- So we have with us Sean O'Sullivan,
and first I'll give you
all a little background
on the Khan Academy connection.
About three years ago, we get an e-mail
from you saying that
you wanted to help us.
And we're like, uh, okay.
And so you show up, and then you know,
we spend more...
it was at 277 Castro, I
think we were probably
what, a five person organization then?
Maybe, three person
organization at the time.
You spend a half an hour with...
half a day with me and Shantanu,
and you leave essentially one of our
biggest supporters ever.
So, you know, thank you,
and that was a big vote of confidence
in what we've done.
It was a phase of the organization where
we didn't know what it would become,
and all the rest, so
that was a, you know...
- Well, you were already
so far down the road
it was obvious that you
were on to great things.
And here, look at the team
you've got around you.
You've built an amazing set of products
and capabilities and
affecting many millions
of people's lives.
It's something that anyone is lucky
whether you're working
here or supporting Khan,
lucky to be a part of such a great
social movement for good.
- I knock on wood every morning. (laughs)
So let me introduce everyone to you.
So you have actually
several claims to fame
that I knew about you before,
but then this morning I started doing
some research about you,
and you have lived a full life.
So I guess right now you're most famous
especially in Ireland for
being on the Dragon's Den,
which is essentially like
the Shark Tank of Ireland.
- Yep, that's right.
(talking over each other)
It's actually the third most
popular show in Ireland,
after like the Late
Late Show, and the news.
So it's super...
like, nobody really knows
the Shark Tank here,
but it's, I don't know,
it's probably the 50th
or 100th most popular show
in America, I don't know.
But in Ireland, you know, I
can't walk down the street
without people recognizing me.
- [Sal] Or giving you a business plan,
and you have to be...
- Yeah, exactly, all that.
- And it's one of these
premises where it's
a bunch of investors,
and they have to pitch,
and you all have like
money on your coffee table.
- Yes, that's the one.
That's the show.
- And we have some footage of it.
- [Voiceover] Who is prepared to enter
the Dragon's Den?
Inside could be the money to turn
business dreams into reality.
But only the bravest and the best
contain the dragons who guard the prize.
Those dragons are five of the country's
most wealthy and
successful business people.
And the budding entrepeneurs who dare
to face them in the den
need to convince them
to invest in their dreams.
The dragons all know what
it takes to be successful
in the fiercely competitive
world of business
having built their companies the hard way.
Technology pioneer Sean O'Sullvian
runs Avego, a world leading
transportation software
company headquartered in Cork,
and operating globaly
while investing millions
in start-up businesses.
- My vision is to mix style
and fashion with wonderful
music engineering, and this is it.
It's called Ig Guitars.
The electric guitar industry has been
dominated by products which have
not been innovated for 50 years.
I'm conscious of style.
I like to wear clothes that represent
what I stand for, and
so do all my generation.
This is what they want.
It's new, it's cool,
it's highly functional
and they will love it.
I am doing for guitars
what Steve Jobs has done for phones.
- You know one of my fellow dragons
was in a rock band, a rock star,
and old recording studios as well.
- He was only the piano player.
- [Gavin] Janet Speaks French.
If you Google, it was big in the '50s.
- Before I was born.
But not before Gavin was born.
What's the market for guitars?
How many sell a year?
- Yeah, so, like this approximately
between the States and Europe,
you've got about a million
electric guitars per year.
- What is the revenues
that you're projecting?
- I'm aiming to sell 2,000
guitars in the first year
at 160 euros per guitar, so that's working
out at 320,000.
I wanted to retail at
349, but I want to bring
that back to 299 after
you know, I'm getting
more efficient with production
and stuff like that.
- Rob, I think you're potentially a
really great entrepeneur, and I think
you're probably going to need more money
to do this than the 35,000.
So I'd like to give
you a little more money
than you asked for and take a little more
equity than you asked for.
So I propose to give you 50,000 euro
for 25% equity in your company.
- Okay.
- Also, we have a hardware
accelerator program
in China that takes
designers like yourself
from anywhere around the world,
puts them in situ, in the environment.
We can put you into a program like that,
and get you working
directly with the factories
and getting more electronics.
- Oh, that would be absolutely awesome.
- These are all things I'd love to work
with you on future
generations of products.
- Um, you know, if I
was working with you...
I'd really like to work
with you, but 25 percent.
Would you do anything where
you could pare that back,
you know if we hit targets to 20 percent?
