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

khanacademy.org

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

#31

Post by Aachen »

Where your money goes is detailed here: https://khanacademyannualreport.org/financial-information/ (see PDF downloads).

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 "program services" (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 "program services", and they were running at a slight deficit. Looks pretty OK to me.

Assuming "information technology" means hosting, that's about 5M. Doing that times 2.5 would indeed create quite a problem, and that's assuming they don't need more people working on it to keep up with the new crowd.

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

#32

Post by noja »

dmayle wrote: post #27

(Replying to a trollish comment, but don'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. I think Khan Academy is fantastic, and was going to donate until I saw this figure (verified). I think that it's entirely inappropriate to extract that much from the donations.

because....?

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

#33

Post by the_pwner224 »

thoraway329 wrote: post #20
Crosseye_Jack wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The IT staff also get paid... How very dare them. Go to work and earn a living... It’s disgusting I say. They should do it completely for the love of it. Same goes for those pesky YouTubers. Long story short. If you don’t offer a decent incentive package, you won’t incentivise people to come and take a CEO roll. If you look around you will find that CEO at other charity’s also get paid well.

Yes I know and it does disgust me. I wasn't talking about IT staff and regular employees. The CEO founded the "company", does he really need to incentivise himself with a near million dollars a year? I thought NPOs were created by people who want to change the world, but with this salary it seriously skews my perception of his true intentions.

This 1m/yr is nothing compared to the impact KA has. It's no longer just a site with videos; it is a huge e-learning platform that is widely used and integrated in schools across the world. Being the CEO of KA must be a lot of work and I think most people would agree is worthy of that level of compensation.

Or to put it another way: the government is also a nonprofit organization, but it needs good workers to fulfill its goals and those workers should be fairly compensated. We wouldn't get anywhere if the government paid everyone minimum wage.

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

#34

Post by ipsum2 »

the_pwner224 wrote: post #33
thoraway329 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes I know and it does disgust me. I wasn't talking about IT staff and regular employees. The CEO founded the "company", does he really need to incentivise himself with a near million dollars a year? I thought NPOs were created by people who want to change the world, but with this salary it seriously skews my perception of his true intentions.

This 1m/yr is nothing compared to the impact KA has. It's no longer just a site with videos; it is a huge e-learning platform that is widely used and integrated in schools across the world. Being the CEO of KA must be a lot of work and I think most people would agree is worthy of that level of compensation. Or to put it another way: the government is also a nonprofit organization, but it needs good workers to fulfill…

No one gets in the government gets paid $800k, the highest paid salary is the president, at $400k.

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

#35

Post by Crosseye_Jack »

thoraway329 wrote: post #20
Crosseye_Jack wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The IT staff also get paid... How very dare them. Go to work and earn a living... It’s disgusting I say. They should do it completely for the love of it. Same goes for those pesky YouTubers. Long story short. If you don’t offer a decent incentive package, you won’t incentivise people to come and take a CEO roll. If you look around you will find that CEO at other charity’s also get paid well.

Yes I know and it does disgust me. I wasn't talking about IT staff and regular employees. The CEO founded the "company", does he really need to incentivise himself with a near million dollars a year? I thought NPOs were created by people who want to change the world, but with this salary it seriously skews my perception of his true intentions.

But why not talk about the IT staff? You want their site to run to well right? You want some decent site reliability engineers right? Well you might find some that will do the job for less then they can earn for the same role in the for-profit world, you are still going to have to pay a decent wage for their skill and let’s be honest here so they can continue to live in a comfort they have become accustomed too.

The CEO doesn’t earn no where near the CEO’s for other charities in the US go have a look over here https://www.charitywatch.org/top-charity-salaries

Edit: You can “change the world” (even if it’s a very small change, in a small part of the world) and still earn a fair living for your actions. You are completely free to feel that 800k isn’t fair payment. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. I’m not embedded into khan to know if he is really worth that paycheque. But I know the charity hasn’t been run into the ground.

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

#36

Post by amachefe »

dmayle wrote: post #27

(Replying to a trollish comment, but don'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. I think Khan Academy is fantastic, and was going to donate until I saw this figure (verified). I think that it's entirely inappropriate to extract that much from the donations.

Are you not the one trolling?

So will the figure be less of it's he is doing the same work for a company?

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

#37

Post by kharak »

dmayle wrote: post #27

(Replying to a trollish comment, but don'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. I think Khan Academy is fantastic, and was going to donate until I saw this figure (verified). I think that it's entirely inappropriate to extract that much from the donations.

Yes, truly terrible that non-profit organisations serving the common good should provide high salaries. Founder and employees should just go into banking, because those guys absolutely deserve their high pay.

Imagine, just imagine a society, where doing non-profit could be a valid career option without a disadvantage in the income department. The horror.

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

#38

Post by [deleted] »

Aachen wrote: post #31

Where your money goes is detailed here: https://khanacademyannualreport.org/financial-information/ (see PDF downloads). 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 "program services" (I guess creating content, developing the platform, etc.). This loo…

[deleted]

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

#39

Post by ipsum2 »

robinhouston wrote: post #30

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.

It helps that Khan Academy's videos are hosted on Youtube. I imagine thats a large chunk of the bandwidth.

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

#40

Post by monkin »

dmayle wrote: post #27

(Replying to a trollish comment, but don'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. I think Khan Academy is fantastic, and was going to donate until I saw this figure (verified). I think that it's entirely inappropriate to extract that much from the donations.

> I think that it's entirely inappropriate to extract that much from the donations.

You know, that Stallman lived for years out of donations? And no one was opposite of that. It also worked for WikiMedia etc. It's great business model but people need to stop looking on non-profits like that next corporation. They require far more work and I think leaders of such projects should be compensated well. :)

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