FOUNDER SERIES
Meet This 43-Year-Old “Brilliant Mind” Behind the $2.79 Billion Language Learning Platform Duolingo
Luis Von Ahn is the co-founder and CEO of the most well-known language-learning site in the world, as well as the founder of the startup reCAPTCHA, which was acquired by Google in 2009.
Luis von Ahn, a Guatemalan businessman and consulting professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was born on August 19, 1978.
He is credited with being a crowdsourcing pioneer.
He is the co-founder and CEO of Duolingo, the most well-known language-learning site in the world, as well as the founder of the startup reCAPTCHA, which was acquired by Google in 2009.
By the time Duolingo founder Luis von Ahn turned 24, he was already a millionaire several times over.
And, this is his story…
Early Life and Education
Guatemala City was the city where Luis von Ahn was born and raised. He is German-Jewish and a Guatemalan.
Von Ahn was raised in an affluent home by parents who were both doctors.
He sees his attendance at a private English language school in Guatemala City as a significant privilege.
His mother gave von Ahn a Commodore 64 computer when he was eight years old, sparking his interest in technology and computer science.
Von Ahn enrolled at Duke University when he was 18 years old and graduated with a Bachelor of Science (BS) in Mathematics in 2000.
Later, in 2005, he received his Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University.
At the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, Von Ahn joined the faculty in 2006.
Von Ahn’s Career
Early work by Von Ahn focused on the topic of encryption.
He was the first to offer precise definitions of steganography and to demonstrate the viability of private-key steganography, along with Nicholas J. Hopper and John Langford.
With Manuel Blum, he conducted early groundbreaking research on CAPTCHAs in 2000, which are computer-generated tests that people can easily pass but that machines have not yet mastered.
Web sites utilize these tools to stop automated programs, or bots, from engaging in widespread abuse, such as automatically creating a large number of accounts or buying a big number of tickets for scalpers to resell.
Due to a lot of coverage in the New York Times, USA Today, on the Discovery Channel, NOVA scienceNOW, and other mainstream media, CAPTCHAs gave von Ahn his first significant level of public renown.
Today, 200 million individuals complete a CAPTCHA every day, according to von Ahn, who spoke with CNBC Make It.
Then in 2007, Von Ahn created reCAPTCHA, a new kind of CAPTCHA that aids in the digitization of books.
In reCAPTCHA, words that optical character recognition could not recognize are delivered to users all over the internet to be recognized.
The images of the words that are displayed to the user are taken directly from old books that are being converted into digital format.
Over 100,000 websites currently employ ReCAPTCHA, which is currently transcribing 40 million words every day.
Duolingo
Duolingo is a platform for language learning that von Ahn and his Ph.D. student Severin Hacker started creating in 2009.
They established a business with the same name, running it under the leadership of von Ahn as CEO and Hacker as CTO.
Duolingo began as a private beta test in November 2011 and was made available to the general public in June 2012.
Duolingo had a $1.5 billion market value as of May 2020.
Currently, 6% of Duolingo’s user base subscribes, which enables the firm to continue offering portions of its services for free to millions of additional users.
Recently in March 2022, the company’s market capitalization was evaluated as $2.79 billion.
Von Ahn revealed in an interview with NPR that during the COVID-19 outbreak, Duolingo’s user base increased.
Continue learning about — Duolingo FAQs
Honors
He has received various awards and acclaim for his work on CAPTCHAs and human computation on a global scale.
He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2006, a Sloan Fellowship in 2009, a Fellowship from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation in 2009, a Fellowship from Microsoft for New Faculty in 2007, and a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers in 2012.
He has also been recognized on numerous achievement lists, such as Silicon.com’s 50 Most Influential People in Technology, MIT Technology Review’s TR35: Young Innovators Under 35, and Fast Company’s 100 Most Innovative People in Business.
He was also named one of Discover’s 50 Best Brains in Science.
The Key Takeaway
Many items in Luis von Ahn’s work have him mirrored in them.
He produced items that have a global impact: Data-Privacy.
In other words, he had confidence in his ability to carry out his vision.
Due to his aptitude for computer technology, he was paving the way for his mission — education.
Because of the chances that being bilingual provided, he wanted to spread the gift of interacting with others on a deeper, more heartfelt level, and that’s how he creates Duolingo.
Von Ahn claims that his success is the result of hard effort and perseverance rather than intelligence.
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