- If you sell 2,000
guitars in the first year,
I'll give up from 25
and down to 20 percent.
- Okay, cool.
Yeah, done deal.
- Great, congratulations.
- [Voiceover] A deal, and a last minute
reduction in equity.
Now that's worth getting out of bed for.
- Take it easy.
- [Sean] Take care.
- [Rob] Good luck.
- Was it him you were looking at?
Because I didn't see the differentiation
of the product.
- The product is...
- [Ramona] No, his product's good.
- the product is different.
It's absolutely different.
- Sean, that sales model
that he's gonna sell,
pay as much as you think
you feel a guitar is worth,
I think that would work.
(all laugh)
- All right, that's it.
That's Rob O'Reilly.
And that deal closed,
and Rob has actually
since come out with some,
a second generation of products.
- So it worked out well?
- Oh yeah, it worked out, yeah.
- This is like a real thing.
Cause you see this on TV shows,
you don't think...
- Yep, no.
It's actually, a lot
of times, half the time
the deal doesn't go through,
even after it seems like it goes through.
In my case, probably they go through
around 80, 85% of the time.
But some of the other dragons or sharks
don't actually...
You know, they don't
come to terms at the end.
- And so this is actually a venture
that you're still working
on and still is... - Yeah.
- You know, it's...
They're producing, you know,
it's got some rave reviews.
It's a very unusual guitar.
It has several unique
features that, you know,
it has a midi output, as
well as the sound out.
It has, it's cut out in the center,
it has a balance beam, it's got plectrum.
It's a nicely designed guitar.
- We'll talk about it because,
as we'll see, that is part of your past.
Is in the music industry.
- Yes.
Invest in what you know.
- Exactly.
So we'll start at the beginning,
because I mean obviously
it's an interesting
life so far you've had.
You were born in New York,
you're of Irish descent.
- [Sean] New York City.
New York City, Irish descent.
You eventually end up back in Ireland.
But how did it start?
I was reading about,
I mean you are one of nine children?
- Yes, I was one of nine children.
So I was born in New York City.
I actually had a deadbeat dad, actually.
So, my mother and my father got separated
when I was three.
We were raised in poverty
in upstate New York
on the welfare system.
So for five or six years, my mom
was raising the nine kids who were
all under the age of 10.
I was three.
- Nine kids under the age of 10?
- Yeah, at one point.
But then we got older, and after, you know
six or seven years of that,
she was able to get a job and we sort of
worked our way out of
poverty over the years.
But that was the start of it.
You know, it's, New York
state is not a great place
to be growing up poor,
because the weather is
actually quite severe
compared to California, so it could be,
with wind chill or
whatever, minus 40 degrees.
And so when we would go to sleep at night,
in the dead of winter,
we'd gather in one room with a wood stove
with the wood that we cut down
from trees ourselves and just try to,
you know, all of us, sometimes
a couple people in one bed,
just the six or seven people say,
in one room sleeping with a wood stove.
It's probably different
than how you grew up.
But maybe not. (laughs)
It wasn't that bad, actually.
- And how did you, given that start,
which is a hard beginning,
how did you get into technology?
How did you get into computers,
which was kind of your first passion,
or one of your first
passions, that and music?
- Yeah, so my first passion probably
would have been computers.
Somehow saw my older
brother went to college
and he, this was back in the day
when they still had punch cards,
and I saw some print outs
of work that he was doing
as a computer science program himself.
So I said wow, I really...
It was just fascinating, it
was really appealing to me.
You know when you grow up poor,
you don't have that much control
over your environment,
and to actually be able
to control a computer
is an incredibly powerful thing.
It does whatever you tell it to do.
That's really remarkable.
So it was a way of
getting some control over
the situation and being
able to develop myself
and support myself.
- And you even support,
even when you were in high school?
- Yeah, actually I had
my first professional
job programming was when I was 14.
So I had learned some programming,
and there's, in America, for the poorest
of the poor there's a program called
the Civilian Employment Training Act,
I'm not sure if it's still around,
but they basically give you jobs
that are supposed to prepare you for
a long time career.
So they gave me a job being
a janitor in my high school.
And I said, well jeez,
that's not the greatest
career potential, and I don't understand
why it's a training act if I don't
really need that much training to push
a broom around or a
vacuum cleaner or whatever
in the first place.
