PODCAST: How I built this (Luis von Ahn - Captcha & Duolingo)

How I built this from Guy Raz tells the story of entrepreneurs on their story from the beginning to the current moment. Guy Raz is an expert at dissecting the story and helping understand the story. I have learned so many lessons from these stories and I'm hoping you learn from them. You can listen to it here.

Luis had a love for math and machines. He grew up around them in Guatemala and this provided the base for his love of computers and technology. It's this story coming from Guatemala that is so remarkable and inspiring. His work has always been finding problems and creating solutions.

Lessons Learned:

1. Power of people

Luis understood the power of people and used computers to harness this power. He was mad that people would use captcha and it was a ridiculous waste of time for humanity. He ended up using crowdsourcing through captcha to have people digitize thousands of books. Computers could not distinguish all the words in books and so he used this concept to have people do the effort. This is also how he figured out how to make money by having newspapers pay to have him use the captcha to digitize book archives. This was my favorite part hearing how he used captcha to digitize because it is so ridiculously smart. He got millions to do work for him!

The Captcha Algorithm:

The algorithm sends two words and they know the one word they send you and not the other. They check if you are human by checking if you get the word they know and then if 10 people get the word you don't know the same, then it logs it. The accuracy of this process was nearly 99%. I love hearing how they did it because it shows how simple but genius it is.

2. Solve problems

Yahoo had a problem with spam email accounts and inboxes were filling with spam. Luis heard about this and he and his advisor created a solution: distinguish between humans and computers. Humans could not create spam accounts at the scale of humans. So, they used these pictures as a test. They were driven by the problem and creating the solution.

3. Academia

Luis had many opportunities to go into the tech world and make loads of money. He got calls from Bill Gates! He chose academia because he a passion for learning and working with students. This is something I am always thinking about because you can give so much back.

4. Practicality

Luis originally wanted to crowdsource Duolingo by having people on the platform translate for news organizations. They could collaborate and then sell it back to the CNN website. This ended up not working out because there were too many ways to translate and also translations were not monetarily viable. He had to pivot and change the way he made the service.

He originally wanted to be solely free. He prided himself so much on giving people the power of language for free. He said no ads, no charging. However, by doing this he cornered himself because his mission of language learning had to produce money or the overarching idea wouldn't work. He put Ads and then people started asking if they could pay for no ads. He realized this is where he could make money. The freemium model ended up working best for his business. This journey from free to freemium was key because it shows how you need to be adaptable and practical to make your overall mission possible.

5. GAMEIFY

Duolingo gamified learning and this is what makes it so smart. It encourages people to use it. It makes it fun, exciting and motivating. This a key in tech. Companies like FitBit, Instagram, Facebook gamify many experiences so that people continue to use their service. In this case, though, people are motivated to do something worthwhile: learn a language. That's also why the Duolingo message which is kind of a meme is so important for keeping people motivated.

Quotes:

"Humans can do things computers cannot" (Talking about the power of crowdsourcing)

"A week of people typing in Captcha could digitize a year of the NYT archive" (This is crazy)

"Learning English completely changed our lives"

"If you learn English, you can double your earning potential"

"If you want to hire good designers and coders, they are expensive"

"40 million active users and 3% are subscribers" (This is an incredible statistic)

"Our mission is giving free language education and its good for business"

"Our user base is our marketing base!!! We spend all our effort on making our product better" - (Luis understands that education programs that market, but don't perform don't fulfill their goal. Love this sentiment)