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You know, I was feeling good, I thought, Okay, well, we can continue raising money for a while. At some point, we raise money from Google Capital G is one of their investment arms on a partner from that firm sat me down and she said Nobody else will invest in this company If you don't figure out how to make money, you know you're not gonna find a bigger fool where the biggest fool on that's when we started kind of freaking out and try to figure out how we're gonna make money. But we have no idea how we were gonna make money

from NPR. It's how I built this show that innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, stories behind the movements they built I'm Guy Raz and on the show today have a perfect storm of skill and luck drove Louise fun on to create capture than recapture and then dueling go foreign language have valued at $1.5 billion. Think about the small moments or decisions in your life that actually had a huge impact on how your life turned out. Maybe it was a conversation you struck up with the person next to you on an airplane. Maybe it was a party you reluctantly went to Onley to meet the person you'd eventually marry. Or maybe it was a decision to stay on vacation an extra day that sparked a new idea for Kevin Systrom. It was a random remark from his girlfriend that made him decide to use filters on Instagram. For Blake Mycoskie, it was a chance meeting with a group of young Argentineans who took him to the countryside, where he saw kids with no shoes that one day inspired him to create Tom's. And for Louise Fun on It was a free lecture at Carnegie Mellon University in 2000. We'll get deeper to the story in a few minutes, but that single lecture would lead him to invent to ingenious new tools. The first was capture Yes,

captures those annoying, twisted and blurred letters. You have to type into a website to prove you're human and the 2nd 1 was dueling. Go Now, the biggest language learning app in the world, which is now getting even more popular because people are looking for new things to do now that they're stuck at home. Both capture and dueling go work designed to harness the power of crowdsourcing to solve problems. And I'm gonna blow your mind here. If you have ever typed in a capture or used dueling Go, there's a good chance you've taken part in a massive online collaboration that you probably weren't even aware of. And it's amazing how Louise came up with all this. But let's start at the beginning. Louise was born in Guatemala in the late 19 seventies. Both his parents were doctors, and though he was surrounded by poverty and violence in Guatemala City, Louise screw up in comparative privilege. And as a kids, he spent a lot of time hanging out at the family business.

My mother's family actually had a candy factory. Everybody is always amazed at the fact that I grew up with a candy factory and you know, they think that it was like Willy Wonka or something. I was not all that much into the candy itself. I was into the machines because basically the Candies made by these gigantic machines that pump out I don't know how many thousands of pieces of candy per hour. And basically all my weekends I spent playing at the candy factory and I would take the machines apart and put him back together. There would be some extra pieces after I put him back together usually, and that would be a

problem. What? What kind of student were you were you was school pretty easy

for you. Yeah, I was pretty nerdy. Basically. I was really good at math. Yeah, math was just easy to me. I know what I would do during the summers is basically get either next year's or, you know, a couple years later, math books and basically do all the exercises. Wow. Um, it kind of came easy, but the way I really got good at is by doing hundreds and hundreds of exercises.

That's what you would do in the summer time. Yeah,

I was bored. I mean, I was an only child. I didn't have that much to d'oh. This is remember, this is also pre Internet, pre everything. So what was I gonna do? And that's what I did.

I was putting playing cards in the spokes of my bicycle and buying jolly ranchers at 7 11 should done math books. So you were. Did you just love math? I mean, was it? It sounds like kids don't think about their future. They're not like I'm going to study math so I could be in Tech one day like it must have really enjoyed

it. I did. I enjoyed it. It was It was like a puzzle for me. By the way, this is not the only thing I did. I mean, I also played a lot of video games, Pirated video games in my Commodore 64

like floppy disks. I'm floppy

disk floppy disks. Yeah, that's right. I wanted a Nintendo when I was eight. My mother would not get meaning tender. She instead got me a computer, a Commodore 64 on. I couldn't figure out how to use it, but eventually I kind of read like the manual and stuff, and I figured out how to use it more. And then I figured out I could pirate other people's video games, and so I became a little hub in my in my little neighborhood, but these were not other kids. These were adults or kind of basically young adults who had a computer, and they would come to my house and I would take their games and give them my games in exchange. So I then I collected a pretty large number of video games.

But she mentioned right that because your childhood sounds pretty nice. But like as a kid, I guess, or even as a teenager, there was a civil war in Guatemala, right? I mean, we know that today there's a lot of violence there, obviously violence in the U. S. And other countries, too. But Guatemala has been particularly hard hit. I mean, did it feel dangerous when you were a kid?

Yes, it did. There was a civil war pretty much since I was born in 79 to 1996. There was a civil war going on the whole time. It always felt dangerous. When I was 15 or so, my aunt was kidnapped for ransom. I mean, she was gone for seven or eight days. People's cars would be stolen every couple of months. Somebody's car would be stolen in my family. Going out past 7:30 p.m. Was rare. You needed to go out in a large group if you were going to go up at 7 30 PM And, you know, I did have my house had walls and barbed wire ins. Yeah, it felt dangerous.

I mean, this is one of the this one of the reasons I came to the U. S. Actually, I mean, you know what I was after My aunt was kidnapped. I thought to myself, I

don't want to live here. Yeah, And I guess you did end up leaving Guatemala for college because you went to Duke in North Carolina. And you would you describe yourself as a like a math nerd in school? And is that what you intended to do? Like to do something in math?

That's what I wanted to become a a math professor. E was pretty certain I wanted to become a math professor. You know, at the time, I thought the best thing that I can do is really learn a lot of math, and I really loved it. And I thought it was a few tile to learn how to deal with other people on it is interesting because my job these days is 100% just dealing with other people in people's problems.

I'm just trying understand this. So So by becoming a math professor, you thought, Hey, I wouldn't have to deal with people I would just deal with, Like, fax and data and numbers.

Yes, yes. And, you know, I I'll do math research all day long, and every now and then I'll teach a class, but whatever, that's like attacks. Um, that's

that's what I thought. So all right, So you are, um So you get your degree and you following this path to go into academia and you go into a PhD program at Carnegie Mellon. Correct. And I guess you go into computer science, right?

Yes. I changed from math, computer science because I visited a math grad school and what people were saying, The professor was saying, Oh, I'm working on this open problem that nobody has been able to solve for the last 300 years. And I thought, I don't think I'm smart enough. I mean, if you haven't done it and nobody's done it in 300 years, that's kind of not for me. Whereas when you visit in computer science, I mean, this is crazy. Think before like Oh, yeah, I saw the no problem yesterday. Well, it's a much younger field and so that I thought that was much more exciting for me at

least. So you are You started this year? 2000. You start your PhD program at Carnegie Mellon. But I guess, like, really soon after you start, um, you go to some talk by someone from Yahoo, comes to campus to talk about Yahoo. Yahoo is a big deal in 2000. Is that what's the story?

