I’ve already had several careers and, at this point, I just want to do good work
Anna Berns partners with international volunteers and nonprofits to accelerate Khan Academy’s mission of a free world-class education for anyone, anywhere
Quick profile on Anna
- Mountain View, California
- ~25 years since graduating from Cornell University with a Master’s degree in Operations Research and Industrial Engineering
- International content program manager and localization community liaison at Khan Academy, past experience with Benetech, a nonprofit that empowers communities with software for social good
- Anna helps to scale Khan Academy’s free online educational content to 40+ languages like Bulgarian, French, Turkish, and Korean.
- Interview date = Feb 26, 2020
How did you get to where you are?
I thought I would be a teacher — it was largely driven by the fact that both of my parents were teachers. I didn’t really understand what being a teacher meant, but it was more that I associated adulthood with being a teacher. Growing up in a household like that, it was clear to me that education was important. When I came to Khan Academy, my parents probably thought “finally! finally she’s doing something.” They don’t totally understand online education because they’re very old school teachers, but I think it’s fun for them to know I’m doing something education-related, even though I’m not teaching.
My parents met at the University of Heidelberg in a philosophy class. They were very much into literature, classics, and philosophy. They both always loved academics and it was clear they were going to do that with their lives. They don’t totally understand where the techie thing came from for me. I always wanted to do something more applied, compared to their more theoretical approach.
I have always been a “math person,” and I knew I wanted to do something math-y for a job. When I did math in undergrad it was very theoretical, although super interesting. At that point I knew I didn’t want to teach, but instead apply math to something real world and tangible. I started doing applied math and operations research, which is basically math modeling of real world problems. My first job was what we would now call data science, but it was long enough ago that we just called it data analysis.
After grad school in operations research/industrial engineering, I was recruited to Silicon Valley to work for a software company. I visited for the interview and the company felt right, compared to larger consulting companies I was also talking with. The company here was smaller, we were building custom software for clients, and I really liked the people I interviewed with. It was also the end of a very long winter in upstate New York, and I interviewed here in Mountain View in March and I didn’t even have to wear a jacket! It was a really unique place and when I started the company had 100 people. Then we merged with another company and then we were bought by another company. The company kept getting bigger and the culture changed. I learned a lot by working with great people (both colleagues and customers) and was technically challenged overall.
But, at the end of the day, we were building software to help big companies make more money. I got to a point where I just didn’t care about that, and needed to find something else to do that I could care more about.
I had been doing ballet for most of my life. When I came out here after grad school for work, I started taking classes at a local ballet school and volunteering for them. As I started getting more involved I started to think about switching into nonprofit, but I didn’t really know what that meant and how to figure that out. I began volunteering much more and joined the board of that nonprofit; in the process, I learned about what it means to run a nonprofit, fundraise, and spent a lot of time over several years on this. This reinforced to me that I wanted to not only do this as a nonprofit volunteer, but do this type of work as a day in and day out job.
I thought I was going to have to choose between nonprofit and tech, while wanting to find something that was both.
As a planner, it was a very odd thing for me to decide to leave my job without having a plan yet. I took time and did a lot of informational interviewing with people and many short-term consulting gigs to figure out the kind of work I wanted to do. At the time, I had morphed into doing a lot of account management, product management, and partner management type of roles because others noticed that I could talk to both engineers and business people; I could be the liaison in the middle. Then I got really lucky. Someone saw a job posting that made them think of me. The post was from a nonprofit tech company in Palo Alto, called Benetech, that was hiring for a product manager for software used by human rights groups. The company also built software for environmental project management and for people with disabilities — for example someone who couldn’t read a book due to a visual impairment or a reading disability. Their tagline was “technology serving humanity.” It was perfect for me and I started doing product management for the human rights program, but then had a zillion different jobs across operations and business development as well, since it was a small team of 20 people. I stayed there more than 10 years and when I left it was around 80 people or so. During my time there I had many, many different roles.
For me it has never been that I’ve had a goal to get to a certain position or seniority level
I’ve never cared about being at the top. I want to be respected, but thinking about the stepping stones to a position has never been interesting to me. I want to do good work and I want to feel good about the work I do.
How did you get into internationalization?
Benetech is where I learned about internationalization because of our human rights work. Most of our users were not in the US and also not English speakers. It appealed to my love of all things international, since I spent a lot of time traveling while growing up since my mom was from Germany. Being able to work internationally was really amazing and super fun.