But I found a county agency that was
a couple miles from my house,
so I asked the person who ran that agency
if I could just have a job basically
changing data tapes or printing out things
just to get started, and
then when he discovered
I could program, and I could program
better than several of
the other programmers
that were older professionals,
that I ended up getting started that way.
- Wow, wow.
I didn't even appreciate...
I mean, this wasn't that long ago.
This was like the early '80s?
- This was the...
yeah, early '80s.
- Early '80s that they
would recommend for a
14-year-old to be the janitor
at his own high school?
- Yeah, like it's better than nothing
because you still get to...
It's a minimum wage job,
but you still get some...
You're working, and you're contributing
to your family's situation.
So it's not a terrible program,
although they're obviously, they could
have aimed a little higher than janitor.
So I did work as a janitor,
and as a groundskeeper
and things like that
for maybe a year before I'd found
a way to get myself out of it.
- And obviously you got that job,
and you kept developing it,
and you go to Rensselaer.
- Yeah, so I got into
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
which is in Troy, New York.
The oldest English
speaking engineering school
in the world, continuously
running or whatever.
The claim to fame is the
inventor of the television,
the inventor of the semiconductor process,
the first microprocessor,
and all these other...
you know, the Brooklyn Bridge, all those
other sort of things.
And as a, I grew up like
an hour southwest of there,
so I was always hearing about how they
were in the Mars Rover project,
and all this when I was growing up.
And I just said, wow, that just sounds
like the kind of thing I want to do.
Do really impactful, amazing things.
So that's what got me into engineering.
And never looked back.
You know, I think that engineers have a
disproportionate power in the planet
to affect the world in massive ways.
So, we were just talking
about this a little earlier,
that a lot of the brightest students
unfortunately choose to major in areas
which are basically service industries.
Like one-to-one service industries,
like the brightest kids
in high school sometimes
end up choosing to become
doctors or lawyers.
And those are things that are one-to-one
service industries, verses becoming
an engineer, where you have the capability
to affect millions and
billions of people's lives
with products that you design,
and impacts that you have on the planet.
Which I've also been
lucky to have been able to
have been part of teams and leading teams
that have had those kinds
of changes over the years.
- And that's your first experience
coming out of college.
And especially growing up poor,
my background wasn't as dire as yours,
but not that different as well.
One of the things when
you come out of college
is that fear of,
well do I be an entrepreneur
and kind of risk it all,
or do I at least just
go for the middle class
you know, pay the bills, get a car.
You went entrepreneurial.
- Yeah, from the beginning days like,
I mean, it's really easy to go living like
from living like a college student
where you don't have any money,
you don't have any
possessions or whatever,
to living like an entrepreneur,
which is the same exact,
you haven't changed anything.
(both laugh)
You don't have any money,
you don't have any needs
or things that would
prevent you from doing it.
So I was lucky enough.
I had worked my way through college
for IBM and a couple of other smaller
tech companies during
summers and what-not,
so I was able to know that I also,
I also knew before I graduated college,
that I didn't really want
to work for a large company.
Because I saw, like IBM's a great
company and everything,
but I saw some of the
best engineers that I was
working with in research,
Triangle Park at one
point, North Carolina,
that they were working on
this video phone project
back in 1984 or something,
and then IBM the company bought ROHM,
which is a key systems phone provider,
for like a billion dollars.
And so this team of
super dedicated engineers
that had been workign like eight years
on this amazing product,
just got exed off because of some big
corporate decision that had been made
10 levels above them.
And they'd worked their
bones off to produce
this unbelievable break,
ground-breaking product
and it never saw the light of day.
And I said, you know, I'd rather not
have that happen to me.
I'd rather be working
in a smaller environment
where I can have a lot more control
over my destiny.
And so that's why I
chose to start a company.
That's why I think it's
always great to work
in smaller organizations
that do have big impact.
Like you have here at Khan Academy.
- And at first, it was Mapinfo.
This was, I mean you, it was kind of
a pioneering company.
Now everything, you know, Google Maps
and you have all these, you know...
- Yeah, so if you've ever...
Has anyone ever done this?
Has anyone ever typed an address
into a computer and seen a street map?
Can I see a show of hands
if anyone's done that before?
So we invented that.
And that was a long long time ago.
Because I'm approaching 50 like
a bullet train to that wall over there.
Before you can say oompa loompa,
I'm gonna be 50 years old.
So, um, like, it was a long long time ago.
It's 30 years ago that we did this.