Yeah, that was serendipity again. Most of most of the things that have happened in my life are serendipitous. I was the first year PhD student I had been a Carnegie Mellon for maybe two months. I had you know, the first thing you got to do when you become a PhD students find an advisor. I had found myself an adviser and we went to a talk together. This guy from Yahoo was the chief scientist of Yahoo at the time. And like you said, Yahoo at the time was the and the biggest tech company out there and he came to give a talk a Carnegie Mellon. And it was the talk was basically 10 problems that they didn't know how to solve at Yahoo. And I was an enterprising PhD student, and I thought, I'm going to try to solve

these problems. And what was the problem that he said they had?

Yes, yes. So the problem for this particular one was there were people who were writing programs to obtain millions of free email accounts. And so Yahoo at the time gave out email accounts share for free. And some people thought it would be good to send spam from Yahoo accounts. The problem is, each Yahoo account only allowed it to send, like, 500 messages a day. So if you want to send 10 million spam messages per day, you just have to get a bunch of Yahoo accounts, and from each one of them you send 500 messages

and this is the era I remember. This will remember this where you would get hundreds of messages spam messages about a certain bodily enhancements. You would get messages about the hormone growth things. I mean baldness. It was

it was a Canadian pharmacy. You Viagra, right? Just

span. It was a huge problem. And he was like, We can't figure out how to stop these computers Are programmers from making, you know, just creating all these email accounts

yet. And so that was

that was the problem. And just to be clear, these spammers were not physically setting up each individual email account.

No, they had written programs that would just set up millions of email accounts a day or however many per day s o. I thought about it for weeks and months, and I talked about it with my PhD advisor Manuel. And together we came up with the solution, which was thinking, Here is Look, computer programs can get a 1,000,000 email accounts per day because, well, compute burger and do things very fast. And it also doesn't get bored. Humans human can't get very many email accounts. So how about this? How about if we make sure that whatever is getting an email account is actually a human and not a computer program? Then we started thinking, OK, well,

how could we distinguish between a human and a computer? And that's where this this idea came came about its this idea of a capture, where it's basically these distorted characters that you have to type whenever you're buying tickets on Ticketmaster, getting, you know, an email account or stuff like that. The idea is that a computer can generate one of these, you know, basically take some some letters, put him in an image, distort them, and then it could give them out. And it turns out that humans can read these. What? That time, humans could read these very well. We still can, but computers could not. I

can't read them on the human that can't read

them. I can't read. I don't know. I don't know how much

of a human you are now. They're like point to every stop sign

point, every bridge. Yet it's changed, But basically at the time the idea was humans can read these disorder characters much better than computers. So let's give basically, every time that somebody's trying to get an email account, let's give him a test to see if they're human or not.

And you just start doing this on your own like, did you tell Yahoo? Did you tell him, or are we just like This is fun. I want to want to figure this out. Like just working independently.

I mean, with my PhD advisor it was It became our research. Became my research subject. Andi. Yeah, we did

not tell Yahoo because it sounds like here's the kid getting the math, Mathematics, workbooks in the summer. It's like, you just seem like a funding this

off. Yeah, it was fun. And but that's like that. That's the core of the PhD program. I think you know, you're trying to find problems that others haven't

solved. I get

you and your this seems like a problem that people haven't solved. So we

were working on it and you called it capture. Did you name it? Capture. And what does

that mean? It's an acronym

expense. Sure to like to capture

its Not well, yes, this anagram that sounds like capture, which, you know, the idea was to capture the, you know, the bottom of the computer. It stands for completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart. So it was just an acronym. But But now I think most people have heard of the word captured. Do not know what it stands

for and you come up with this thing capture And what do you do? Do you, like, email this guy Yahoo and say, Hey, I got your solution for you.

You basically I mean, we met him and we said, Hey, you know, we think we have a solution here. Some code, you know, when we explain how it works and what was amazing. And now that I know how large companies operate and how slow things move, what's amazing is within about a week of when we sent them this year, it was already functional. Wow. You know, life. It was life. So I guess the problem that they had was so big that when they saw this, they were like, Okay, let's let's do it.

So they saw this. They're like, Oh, my God, this is great. And so you must have just like you were, like, what? 25

20 2021

21 21. My God, you write c all of a sudden, you're an overnight millionaire multimillionaire.

No, no, no, no, no, no. Money was no money exchanged hands.

Wait. You gave capture to them? You just said Hey, here you go.

Yep.

I mean, listen, you gave it to a multi $1,000,000,000 companies gave them capture.

I didn't know how things working on. You know, the truth of the matter is probably a good thing. In retrospect, I mean, who knows what would have happened? But I don't have regrets, But yes, that was, um that's what started happening. And then basically every other website started, you know, they saw that it wasn't in the front page of Young. So everywhere the website started copying are making their own version within a couple of years, pretty much everywhere on the web. You know, when you have to get an email account when you have to enter a comment on a log when you were, you have to buy tickets on Ticketmaster. You have to enter one of

these. You were the guy. You were the guy who made it really hard. For dopes like me. To get right back to Constant

was annoying is annoying people. And every time that I would be at a party or something, you know, they would ask me what I did, and then they would get me to explain my research. I explain that I had done that. And I would say, What the hell do

you screw you? But some of the research you did. I mean, you did actually write some software that you sold for. I think for some money this time, Um, I mean, just, like, just briefly explain how that happened and what you were working

on. Yeah. I mean, this is It's funny. I mean, at the time, that was not called crowd sourcing, but my PhD research was basically on crowd sourcing. I had worked on capture where the idea was that humans can do some things. Computers cannot. Yep. So my PhD research was basically that finding things that computers could not yet dio and then finding ways to get people to do them. And in particular, the main thing that I did in that time was the game. And people love to play it. But as they were playing it, they were actually helping computers figure out what's inside an image.

How did the game work?

The way the game work was this You went to a website and you got randomly paired with somebody else who had shown up to the website. Got it and you were both shown the same

image and any image of random inch like an elephant

on image from the Internet domestic and you were told, type whatever the other person's typing just that typing words. And if you are one of your words matches one of their words. You both get points. Got it? What was interesting about this game is that the words that people typed, the only thing they had in common was the image. So the words that people typed were basically related to the image. Because if you're told to do this, what are you gonna type the visited picture of an elf and you're gonna take elephant because you think the other person also typing elephant? So those words were really good labels for the much we really with tags for the image. Basically. So I put it online, a program that millions of people played it, and this was a game that was helping label all images on the Web. And at some point, actually,

Google, in fact, bought it. They just bought the technology, and then it got implemented. They changed the name from the PSP game, which I called it the ES began because they es extrasensory perception. The idea was, like, tried to think what the other person was thinking to the very amazing name off the Google image label, er, which is much less

interesting. And and so they bought this from you. And was that, like, life changing money? I mean, what were you all of a sudden super rich? No,

it was not super rich, but it was It was good.

