reCAPTCHA and Duolingo: Luis von Ahn

How I Built This with Guy Raz

Guy Raz | Wondery

Business

4.8 • 31.1K Ratings

🗓️ 25 May 2020

⏱️ 66 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In 2000, Luis von Ahn was starting his PhD in computer science when he attended a talk and happened to learn about one of Yahoo's biggest problems: automated bots were signing up for millions of free Yahoo email accounts, and generating tons of spam. Luis' idea to solve this problem became CAPTCHA, the squiggly letters we type into a website to prove we're human. He gave away that idea for free, but years later, that same idea had evolved into a new way to monetize language learning on the web, and became Duolingo. Today, the popular app is valued at $1.5 billion, and is seeing a big spike in growth while people are confined to their homes. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, Prime Members, you can listen to how I built this early and ad-free on Amazon Music.
0:07.0	Download the app today.
0:09.0	New Year's is here, and with it brings the possibility of change.
0:13.0	As one behavioral scientist put it, first starts are really powerful.
0:17.0	So as you head into 2023, LifeKit is a great resource to help you plan your life and tackle changes, both big and small.
0:24.0	Listen to the LifeKit podcast from NPR.
0:27.0	I was feeling good, I thought, well, we can continue raising money for a while.
0:33.0	At some point, we raised money from Google, Capital G, one of their investment arms.
0:41.0	And the partner from that firm sat me down and she said,
0:45.0	nobody else will invest in this company if you don't figure out how to make money.
0:49.0	You're not going to find a bigger fool.
0:51.0	Where the big is fool.
0:53.0	And that's when we started kind of freaking out and try to figure out how we're going to make money.
0:58.0	But we had no idea how we were going to make money.
1:04.0	From NPR, it's how I built this.
1:06.0	The show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.
1:13.0	I'm Guy Ross and on the show today, have a perfect storm of skill and luck drove Luis van On to create capture, then recapture, and then dualingo.
1:28.0	A foreign language app valued at $1.5 billion.
1:33.0	Think about the small moments or decisions in your life that actually had a huge impact on how your life turned out.
1:43.0	Maybe it was a conversation you struck up with the person next to you on a airplane.
1:48.0	Maybe it was a party you reluctantly went to only to meet the person you'd eventually marry.
1:54.0	Or maybe it was a decision to stay on vacation an extra day that sparked a new idea.
	...

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