And you know, it was a big idea back then,
and it pioneered and set the groundwork
for all the technology that has since
developed from it.
I have a total huge respect for what
Google's, you know, the street view thing.
They've really, you
know, a lot of companies
have done a lot with the technology.
But we pioneered it.
The first million or so people that used
street mapping on computers were,
99% of them were using Mapinfo.
It became a couple hundred
million dollar company.
It became a public company.
It was licensed by a lot
of the bigger companies
to do it, but more importantly,
the thousands of re-sellers
and the thousands
of local countries that
were using our product
digitized all the street
maps using our product
or made it available to their customers
using our product,
which sort of set the groundwork
for all the mapping that happens today.
So it's pretty cool.
So that was my first company.
I was there for seven years,
and I was the president and chairman of it
for then, and then I left.
- It goes public, and you leave,
and the classic Silicon Valley thing is
oh, I've had one exit,
let me go do my next one,
or let me become a partner at a VC firm.
You start a rock band.
- Yeah, yeah.
(audience laughs)
That was an unconventional choice.
I think I've made several
unconventional choices.
- I was listening earlier this morning
to "Love is Pain."
- Oh my god.
That's from our first EP, five song EP.
Some copyright violators
put it up onto the Internet.
- Which you were happy about.
It was funny, because I saw..
The name of the band
was Janet Speaks French.
You actually got on the radio?
- Yeah, we were Top 40
in 80 radio stations
or something like that.
- [Sal] Top 40?
- Yeah, yeah.
But you know, 80 radio
stations in the United States
is 2800 radio stations or whatever,
so none of you would have heard it
if you were even alive back in 1994,
whenever it was.
- [Sal] I was there in 1994.
- You were alive?
- [Sal] Yeah, yeah, I was alive.
I was going through high school.
(Sean laughs)
And, I mean, what was
going through your mind?
Obviously music was a love of yours.
You had, I guess you were comfortable
at this point financially.
- Actually, I wasn't quite
comfortable at that point
because the company was in
the registration process,
but it hadn't actually
gone public at that point.
So for awhile I was just doing it,
and that was all right.
I don't live like in a
really extravagant way,
I don't need that much money.
Cause you know, it always,
it's good grounding
to remember where you came from.
Because you could be
right back there any time.
You never know what's in front of you.
So I've never needed that much to get by.
So being a struggling rock musician
wasn't that big of an adjustment for me.
- And you do that for how many years?
- Two years, actually.
- Two years.
- And then I started a technology company,
an internet company.
It was 1995 or something, end of 1995.
And so that was back when Netscape
wasn't called Netscape, it was called
Mosaic Communications.
And probably none of you even heard
of Netscape even.
(talking over each other)
- We hire people older than 16.
(both laugh)
- [Sean] Okay, good.
I forget who I'm talking to.
An engineering crowd.
How many of you are engineers out there?
A handful.
Oh, half.
So, yeah, and we came up with this concept
of network services over the Internet,
and software for inside the Internet,
which we then called Cloud Computing.
So we came up with that term,
I co-coined that term,
myself and George Favaloro
from Compaq Computer.
- We should take pause there.
Coined Cloud Computing.
- There you go, for what it's worth.
- And "Love is Pain."
(laughter)
- It's not my favorite song, actually.
You have to probably
go to the second album
before you hit my favorite song.
What's good on that album?
"It Isn't Love".
That's probably my favorite.
- "It Isn't Love."
You were going through some hard times.
- Yeah, absolutely.
I was not popular with ladies.
(both laugh)
- Our next company gathering,
we'll have a little bit of...
- We can talk about that offline.
- And so you start the next company,
and that was another...
- It was called NetCentric.
And that grew to like,
say 10 million in sales.
It wasn't a huge thing,
and it got sold off basically in pieces
to Cisco, or somebody else,
I can't even remember.
Like I blocked that whole part of my...
it wasn't a great success at all.
The investors, like
myself, I invested in it,
didn't make their money back on it.
So it was a lesson in life.
- And maybe I'm skipping,
I found this fascinating,
I didn't know about this.
i mean, we've known each
other for three years,
but I didn't know this
whole chapter in your life,
you then go to Iraq.
- No, actually, then I became a filmmaker.
- Then you became a filmmaker.
Oh yeah, you went to film school.
You became a filmmaker.
- Yeah, so I went to
USC film school in LA,
which is awesome.
