Commencement Speech
for Khan Lab School
June, 2025
Thank you, Kim, Sal, the proud parents in the back, maybe even some grandparents, brothers, sisters, the teachers, and of course the graduating class of 2025. It’s good to be back.
I don’t know if you know, but you have a party trick up your sleeves. 2025 is a square graduation year. It is 45^2. That is 20 plus 25, squared. This fact blew my mind. The last year this happened was 1936. There are two other fun facts about 2025, actually. Come up afterward if you’re interested. Yes, I’m a math major :)
The truth is, I’m a 21-year-old who very much hasn’t figured everything out. I graduated two weeks ago from MIT. I cried while walking up in my robes, comforting myself by joking that our regalia made us look like wizards from Hogwarts. Sal invented that analogy. I cried because it was the end of a time I loved. I found my people at MIT, and I was hugging them goodbye. You probably feel the same way about your friends at Khan Lab School. Amazingly, it took me until the day before commencement to realize something strange. At the end of school, they invite you to the beginning. That’s what commencement means. And beginnings... okay, those are exciting.
My first day at Khan Lab School, freshman year, the head of the upper school at the time, Brandon, told us about cleaning crew. Seven students would sweep the floor and wipe down the tables when the day ended. We used these single-use Clorox wipes with a smell that burned my nose, probably a hundred of them or more that first day. My friend Parth and I had an idea. What if we cleaned with reusable rags dipped in cleaning fluid? Brandon said we should write up a proposal. That Friday we spent two hours of goal time doing research. We could save $100/year compared to the Clorox wipes. Chi-Ray can confirm this proposal is the first email he ever received from me!
Right there, I experienced the first spark of what made Khan Lab School so special for me. Whether or not cleaning fluid was the best idea, if you had an idea for how to improve things, you were encouraged to express it and advocate for it. Take this mindset to college and to the world. I learned the concept of a “one-pager.” Guys, this is one of the secret keys to life. Put down vision, problem, proposal, anticipating challenges, and whatever else that allows someone to skim and say yes. Remember, just one page! From the beginning, Khan Lab School was open to this sort of creative, helpful idea.
But it wasn’t always smooth sailing. At the beginning of sophomore year, I decided it was my dream to intern at Khan Academy—to give back to the place that had given me so much, with the potential to help millions of learners around the world. They say you’re connected to anyone by five degrees of separation, and indeed! In August, my mom’s colleague’s son’s friend’s friend (that’s 5), Ben Kraft, agreed to meet me. He was a software engineer at Khan Academy. He was supportive but told me child labor laws were a problem. First rejection. In March I applied again. AP exams hit... I promptly forgot to follow up until June... and learned I’d been rejected again. I scrambled, but what happened next taught me some of the most valuable lessons of my life.
My friend Drew Bent, at the time a teacher at Khan Lab School, coached me based on his favorite class at MIT called “11.011 The Art and Science of Negotiation.” He helped me see from Khan Academy’s perspective. KA might worry that I was just 15 years old, needed a project, needed to be paid, and might not be all that useful. Plus, the software intern program was full. How could I fix each concern? I had an idea. I’d just learned multivariable calculus on Khan Academy, but unlike their courses on trigonometry or precalculus, this course had no practice problems. What if I built them? I’d be a math content intern, unpaid, and hit the ground running. I was feeling very satisfied at that point, but the next thing Drew said made my stomach lurch: “What if we walk across the hall and pitch it to them right now?” My heart skipped beats the whole walk over. I’m glad Drew led me along, though. It turns out progress can be 100 times faster live compared to over email. The math team was all smiles, and that summer I ended up creating 600 practice problems. It was the best summer of my life, surrounded by so many people who cared about education.
The whole story reinforced that this was a place where people would listen if you had an idea for how to be useful. It was fine if I felt confused, lost, or unsuccessful along the way. The third time was the charm for Khan Academy. Now there’s a new company I dream of working at, and I submitted my ninth application last week. I coined a new phrase, “Ninth time’s the charm!” Wish me luck.
And look, I haven’t figured everything out. But let me tell you some of the things I currently believe. And the start of it is an idea from Paul Graham, a Silicon Valley guy who writes a lot of essays, that very few of us are billionaires, but most of us are time billionaires. There’s a good chance you have over a billion seconds left in your life, or about 32 years for the math majors. The way you lose your time is the same way you lose money: investing it badly. A project can drag on and you’re not getting something out of it. One of my mentors, Ben Spector, told me once, “We live in an extremely exciting time.” If you are going to spend your time, it should be moving you in an extremely exciting direction. Four principles have helped me stay focused.
