When I was eight years old, in Guatemala City, Louis Von Ahn dreamed of a Nintendo. However, his mother surprised him with a gift that would change his life forever: a computer. Without knowing it, this was the first step to create the captchas and Duolingo.
My mom has always been there. The fact that she bought me a computer changed my life. She always did everything so that I went to the best schools and coming to the United States to university has been the greatest example, ”she says in an interview.
Luis Von Ahn and his secret weapon: a computer
The computer became a new field to explore, in his world, from there his interest in programming was born. Five years later, at 13, he had already created his first show. That childhood gift led him to develop the Captcha and Recaptcha programs in 2000, which he sold to Google in 2009. At just 29 years old, he was already a millionaire. In 2011, he created Duolingo, a digital platform to learn more than 80 languages, which today is worth 700 million dollars and is very close to becoming a unicorn company.
In his native Guatemala, he is a hero, for Latinos he is a champion and for the world he is a genius. He is perhaps the Latin American who has reached the highest in the technology market.
Luis Von Ahn wanted to study Mathematics when he left high school, but he couldn’t find a university in Guatemala that offered that degree. That’s how he came to the United States with a scholarship in 1996 to study at Duke University, to later go to Carnegie Mellon University.
Google and Captchas
Yahoo! implemented in 2000, a system to verify that every time a new email account was created, there was a human being behind it and not a program that would use that account to send hundreds of spam emails. That system was created by the gustemalteco.
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The impact of the system was massive: 200 million times a day Captchas were typed around the world, according to Luis Von Ahn. In addition to Yahoo!, online stores, blogs, and online ticketing systems like Ticketmaster have integrated it into their platforms.
This vision allowed him to found Recaptcha, the evolution of his anti-spam system that had a more productive goal: help digitize a book. In 2009 the Captcha and Recaptcha system was acquired by Google. Although the amount of the transaction was never disclosed, the Guatemalan affirms that with that money there was no need to “go back to work.”
Duolingo and the world of languages
Most people seek to be millionaires and when they achieve it, several retire to enjoy themselves. However, Von Ahn was 29 years old and accomplished that feat. But the memories of education in Guatemala convinced him to return to the world of entrepreneurship, now he would create Duolingo, the most used education platform in the world.
After two years working for Google, helping to integrate Recaptcha, the Guatemalan decided to focus on the world of education.
It was born out of a passion to improve education,” he explained. That’s why she decided to make it totally free.”
Duolingo is found in 82 countries, there are currently more than 200 million users who learn languages for free, including Bill Gates, completing more than 7 billion exercises a month.
Regarding the challenges he has faced within the platform, it is that “until just a few years ago, Duolingo was practically not generating money. The difficult thing is that we don’t want to charge the user for the use of the platform, so we find different ways to be self-sufficient”.
Luis von Ahn affirms that within his career he has had several key moments, one of them was when Apple named Duolingo as the application of the year, a fact that led him to know that the decision to continue undertaking was really the correct one and that his undertaking It helps many people in the world.
Duolingo has grown a lot as a company. It currently has more than 500 employees and is valued at $2.78 billion.
Duolingo’s CEO is focused on three goals for the next few years: making the app a sustainable business, teaching languages in the most effective way possible, and expanding learning through other types of content and experiences.
“We are going to expand to other types of products, such as a podcast for people in the United States to learn Spanish, as well as events with people. My biggest goal is that within two years, a person can perfectly learn a language through Duolingo”, Luis von Ahn tells us.
Jump off the trampoline!
The CEO of the language app gives valuable advice to all start-up entrepreneurs, but it scares them.
That they just do it, in my experience the biggest problem that entrepreneurs have who haven’t started is simply that, they haven’t started, they keep thinking ‘I’d like to start but I don’t know what’, I would tell them, just do it, it’s like jumping off the trampoline, you just have to do it.”
Another piece of advice that he gives to entrepreneurs, he learned from his first boss (actually he was his PhD advisor) Manuel Blum, who taught them to explain projects concisely and clearly, this would help him talk about a clearer way.
Luis Von Ahn was 17 years old when he left Guatemala to study in the United States. Behind him was his family, his friends and his home. “It wasn’t easy, but I did it, the first months I missed my mom a lot, because without that gift that he gave me when I was little, I would not have achieved this.”
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