Got it. Okay, so you you went on to earn your PhD and you get a job at Carnegie Mellon. Correct? You're a young professor. Your tenure track. And by the way, early on in your academic career condition this you are granted a very like one of the most prestigious awards. The MacArthur grant. There is a genius grand. Um, basically, they pick a few people a year and give them, like, half a $1,000,000 of unrestricted money to work on on whatever they want. I mean, been mind blowing?

Yeah, that was, you know, I've gotten a number of awards in my life, but I mean, that was a particular that was probably the most impact for one and a sense of just how I felt. Onda. Also, they do this crazy thing where they don't You have no idea that you're being considered or anything. And they call you randomly. Yeah, they figure out your phone number one that you pick up, and then they just tell you, you know, have you ever heard of the MacArthur Fellowship? You know, you say yes and then e just tell you and you're like, Wow, what the hell First, you think it's

a Frank? I thought it was a prank. Yeah, and I guess, like, around this time to say enough is apocryphal or not. But I read that Bill Gates personally called you to try to convince you to leave your job at Carnegie Mellon and to go work for Microsoft. Is that true? That that is true. What they pick up your cellphone is like, please hold for Mr Gates Or it was like

he was that I was pretty much like that. It was pretty much like that. I mean, it was somebody, you know, basically said that police hold for Mr Gates

and where you were like, OK, and he gets on the phone and he's like Louise, it's Bill Gates

here. That's exactly right. I have been an intern. I had been, like, a year and 1/2 before that. I had been an Internet Microsoft. And so I had good ties with Microsoft, and they really wanted to hire me for Microsoft Research. And so that is Bill Gates spent, I don't know, 45 minutes to an hour trying to convince me to go there. Very flattered. But, you know, at the time, I just wanted to do my own thing,

Would be a professor. You say no to Bill Gates. What? You were like, Oh, wow. Thank Mr Gates Really so nice and so honored. But I just you know, no, I

didn't actually say no. I said I would think about it. And then and then I said no to like a recruiter, but it was not easy. I mean, he's a major hero of mine. I mean, he's just an amazing human being, but I just wanted to be a professor at the time. I thought, I want to do my own thing. I want to be a professor and that that's that's what I wanted to dio

Yeah, was money important to you. I mean, you know, was important. It

mattered. And it interesting. I guess it mattered more than it does now. It was nice to know that I, you know, I could I could buy a nicer car, Had a nicer apartment or something. Eso is nice. But it was It's never been my driving force, I would say.

Okay, so you decide. I'm not Bill Gates. Thank you. No, thanks. I'm not going Microsoft. I'm gonna stay doing this work. So you are now. Were you lecturing? Are you teaching classes?

I was teaching. I was teaching a huge class. It was called great theoretical ideas in computer science. It's just a fancy name is basically a a discreet math class. People who don't do well, they're usually changed

majors. And you're like, Not like John Nash. But I'm thinking about that movie or in front of, like, a big black border, a whiteboard and doing equations and problems. And from 250.

Yeah, it slides had already been around, so I used I used PowerPoint. You okay? I know that

old right? Yeah, you're right. Okay, So you're teaching and, um, you had done capture and lots of people are saying, Hey, it's annoying. And you like Yep, I hear you. And And people kept saying that to you Like

I kept hearing that. Yep. Yep. On bats. That's when I started thinking, Each time you do it, you waste about 10 seconds of your time. And I just started this thought just came to me. If wow, how much time am I wasting of humanity? And, you know, I did a little back of the envelope calculation realized about 200 million times a day. Somebody types of capture. And that's when you get 200 million times a day times 10 seconds. So humanity as a whole is wasting about $500,000 a day typing these captures. And that's when I started thinking,

huh? Related to you know, all my research that I have done. Is there something we can get humans to the while they're typing and capture that is also useful. And we get them to do something useful. And it occurred to me that yeah, we could get them to help digitize books.

How did sorry pause? How did you come to that idea? So, like when you type in a random lent random letters from a capture you were thinking. I wait, how do we have a secondary use for this? And maybe books digitizing books? How did you even have that even occurred to you?

I was thinking for a long time Can we get people to do something? But at the same time kind of extract valuable computational effort from it until it finally occurred to me out. There's all these projects out there trying to digitize all the worlds books Google had announced really time. It's some kind of insane, an ambitious project that we're gonna take all of the world's book out everything that's ever been written, 100 million books ever written, and we're gonna put him online. This is what we're gonna do. And now in this process, the way the process works is you take a book physical book. Then you scan every page, and then the computer needs to be able to decipher all of the words in those photographs. Now the problem is that computers cannot record at the time could not recognize many of the words about 30% of the world's computers could not recognize, and the reason for that, By the way, which is? This amazing thing is the same reason why computers could not read. Capture us. Basically, this looked kind of like distorted letters

and distorted letters or just inherently difficult for computers to recognize. Like Like, that's the point of capture.

That's right. And so it occurred to me Oh, wow. Um, what if we just take the words out of a book that the computer could not read? And then we send them to people while they're typing captures on the Internet. So basically, next time, you type of capture the words that you see actually coming from a book and whatever you enter is in fact used to help digitize a book.

Do you remember when you came upon that idea, Was it Was it like, in a flash, or was it just like

it did? It occurred. I remember. I was I was driving from Washington D. C back to Pittsburgh because I had been to some National Science Foundation panel or something like that. Then I spent the next, you know, few weeks just kind of going over it and over going over it. And I thought, Okay, this this will work on. Um you know, I started building the system, but then I I recruited. Ah, guy who was his name is Ben. More I He was maybe a freshman and computer science at Carnegie Mellon.

He was one of my students. He was in my class in my large class. It was the best student. And I thought you you can help me build this. And so together we built the system that would take a scan off a book and extract all the words the computer could not recognize and then send them as a catch. Now, we decided we're gonna goto big websites and we're gonna tell them Hey, look, we have this capture Services free is better than yours. Yours is relatively crappy. This one's pretty good, and we'll give it to you for free. But all we have to be able to do is see what your users can type are typing during this so that we get to digitize the books

and did website start like start to use this tool?