First of all: honor your time. If you realize something is not right, quit it. It is actually good to stop. If your time is crammed full of okay things, you might not be able to say “yes” to the incredible thing that shows up later. A lot of times in my life I felt nervous I hadn’t decided what to do yet. It is so tempting to collapse the uncertainty, but if you leave things nervously uncertain, you make the space to say “yes” when something incredible arrives. This fall, I had no idea what I wanted to do for my master’s thesis research. But I forced myself to keep time open by taking only two classes. I researched all sorts of dead ends that September until my supervisor wrote to me, “Hey, want to write up a paper on some ideas I had?” I said, “Let’s write it up all weekend. We can call it a write-a-thon.” We wrote maniacally, maybe 60 hours in a week. That paper ended up launching the research I did the rest of the year.
The second thing I believe is it helps to learn to love change of state. This was the bitterest lesson for me, because I love calmness and consistency. When plans change, the easiest reaction is to try to reconstruct what existed before; a clear-eyed analysis might contend that what existed is gone, and it is time to plan anew. A university in Ukraine faced this choice the day of the invasion in 2022; the president of that university chose to abandon a whole slate of research and projects, and instead phoned up the government and said, “I have 100 analysts and researchers at your disposal. What do you need?” This university continued with its eye toward what is possible now and not yesterday, and it is the one I ended up working with to create Khan Academy for Ukraine, a project a friend and I started 2 years ago to translate Khan Academy materials to create free, world-class education for millions of children in Ukraine. More recently, and more personally, I get the question a lot, “What are you doing after graduating?” You might be getting a similar question often. My answer as of yesterday is “I don’t know.” My plan was to fly to Israel next week to work over the summer at an AI startup. After yesterday’s events, that flight is cancelled. This change of plans might seem large, but I actually expect it to be very small compared to the scientific and technological changes that will pile up this decade. When parenting, some advice sometimes is “prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child.” I don’t think the road is making any preparations for us, and so we will need to be ready to adjust very flexibly this generation. I think we can do that.
When things might seem uncertain, the third thing I believe is you will get much farther if you rely on internal motivation. This is not what other people think you should want. This is what connects directly to your life goals, and it is your strength. For me, my life goal is not to be an AI researcher. That’s the difference between a how and a why. My life goal is to have a big, positive impact on society. That’s why I do things. The summer at Khan Academy fit the bill perfectly. It was exactly what I, not my parents, not my friends, what I cared about. Whatever goals make your heart sing, lean into them.
And when you lean into them, the fourth thing I believe is that you can move a lot faster than you may think is possible. One especially powerful tool on your side is phone calls. Your parents know what these are. A lot of us might prefer to email or text, but if you have a problem, or an opportunity, there’s no faster way than a phone call. For example, let’s say I need to remember some important detail, like how long this speech is supposed to be. Hmm, let me call Sita. [Call Sita.] “Hey Sita, how long is this speech supposed to be?” [Hold speaker phone to mic. Sita speaks.] “15 minutes.” [I speak.] “Ah ah, ok! Thanks, Sita!” [Hang up.]
I’d like to conclude with a thought experiment from my favorite commencement speech.
Imagine yourself in 50 years. You’re almost 70. You’re near the end of your career. But imagine you’re on your couch, 2075, and you start to reflect on your life. You start to think of all the successes you’ve had, career successes, family successes, the great memories you’ve made. But then you begin to think about the things you wish you had done a little bit different. Your regrets. And I can imagine what they might be. You’ll wish you had spent more time with your children. You’ll wish you had told your spouse that you loved them more frequently. You’ll wish you had told your parents how much you love them and how much you appreciate them before they passed away.
And just while that’s happening, a genie appears. The genie says, “Well, I’ve been listening in to your regrets. You seem like a good person. I’m willing to give you a second chance, if you are open to it.” And so you say, “Sure.”
And so the genie snaps his fingers, you blink your eyes, and when you open your eyes, you find yourself right there, right where you are right now, June 13th, 2025, at Khan Lab School, some crazy guy named Laker is giving a speech. And you say, “Oh my God, I’m in my 17 or 18 year old, pain-free body again. I’m around my peers again. This genie was serious. I have a second chance. I can have all the successes, all of the adventures that I had the first time around, but now... I can optimize things. Now when I see my classmates and I give them a hug, I can hug them a little bit harder. Now that my parents are back, I can finally tell them how much I appreciate them. I can finally give them more hugs, more time. I can do everything better. I can laugh more. I can sing more. I can dance more. I can be more of a source of positivity for people around me and empower more people.”
Now, thank you, Sal, for inspiring me and all of us with those words from your commencement speech, MIT 2012. With great power comes great responsibility, KLS Class of 2025. You are very smart. You are very well connected. You have surprisingly good credentials as a college student—almost anyone will be willing to talk to you. And the world has great need. Be powerful. Be assertive. Honor your time. Follow your deepest why. Pick up the phone. Advocate for your good ideas. And today, just hug your friends and family a little bit harder.