What would the world look like if everyone had access to the same level of education? What could we accomplish?

Sal Khan, founder of Khan Academy, is working to make education available to anyone, anywhere in the world, for free—with programs hosted entirely in the cloud. In this episode of Formative, Khan relates how an informal tutoring session for his cousin and a sci-fi novel by Isaac Asimov led him to create a not-for-profit that reached over 100 million students in the past year alone.

Khan and his sister were born in Metairie, La. and raised by their mother, who immigrated to the US from India.

“We weren’t well off,” he shares in the video.

Khan’s early life was heavily influenced by his hardworking mother and an equally intelligent older sister whose previous success in school helped her brother get fast-tracked into the gifted program. There Khan met teachers who encouraged him to explore all of his interests and, in doing so, spurred an early love of learning.

“Now when I look back,” he recalls, “that program is what kept my curiosity from being squashed.”

After attending MIT and Harvard, Khan went on to become a hedge fund analyst in Boston. While he was earning a lot of money, he wasn’t following his passion for education. He considered becoming a professor, but found that professors spend more of their time on research than education.

So he started out tutoring his younger cousins in math and creating videos for them to watch before they met with him for tutoring sessions. What he found was that his cousins were learning more from the videos, and the first cousin he took on as a pupil went from the bottom of the class to the very top in less than six months.

His videos started to gain traction outside of his family. As the view counts grew exponentially, Khan made the decision along with his wife to commit one year to turning his educational work into a full-time not-for-profit.

Khan’s work drew the interest of many philanthropists, but after expressing interest in his program, they declined to get involved. His luck turned when he met Ann Doerr, who gave him his first major investment—of $100,000.

Today, Khan Academy has millions of students, with programs in 36 languages, and is bringing free education to the masses.