You know, some small websites started using at the first largest. It wasn't even large. The largest website for a while that was using this was called online booty call. Nice on. And they were to get an account in online booty call. You had to you have to type of capture. And it was our capture. And every time every person that was getting an accounting online booty call was starting to help digitize God bless them. God bless them. Indeed. And at some point a website that was relatively new at the time, um decided they needed to put a capture on their on their registration flow and they called us up. And it was it was ah website called facebook dot com. Andi, they were relatively new, and they were like,

Hey, listen, you know, way saw. We came across it. It seems like you have a good capture. Can we? You know?

Can we put it up this in 2007?

Probably 11 6 way said it. Okay, cool on They did it on that website was growing very fast, and so pretty soon we just had a ton of people using our thing. And then, at some point, I was giving a talk somewhere in Dallas about this system and how we could digitize books etcetera. The guy who was the CTO of the New York Times was in the talk and he said to me, Hey, you know what way have this archive off? 130 years of content from the New York Times that we have not been able to digitize, particularly because computers cannot recognize the words. How about you digitize

it for us? And I'm just just had a curiosity. Eventually, I'm assuming you thought this could make money.

We thought I thought, But we really didn't. It was kind of thought we could make money, but we didn't know how. And what happened is this guy, you know, he sent me an email. He is that No, I was serious. Let's do it. How much would you charge me to do

this? Charge them to do what? Digitized,

help digitize

their content in new old

New York Times. The entirety of the New York Times are and so, you know, we kind of scrambling. We had no idea how much charge him, and then we just thought to ourselves, Okay, how much would this person have to pay people to digitize? Because the only other solution is people Yeah. So we came up with something we said, Okay, divide that by four on. That's what we'll charge your way. Number we came up with was for every year of content, we will charge you $42,000

for every year of content in the times.

Okay, Yes, Over every. You think one year, all additions of that year, we'll charge $42,000 to digitize the whole thing. That's the number we came up with. And then, um, they they

said yes. And how many years of that's, like 120? 30

years of Yes, this is several $1,000,000 of a contract there. But they said, Okay, we'll pay you per year. Let's do in one year than another year. Then let's let's see what happens. And so they sent us the first year we did it and it turns out, because Facebook was already using our capture. We actually we're digitizing relatively fast,

like how quickly would it take to digitize a

year a year? What's being done in about a week?

What a week of people typing and captures could digitize a whole year of the New York Times?

Yes, so that's That's what was going on.

I'm just here. Here's a question. Right. Which is say, I'm I was getting on Facebook in 2000. This is like 2008. I think when the time's approaches you right? Yes. So I'm on Facebook in 2008 and I I sign up for it, and I got to write a capture. And the word that I've got, um, decipher is, um anxiety. Simple. My favorite words. And I type that in. But how do you know? How does capture know that I did that accurately?

Ah, that's a very good question. So what happens is for you. We actually give you two words we give you one is the word. Anxiety is a new word that we just got off. Whatever The New York Times and then the other word is a word that we already have digital were didn't know what the and serious for the other work. And then we don't tell you which one's which we just tell you. Please type both get. And if you type the correct word for the one for which we already know the answer, we assume you're human. And then we also get some confidence that you typed the other word correctly. And if we give this new word to like 10 different people and they all type the same, you know, the same word, the old type of society, then we're really right. Okay, then we know it's

right. So your accuracy was pretty high, Very high here. Wow. So within a week or so, you get this first year of the New York Times digitized, and then presumably there, like, Okay, let's

keep going. That's right. And so what started happening is they started sending us checks for $42,000 coming in pretty quickly. Nice. And by the way, we had no company. We had nothing on. At some point, Carnegie Mellon got wind of this on their like, Wait a second. You're kind of running a company here, but not really, because there's not even a company that you got to get out of here. Yeah, they had a standard deal. That's is OK. If you're going to start a company based on something that you came up in,

your research will take 5% of this company, and so that's what happened. So we just said. Okay, how about you keep 5% will start a company. And so we did. We started company. I got a lawyer, We formed the company, and pretty soon we were making, you know, $42,000 every

few days. And And did you call it Recapture?

It was recapture, Inc. Yes.

Did you leave Carnegie Mellon, or did you stay on Is

no. I stayed us a professor. This was really a side hustle. Everybody status. A professor Bled was also working on it Stayed as an underground. He was like by then he was like a sophomore. He said you just ate us an underground status. The professor was this side hustle, but it was making quite a bit of money for for us not doing all

that much in there, it's incredible. I mean, you basically have a tussle where all of the work is being done for you by people who aren't don't even know and wouldn't really care, because it takes them two seconds and they're getting a free Facebook account. Meantime, there, digitizing the times. And you're getting $42,000 checks every couple of days in the times. Yep. It's like one of the most genius businesses ever. Like I can we Can you? We talk after this interview's over. To figure out a thing like this is amazing. You don't have many employees is incredible.

Yeah, it was pretty good. But then, you know, that went on for some time. And then actually, Google, in fact bought it for their own book. Digitization process.

Hold on. They approach. Do they saw this and they saw that this was really And they said to you, Hey, we can use this for art books, digitization and and what they like through a number on the table.

Yes. I mean, multiple numbers were thrown in and out in the end way decided this was a good home for it. So we you sold it to Google. And this time I did go to Google for two years. Eso I took a leave off being a professor.

Okay, So you were running this company, the small business Google buys it from you, which is just incredible. You're still, at this point really young. This is really life

changing. Especially since we didn't have we didn't have investors or anything. It's a lot of money went

to us and your start up cost for relatively low. Yeah. All right. So you get acquired by Google. You are still a professor at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh. But you went to California toe Silicon Valley. Teoh to go work. A Google

Google happens to have an office here in Pittsburgh. Uh, okay. And so I was spending about half time here in Pittsburgh. Halftime in

California. And what were you doing? A Google. Were you still just basically running?

Recapture? Well, the first order of business was to integrate Rick option to the Google infrastructure. That took about a year, But I was still a professor, Andi, even though I wasn't leave, I still have PhD students. And towards the end of that first year, I started getting very, very interested in the project which happened to turn into dueling go

and presumably, Louise. I mean, given that you'd already turned on Microsoft, like, four years earlier, you were not gonna become a Google. Er you really? I mean, this is part of the deal. Had to go work with Google, make this happen. But it sounds to me like you're so restless. You You were not going to just work in a big organization

for that. I wasn't gonna do that. Yeah, it's not. It's not my thing. I mean, I kind of have to do my own

thing. What do you think the reason for that is?

I don't know. I mean, you know, I probably because I'm an only child.

I know. Are you just just restless?

I'm restless and also obsessive. I obsess on one thing, and this is this is what happened with Google in the end. I mean, I was starting to get obsessed on this new project to a lingo, and I just had to leave on, by the way, leaving costs me quite a bit of money because some of the recapture payment required that I stayed there for three years. Yeah, and I did not stay for three years.

