Hardware Podcasts

reCAPTCHA and Duolingo: Luis von Ahn

How I Built This · 25 May 2020 · 1h 04m

What this episode covers

Luis von Ahn, co-founder of Duolingo and reCAPTCHA, recounts how a 2000 lecture at Carnegie Mellon inspired him to create CAPTCHA to stop Yahoo spam bots, which he gave away for free. He later evolved this into reCAPTCHA to digitize books for the New York Times, selling the company to Google, before pivoting to Duolingo with co-founder Severin Hacker to provide free language education. Von Ahn details the struggle to find a sustainable business model, the decision to introduce ads and subscriptions, and the massive growth driven by the pandemic.

Most relevant to

founders before launch, early-stage companies and companies scaling up

Topics

Mentioned

Companies
Yahoo, Google, New York Times, Carnegie Mellon University, Union Square Ventures, CNN, BuzzFeed, Facebook
Products
Duolingo, reCAPTCHA, Rosetta Stone, ESP Game, Duolingo ABC
Also
Ashton Kutcher, Tim Ferriss

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