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Khan Academy Salman Khan with the Big Hairy Audacious Goal of providing a free, world class education to anyone, anywhere, anytime. That’s a lot of knowledge. Having long been inspired and captivated by the Khan Academy, I was really curious to know how they plan to do it. Ben Kamens How to Scale your Startup to Millions of Users .
The short answer : develop a strong team, focus on features, let Google App Engine
Some people seem to be turned off by all the GAE love in the interview. Part of it is that the interviewer is Fred Sauer, Developer Advocate for Google App Engine, so there’s a level of familiarity between the two. But the biggest part is simply that they really like GAE, for all the reasons your are supposed to like GAE. And that’s OK. In this day and age you are free to love whichever platform you choose.
Biggest surprise :
A profile on 60 Minutes drove more traffic than TechChrunch, HackerNews, and everything else combined. Old media is not dead.
Part I liked the best :
GAE is an abstraction over all the typical scalability issues and that let’s you focus on business problems. All abstractions leak , you are going to have to deal with problems no matter what you choose, but you are choosing the type of problems you want to deal with by the platform you select. It's all about understanding the tradeoffs you're making.
Here’s my gloss on the major takeaways from the interview:
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