And I was making films, and made
like 100 films in five years.
- [Sal] Sounds like me, I just kind of...
Yours are probably better.
- Well, like they were
little three minute videos,
and music videos, and you know, lots of
other things like that.
But I was looking for a project,
and the Iraq war was about to start
in 2003, so it was March 2003
when I finally, I started working
on trying to get into Iraq,
get permission to get into Iraq
in the end of 2002.
- [Sal] Cause you saw the war was coming.
The drumbeats.
- The drumbeats were going,
there were all these protest
all over New York, LA,
I filmed all that.
And then I got myself in
with a peace activist group
called the Christian Peacemaking Team,
which I was just gonna be documenting
their struggles.
And they were allowed into Iraq
under the Saddam regime,
and so I went in there.
I was in Iraq when the, you know...
in Baghdad when what was it called?
Shock and awe began.
It was actually quite an amazing time
to be there and see it both pre and post.
But as a filmmaker, you know, I also
when you go into dictatarian regimes,
they have followers called...
oh jeez, I'm forgetting everything.
Minders, yeah, but the minders...
Oh yeah, that's what
they're called, minders.
Thank you very much.
So they have government,
like the industry of information...
i'm forgetting what the name of
the ministry of information was.
But anyway, the Ministry of Information
said we'll attach a minder to you,
to make sure you didn't
take photos of anything
you were not supposed to take photos of.
They will take you to a place where maybe
a bomb went wrong, or they claim a bomb
went the wrong way,
or they'll take you to hospitals
and show you pictures
of women and children,
but they won't actually let you
photograph anything else.
So I was ejected from the country,
because I've never taken
very well to rules.
And so, that's where I
met my wife actually,
she was also a rule breaker.
She was arrested by the Syrians
when she was trying to cross the river
into Iraq illegally.
But she was in Jordan, and then when
Baghdad fell, the border fell,
and we were able to go
back into the country.
So I was there for the
next 18 months or so.
- Wow.
This is like, you could make a movie.
I'm already imagining the casting for...
- Who would they cast as me?
- Well, I'll think about that.
I have some ideas, but
I'll tell you after.
And then you go back into...
And I was even reading,
I mean, one of your partners in this.
- Yeah, Mohayman Al Safar probably,
is that what you're referring to?
I worked a little bit for CNN and Reuters
and just doing a lot of
freelance work at that point,
and then after a while I got fed up
with the US government's
ability to execute.
They couldn't get anything
done, it didn't seem.
So I started a humanitarian organization
called JumpStart International,
and we went in and we cleaned up
a whole bunch of...
we employed 3500 people in the end.
It started with just myself and 30 guys,
and then we grew it up over the time
to about 3500 people.
So we were actually the largest
humanitarian organization
after the UN pulled out
pretty early.
They were bombed and what not,
so in Iraq--
- [Sal] This was during the war.
What time period is this?
- This is, well actually, there was
sort of a postwar period which was
from say around April May of 2003
to when the civil war started,
which was April of 2004.
- I see.
You were kicked out,
and then you come back.
- I came back almost immediately.
Because Baghdad just lasted
for another nine days
or something like that before it fell.
Or five days or something.
And then I went back, and I was
running this humanitarian organization.
And then the civil war...
and I built that up, and
the civil war started
in April of 2004, and
then I was still there
until the end of that year.
- Wow.
And your partner in this...
- Yeah, my co-founder of JumpStart
was Mohayman Al Safar who was an Iraqi,
and he was assassinated
because we were just
driving around all the time,
you know, just us,
visiting all the projects.
So we would have 80 projects at a time.
Hospitals and universities,
and we'd be cleaning up or taking down
skyscrapers that were bombed or burned.
And then just, it was just a big manpower
and engineering effort to
try to clean up the city
and we built a lot of
housing, thousands of homes.
- You must have seen some jarring...
- Yeah, so both during the war and...
The civil war was actually the worst part.
If you think about American history,
the civil war is where more Americans
have died I'm sure by many factors.
- [Sal] Like half a million, yeah.
- You'd have 250,000
or something like that
would die, verses in World War II
over six years, I think we lost
a million people, or less than that.
So the American civil war is the worst.
In Iraq it's the exact same thing.
When that started in April of 2004
all the way to recently,
it's been the bloodiest sort of period.
- And you all were inserting yourselves
in kind of the, just
where there was carnage...
