Welcome to the last episode of our first season of the Duolingo Spanish podcast.

Today we bring you a story from someone you might recognize.

Here's a hint, a clip from one of his TED Talks.

So what we've been working on for the last year and a half is a new website.

It's called Duolingo, where the basic idea is people learn a new language for free

while simultaneously translating the web.

So basically they're learning by doing.

That's Luis Von An, co-founder and CEO of Duolingo, back in 2011.

There's a path that led Luis to this stage.

And it starts before he launched a Duolingo or became a computer science professor

at Carnegie Mellon University.

It starts back when he was a regular kid growing up in Las Udares, Veguade Mala.

He has fond memories of that time, a visit to his family's candy factory,

and of how obsessed he was with math and science.

But there's one memory from the year he graduated high school

that Luis wishes he could erase.

Even though it's what eventually led him to leave Guatemala for the United States.

It happened often during those final years of the Civil War in Guatemala.

By the mid-90s, when the war between the country's military and communist guerrilla fighters was over,

more than 200,000 indigenous people had been killed.

As a child, Luis was mostly unaware of the war because it was fought in the rural areas of the country.

Until the day, his family got that fateful call.

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