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Khan Academy requests for donations as their servers are at 250% normal load

479 pointsby karimfabout 5 years ago

28 comments

Aachenabout 5 years ago
Where your money goes is detailed here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;khanacademyannualreport.org&#x2F;financial-information&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;khanacademyannualreport.org&#x2F;financial-information&#x2F;</a> (see PDF downloads).<p>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 &quot;program services&quot; (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 &quot;program services&quot;, and they were running at a slight deficit. Looks pretty OK to me.<p>Assuming &quot;information technology&quot; means hosting, that&#x27;s about 5M. Doing that times 2.5 would indeed create quite a problem, and that&#x27;s assuming they don&#x27;t need more people working on it to keep up with the new crowd.
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arzelabout 5 years ago
Ahh.. Khan Academy.. the usefulness this site provided throughout my middle and high school education. Quite frankly, it literally saved my ass. I&#x27;ve gone ahead and donated $1K.
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elricabout 5 years ago
If anyone from Khan Academy is reading this: I tried to donate and my transaction was flagged as &quot;suspicious&quot;, now my card is blocked. Probably because their PSP doesn&#x27;t seem to implement 3DSecure. What&#x27;s grating is that after I tried to donate I had to solve a bunch of reCaptchas before it showed me the failure status.
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dannysuabout 5 years ago
I&#x27;ve been a fan of Khan Academy since they were just some Youtube videos.<p>You can find Khan Academy&#x27;s past Form 990 online and I&#x27;ve been archiving them.<p>Sal Khan made:<p>2008: ? ($0 revenue)<p>2009: ?<p>2010: $70,833<p>2011: $348,879<p>2012: $348,529<p>2013: $348,292<p>2014: $548,116<p>2015: $800,000<p>2016: $815,000<p>2017: $785,000<p>2018: $824,000<p>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.<p>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.<p>Sal Khan&#x27;s compensation as a CEO is only ~3.x times of many senior positions in the organization. Not outrageous at all.<p>In 2008&#x27;s Form 990, Sal Khan wrote that KA is being used by 10,000 students daily. I don&#x27;t know how many accounts, but growing from that to 71 million in 2018 is incredible. The impact to the world is undeniable.
stupidcarabout 5 years ago
Seems like governments should be funding Khan Academy during this period, since they are effectively replacing regular public education.
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throwaway13337about 5 years ago
I quite enjoyed khan academy when it was just Khan doing lectures. They were terrific.<p>I can&#x27;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&#x27;t seem to talk about it.
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karimfabout 5 years ago
Here&#x27;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.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=cjGERWYvzqk" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=cjGERWYvzqk</a>
drewg123about 5 years ago
I was hoping to find more info on the &quot;250% nominal load&quot; mentioned in the title. However, I didn&#x27;t see anything about load on the linked page, just a generic looking donation page.<p>I&#x27;m a bit biased, because I focus on CPU efficiency for a major CDN, but I&#x27;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 &quot;fancy&quot; features?
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robinhoustonabout 5 years ago
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.
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kvzabout 5 years ago
Went ahead and offered them our encoding service at cost-price
discordanceabout 5 years ago
Worthy internet causes: Khan Academy, Wikipedia and Electronic Frontier Foundation<p>Any other suggestions?
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alex_dufabout 5 years ago
Time to use webtorrents to lower the bandwidth cost?
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gigatexalabout 5 years ago
I donated what I could. They’re doing amazing work
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op03about 5 years ago
Would moving to torrents reduce the load? Kiwix seems to able to distribute offline wikipedia stackoverflow etc that way - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.kiwix.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Content_in_all_languages" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.kiwix.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Content_in_all_languages</a>
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Joe_Ewingabout 5 years ago
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.
Mandatumabout 5 years ago
Please register Khan Academy in other jurisdictions so I can claim tax breaks. Specifically: UK, Australia and Canada.<p>Look to how Effective Altruism has setup its various entities around the world.
11235813213455about 5 years ago
In the other way, there might be plenty businesses using too much energy for their current usages&#x2F;load
jason0597about 5 years ago
I gave them about 4 pounds, the videos did help me and I feel like I have to give something back
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polskibusabout 5 years ago
Shouldn&#x27;t they address public cloud owners for resources directly?
Farfromthehoodabout 5 years ago
PornHub didn&#x27;t ask for help. Just sayin&#x27;
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boromiabout 5 years ago
Done.. wish them the best of luck
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maestabout 5 years ago
Not that familiar with Khan Academy, but shouldn&#x27;t their income also be at 250% normal load?
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wendyshuabout 5 years ago
Salman Khan takes $800k&#x2F;yr from Khan Academy donations for himself, maybe he should donate.
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notokayabout 5 years ago
Khan Academy don&#x27;t care about users feedback for years, so, no donations from me.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;khanacademy.zendesk.com&#x2F;hc&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;community&#x2F;posts&#x2F;115001114611-Reset-Unit-Tests" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;khanacademy.zendesk.com&#x2F;hc&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;community&#x2F;posts&#x2F;115...</a>
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happy-go-luckyabout 5 years ago
I think the increase in load is due to school closures as a result of COVID-19.
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dirtydroogabout 5 years ago
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?
ibeckermayerabout 5 years ago
Khan Academy is a $40m&#x2F;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)
dmayleabout 5 years ago
(Replying to a trollish comment, but don&#x27;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.<p>I think Khan Academy is fantastic, and was going to donate until I saw this figure (verified). I think that it&#x27;s entirely inappropriate to extract that much from the donations.
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