- Yeah, so we would clean up after
a terrorist bombing.
And there'd be body parts, and we'd
be stepping over body
parts or stepping on them
or cleaning up things.
A lot of my workers would be injured,
and I was just living...
I wasn't living in the Green Zone,
which is the American occupied, or the
coalition occupied territory.
I was living in the Red Zone.
The other area, the
other parts of the city.
So we would just go around all the time.
- I guess it was a question,
what was driving you to do...
- I was frustrated.
What does any entrepreneur
feel like, you know,
when you see a market
that's not being served.
Or when you...
just like, this needs to happen.
It's so stupid the work
wasn't getting done.
- But you didn't think
especially as a American
or someone who looks European--
- Especially as an American.
- Not being in the Green
Zone, were you afraid?
I mean, you could be a target.
You could be abducted.
- For sure.
But there were Americans
there risking their lives
that had suits and guns and what not.
But why shouldn't an
American who's unarmed
be out there risking their life
for the same cause,
to hopefully liberate the country
and set them on their course,
and leave them alone.
But you know, it's...
I was in danger.
- [Sal] Were there a
lot of folks like this?
- No, there weren't many.
- Yeah, cause my impression
just through the news
and whatever else is that
you had the Green Zone
that's where the civilian,
the western civilians lived,
and every now and then might with
a huge military escort,
kind make an excursion
outside of the Green Zone.
So were there...
- And there's actually,
USA Today called me at one point,
I think it was around September 2004,
and they said, "We think
you're the last one there."
(laughs)
And I said, "No, the
Christian Peacemaking Team."
I kept in contact with,
they're still around.
Then they got, you know,
they got kidnapped and tortured,
and some of them killed as well.
There were not that many people.
- I mean, I'm just trying to un...
- It's admirable, it's amazing to kind of
go in and do this stuff,
but especially, you're
like the last one...
Even the people who are...
- Turn off the lights when you leave.
- They're getting
abducted, getting tortured.
- I had probably most of the people I knew
probably got either kidnapped or...
- But I mean, in your
mind, did you view this
as a rational...
Weren't you afraid, weren't you...
You know, there's being brave,
and then there's...
- Well actually, what finally sent me from
the country when I did leave,
is because they thought actually,
and I'm not that religious of a person.
But what finally sent me from the country
is I was blinded in my left eye,
and I had cancer.
Those two indicators.
If it was just the cancer by itself...
(both laugh)
So I got skin cancer, actually.
And if you look closely,
they actually cut out an
inch, a two inch patch.
And it just kept getting worse,
and I couldn't...
you know, and actually the US...
- [Sal] And what was your family
telling you? - [Sean] The US
Military hospital was very good.
- They didn't even charge
me anything to dig it out.
- Well they shouldn't.
(Sean laughs)
- And then I went blind in my left eye,
and that was becauase I got some infection
and then the Iraqi doctor that I went to
gave me a steroid, but
it was a viral infection
and so a steroid and a virus,
it makes it a supervirus.
And it basically ate my eye.
And so it ate the skin off my eye,
and I didn't have any skin on my eye.
It was bad.
At that point I said, you know,
God is trying to give me a message.
Because in Irish
actually, O'Sullivan means
the one-eyed giant or something.
So there I was with one eye left,
and actually amazingly,
I got treatment for it afterwards,
and they take your blood, and they make
some sort of special
potion out of your blood,
and you can put it into your eye,
and my eye grew back.
And my vision got better
than it was before.
So actually, my vision's now better
than it was before.
- Than it was pre being eaten by
a steroid induced virus.
Eye eating virus.
- If you have eye trouble,
I recommend going to Iraq.
I'll set you up with this Iraqi doctor.
(laughter)
- I didn't even know half of this stuff.
I thought I'd done my...
This is mind blowing.
I want to talk more,
we don't have a lot...
- At the end of it, I said, you know,
I am getting enough messages here.
I mean, everybody's telling me.
I mean, freaking NBC News followed me
around for a day to do my obituary.
- [Sal] Seriously?
- Yeah.
They didn't tell me they were
doing my obituary. - [Sal]
Like the guy who wants to die?
No, no, no.
I didn't want to die.
I didn't want to die.
- It looks like someone
who almost has a...
You know, like the guy in World War I who
always wants to be at the front.
- No, you know what, like...
- Americans had to do something.
And it was very very very frustrating
to just go and do, to let the situation
be what it was.