So So you had to give up some of the money. But in the meantime, you're still at Carnegie Mellon teaching. Um, I guess you got a graduate student there who would eventually become your co founder at dueling going. I think his name his Severin Hacker.

Is that right? Severin Hacker.

Last name is Hacker. I mean, It's like a movie name. His name is Severin Hacker.

And by the way, the way I met him, I was literally sitting in my office one day minding my own business. And then this lanky guy shows up super tall and super skinny, and he says, Hi, I'm Severin Hacker. And I just said, What? The detainee in parts it And then he just did hand gestures. Seven. He did a gesture that it's like basically cutting his arm. Yeah, if he was severing it. Yeah, on then, Hacker,

he just did, like as if he was, like, moving his fingers like helping with the computer. Oh, Severin Hacker Wow on He said, Yeah, I'm here. And I would like Teoh do research. We're gonna work with you And I said, Get sure your name so amazing Out Do it

when we come back in Just a moment, Louise. And yes, Severin Hacker, take the recapture business model and try to use it again to teach people foreign languages for free. And how they discover that particular model is just not gonna work. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to how I built this from NPR support for this podcast and the following message come from E trade. Trading isn't for everyone, but each rate is whether it's saving for rainy day or your retirement. E trade Has you covered? They can help you check financial goals off your list. And with a team of professionals giving you support when you need it, you can be confident that your money is working hard for you. Get more than just trading with the trade to get started. Visit etrade dot com slash podcasts for more information Each rate. Securities LLC member Finn Recip IQ This message comes from NPR sponsor Apple TV Plus with Boys State,

featuring the high school program that has spawned a U. S president, senators, pro athletes and a Supreme Court justice. Boys State follows 1000 teen boys as they create their own mock government, winner of the Sundance Grand jury Price and a Revolution in Very tae filmmaking, says Variety Watch Boy State Rated PG 13. An Apple original film now on the Apple TV App subscription required for Apple TV plus Hey, welcome back to how I built this from NPR. I'm Guy Raz. So it's around 2012 and Louise has been working at Google for two years, and he's got one more year to go to get fully paid out. But he's itching to get going on his next project, so he walks away from Google early.

Interestingly, what motivates me started changing quite a bit after the Recapture acquisition because I really thought, OK, I'm in a really fortunate position in my life. I've now, you know, I don't particular need to worry about money. Can I do something that helps people? And so I really started thinking about education, and several, unfortunately, was also very much into education. We started thinking, Can we do something with education that gives it away for free? And the thinking really was. There's all these people that I grew up with in Guatemala, very poor,

and a lot of people talk about education or something that brings equality to different social classes. But I always thought, as the opposite, something brings inequality because what happened? At least you know, in my case, those who have money can buy themselves the best education in the world and those who don't barely learn how to read and write.

But you're thinking along the lines of like what is something that can be free, but that would kind of be self generating. So, for example, many business models offer a free service with advertising. That's Facebook's model. That's Google's model. They capture your data, but you get this service in return. But you were thinking, How can I create something that doesn't cost people anything? But that can be sustainable?

That's that's what I was thinking. I was thinking, Can we make it sustainable? And can we make it free? And languages in particular changed. I mean, duelling was a way to learn languages. We we ended up going to languages, particularly also because in both of our cases were not native English speakers. Several it was not either. No, really, from is from Switzerland. He's a Swiss German native speaker, and so, in both of our cases, learning English completely changed our lives.

And I just knew, you know, when I was growing up, everybody in Guatemala wants to learn English. Nobody could afford it, and turns out that in most countries in the world, if you know English, you can double your income potential. So we thought, OK, can we figure out a way to teach. People languish in particular, teach you English in a way that's that's free and but also self sustaining. Like, how can we make it so that it kind of pays for

itself? Okay, so you've got this language you think languages where it's gonna be at, because that's that's how we can actually help people increased their income, for example, especially in other countries. Um, And then the next question Okay, what is that? What is that thing look like?

Yep, that's what we were thinking and then eventually came up with this idea, which is pretty similar to recapture. Turns out to they dueling with does not work this way. It is a good idea, but it is. Ah, relatively impractical

idea. What? So what was it?

So the idea was this. We're going to give the service entirely for free. But instead of having people pay us, we're going to get them to help us translate stuff. So look, there are all these companies that want it translates the for example. CNN would like to translate all their news that they publish from English to Spanish. They're currently paying people to do that translation we thought. OK, what if we get these people who are learning English on our platform? What if that's a part of their way to practice? You know, after they learn some stuff we told we tell him Hey, here's the CNN article. Can you translate it? It's in English. You're learning,

which can you translate it into Spanish? And then if we get multiple people to translate the same thing and they kind of collaborate with each other to make a translation at the end, we'll get a translation. And we thought, OK, we could sell that translation back to somebody like CNN on make money

that way and and you would use the same technique is used with recapture, like 10 people got that. The same exact sentence you knew was right.

Had to be a little smarter than that. It turns out if you give a sentence to 10 people, that will translate it differently. But generally, yes. I mean, we would use, you know, kind of. They had to be pretty close to each other than we also had another step. Where, and the exercise to the person wasn't translate this but Ellis, whether this translations right or wrong, right? So some people would check the translations. But in the end, we built the system,

actually, but we're pretty well that basically you could give it a text in English. There were people who were learning English or who could be learning English, and then they would be they would help translate it, and then the system would pop out. A translation that was made by people on the translation was

very good. It's instead of CNN, paying some translations service, they would just pay you and you again, Like the New York Times said, maybe 40. Do those objects. They would just have your students learning a language. But they would also be translating these articles into their native language.

That's exactly what

the idea Waas. So Okay, So you have this really great idea, by the way. And I'm assuming you're funding the whole project,

right? Because, yeah, it was a Carnegie Mellon project that it was being funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation and also from my MacArthur grant at Carnegie Mellon funding at the time. What it meant is basically paying for severance salary.

And so at What point did you say? The Severin. All right, let's spin this out and started business and figure

out who you know. This was also an interesting thing. We okay, we thought. Okay, well, let's do this. This is a good idea. Were convinced is a good idea. Let's do this. But the first thing you do is hire more people, cause the two of us just can't do it. So we started hiring people, But all inside Carnegie Mellon, we realized actually, having people was pretty expensive inside a university. And then we thought,

Okay, Well, what I need to do is apply for a bigger grant from a NASA national Science Foundation. And I started working on that. And these thieves grant applications is like 30 pages long, and you have to wait like a year to hear whether you get it or not. And it's like a couple $1,000,000 maybe. And so I was working on that, and then suddenly I got connected to a venture capital from Union Square Ventures. And, you know, I talked to them about this and very quickly they get back to me and they're like, Hey, we could fund this I didn't have to write 30 pages. It was much easier

to that money. So they wanted to just They wanted in on this because, Well, first of all, you had a track record.

