How Duolingo’s CEO harnessed our game addiction for good
Corner Office from Marketplace
Marketplace
4.8 • 545 Ratings
🗓️ 13 March 2019
⏱️ 14 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
You already know Luis von Ahn’s work. He helped create CAPTCHA, the technology that helps control spam on the internet and crowd-sources humans to help computers read and digitize old text. In 2012, he co-founded Duolingo, a free language learning app. To him, the app was meant to solve “this mismatch where most of the people trying to learn a language didn’t have $1,000, whereas the software that would teach you a language cost about $1,000.” Von Ahn says there are now more Americans learning on his app than there are in the public school system. Why? Because Duolingo works like a video game.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey everybody, it's Kai Rosdahl. Thanks for downloading this episode of the Corner Office podcast. |
| 0:08.5 | Today I'm talking to Louis von An. He is the co-founder and CEO of Duolingo, the free language |
| 0:14.3 | learning app. It's got something like 300 million users all over the planet. It makes learning new |
| 0:19.7 | languages feel a little bit like playing a game. |
| 0:22.3 | He's also a computer scientist used to teach at Carnegie Mellon University. |
| 0:26.5 | Before Duolingo, he co-founded the system CAPTCHA. |
| 0:30.0 | You know those things, right? |
| 0:31.0 | Those little tests, the numbers, and the letters that can tell if you're a human or a robot on |
| 0:35.0 | the Internet that he gave away to Yahoo, as you'll hear. |
| 0:40.2 | We're expecting you. |
| 0:41.6 | Won't you have a seat? |
| 0:42.7 | Ready to go to work? |
| 0:45.2 | Luis von on. |
| 0:46.0 | Welcome to the program. |
| 0:47.1 | Hi. |
| 0:47.3 | Thank you for having me. |
| 0:48.2 | When you were trying to raise money for this thing, what was the elevator pitch? |
| 0:52.5 | What did you go out to your funders, your venture |
| 0:55.1 | capitalists and say? Well, I basically said Duolingo is going to be, well, it depends on which |
| 1:01.6 | round of funding. In the earlier rounds. Let's start the first round, you know, the early |
| 1:05.9 | rounds when you were still trying to figure out what it was. Yeah, in the earlier rounds, |
| 1:10.0 | you know, we hadn't even really launched an app or anything. |
... |
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