And I'm proud of America, actually.
I think Americans try to do the most
incredible things for the planet.
Their intent, what separates
their intent and their execution
sometimes is awful.
And everyone says oh yeah,
there was some ill intent in all this.
And yeah, maybe a little bit.
But it was mostly just
misconceived in my view.
And so to just let that go,
it was speaking to my core
that I needed to do something.
And I was in a place to do something.
I had some money, and actually gave,
you know I started it myself.
And then I got some UN funding
and some other funding to keep it going.
- Now was your wife with you?
- Yeah.
Well, she was a war reporter.
So she's a little bit accustomed to it.
But it was time for both of us to get out.
So we got married.
And I was actually then
working in the Gaza strip,
we built a university, Gaza Polytechnic,
and I was on that trip.
You know, we got married on New Years Eve,
and nine months and seven days later,
Charlotte, our first daughter was born.
So I think that's God's other signal,
was that I was not supposed
to be in war zones anymore.
So I was in the Gaza
strip when I found out
my wife was pregnant,
and that was basically at the end of it,
I said screw it, I'm not going
to do this anymore.
So I didn't.
And now I've gone back and I've thrown
myself at the technology.
- And then you go back to Ireland.
Why Ireland as opposed to...
- I was using my Irish passport
when I was going in and
around in the Green Zone
to get into the Green Zone.
- As opposed to your Amer--
Why the Irish?
- Well I was under the pretense
that Iraqi Arabic speakers
couldn't tell the difference
between Irish sounding
accents and American sounding accents.
And actually, um..
- [Sal] And it would just be better if you
were abducted with an Irish passport
verses an American one?
- Yeah, absolutely.
It would have been better.
The admission fee to get in for a visa
is like 1/10 as much if you have
your Irish passport verses if you
have your American passport.
Costs you 100 dollars
or something to get in
as an American, or five dollars.
- So then you go back to Ireland,
you, I guess because you
were using the passport
you started to feel, I guess
you always kept some type
of a joint citizenship.
- Yeah, I had through my grandparents,
I had Irish citizenship.
So I started a company in Ireland,
and now I live...
The quality of life in Ireland is great.
I love, it's great being there.
And we've just sort of started a company
a couple of companies that...
- You started a couple companies,
and even in your current SOSVentures,
you all have backed some
of the fairly well known...
Guitar Hero.
- Oh yeah, well so, Guitar Hero
would have been a great win for us.
I backed pretty heavily
a company called Netflix.
- Yes, we've heard of it.
- It's done well.
And a number of, we
have about 160 companies
in the portfolio.
Elite Motion is one of the ones
I was just talking about,
is a great big one that we were the first
VC in on that as well.
That's a recent one.
So this week in San Francisco,
we're actually launching
20 different companies.
On Monday we launched 10 from HAXLR8R
and today, later today we're launching
the Leap Accelerator
program in San Francisco
with 10 new companies.
So we do a lot,
and I manage a couple
hundred million dollar fund,
and we believe in accelerating companies.
We're the accelerator VC.
So we do a lot to try to
start as many good companies as we can.
Because ultimately you can try to
go in and you can try
to change people's lives
by building a house or something lke that.
But if you can change their lives
by for example enabling cloud computing,
or enabling street mapping on computers,
or any of these new technologies
that we're launching,
these are really
transforming tens of millions
if not more of people's lives.
This is what I was speaking to,
in terms of the disproportionate power
that engineers have to
impact the quality of
life of mankind.
And we can, you know, that's the most
impact you can have as a person.
Even as a venture capitalist,
that's what I look to.
Is this adding good to
the planet to do this?
And what you're doing in Khan Academy,
it was a five million dollar
commitment that we made,
which is a reasonable size commitment.
- Huge, it continues to
be one of our largest
gifts ever,
but especially at that
phase of the organization.
It was a big deal for us.
- Well, thank you.
But I feel honored to be
a part of your success,
because what you're doing
is so transformative
and potentially so transformative.
I know you're only part of the way there,
so none of you engineers
need to rest on your laurels. (laughs)
Because there's a lot more
that needs to be done.
But life is like that.
You try to get up every day
and do something amazing,
and try to make the world a better place.
That's all the guiding
philosophy is about.
- And what's been incredible,
obviously you helped support us,
but you've also turned into
something of an advisor,
and you've been driving some pretty neat
initiatves in Ireland
that we're actually hoping
to eventually replicate.
