Smash Notes

Back to reCAPTCHA and Duolingo: Luis von Ahn, with Luis von Ahn.

What Happened When His Aunt Was Kidnapped?

When he was 15 or so, his aunt was kidnapped for ransom and was gone for seven or eight days. Cars in his family were stolen every couple of months, so daily life felt dangerous.

Transcript

reCAPTCHA and Duolingo: Luis von Ahn ·

How I Built This with Guy Raz

More from this episode

  1. Why Did He Spend Weekends at the Candy Factory?He liked the machines more than the candy.
  2. How Do You Stop Programs From Opening Free Email Accounts?Programs could get a 1,000,000 email accounts per day because they work fast and never get bored, while humans cannot open many accounts.
  3. What Happened When People Typed Captures for the New York Times?Because Facebook was already using their capture, typing captures for about a week could digitize a whole year of the New York Times.
  4. How Did They Plan to Make Free Language Lessons Pay for Themselves?They would give the service entirely for free, have learners help translate material for companies such as CNN, and sell those translations so the lessons…
  5. How Much Outside Money Did They Raise in That First Round?The first outside financing was 3.3 million, described as a normal series.
  6. What Happened to Duolingo News Translation Contracts?By 2013 there were 15 million users, but news-organization contracts were not sustainable.
  7. How Did Paid Subscriptions Compare With Advertising?A paid plan at 9 99 per month, sold so people could avoid ads, brought in a ton more money than ads.

People

More answers like this

More with Luis von Ahn

More with Guy Raz

Related episodes

Plays from this note through the rest of the episode.

Note

Weekly highlights

One letter a week.

The notes worth hearing, with the minute they were said.