The Ledger
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Luis von Ahn: Do not bet early on unproven new tech platforms
“What we've learned
Is not to bet on these very new products, because you really never know if they're going to work. So it's not that Apple Watch didn't work. Apple Watch ended up working, but what didn't work was apps on Apple Watch. There's just.
That's ju…”
Von Ahn: Duolingo could charge $150/year and users would pay
“The reality is it's not even 60 bucks a year. I mean, we can charge 150 and people will pay it.”
Von Ahn: Duolingo has 50x Rosetta Stone's users and 5x its revenue
“By now, I would say we probably have 50 times more users than they do. Our revenue is probably five X their revenue.”
Von Ahn: Education companies become marketing-driven because product improvement is hard
“A lot of companies in education eventually turn into marketing companies. For the following reason. You realize, man, making improvements in 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…”
Von Ahn: Duolingo captures 90% of mobile language app users
“If you take all people who are learning languages on mobile apps, 90% of them are using Duolingo.”
Luis von Ahn: Mission-focused founders usually make more money than profit-driven founders
“In my experience, that type of business usually is a lot more successful. Even if early, if the founder is not necessarily all that much into making money, et cetera, they end up making more money than the ones that are where the founder's like, I just want to…”
Von Ahn: Traditional education increases inequality rather than reducing it
“A lot of people talk about education as something that brings equality to different social classes, but I always saw it as the opposite, something that brings inequality, because what happened, at least, you know, in my case, those who have money can buy thems…”
Von Ahn: Knowing English doubles income potential in most countries
“And it turns out that in most countries in the world, if you know English, you can double your income potential.”
Von Ahn: USV invested in Duolingo despite doubting the idea worked
“I mean, they've now told me, look, we'd never thought this would work, but you had a really good track record. So why not?”
Von Ahn: Duolingo promised investors it would never charge users
“And so when we talk to investors, the first thing I would tell them is, look, the one thing that will not change is I'm not going to charge for people to learn a language here.”
Von Ahn: Duolingo has 50x users and 5x revenue of Rosetta Stone
“By now, I would say we probably have 50 times more uses than they do. Our revenue is probably five X their revenue.”
Luis von Ahn: Education drives socioeconomic inequality instead of equalizing society
“And a lot of people talk about education as something that brings Equality to different social classes, but I always saw it as the opposite, something that brings inequality, because what happened, at least, you know, in my case, those who have money can buy t…”
Von Ahn: Knowing English doubles income potential in most countries
“And it turns out that in most countries in the world, if you know English, you can double your income potential.”
Von Ahn: Duolingo canceled revenue contracts to rely solely on VC
“So I made the difficult decision to cancel those contracts and forget about trying to make money and just raise more venture capital.”
Von Ahn: Duolingo makes significantly more money from subscriptions than ads
“It turned out, and this is just, we really just didn't realize this subscriptions made us a ton more money than the ads.”
Von Ahn: Launching a second city clarifies a company's true business model
“As soon as you open your second city, you kind of start understanding a lot better what your business really is. You know, what is just Chicago and what is your business?”
Von Ahn: Early Duolingo team were 'communists' who viewed monetization as evil
“When we started Duolingo, I can best describe us as communists. We did not want to make money. Nobody in the company wanted to make money, and it was thought of as a, as an evil thing.”
Von Ahn: Requiring partners to pay filters for true venue commitment
“If these places are willing to put in the money for something, that means they care. And that, that's a way to suss out how much this place actually cares about having your machine versus a place that just doesn't care all that much.”
Von Ahn: CapitalG partner warned Duolingo had to start making money
“And at some point, we raised money from Google. Capital G is one of their investment arms. And the 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 going to…”
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: Translation is a bad business stuck in a race to the bottom
“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, because, and then we're like, fine, we'll do it…”
Von Ahn: Duolingo reached a $10M run rate from one lesson-end ad
“As soon as we put that ad, our run rate went from zero to, like,
Ten million bucks a year.
One tiny ad.
It didn't even cover the whole screen.”
Von Ahn: Duolingo has 40M MAUs and a 3% paid conversion rate
“Active users right now, we have about forty million monthly active users, and about three percent of them are paying subscribers.”
Von Ahn: Maintaining motivation is the hardest part of language learning
“The hardest thing about learning a language is staying motivated. So we spend a lot of effort trying to make Duolingo more motivating and more fun, and the way we do that is just by adding game elements.”
Von Ahn: No money was exchanged when giving CAPTCHA to Yahoo
“No, no, no, no, no money was, no money exchanged hands.”
Von Ahn: Early CAPTCHAs wasted 500,000 hours of human time daily
“I did a little back of the envelope calculation, realized about two hundred million Times a day somebody types a captcha. And that's when you get two hundred million times a day times 10 seconds. So humanity as a whole is wasting about 500,000 hours a day typi…”
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: Staying motivated is the hardest part of self-learning
“The hardest thing about learning, learning something by yourself is staying motivated.”
Von Ahn: Adding one ad jumped Duolingo's revenue run rate to $10M
“I mean, as soon as we put that ad, our run rate went from zero to like ten million bucks a year.”
Von Ahn: Duolingo has 40M MAUs with a 3% paid conversion rate
“Yeah, I mean, active users right now, we have about Forty million monthly active users, and about three percent of them are paying subscribers.”
Luis von Ahn: Duolingo daily revenue grew 50% to $600,000 during lockdowns
“Our revenue has gone up about 50%. So we used to make about 400,000 dollars a day. We now make about 600,000 dollars a day.”
Von Ahn: Duolingo waited five years until 2017 to monetize
“Certainly we took too long to monetize. I mean, we didn't, we did not start monetizing until 2017, so it's five years in.”
Von Ahn: Yahoo deployed CAPTCHA live within about a week of receiving code
“What was amazing is within about a week of when we sent them this, it was already functional. You know, live. It was live.”
Von Ahn: No money was exchanged when providing CAPTCHA to Yahoo
“No money was, no money exchanged hands here.”
Von Ahn: Millions played the ESP Game to label web images
“So I put it online, I programmed it, millions of people played it, and this was a game that was helping label all images on the web.”
Luis von Ahn: Google Acquired ESP Game for Google Image Labeler
“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 ESP game, which I call it the ESP game, because it's like ES, extrasensory perception. The idea was like, tried…”
Von Ahn: Bill Gates spent an hour personally trying to recruit me
“I had been an intern, I had been, like a year and a half before that, I had been an intern at Microsoft. And so I had good ties with Microsoft, and they really wanted to hire me for Microsoft Research. And so that is, you know, Bill Gates spent, I don't know, …”
Von Ahn: Humans wasted 500,000 hours daily solving 200 million CAPTCHAs
“About two hundred million times a day somebody types a capture. And that's when you get two hundred million times a day times 10 seconds. So humanity as a whole is wasting about 500,000 hours a day typing these captchas.”
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: Duolingo raised $3.3M Series A from USV, Ferriss, and Kutcher
“It's 3.3 million, which at the time, this was a normal series A. So it's three million dollars from Union Square Ventures and 300,000 from a combination of Tim Ferriss and Ashton Kutcher.”
Von Ahn: Duolingo raised $45 million from Google's CapitalG
“And at some point we raised money from Google capital G is one of their investment arms. We raised money from them. It was, I believe it was forty-five million bucks that we raised from them.”
Von Ahn: Subscriptions generated far more revenue for Duolingo than ads
“Subscriptions made us a ton more money than the ads.”