Hello everyone, welcome to Pilas Pues, the program where every week you find content about personal, professional, and academic development. Today we are in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with Luis Von Ahn, who has opened his doors to talk a bit about everything he is doing in the world of technology. Welcome, Luis. Hello, how are you? Luis is Guatemalan and has stood out on many technology topics such as CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA, which are his initial companies, and he is also the founder of Duolingo, the app for learning languages that now not only limits to languages but will also serve us to learn mathematics and acquire other knowledge. Thank you, Luis. We want to start this interview by asking you, did you always want to be an entrepreneur, how did the dream start?
No, I didn't want to be an entrepreneur. What I wanted to be since I was 13 was a university professor in mathematics. When I graduated from high school in Guatemala, I thought about staying in Guatemala, but at that time, the mathematics career only existed at the University of San Carlos and at Del Valle. And in both universities, there was the problem that very few people were studying the career, so classes weren't offered. You had to wait until there were enough students, and it turned out that it took like 10 years to graduate because classes weren't given. So I said, well, I want to study mathematics, and that's what made me come here to the United States. I came, studied mathematics, but it turns out that halfway through my studies, I decided that I preferred computer science over mathematics. So I continued, finished the mathematics degree, but from there I got a doctorate in computer science. And I became a university professor of computer science. That's what I did. But at some point, I started developing technology that could be sold. So I started a company, the first company I started was just me, one person, and I sold it to Google. Then I started another company, which was reCAPTCHA, which had like 20 people, and I also sold it to Google, and then I started Duolingo. But the idea was never to start companies, it was to do projects, but at some point, it was always like, well, this can become a company, and it became a company.
Okay. You had a purpose and then it changed.
It always started with a purpose. Yes, for example, with Duolingo, the purpose was to develop education and give it to the world for free. It turns out, and we started as a university project, not a company, but at some point, it turned out that it was easier to get money and funds to pay for the entire operation being a company rather than a university project, so we decided to make it a company.
Of course. And now Luis, since you are really considered one of the entrepreneurs who has stood out the most in the country, could you tell us a bit about what have been the main challenges you have faced in this time?
Well, quite a few over time. The first was coming to the United States. It wasn't easy, but it was a challenge. After that, in terms of companies, for me, the hardest part is starting at the beginning. It's very difficult to start because at the beginning you don't have a team, there's no one, so hiring the first person is very difficult because who wants to work for a company that doesn't exist? Yes, just the idea. So it's hard to hire people at the beginning. At Duolingo specifically, the biggest challenge we had was how to start making money. The first years, Duolingo wasn't making any money; we simply had venture capital investment, risk capital, I think it's called in Spanish. We had venture capital investment, but we weren't earning any money. We offered a language learning app totally free, so people didn't pay us and we didn't make money. In 2016, when we had been offering the app totally free for about 4 years, we decided it was time to start making money, to commercialize it to really cover the operation. And that was a real challenge because we wanted to do two things. We wanted to make enough money to cover the operation, which by then cost about 100 million dollars a year, which is a lot of money. We wanted to make enough to do that and at the same time we wanted to offer free education. That's difficult to do both at the same time, but fortunately, what we decided to do worked: anyone can learn on Duolingo totally free, but if they don't pay, they have to watch ads, and the ads pay us a little money, but not much, honestly. On the other hand, if a user doesn't want to watch the ads, they can pay us to subscribe. And it turns out that 7% of our users pay us to subscribe. But that 7% gives us like now about 500 million dollars a year. So that worked, but the majority, 93% of our users use Duolingo totally free, and that's what we wanted.
Okay. So one of the main challenges at the beginning was the lack of investment, which later came about somehow. Luis, now that you tell me this, do you think an entrepreneur is made or is one born with that DNA and chip that says, 'Well, I'm going to be an entrepreneur.'
I think it can be both. I think there are people who want to be entrepreneurs since they are little. Yes, in my case, I didn't want to be an entrepreneur. More specifically, I didn't want to be an entrepreneur. But I think it can be done if someone really wants to develop an idea, I think it can be done. I've seen entrepreneurs who are very different from each other, so there isn't just one way to be an entrepreneur. It could be that someone is very good at hustling, and that helps them be an entrepreneur. There are other people who are very good at technology and very bad at hustling, but that helps them understand. There are other people who are very good managers. Everyone has their things, and in the end, you can be an entrepreneur in many ways. In my case, when I started with this, I wasn't very good at managing people. In fact, I had never fired anyone and didn't know. The first time I fired someone, they didn't understand that I had fired them and they laughed the next day. My skills were elsewhere. I was bad at it, but I was good at technology, and over time, I've learned how to handle people, etc. But I believe that one can become an entrepreneur.
Okay. And for someone who is starting and has an idea, a specific idea, but wants to turn this idea into something grandiose, the best, what recommendation could you give to this person?
The first thing I would say is that your idea is probably not very good. This is true for everyone's ideas, including mine, and the most important thing to do is to be open to changing it and at the same time start working on it. What happens to many people is that they say, 'I have a great idea,' but I'll start tomorrow, I'll start next year. And what ends up happening is that life passes them by and they never start. Even if the idea isn't very good, what you have to do is start, and then when you start, you begin to realize, oh, this doesn't work, but you can change it a little so that it does work, or change it. That has happened to me in all the companies I've made. That definitely happened at Duolingo, where at first, in fact, at first we didn't even want to teach languages. At first, the idea was that we would teach other things, we wanted to teach mathematics, etc. And over time, we realized it was better to start teaching languages, and we've changed a lot of things. But the thing is, if you're not doing it, it's very difficult to come up with the perfect idea because you haven't tried it. It's better to get moving than to have everything planned. It's better to get moving because the problem with having everything planned is that you can never plan everything because you don't know what will happen. You start working and suddenly realize that this didn't work. Or it turns out that you hire the first employee, and the first employee doesn't know how to do what you wanted, but knows how to do something else, and you decide, 'Ah, let's do this.' That definitely happened to us with Duolingo at the beginning. Duolingo was just a website, not an app. And about three months after starting, we hired someone who was very good at developing apps, and we said, 'Why don't we make an app?' And today, about 95% of our users are on the app and not on the website, but that wasn't planned.
