with a daily class schedules, to kind of approximate,

keep the learning going on during the closers,

webinars for teachers and parents,

and also this homeroom is really

just a way to stay connected.

Talk to interesting people about interesting topics

and answer any questions you have.

And so over the course of this conversation,

and I have a very exciting guest today,

I'll give him a proper introduction in a few minutes.

I encourage you to put any questions you might have

on Facebook or on YouTube,

and our team is going to be looking at them,

and getting to as many of them as possible.

I will give my standard announcement,

Khan Academy just as a reminder is a not for profit,

we only exist because of philanthropic donations.

We were running at a deficit even before the COVID crisis,

and you could imagine now that our traffic,

our usage is almost three X of what it typically is,

registrations are five to 10 X of what they typically are,

and we're trying to accelerate a bunch of programs,

our costs have gone up even higher.

And so if you're in a position to so,

please think about making a donation.

I wanna give a special shout out to several corporations

that have stepped up in just the last few weeks

to help with this effort including Bank of America,

AT&T, Novartis, Fastly and Google.org.

So thanks all of them, and for our longtime supporters,

obviously, many foundations and corporations,

but we do need more help, so if you can,

please think about donating.

So with that, I'd like to introduce our next guest

who is actually been playing a huge role in Khan Academy,

even existing, he's been a supporter of Khan Academy

from really the early years, Jorge Paulo Lemann.

Nice to see you, Jorge Paulo.

- Hi, how are you Sal?

- I'm doing all right, and you know,

I thought there's a lot of interesting things for us

to talk about over the course of this con,

over the course of the next 30 minutes or so.

You've done very well and from a business point of view,

you've been a very active philanthropist.

I think you have some very interesting life stories.

We have some young, a lot of young people

who watch this Live stream who are really just trying

to figure out how to navigate their own lives,

so maybe that's a good place to start,

you know, I was reading some of your bio,

and obviously, we've known each other for many years now,

but talk a little bit about your early start,

you know, it sounds like you're a very good student.

You're an amazing tennis player,

and then you got to college,

and it sounded like you didn't have the,

you weren't a fish in water initially,(laughs)

you had some hard times.

- So I went to college when I was very young, 17.

I had never been to the United States before.

And I was basically a surfer and a tennis player.

And college was tough in the beginning,

I wasn't used to studying, I wasn't used to reading,

so it was very tough but I made it through,

and adapting that first year was one

of the many crises I sort of went through in life.

I was making a list of all the crises

I've gone through in the last 80 years.

And I guess it started when I was born five days

before the Second World War.

So when even when I was four or five,

I remember to my family, listening to bank,

Voice of America and finding out what was going on the war.

And so every sort of eight to 10 years,

there is some sort of a crisis that comes up,

and you really learn how to live with them,

you learn how to adapt.

And each one of the crises I think I've come out

a better informed person or better prepared person,

or like that.

This crisis we're now undergoing

is one of the toughest ones,

but you know, we'll make it out of it,

and I'm trying to figure out what are gonna be the learnings

and how can I come out of it better than I was before,

so this is one more crises action.

- Now, that's a good way to think about it.

And you have more experience to draw from than I do,

but it does seem like it feels around roughly every decade,

something comes up either personally,

or in the macro picture as a whole.

But I wanna double click on what you talked

about your early life,

because I think there's so many students

who even before the COVID crisis

were feeling a little bit lost.

They feel a hunger to make something out

of their life, have a purpose,

but sometimes don't know what it is, how to discover it.

And then obviously, in times of crisis,

like now things can get even more difficult.

So in those early years as you mentioned;

you're coming from Brazil,

you're a freshman in Boston,

you didn't like the weather,

you were having trouble getting used

to just even how things worked.

What were you telling inside of your head,

or what do you think it was the traits,

or the muscles that you had that allowed you

to persevere through that and not essentially give up?

- Well, my family thought it was important.

I actually wanted to quit Harvard,

but you know, my family kept saying,

"Ah, ah, Harvard is so important then,

"get it done and get it over with, et cetera,"

and like that.

So after my first year at Harvard

where I flunked a lot of courses

and almost got suspended and like that.

