If you’re not one of their 500 million users, Duolingo is a phenomenally successful app where you practise a language in small chunks every day. Launched in 2012, it has become the number one language learning app and the most downloaded education app in the world. The company floated in 2021 and currently has a market cap of just under 4 billion dollars. 

It’s rare for a founder to be brilliant at both invention and business but Luis Von Ahn, the Co-Founder and CEO of Duolingo, is one of them. Before Duolingo, he invented Captcha - those squiggly letters you have to write out to prove you’re not a computer. The guy’s a genius, and that’s a fact. He actually won an award for being one in 2006, the prestigious Macarthur Fellows Program award. It’s colloquially known as the genius grant, because it’s said you have to be one to get it. 

Luis grew up in a single parent household in Guatemala. His mother spent all the money she could sending him to the best school she could afford. This experience, of seeing the difference between those who receive a good education and those who don’t, would later form the basis of Duolingo. But when Luis and his Co-Founder Severin started Duolingo in 2012 they had a big problem - how could they keep their users coming back? Listen to find out. 

Show notes:

• (01:50) - The beginning of Duolingo
• (08:40) - Getting first interested in computers at 8 years old. 
• (11:15) - Inventing CAPTCHA
• (16:00) - Selling reCAPTCHA to Google 
• (19:45) - How he handled suddenly becoming very rich 
• (23:30) - The key things they did right with Duolingo in the early days
• (25:25) - How they got their users to stay motivated
• (29:00) - Working out how to teach Gen Z
• (33:00) - Why he doesn’t see Google Translate as a competitor
• (35:40) - Using crowdsourcing as a tool to grow the business
• (40:35) - His advice for other entrepreneurs

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