Kansas City, Mo. (PRWEB) September 25, 2013
Graffiti was the inspiration for one founder who became a fashion mogul and serial entrepreneur. A popular feature film taught another founder an important lesson about entrepreneurship. Poor service planted the seed for an innovative global airline for an entrepreneur who now runs several successful companies.
Personal lessons and insights from accomplished entrepreneurs are the basis of a new Khan Academy online interview series introduced today by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. The series represents the first entrepreneurship content to be added to the Academy’s vast collection of free online educational tutorials and learning resources, potentially inspiring its 6 million student users a month.
“The Kauffman Foundation is honored to work with Khan Academy on this vital work. The Academy is the embodiment of what is possible when an entrepreneurial mindset is applied to a great need or opportunity in the market, thereby disrupting everything we thought we knew about education," said Thom Ruhe, vice president of Entrepreneurship at the Kauffman Foundation, a private foundation dedicated to improving education and advancing entrepreneurship. “Khan Academy users will learn how they too can apply their knowledge to solve problems, just as the entrepreneurs in the series have.”
Presented in a conversational format with accompanying illustrations, the 20 videos featuring nine entrepreneurs sharing their experiences include a range of tips, anecdotes and personal characteristics, such as being fearless and thinking big.
“Khan Academy provides students with foundational elements necessary to become innovators and entrepreneurs,” says Sal Khan, founder and executive director of Khan Academy. “We offer lessons and project-based learning tutorials in a wide variety of subjects. We are excited to now partner with the Kauffman Foundation to add inspirational lessons from some of the world’s leading entrepreneurs. Kauffman’s entrepreneurship interview series illuminates the subtle lessons that can’t be conveyed in textbooks.”
The entrepreneurs featured in the new interview series are:
- Ben Milne, CEO of Dwolla
- Danny O’Neill, president of The Roasterie
- Giles Shih, president and CEO of BioResource International
- Lara Morgan, founder of Pacific Direct
- Marc Ecko, founder of Ecko Unlimited
- Philip Rosedale, founder and chairman of Second Life and founder of Coffee and Power
- Richard Branson, chairman of the Virgin Group
- T.A. McCann, founder and CEO of Gist
- Zach Kaplan, CEO of Inventables
The Kauffman Foundation will add new content featuring more entrepreneurs in the near future. To see the Kauffman/Khan entrepreneurship interview series, go to https://www.khanacademy.org/r/entrepreneurship.
About the Kauffman Foundation
The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation is a private, nonpartisan foundation that aims to foster economic independence by advancing educational achievement and entrepreneurial success. Founded by late entrepreneur and philanthropist Ewing Marion Kauffman, the Foundation is based in Kansas City, Mo., and has approximately $2 billion in assets. For more information, visit http://www.kauffman.org, and follow the Foundation on http://www.twitter.com/kauffmanfdn and http://www.facebook.com/kauffmanfdn.
About Khan Academy
Khan Academy is a 501(c)3 non-profit with a mission of providing a free world-class education for anyone, anywhere. Khan Academy provides free online educational materials (e.g., practice exercises, instructional videos, dashboard analytics, teacher tools) that support personalized education for users of all ages in a scalable way. In the last two years, the organization has delivered over 300 million lessons and 1.3 billion exercise problems. Currently it has 6 million users per month and over 3 million exercise problems completed each day. Khan Academy covers subjects from basic Math to college level Biology and Art History. For more information, visit http://www.khanacademy.org.