I realized how seeing the software in other languages makes me inordinately happy
I don’t know why I geek out about that. Even my husband would recognize I’m in a good mood when I’d come home and assume it was because I worked on translation stuff that day. This eventually morphed into other roles. The human rights program was one of the smaller programs at the organization. Someone had to design the projects and I would take on that role since there weren’t too many other people involved. For the budgeting, reports for the funders, and operations, it was similar in terms of stepping in to lead those parts of the program. I just started to own more and more for the human rights program and eventually even some project/grant management for other programs.
After Benetech, I went to a nonprofit in the East Bay which is close to where I live, and it was a better commute with a young family. My role was a director of operations role for a nonprofit that provided services for local seniors. It was neat because I had never worked for an organization whose efforts were embedded in my own community, and it was great to have a direct impact to on the community where I lived.
But, I had also been thinking a lot about educational tech. This is party because of having school aged kids and seeing different ed-tech tools used across teachers and classrooms. I knew the potential for ed-tech was amazing, but I also saw how some of the tools were not that great, having done a lot of QA and thinking about user experience. From that, I knew ed-tech would be super interesting and something I would get excited about. So, when I saw a role at Khan Academy open up I was thrilled about the potential to work in ed-tech and on the international side of things again. Khan Academy wanted someone to manage the community and partnerships with international organizations who are translating and localizing our content. It was the perfect combination for me. Not only could I feel good about the mission and being impact driven, but it also genuinely made me feel exhilarated about my work.
What does your role at Khan Academy look like?
Day to day is never the same for me, which is fun. I work with folks who are at Khan Academy, but I work even more with international volunteers and nonprofit organizations who we collaborate with to make our educational resources available in 40+ languages. A lot of what we do is onboarding and training new language advocates. Language advocates localize content, make content relevant to local curricula, train teachers, work with the Ministry of Education in their countries, do awareness raising and outreach, and also talk about education policy. We provide all sorts of support to help them do their jobs. Part of my job is to create a sense of community among these language advocates.
My job is part community manager, part support, part training, and being the liaison between language advocates and Khan Academy.
Some of it is telling Khan Academy the needs and desires of the language advocates. Some of it is making sure that the language advocates know if we’re updating the product or adding in new content at Khan Academy. There’s constant communication in both directions and being an “advocate for the language advocates”.
There are over 60 languages being worked on at Khan Academy by the language advocates. Some of these language teams are literally just 1–2 people volunteering their time (some of whom are doing the translation on top of their school work or actual job). Some are part of an education nonprofit in their country where this is one of their projects and they have full time staff and also volunteers. Some language teams have 20 staff members and hundreds of volunteers! I would say there are probably 20 to 30 language advocates who I interact with on an ongoing basis.
Occasionally people still ask me questions about what I want to do with my career.
I’ve already had several careers and at this point I just want to do good work
What success is, to me, is that more kids around the world get to learn. As you’re further along in your career and have experienced more things, you can focus a little more on what does and doesn’t make you happy. And for me, the work I do at Khan Academy makes me really excited.
What are some challenges you’ve faced in joining the nonprofit world?
I worked at for profit organizations for ~10 years and have been in nonprofit for ~15 years now. The obvious difference is that I made a decision to take a pay cut when moving to nonprofit. I’m still not making what I made in the for profit world when I left it many many years ago. But, I do know I am happier at work, so it’s worth it to me. In the for profit world I had gotten to a point where I wasn’t happy and feeling fulfilled at work.
Then, I think every company feels they have budget and resource constraints. Obviously, when you’re a nonprofit, you have more of that. You’re constantly having to reprioritize and make tradeoff decisions because of how constrained you are. This is really just an extension of what you would do in any other job.
