ReCAPTCHA
product on 9 shows · 14 statements across 4 episodes · said 51 times in 11 episodes since 2014
How I Built This 24 
the a16z Podcast 10 
the Startup Ideas Podcast 6 
My First Million 4 
No Priors 2 
Sourcery 2 
Acquired 1 
Cheeky Pint 1 
the MAD Podcast 1
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2026 2 mentions in 1 episode
2025 11 mentions in 5 episodes 2 per episode
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2023 9 mentions in 1 episode
2021 4 mentions in 1 episode
2020 15 mentions in 1 episode
2019 9 mentions in 1 episode
every mention on every show, scene by scene, with the transcript →
14 statements about ReCAPTCHA, every show
Rocha: SaaS companies should reevaluate blocking bot signups via reCAPTCHA
“So even like small things like adding reCAPTCHA on the signup, To prevent bots. Now you have to think, do you really want to prevent bots from signing up? Maybe you don't, right?”
Von Ahn: reCAPTCHA charged the NYT $42,000 per archive year
“And we, the number we came up with was for every year of content, we will charge you 42,000 dollars.”
Von Ahn: reCAPTCHA digitized a year of NYT archives every week
“A year was being done in about a week.”
Von Ahn: Carnegie Mellon took 5% equity in research spinouts
“They had a standard deal that says, okay, if you're gonna start a company based on, on something that you came up in your research, we'll take five percent of this company.”
Von Ahn forfeited part of his Google payout by leaving early
“Leaving cost me quite a bit of money, because some of the recapture payment required that I stay there for three years, yeah, and I did not stay for three years.”
Von Ahn: Early OCR failed on 30% of scanned book words
“Computers cannot, or at the time, could not recognize many of the words. About 30% of the words computers could not recognize.”
Von Ahn: Online Booty Call was reCAPTCHA's first major client
“The first largest, it wasn't even large, the largest website for a while was That was using us was called Online Booty Call.”
Von Ahn: reCAPTCHA charged NYT $42,000 per archive year
“The number we came up with was for every year of content, we will charge you 42,000 dollars.”
Von Ahn: CMU took standard 5% equity in research spinouts
“They had a standard deal that says, okay, if you're going to start a company based on, on something that you came up in your research, we'll take five percent of this company.”
Von Ahn: reCAPTCHA had no outside investors when Google acquired it
“Especially since we didn't have investors or anything. It's all the money went to us.”
Von Ahn forfeited part of Google payout by leaving before three years
“Leaving cost me quite a bit of money, because some of the reCAPTCHA payment required that I stay there for three years. Yeah, and I did not stay for three years.”
reCAPTCHA required 10 matching user responses to establish ground truth text
“And the way we got the ground truth here is, is simply by having, you know, 10 different people agree with each other. So if you gave the same word to 10 different people and they all agreed that we consider that ground truth that to a very large extent that w…”
von Ahn: reCAPTCHA digitized 2 to 3 million books annually
“There are a hundred million books that needed to be digitized. That was the total number of books that has ever been written, you know, before the digital era was one hundred million. At the pace that we were going, we were able to digitize about two to three …”