It was mainly the track record. In retrospect, I you know, I know I have a relatively good relations, like close relationship with the unit square folks. I mean, they've now told me, Look, we've never thought this would work, but you had a really good track record,

so why not? They want to invest in you, right? So when they they approach it is that we want to fund this, we want to invest in this men. At this point, you had not dealt with an outside investors in

your we had not. And also this this it was still not a company. So at that time, we just thought Okay, well, let's make it a company, and let's take some funding. Yeah.

And how did you do that? Did you? Was there. I mean, seven was your student. So was there an uncomfortable conversation? Was it pretty clear? You're like, Listen, it was my idea. I'm the boss, so I'm gonna have x percentage

and you know Severin is just I think it's partly because he Swiss or because he's a computer. He's like Mr spoke. He had that conversation with me. I didn't have it. He sat down and he said, I want us to write a contract But it's not a lawyer contract. I just want to write basically a word document that we write few lines long that just basically says What? Our understanding this and we're both going to sign it. And we wrote down a contract that was just really simple. It's like we'll go in it half and half on all decisions related to hiring. We're gonna get together all decisions related to, um I don't even remember what else. But there's like, three or four bullet points on. Then it just said his name and my name and we signed it, and that was it.

So you create a company and you've got some interested investors on, and I think you raised like, three plus $1,000,000 from a bunch of different investors, right?

It was 3.3 million, which at the time this was a normal series. A $3 million from UNESCO Adventures on 300,000 from a combination off Tim Ferriss and Ashton Kutcher.

Ashton Kutcher He was, like, way ahead of the rest of Hollywood. Now everybody wants

Ashton. Kutcher is very smart guy.

I mean, it was way ahead the game. Everybody now wants to be in Ashton Kutcher there, like right? It's like there's LeBron James and the Serena Williams. And there's anyway, All right, So Ashton cushier with that money, did you get an office? Did you get a staff? And how many did we able to hire a bunch of people?

Yeah, we heard a few people. We did get an office very close to the Carnegie Mellon campus, and, you know, we started working on it, and at the time, pretty much everybody told us you're not going to be able to beat Rosetta Stone. Like, why would anybody use this? You know, we just kept in state. Well, because it's free. This is gonna be free then. That was our main selling point. We didn't know if it was gonna work,

but we you know, we worked on it and we launched. We launched dueling go dot com in 2012 and it was very fortunate that I had given a Ted talk about this as soon as that went online. We got a ton of people come to do lingo dot com to try on to try it out. And, um, it started growing pretty fast because it was a free way to learn a language. And, you know, at the end of your lessons, we would say, Hey, here's this article you want, Help us translate it. And we we landed a contract with CNN and a contract with bus feet that we're gonna translate all their news from English

to Spanish. By the way, how did you convince? I mean, it was it was relatively

easy. They're just cheaper. They didn't cost us any money to to get the regulations are users were doing it. We just said, Oh, how much do you, you know, pay for at the time was like they paid, like, 10 cents. A word was said, I will do it for 55 cents a word, and it worked. You know, the translations worked on everything. There was one problem. The amount of money that we were going to make was actually relatively small,

and it's because translations are. It's a pretty shitty business. Translation. It's five cents a word. But then, pretty soon, suddenly, you know, the people from Buzzfeed found somebody else that would do it for four cents a word. And then we're like, Fine will do for three. Race to the bottom. It's a race to the bottom and then computers are getting better

at it. And by the way, you you I'm assuming you didn't want to found a translation service, you were founding an education

company. That's right. And when one thing would realize this last we were executing on these contracts, we realized that's where the money is coming from. So we're spending more and more of our effort, making sure the translations are accurate. A supposed to teaching.

Well, and it was There was no ads. It was just a website initially, and ah, but you had a lot of people who signed up, right? Like a couple of 1,000,000.

Yeah, exactly. We were growing. It was good. But then a couple of things happened. The first thing that happened is we realized this was not gonna be a great business. The other thing that happened is we hired a one engineer and summer intern. They started on the same day on a summer, and we told them, Hey, the two of you, you don't know each other. We heard these APS are the thing now instead of websites or they're starting to become the thing can you to make a companion app to dueling, go to dueling go dot com. Let's try that. That's gonna be your, you know,

kind of summer project. Let's make a companion After duelling come they came back at some point, they say, You know what? It doesn't have to be a companion app. We can actually do all the functionality of dueling go weaken, fully learn a lot of aspects of the language from this app. So we developed that we launched it and we were at exactly the right time because there were other APS to learn a language in the APP store. But they were pretty crappy on also costs money and so very quickly became the most downloaded education app off all aps.

Wow! And you guys were there, like right as APS were, like, totally starting to explode. Yeah, that's right. And how are you just curious how I mean, you did not have a your uneducated your professor. But how are you building a curriculum in different languages?

Where he have? This is great. I mean, well, we didn't We had no idea. I mean, we went and read some books about how to teach languages. And first of all, most everybody does not agree on what the best way is to teach a language. And then So we thought, Okay, this is pretty hard. Let's just take what we can from the books and put it out there. So I made the first Spanish course myself because I'm a native Spanish speaker. Severin made the first German course himself,

and this is gonna be just, like, kind of the Gamification model where it was just level up, level up,

level up, level up. That's the other thing that we realized in the process. When we started making the first versions of the courses, we had people try it out and people would say, Oh my God, this is really boring. The hardest thing about learning learning something by yourself is staying motivated. So let's make it fun. So fortunately, early on, we made something that was both fun and also thought your language.

Got it. All right. So you so you launch this thing. Is it pretty clear to you, You know, by the end of that year, by 2013 I mean, I think you got 15 million users by the end of that year. Was it pretty clear to you that it was not gonna make money? It was not gonna be sustainable just by doing contracts with news organizations.

It waas it waas, and particularly because we couldn't figure out how to make the translations stuff work on our app. Just people couldn't type that much in the app it said us. We just could not figure that out. And the majority of her uses were in the app. So I made the difficult decision to cancel those contracts and forget about trying to make money and just race more venture capital. And sure enough, we we we have some very good investors who decided to invest. And that's how we were sustaining ourselves.

So you're basically sustaining yourself off investment cash. But did you feel like you had to? You had to change your business model.

