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luis-von-ahn

3 min read

reCAPTCHA and Duolingo Founder Luis von Ahn

Podcast

  • Resouces

  • What was behind Luis’ early desire to become a Math professor and why did Luis switch from Math to Computer Science?

    • Luis was a math nerd. By doing math research he doesn’t need to deal with people.

  • Describe the problem posed by the Yahoo! Chief Scientist at a talk that Luis went to, the solution that Luis and his advisor came up with, and how much money he made on it.

    • There are people out there registering large amounts of email addresses using computer program.
    • Let computer generate distorted letters and digits that computers cannot read but human can.
    • He didn’t make anything – Luis just gave the code to Yahoo.

  • Describe the “game” that Luis developed as part of his PhD research, and who bought the technology.

    • “Finding things that computers cannot do but human can.”
    • Go to website, randomly paired with another, you are shown the same picture, now type the word you think the other people is typing. – This creates labels for the image.
    • Google bought this technology.

  • Describe Luis’ rationale for why his captcha technology needed to have people do something useful in solving the captcha.

    • People spent so much time solving CAPTCHA, can we let them do some meaningful work out of this?

  • Describe how Luis’ first company came out of a project digitizing old issues of The New York Times, who bought the company, and what amount of the money went to investors.

    • $42k for every year of content for New York Times.
    • Luis can’t take checks directly from The New York Times; hence he started a company.
    • Google bought this.
    • 5% of the money went to CMU, others all went to Luis himself.

  • Describe the problem that Luis and PhD student Severin Hacker come up with to work on.

    • Do something that gives education for free to the poor.

  • Describe the “right-place-at-the-right-time” moment for DuoLingo.

    • Connected with venture capitalists.

  • Describe the “biggest fool” moment Luis encountered in raising venture funds, the standard ways of making money from an app, and how DuoLingo settled on a way to make money.

    • DuoLingo didn’t had any plan to make money at the beginning.
    • Typical ways of making money: ad, pay-wall, selling user data.
    • Ended up adding ads – then subscription to turn off ads.

  • What did Luis attribute to DuoLingo’s success over other language learning tools like Rosetta Stone and why?

    • It’s free.
    • Other apps are crappy.
    • DuoLingo teaches you really well from beginning to intermediate level.

  • What was the most meaningful insight for you personally from Luis’s story?

    • Think differently, identify the key problem, explore what is fun.

  • What is the current estimated current market cap for Duolingo?

    • $6.75B

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