Sal Khan, Founder, Khan Academy, gave the keynote presentation at the annual Pace Pitch Contest in NYC. He talked about building a social venture in the education space and offered advice for entrepreneurs and those looking to start up a new business. He gave the keynote via skype (above). The video below is a highlight of his TED talk and provides some background and context to who he is and what he does and why he is Bill Gates’ favorite teacher.
The Pace Pitch Contest is based on the Elevator Pitch concept, popular in the venture capital community. It is an extremely concise presentation of an entrepreneur’s idea, business model, marketing strategy, competitive analysis, and financial plan, which is delivered to potential investors. The premise is that it could be made in a few minutes, should the entrepreneur spot a potential investor on an elevator and have the opportunity to pitch their idea during the brief ride.
Finalists in the New Business Concept category and the Social Venture category each have exactly three minutes to pitch their new venture idea to a distinguished panel of judges and an enthusiastic audience. In addition to broad participation at Pace, the contest has welcomed student competitors from a number of other universities, including Columbia, Harvard, MIT, NYU, Princeton, and Stanford.
Salman Khan – Founder, the Khan Academy
Sal is the Founder, Executive Director, and Faculty of the Khan Academy. He started the Khan Academy as a way to tutor his cousins remotely–while he was a hedge fund analyst in Boston, and they were students in New Orleans. He started posting videos on YouTube, and more and more people kept watching. It was clear there was a huge unmet need, so Sal left his hedge fund job and started Khan Academy with the mission of providing a free world-class education to anyone, anywhere.
Sal holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, where he was the president of his class. He also attended MIT, where he received 3 degrees: a Masters in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, a B.S. in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, and a B.S. in Mathematics.
