Created seven years ago by MacArthur “genius” computer geek Luis von Ahn, Duolingo has hooked everyone from Bill Gates, Khloe Kardashian and Jack Dorsey to Syrian refugees in Turkey.
eg for your life in Spanish,” demands Duo, a plump green owl. The viral meme circulating on Twitter stars the mascot forthe hugely popular language-learning app, downloaded by more than 300 million people worldwide. While the meme is a joke, the real app is plenty insistent.
He splurged on a Lamborghini and a Tesla Model S but otherwise leads a modest life, remaining in the six-bedroom house he bought with his ex-wife in Pittsburgh’s Point Breeze neighborhood, close to Duolingo’s offices. “I could have gone to Guatemala to live in a villa, but I didn’t want to,” he says. Instead, he has thrown himself into building the world’s most downloaded education app.
He likes to say that the money he forfeits giving away the app is equivalent to the cost of his rivals’ bloated marketing budgets. He also boasts that users are less likely to quit Duolingo than they are to bail out of competing language apps. “Our retention is comparable to games,” he says. He went to America for college and graduate school, earning a bachelor’s in math at Duke and a Ph.D. in computer science at Carnegie Mellon , where he studied under Manuel Blum, 1995 winner of theTogether they created CAPTCHA, an academic project they gave away for free. While he was still a grad student, Von Ahn built athat used crowdsourcing to identify image files. He sold it to Google in 2004 for an undisclosed sum. “I didn’t really need to worry about money after that,” he says.
First, Duolingo would find customers who needed texts translated. Then it would get crowds of users who were studying English on Duolingo to translate English passages into their native language. If enough users worked on the same passages, the translations came out well.
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