to really talk about much 😅
Anyway, yeah! That's what I'm up to now. Best wishes, all! 💜
—Emi
You know, there's always a lot of different reasons for leaving somewhere after five years. There's always a lot of stories and details, and I'm not going to share them all 😅 Mostly just… over five years, the org changed a lot, and so did I 💜
💭 One big lesson for me was: the value of Small Bold Ambition.
From my point of view, Khan Academy's defining ambition was to use tech to deliver more learning: automated lessons and AI guidance, so students can learn more without taking time from human teachers. This helps make modern education more efficient, and it scales well.
Whereas, to my mind, Khan Academy's big opportunity was to use tech to deliver better learning: charting a path toward your own needs and passions, taught with stronger ethical values, and empowering new ways of teaching, learning, and collaborating. This helps make education more equitable, but it's hard to do at all, and even harder to scale.
When I think back to ~2013–2015, I feel like Khan Academy had a big cultural opportunity. Sal was a household name in a lot of different places around the world, with a lot of global trust, excitement, and goodwill. The internet was growing in power, and hadn't finished consolidating into walled gardens yet. There was a real spark, a real moment—and Khan Academy found itself right in the middle of it.
Personally, I wish we had leveraged that momentum toward revolutionary outside-the-system work: taken some bold risks to teach people in new ways, and pushed back against the centralization of digital and educational power during this vulnerable moment. And, well, there were some cool efforts in that direction!
But overall, we mostly focused that energy toward growth and safe bets, instead. Which is a decision that makes sense, and has some important value—but isn't quite the same as what my friends in the company and I would have made 😅
It's good to help lots of people, of course! But personally, I wish we'd been much slower to scale up. Now, our large product surface area, tightly coupled to major educational standards, has made us large and stable and successful! But it's also made it very difficult to try new things in our product, which means it's pretty much gonna stay the way it is today—whereas my personal passion is to make change that pushes even further beyond the social status quo 💜
So the learning for me was: Bigness makes things hard to change. Doing something new and better, often means choosing not to scale up yet. And I think that's the energy I'm going to take into whatever I do next.
🌴 And so my next Small Bold Ambition is to help my family thrive.
The year 2020 hit a lot of people hard for a lot of different reasons, and I particularly saw my queer friends, family, and community get worn down to the bone.
And personally, with this new chance to breathe, I'm learning a lot about my own needs, and the basics of life that I'm simply not taking care of.
So, thankfully, I have the financial privilege to take some time off from work, and focus on healing myself and the people closest to me. I'm building a life I can be happy with and proud of—and then I'll see about layering a new job into it 😅
✨ But that next job day will come! And I'm excited for it.
I don't know what I'll do next! I'm not even entirely sure it'll be in tech! But probably I'll just be looking for… a small team with a small product, helping their users in some small but powerful way, and helping each other live happily and healthily.
I'm grateful for the time I got to spend at Khan Academy, though! I met so many of my dearest friends, gained lots of practice, grew my career, and did some good for people while I was there.
I'm glad I had the chance—and I hope I can help find that same spark of hope and love in whatever comes next, and work together with good people to nurture it into something beautiful 💖
📝 In the meantime, I'm doing some coaching and advising work, to stay engaged and help how I can!
If you're an engineer trying to un-stick their career and find joy, reach out and we can talk about it! I love to help find the sticking points, and walk through some frameworks for what real human-first progress can be 💖
Or, if you're a new leader trying to navigate the tension between business strategy and ethics, and wondering whether you're scaling in the right and responsible ways… I'd love to talk about that, too! It's not something the industry seems to really talk about much 😅
Anyway, yeah! That's what I'm up to now. Best wishes, all! 💜
—Emi