Luis von Ahn

A paid plan at 9 99 per month, sold so people could avoid ads, brought in a ton more money than ads. About 3% of about 40 million monthly active users are paying subscribers.

By 2013 there were 15 million users, but news-organization contracts were not sustainable. People could not type much in the app, so those contracts were canceled and more venture capital was raised.

The first outside financing was 3.3 million, described as a normal series. It included $3 million from UNESCO Adventures and 300,000 from a combination of Tim Ferriss and Ashton Kutcher.

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 could sustain themselves.

Because Facebook was already using their capture, typing captures for about a week could digitize a whole year of the New York Times. The crowd did the reading work while signing up, so a year of the paper moved far faster than hiring people to type it.

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. They decided to give an account only if the requester was a human, not a computer program.

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.

He liked the machines more than the candy. Gigantic machines pumped out thousands of pieces an hour, so he spent his weekends taking them apart and putting them back together, usually with extra pieces left over.

Luis is originally from Guatemala, a very poor country where rich people are able to afford the best education, while poor struggle to get any. As a result, the rich continue to be rich, and the poor are poor.

Luis wanted to give everyone equal access to education.

First, Luis was not making any money of captchas. He was just an academic, happy that someone was actually using his creation. Later, he ended up building a small commercial version of captcha and selling it to Google, a product that became the Google Image Labeler.

By 2006 however, captcha was widely used on the internet, and this time Luis started a massively profitable company called Recaptcha. Every time someone was typing in a short segment of captcha, on the back that action was actually digitizing printed text. Meanwhile, companies like New York Times and Google were paying Recaptcha for every input.

These are games that humans play willingly and in the process help computers to solve problems that computers cannot solve otherwise.

Captcha is one of the examples. Crossword puzzles is another.

At some point, Luis found out that Yahoo had a problem with spammers who were abusing their systems and Yahoo had no way to stop them. Luis and his advisor invented Captcha to stop these spammers.