- Yeah, so Ireland's a little petri dish,
and we've got this thing going,
I don't know if Sal or any of the gang
has talked about it called Mathletes.
And it's an experiment that we try,
and it is super cool.
It is just super cool.
I was just looking over some
of the stats this morning.
You know, we came up with this idea
to try to duplicate the
passion that people have
about athletics,
and the pride that people
have about their school
or their individual performance.
And try to have people be as dedicated
to their schools through mathletics
as they would to athletics.
And this is something that
seems like it's working.
It's early days, but in just the age range
that we're talking about, from 11 to 15,
evidently by running this
Mathletes competition
over two and a half months,
the web traffic for Khan Academy
is something like three
and a half times as many.
- For all of Ireland.
- For all of Ireland.
- And you all were essentially
just getting started
these last few months.
- Yeah, and so we launched the idea.
One and a half percent of
all the kids in Ireland
in that age range are now
competing in Mathletes.
If you did that across the United States,
I think it would be like 70,000 schools
would be competing.
And it's competing at a very very very
significant level.
Like the top one percent of kids
in the last two and a half months
have spent, I don't know,
we just looked at the stats.
- It was 20 something hundred.
- 2700 or something like that?
Minutes of study.
Several grade levels.
- In two months.
In just two months.
- Several grade levels of math
in just two and a half months.
Now that's the top one percent.
But if you take it to
the top five percent,
or top 10 percent,
they've done several grade levels of math
within 700 minutes or 580 minutes.
- It's really turned
into a national thing.
The prime minister's involved...
- The An Taoiseach, which is the Irish
for prime minister.
It's a ministerial form of government
rather than....
the president in Ireland is not
the same as the president here.
So the An Taoiseach is the
head of the government.
And so he's given away
the Mathletes prizes.
We have little trophies that he gives
that have been given to the schools
for their competition.
It started in February, the finals,
and it works up like
the NCAA sort of thing,
where there's a whole press coverage,
and there's leader boards
that go out every week.
People know where their schools are
on the leader boards on a county level,
on a regional level,
and on a national level.
So there's a tremendous amount of pride
that people are taking
in their accomplishments
and the accomplishments of their school.
And the teachers are
getting sucked into this
because they're passionate about it,
and because it's exciting.
And because the kids are excited.
And it's potentially
a really really really
interesting way of, you know...
We've seen that something like 350%,
you know the number of people that
are participating in Ireland
is only doubled, even though
it's just this age range.
On Khan Academy now.
But the engagement is like four times.
So the number of page views
and the number of time.
So if we could duplicate
that for the world,
or for the United States,
then you're talking about a lot of impact.
I'm super excited about this.
And another thing I'm excited about
is there's been this fallacy
that women aren't good at math.
And this proves, you know, we've got
an exactly 50/50 gender split
for the top performing
Mathletes in the country.
And then even at the national competition,
which is taking place next Saturday,
there is a slight discrepancy
but we don't know if there's gender bias
in how parents, we don't know,
we have to look at the
data a little bit more,
but it's still incredibly similar.
It's 54% to 46% boys to girls
at the national level.
Which when you think about your day, Sal,
when you were in math competitions,
how many women were
in the competitions verses men?
- There weren't many.
There were...
- It's like an engineering school.
One in 10 or one in six or something.
It's awful.
So we need to as they say women hold up
half the sky, so we have to
use all of our talent, all of our people
to advance the planet.
And more women should become
more technically capable.
- Yeah, awesome.
Well thank you, I could go on for hours
because actually (mumbling)
I have a million questions about Iraq.
But anyway, I mean thank you so much,
this was a bigger treat
than I even expected
the more I got to even know you,
who I've known for three years.
But the more your background,
my respect for you has gone
to even a whole other level.
So thank you for being an early supporter
and continuing to do incredible things.
And pushing us into the direction
frankly we should be going in,
which is getting more community buidling
and more people to kind of
really feel invested in learning.
- Yeah, we're all learning here,
and so each day is a joy
if we just take it that way.
We don't know what the future is.
We can't predict what the future is.
But we can measure, we
can go in a lean way,
and we can adapt our course on the way.
And hopefully some of
the learnings we're doing
our little petri dish in Ireland can apply
to the overall mission,
which I love about what
Khan Academy is doing.
So great.
- But thanks so much, Sal.
- Thank you.
(applause)
