CROWN LETTER: SAL KHAN

Chancellor — Didasko Education Initiative

Sal,

You’ve spent two decades proving that world-class education can be free. I’ve spent nine years building the economic infrastructure to make it sustainable.

I’m offering you a Crown.

Didasko is the education initiative within Liana Banyan — a cooperative commerce platform where creators keep 83.3% of revenue and the margin is permanently locked at Cost + 20%. No extraction. No enshittification. The operating agreement makes it structurally impossible.

You built Khan Academy on the principle that education should be accessible to everyone. Didasko is built on the same principle — plus one addition: the people who teach should own what they build.

The Problem You Know

Education platforms extract 50%+ from instructors. Udemy, Coursera, Skillshare — they all take more than they give. Knowledge gets paywalled. Instructors burn out. Students pay premium prices while teachers earn pennies.

You solved access. We’re solving ownership.

How Didasko Works

  1. Instructors create courses, set their prices
  2. Platform adds 20% margin (transparent, disclosed)
  3. Students access quality education at fair prices
  4. Instructors keep 83.3% of every transaction
  5. Contributors earn Joules (platform future value) for their work

The Three-Gear Currency System underneath — Credits, Marks, Joules — has mathematical solvency proofs. This isn’t promises. It’s engineering.

The Lemonade Stand Model: What if students could practice entrepreneurship like pilots practice in flight simulators?

Here’s something I built that I think speaks directly to education — and it started with a dream.

In 7th grade at Mead Junior High in Colorado, I played a lemonade stand simulation game on classroom computers. Most students skimmed the weather and mood data. I read everything — every variable, every signal — and bet everything on sunny days when customers were happy. By doubling repeatedly, I made millions in the simulation.

The lesson: information asymmetry creates advantage, and the ability to iterate without catastrophic loss enables aggressive learning.

But when real entrepreneurship arrived, the rules changed. Real money. Real failure. Real consequences.

So I built what I call the Lemonade Stand Model: a platform architecture that provides real users, real market dynamics, and minimal cost of failure. Students and researchers can run experiments using actual platform participants — not simulations — at subscription prices starting at $5/month.

The system uses Contingency Operators — isolated sandboxes that fork from live platform state with a single-point change, then run forward to observe cascading effects. Students get to practice with real people, but failure doesn’t cost much.

The origin story: On February 13, 2026, I woke at 3:39 AM and immediately transcribed what I’d been dreaming about: “What if scenarios. Mini sandboxes with single point failures or changes to propose a potential pivot… Call it Thought Experiment, so can test nondestructively.” The screenshots of those notes are preserved in our documentation. The dream became a working paper, which became a SQL schema, which became a research infrastructure.

Why this matters for education:

Imagine an undergraduate entrepreneurship course where:

  • The class shares a single $5/month subscription
  • Each student team defines a micro-initiative Delta (a pricing change, a messaging experiment, a service variation)
  • They track real metrics: conversion rates, repeat usage, satisfaction signals
  • Weekly reports give them concrete experience (seeing projected transaction patterns), space for reflective observation (why did the change improve or degrade net score?), abstract conceptualization (what hypotheses explain the pattern?), and active experimentation (refining the Delta) — mirroring Kolb’s experiential learning cycle

Students complete the course having practiced genuine market reasoning with real users and realistic constraints, but at the cost of a small shared subscription instead of real financial risk. This bridges the gap between classroom case discussions and fully capitalized startups.

The platform operates on a Zero Demographics principle — we don’t just avoid collecting demographic data, we have no mechanism that can collect it. This makes it ethically clean for educational research — no IRB concerns about protected populations.

HexIsle — Education Through Play

One of our flagship products is HexIsle, a water-powered physical computing game launching on Kickstarter. No batteries. No screens. Just hydraulics, pneumatics, magnetic coupling, and laminar flow dynamics — all visible, all learnable.

We’ve designed a full K-12 curriculum around it:

  • Elementary: Water flow, cause and effect, basic physics
  • Middle School: Hydraulic systems, gear ratios, pressure dynamics
  • High School: Fluid mechanics, magnetic fields, thermodynamics
  • All Ages: Game theory, resource management, cooperation vs. competition

The game teaches STEAM by being STEAM. Kids don’t study physics — they use physics to grow palm trees, navigate currents, and build islands.

I’d love to explore integration with Khan Academy if there’s interest. A HexIsle unit on your platform could reach millions of students with hands-on learning that starts with play. And the Lemonade Stand Model could give your students a way to practice entrepreneurship with real market dynamics at minimal cost.

What I’m Asking

I don’t want to be CEO.

I’m an amateur engineer who built the thing. I have 18 handwritten journals, early prototypes from 2003 when I was active duty, and 1,200+ Fusion 360 diagrams from recent years. The patent portfolio now includes 1,244 documented innovations, 210 formal claims across 7 applications.

I want to build, invent, solve problems. I don’t want to run a company — or an initiative. That’s why I need Chancellors.

One Crown, One Offer.

No one else is getting this letter for Chancellor of Didasko. We have made no backup plans — because we want you to know how wanted you are.

What This Doesn’t Require

This doesn’t have to take all your time. The Chancellor role is strategic guidance — quarterly calls, occasional input, your name lending credibility to cooperative education. You keep running Khan Academy. We build Didasko with your vision in mind.

Who I Am

I’m a 52-year-old Army veteran — Infantry (11B) and Aviation (15A), helicopter pilot with FAA Commercial Rotary Wing IFR rating. Father of eight. 21 years in IT development. 2118 on a good day — nowadays I hover in the 2080s when I take a chess break from work.

I’ve been thinking about cooperative economics for 47 years. Building this for nine. I read a lot, and I’m good at chess. I suspect you’d appreciate both.

If the answer is no

I’d be grateful for a referral. Who do you know who might be right for this?

Any door you open helps.

A Red Carpet position is held in your name — a reply from a recognized address confirms it’s you and opens the door.

Help each other help ourselves.

Jonathan Jones Founder, Liana Banyan Corporation Founder@LianaBanyan.com 406-578-1232

LINKS:

ATTACHMENTS:

  • The Lemonade Stand Model (research infrastructure framework)
  • ROI Predictability in Deterministic Platform Economics
  • Three-Gear Currency Differential
  • HexIsle K-12 Curriculum Overview

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