Luis von Ahn became a millionaire before turning 30 and then created Duolingo.
Before founding the popular language-learning app, von Ahn helped make the internet safer by inventing CAPTCHAs.
Duolingo is among the most downloaded apps in the Google Play and Apple App stores. Its concept is simple: apply a layer of gamification with a “don’t break the streak” model to motivate users to learn a language. That, and the persistent presence of Duo, its owl mascot, which has become a meme.
Behind this enormous success is Luis von Ahn, one of the few billionaires from Guatemala. Duolingo wasn’t a one-hit wonder for this 46-year-old man. Thanks to him, the internet is safer, even if it sometimes makes you wonder if you really are human.
Von Ahn had a humble childhood. He was born and raised in Guatemala City in a single-parent household with his mother and grandmother. The billionaire co-founder of Duolingo told Forbes that his childhood was marked by scarce economic resources. “My net worth growing up was probably close to zero. So was my mom’s,” von Ahn said.
Education gave him a future. In 1996, von Ahn, a dual citizen of Guatemala and the U.S., moved to the U.S. to study mathematics at Duke University, later earning a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
The first success that changed the internet. While studying in Pittsburgh, von Ahn attended a lecture where one of the heads of Yahoo presented 10 problems the company needed help solving. At the time, Yahoo was giving away free accounts, but malicious users were creating bots to automatically register thousands of them, and the company couldn’t stop it.
“I went home, thought about it, and—along with my Ph.D. advisor—came up with the idea of CAPTCHA, the distorted characters people have to identify online,” von Ahn said in an interview with the BBC. CAPTCHA verifies that the user is human, not a bot.
The first million. Von Ahn improved the system, leading to the creation of reCAPTCHA. In 2009, Google became interested in the project and bought it from him, earning von Ahn a fortune reportedly in the “eight figures”—a wide range from $10 million to $99.9 million.
This system evolved into Google’s “I’m not a robot” verification tool. Given the sophistication of bots today, the challenge can sometimes make you question whether you're human.
A big waste of time. An interesting anecdote about von Ahn is that he was initially proud of creating his anti-spam verification system. But, like a good mathematician, he ran the numbers. According to CNBC, his system received 200 million hits per day.
On average, it took each user about 10 seconds to solve the problem and confirm they were human. Von Ahn realized he had inadvertently caused 500,000 hours of time to be wasted globally each day on something as unproductive as proving you’re a human.
Duolingo was born in 2011. In 2011, von Ahn partnered with Severin Hacker to found Duolingo, aiming to help people without resources learn languages. “In a Latin American country, and in Guatemala in particular, if you have money, you can buy a very good education, but if you don’t have money, sometimes you don’t even learn how to read and write. That made a big impression on me. This is why we’ve worked really hard to keep Duolingo free, because we want to give access to education to everybody,” von Ahn told the BBC.
He’s a billionaire, but his mother doesn’t believe it. A curious detail von Ahn revealed in the interview with Forbes is that he currently lives in New York with his 87-year-old mother, Norma. She’s not fully aware of the fortune her son has made, which is why she still asks for permission to call Guatemala. “She asks if it’s too expensive to call Guatemala. I tell her, call whoever you want!”
Committed to his origins. Although he achieved success in the U.S., von Ahn remains dedicated to his Guatemalan roots. In 2021, he created a foundation in his name to support causes such as protecting and empowering women and girls in Guatemala. The billionaire says he has donated around $13 million to these philanthropic efforts.
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