I mean, you know this by the way has been one of the biggest struggles with dual Ingle. Our mission from the beginning has been to give free language education. This is where we started the company. That is the thing. There's an easy way to make money here, which is just charged for it. And so when we talk to investors, the first thing I would tell him is Look, the one thing that will not change I'm not gonna charge for people to learn a language here. And so, you know, people would invest. And I think a lot of times that we invested, they would think, OK, eventually,

they're gonna charge. Yeah, right. But I told them, you know, I'm not gonna charge. And so we we race funding and we raced at some point. We had race close to about $100 million.

Wow. Everyone, stop us 100. I mean, you're not manufacturing a product in the factory. Why? I'm just thinking its ones and zeros in a computer. What? You got 10 minutes expensive?

Here's the thing. You want to hire really good engineers and really good designers and really good product managers. They are not cheap. I get you you gotta pay him, Onda. That's three expense,

right? He's the most expensive suffer engineers and the most expensive part of on. But you're based in Pittsburgh. You're not based in California.

Correct. And you would think that because we're based in Pittsburgh paper? Yeah, it's not true. There's a reason from the beginning. We decided we're gonna hire only the very best people. And the very best people have offers from companies in California. And they say I have this offer. That is for you know, I'm just graduated from college. I have this offer this $430,000. Are you gonna match it or not? Yeah, on. So what do you do? But we have no idea how we were gonna make money. I mean,

the first way we tried, which was these translations we had given up on At some point, we race money from Google Capital G is one of their investment arms. We raise money from them, believe it's 45 million bucks that race from them. You know, I was feeling good. I thought Okay, well, we can continue raising money for a while. Like whatever. I don't know. I don't need to figure out how to make money. We can just continue raising money for a while on a partner from that firm. Sat me down and she said, You know,

you're not gonna find a bigger fool. Yeah, where the biggest fool and nobody else will invest in this company if you don't figure out how to make money, If you have zero plans to make money, nobody else is gonna invest in this company on. That's when we started. Kind of freaking out and try to figure out how we're going to make money on dat was that was a difficult

time for the company. Yeah, but, I mean, it doesn't seem like it would have been that complicated because you could just run ads, right? Well, it was a part of you was a part of you, like oh, ads E.

Yes. We were very precious about this. We cared a lot about the user experience in your lingo. And we thought, First of all, we're never gonna put ads in here. Secondly, we're never gonna charge people. And basically, Leila from Google was like, Well, I don't know how you're gonna make money, because these are the standard ways of making money. But you've got to figure it out.

This is an important point because I think a lot of businesses start out this way with really strong principles that seem right. But when you say that, you actually kind of put you box yourself in because sometimes there are reasons to do some of those things in order to accomplish the bigger goal. For example of delivering a free product, you're completely right. So you had to basically do a 1 80 You had to have hard conversations with people and say, Hey, you know, we we have to start thinking about maybe advertising on our side,

and we we did at the time we had I don't know how many employees 60 but it's funny because the people we had hired early on they had offers from, you know, companies that were had much bigger names than us, Facebook, etcetera. And the reason they had come work for us is because they really believed in our mission off kind of given free language education. So we had ended up with a basically 60 to 70 zealots, um, who all just want to shave free education yet the mission, like we're here for the mission. To this day, it is still like that, which is great. But we had a year of turmoil where basically we're like, Okay, well, we need to figure out how we're going to make the sustainable,

because we're not going to be able to raise much more funding. You know, if we never make money up on DSO. Sorry, but there's gotta be a way to make money.

And if you don't have money, you don't even know the business.

We don't have a business, and we're not gonna be able to reach the number of people we want to each. At some point, enough people got convinced that okay, will put an ad at the end of every lesson. I remember. We showed it to our head designer. Who he he almost

vomited. I get it. I mean, did people say to you, or did you get the feeling that, like, I don't know, people thought that you were selling

out? Yeah, I think so. I know. I you know, I don't think it's too many people because I think I myself went through a transformation that took me. It took me several months to go through this transformation. So I and, you know, we put the ad at the end of every lesson. And fortunately, that actually gave us quite a bit of money. I mean, a soon as we put that at our run rate went from zero to, like, 10 million bucks a year. One tiny ad didn't even cover the whole screen.

Was the company Oh, way. Use Google ads. OK, Came from every random random places.

Not late night booty call dot com help?

No, on soon after that, we got a bunch off people who would tell us. Hey, I don't like ads. Can I pay you to turn off the ads? And we thought Okay, how about we launched this description service where the main thing is, you can pay us to turn off the ads. It turned out, and this is just we really just didn't realize this descriptions made us a ton more money than the ads.

And? And what? What was it? What would it cost to subscribe 9 99 per month? Okay, so a little bit more than Spotify, But but through that, you could do any language he wanted any course with no ads,

right? And if you didn't want to pay, you just had to watch. You don't see the ads at the end of

August, And so all of a sudden, people willing to pay some money, but still I mean, we of course, I know we know the advertising model and podcasting, and it's still a small percentage of people when you got a freemium version, right? Even Spotify. Most people are still getting it for free and dealing with yet

Yes. So well, at first it was very few by now. I mean, it's been a couple of years since we added a description by now 3% off. Our users pay for this description,

which is a lot because how Maney? Totally good. Or do you have

We are lot. Yeah, I mean, active uses. Right now we have about 40 million monthly active users, and about 3% of them are paying subscribers.

All right now, here comes the tough part, which is doing, of course, is free. So you know, it's a free offering. But of course, even with free offerings, there's going to criticism. And, you know there have been professors who specialized in this have said, You know, you can't really get that proficient with dealing go. You know, I Maybe I can learn some words or phrases, but it's not,

doesn't really actually teach me a language. And before we dived it into this just in general, when you hear this criticism doesn't make you defensive, or does it make you think, like, uh, maybe we gotta make this little better?

The truth is, there's a lot off marketing out there that tells you that you can learn a language in nine days. This is not true. Actually, learning a language takes years. Yeah, this is This is the first thing to to understand. Yet secondly, there's There's various levels, of course. Do a lingua teaches you pretty well from zero. So starting from the beginning to about intermediate, depending on the language that you're learning, yep. If you want to use dual England and start from zero and get to the point where you're the poet laureate over that country, that is unlikely to happen with dueling go by itself. That's just not going to happen.

But the way we see it is a we keep getting better and better be. If you look at any single method. I mean, take the, for example, the single method of US high school education gap. It kind of doesn't work very well. How proficient are people who take Spanish throughout high school at the end of high school, on average, Not that proficient right on our goal with dueling when we're not there yet. But our goal is to get people from zero to a level of the language is a little called B two, which is where you can get a knowledge job in that language. You know, Google, for example, employees, software engineers here in the United States whose English level is beat to. Okay, that is our goal. We're

not there yet, So we interviewed James Park, who created Fitbit and Fitbit. The genius. If it was, it was like a game ified exercise, right? Like people like I did 10,000 steps today or, you know, I made it. It's hard to get humans to change habits. So how do you get, let's say, a significant percentage of people to finish a language program?