It depends on the nonprofit, but you can also spend a lot of time fundraising. This takes time away from doing the actual work. You’ve made a choice to spend all your energy on something that makes you excited, like the environment, arts, human rights, education, or whatever the cause is. It can then be frustrating since you want to be spending time doing the good work for whatever makes you excited, but you have to do all sorts of fundraising related activities. In the past, at smaller organizations like Benetech or LIFE ElderCare, I would work really closely with the people doing the fundraising. This is because they were raising money for the project I designed and which I would implement and then ultimately report back on to the funders. As a result, I was very tightly involved in fundraising. Most nonprofits get project specific funding and then your ability to do the right thing when you look at the situation higher level becomes much harder, because you have to operate with such a project-centric approach. Khan Academy is lucky in that a lot of funding we receive is not as project specific. Obviously some people still spend a lot of time fundraising at Khan Academy, but it’s nice to be at an organization where I don’t have to be in the nitty-gritty of providing support for seeking funding for each individual project. Now, it’s much more about providing more basic information around how many languages we support at Khan Academy and the international usage (e.g. minutes of learning) we have across the world, to help those on the fundraising team do their jobs.
Another thing I’ve talked a lot about with folks in the nonprofit space is that it’s very easy to get overwhelmed because you realize how large the problems are in the world.
You have to focus on the things you can do, even if it feels small. That means saying “I will do this thing well and make a difference; and if we all collectively do a small amount, then we’ll make a larger change.” Without this approach, the problems seem too big and you stop trying to even do the little things.
What about challenges more specific to Khan Academy?
It still all comes down to resourcing again. I have a set of end users who aren’t the typical user of Khan Academy who are doing the learning. The community of language advocates and their teams are my end user, and they are translating or identifying gaps in a user’s learning experience in other languages. They want to have the capability to do things that would improve education in their country, and are using tools we create, but we don’t always have the resources to do those initiatives. We constantly gather their feedback and then decide what to prioritize based on the available resources.
For example, let’s say we have heard that 10+ of the language advocates want one feature compared to another one off request from 1–2 people. We can then focus on the ask that’s a bit larger and talk to the product folks about what we can do to address the initiative that many advocates would like. There are a lot of areas where, if we had more engineering resources and ability to do more technical work, then we would improve international overall.
Once a year, we have a convention where many of the Khan Academy language advocates come together in the US or elsewhere. In addition to overall community building, during that time we look at all the improvements we can make and then prioritize them. One suggestion that came up at the last convention a year and a half ago was that, although there are tools that let people translate easily, the learning is built around a US-centric curriculum. What if I’m in Bulgaria or Georgia or Turkey or Belgium? In those countries the curriculum might be entirely different. We need the ability to map to the local curriculum so teachers in those countries feel comfortable still teaching what they are supposed to be doing according to country level guidance. We actually built tools to do this and that was amazing. We now have almost 150 courses that were built by language advocates to map back to the local curriculum and that’s because we prioritized this ask, even with limited resources.
What tips do you have on how to merge social impact with work?
There are now many more places to look for with nonprofit / tech combo jobs, like ffwd.org and nten.org, if you want to make that your full time job focus. You can talk to people who have done it — and I’m always willing to talk to folks who are thinking about it. Then you could join groups on LinkedIn or Facebook where you can learn about areas you’re excited about just by listening to other people’s thoughts and experiences.
I would say for folks who don’t want to, or cannot for some reason or the other, have their job directly linked with social impact, then they can find companies that have a corporate social responsibility program or a company foundation. This allows employees to get involved in projects, bring up projects they might be interested in, or vote for who foundation money can go towards. You can also encourage your company to create these kind of programs. If you can find a bunch of like-minded people, you can organize volunteer activities or create a Slack (group chat) channel at your company, to talk about aspects of the world that are interesting to you to create community and opportunities.
There are also a lot ways to use your professional skills to help nonprofits, even if you don’t want to work for them as a career move. Most people think that if they volunteer with a nonprofit they’ll go to a food bank or help build a house with Habitat for Humanity. There are also situations where a nonprofit might need someone to help them think about marketing or create a strategy plan or build the first version of a website. That’s where you can use your technical skills to help. Through that experience you can determine if using your skills in the nonprofit world is even something you would like to do.
If you could change one thing about the world overnight, what would you do?
It might sound kind of silly, but I actually think if you could make everyone assume good intent from everyone else, it would make a huge difference. There are so many problems in the workplace, internationally, politically, and everywhere else, because some people go in to the situation assuming bad intent. From there, misunderstandings happen and things get worse. But, by assuming good intent, and a basic level of empathy, we can each make a small change that goes a long way.
References
- thanks to Albert Hwang and Mimi Chen for connecting me with Anna
- Khan Academy — website
- Khan Academy — contribute to translating
- Khan Academy — news and info about international efforts
- 42 Silicon Valley — 2019 women in tech week