I decided, I made a very stupid decision,

I decided I would go back and I would finish

the next three years in two years.

So I sort of buckled down, took twice the number of courses,

I should normally be taking,

and so I got out of Harvard and I passed,

but (chuckles) I didn't really learn

as much as I could have learned,

or as much as I should have learned.

I was just there to get it over and done with et cetera.

Not only did it later that it became clear to me

how much more I could have learned if I had taken more time.

If I had socialized a bit more.

If I had met a few more of the professors

that were teaching the courses, and things like that.

And basically I was there to get it done with,

and get out of there.

And so it wasn't a good decision, but that's what happened.

And so I got out, and then I went to Europe to work

for a bank in Europe.

And I worked there for about seven months

in this bank and it was very, very boring.

And I always played a lot of tennis

and all my grandparents are Swiss, my parents are Swiss.

So I have a Swiss passport,

so I got invited to play the Swiss nationals in tennis

and I won the Swiss nationals,

which sort of surprised everybody including myself.

- You say that very nonchalantly?

"Yeah, I got invited and I won,

Swiss nationals." (laughs) (Jorge mumbles)

- And then they invited me to play tennis

for the Swiss national tennis team Davis Cup and all that.

I was then 21 and I thought that was much better

than working in a bank.

And so I did that and I played Wimbledon and Roland-Garros,

and all the big tournaments in Europe,

and Davis Cup and I like that.

Meanwhile, my family was sort of wondering,

"Is this guy just gonna play tennis,

"or is he gonna do something else, or?"

Eventually, I came back to Brazil

and started working, et cetera,

but that was sort of my early start.

- And then Jorge. - And then --

- Oh, go ahead.

- Yeah, and then when I came back to Brazil,

I joined all these Ivy Leaguers guys

from the Harvard Business School, Princeton, and like that,

and who would set up a finance company.

And I thought, you know, it looked very good,

and all of them had graduated good Ivy Leaguegy schools

and like that.

Well, the result of that was we went broke in three years,

so that was a very traumatic experience.

So you know, crises are always there,

and you learn something in every one of them,

and hopefully you come out better.

- And you know, in hindsight these are fun stories,

because, you know, many of us know where you ended up,

but at the time, what were you feeling were you,

was it like a crisis of confidence, were you just like,

"I'm not going to be able to make something out of this,"

or were you pretty, you know,

how did you pick up the pieces and say,

"No, I'm gonna keep working on this,"

and especially keep working in finance.

- I'd be pressed for a while,

and you know, I graduated from Harvard,

I thought I was pretty good,

and then go broke at 26 et cetera.

Having just gotten married

like that was not a good experience.

I was invited by a few large organizations to go

and work for them.

And I didn't like that and I liked the liberty of being

in a smaller company, being more of an owner like that.

So I didn't join any of the larger organizations,

and actually joined the small brokerage house in Brazil,

and then that it went reasonably well.

But I really wanted to run my show.

I didn't wanna be part of somebody else's show

and like that.

So after a few years of doing that,

I bought my own brokerage company and set up

what became a successful investment bank later.

- And what I know

what tech ways would you have? - I think my (mumbles).

- Go ahead. - I think my playing tennis

and you know, when you play tennis

you don't win all the sets, or all the games you lose,

and so that sort of taught me that if you don't do well,

you can do better the next time,

you can practice more,

or you can figure things out better like that.

So that's been with me all my life,

I think always trying to do better

and to learn from your mistakes.

And boy, do you learn a lot from your mistakes. (chuckles)

- Now, this is the time we learn the most,

and there's two questions from YouTube

that I think are related to this one,

Marcella Carter asked,

"What was your biggest lesson in life?"

And from YouTube, Matt Gray asks,

"Who was the most influential person in your life?"

So when you're going through this journey,

I'm sure there's a lot of actors there,

but I guess, what advice would you give

to a young Jorge Paulo or someone like you,

who's you know, in that position now,

and then who are your influences,

who kind of got you, kept you on the trajectory?

- Well, you know, when I learned

that it took me a while to learn.

I was a tennis player, a surfer,

and then went to the financial market,

and was basically a trader in the financial market,

so all of those things basically

made me a short term thinker,

I didn't think very far ahead.