Yeah, this is what we spend a lot of our time on. And you know, this is one of the things that when we get criticisms, one of the things that they don't take into account is a lot of the research of ah ha a teacher. Language is done with people who are, in some sense, held hostage in the classroom. The hardest thing about learning a language is staying motivated, so we spend a lot of effort trying to make dueling go. More motivating are more fun. And the way we do that, it's just by adding game elements. I mean, using doing a lot of people refer to it as playing to a lingo. It's just it feels a lot like like playing a game

you get, you get rewards, you get like, level up kind of thing.

That's exactly right. And other things we do, For example, here, this is another interesting thing we do we want you to use to lingo every day. I mean, the truth is, if you actually want to learn a language, you gotta turn it into a habit. One thing that is really powerful for us said We send you notifications, so we have a pretty sophisticated artificial intelligence system is one of the most sophisticated things we have that figures out when to send your notification and what to say in them. Yeah. And, for example, one of the most powerful things we you know, we've done this after about five days. If you haven't come back,

we send your notification That says these notifications don't seem to be working. We're gonna stop sending them for now. That turns out to be an extremely powerful way to get people to come back, huh? Because they feel guilty that we're stopping to send the notification so that gets him to come back.

Yeah, it's like, hold you get a hold, people accountable? Yes, which is very hard. This is why people have personal trainers. Because otherwise you won't go to the gym. Yeah, but why would somebody pick dueling go over any other language app? You mentioned Rosetta Stone, for example. Right? And I'm sure you've looked at it and obviously your competitors, but they probably do a decent job teaching languages. So why wouldn't you just do that?

Yeah, I mean, before we launched were set in Stone was the biggest thing in the world, and everybody told us you're not gonna be able to beat them. Yet. By now I would say we probably have 50 times more uses than they do our revenues. Probably five X, their revenue. Oh, my God, something to that effect. Um, there's a big reason. It's the fact that we're free. And this is one of the things that our mission, which is really given free language education, I think it's actually good for business.

Yeah, we don't spend very much in marketing. We have all these people. 97% of our users don't pay us. So it's just I think we just have this huge user base of people who are basically a marketing engine. But ah, lot off Cos in education eventually turn into marketing companies. Yeah, for the following reason, you realize man making improvements and how well you teach is hard, and it really is very hard. It's It takes years. So for every dollar you have, you quickly realize it's actually better to spend your dollar marketing your product rather than making a product better. Um, I've been hardliner on this. We spend all our for just making the product better, and the main reason is I think we're really in a kind of for the long term, and I think in the long term of the better product will win. Um and this is why we don't spend so much money on marketing.

Louise. In December of 2019 your company was valued at $1.5 billion. Now, we are all in a very different world. A lot of the businesses that have been on how I built this are really struggling. Huge companies, airlines, you know, products. They're in trouble. Some of them will not make it through this. Are you guys seeing a negative impact? Are you seeing people? Or because people are stuck at home may be different. Netflix is doing great. What's going on with you guys? Ready? Cause you're all remote working remotely presented.

Lee, we're all working remotely. Yes, I'm here just by myself. I came here to record this. Yep. Onda, we are closer to the Netflix. We're we're seeing increased demand, like significantly increased. Yes. Significantly. Our revenue has gone up about 50% so we used to make about $400,000 a day. We know make about $600,000

but the ad market is drying

up. Oh, yeah, But we make very little money from our ads. Most of our monies from

from subscription, Because people are sort of stuck at home. You're seeing people signing

up for dueling go. Yes, we are seeing that. And the interesting thing is, we see it. You know, we have uses everywhere in the world. Only 20% of our users are in the US We've seen it in every single country. And this is a thing. Amazing thing. The first country we saw, it obviously is in China. Souness There was, you know, social distancing measures in China are traffic in China doubled and I kind of never thought it would happen anywhere else. But soon after that, Korea was like that. Japan was like that and Italy went like that. The rest of Europe went like that in the US And so we're seeing massively increased a man because of this.

So So what's the exit? I mean, you got investors. Obviously, they convinced you were convinced that you had to keep it sustainable, to grow it and now valued at $1.5 billion. And I know you're not public, so you don't probably disclose your you know, whether you're profitable or not. But it sounds like you're, you know, keeping the lights on pretty well. What's what's the end game? At some point, you know it's seller go public.

The end game here is to go public. That's what we've been working towards. Um, it's going to be very difficult to say these days when we're gonna go public because, you know, with this whole coveting the markets are really crazy. But, you know, we have the revenue now to be able to go public. Um, we are cash flow positive, and one of the things that I think is really important is the way I see it. We have so much more still to go in terms of how much better we can teach and also teaching other stuff. We recently released an app to teach reading to young kids. Let's go do a lingo. ABC. I think there's a huge amount of impact that we can do with that. So I mean to me, it's just keep going with this. That's that's the goal,

Louise, Given all of the things that have happened to you mean your incredible success? How much of that do you attribute to your intelligence and how hard you worked and how much do you think it's because you were lucky?

I was definitely lucky. Mean launching an app at the time we launched the APP was exactly the right time, and launching an app in late 2012 was really good time to launch an app. So, you know, I've been incredibly lucky. I think that and I think just hard work on the same thing. I get obsessed with the same thing. I mean, I've been working on the lingo for now, eight years, and I'm pretty obsessive about it. So I think it's both.

That's Louise fun on co founder. Both duo lingo and Recapture. By the way, Lee says that having a tech company based in Pittsburgh actually helps to attract top talent, even from places like Silicon Valley. For starters, the median price of a home in Pittsburgh today is about $180,000. In San Jose, it's almost $1.1 million. In fact, a while back, duo Lingo put up a recruiting billboard in San Francisco that simply read own a home work in Tech, moved to Pittsburgh on thanks so much for listening to the show this week. You can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. You can also write to us at H i B t at NPR dot org's. And if you want to send a tweet, it's at how I built this or at Guy Raz.

Our show is produced this week by Casey Herman, with music composed by room teen Arab Louis. Thanks also to Julia Carney, Candace Limb, Neva Grant and Jeff Rogers. I'm Guy Raz and even listening to how I built this. This is NPR. How do we reinvent ourselves and what's the secret to living longer? I'm a new system, a roadie. Each week on NPR's Ted Radio Hour, we go on a journey with Ted speakers to seek a deeper understanding of the world and to figure out new ways to think and create.

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