Duolingo teaches 41 languages and is actively used by nearly 100 million people. The total number of people who have used Duolingo over time is around 1 billion, but 100 million use it actively today.
I'm Luis von Ahn. I'm an entrepreneur, a scientist, a university professor, Guatemalan, and I think that's about it. I was born and raised in Guatemala, in Guatemala City. I had a very, very happy childhood, truthfully. My mother's family—my mom is one of 12, meaning she had 11 brothers and sisters. Each of them had a lot of children, so I had around 70 cousins, and I had a great time. I'm an only child to my mother, and I didn't grow up with my father. My parents never married, so I just grew up with my mother, but I lived very close to all my cousins. There were a ton of them, so I spent my time playing with them. That was pretty much my childhood. I always had a lot of energy. I think if I had grown up today, they probably would have given me medication for hyperactivity. But when I was growing up, they didn't really give that to people, so I just had a lot of energy. I would spend my time climbing onto the roof of my house. The adults couldn't climb up there, so they'd always get angry because they wanted me to come down, but I didn't want to come down. What I did on the roof was build antennas so I could communicate. I started making radio systems to communicate with people, but I was never able to communicate with anyone. I only heard things; I did hear other people talking on the radio, but I never managed to transmit a signal. Still, I made all these ugly antennas on my roof.
When I was 8 years old, I asked my mother for a Nintendo because everyone had a Nintendo—the first Nintendo, the original Nintendo. For some reason, my mom didn't want to buy it for me. But instead of buying me a Nintendo, she bought me a computer and brought it home. My mom didn't know how to use a computer. In fact, she never learned. Today, at 86 years old, she has never known how to use a computer. But she brought me a computer and said, "I didn't buy you a Nintendo, but I bought you this. So do whatever you want with the computer." I didn't even know what to do because I was 8 years old and there was a computer sitting there. Back then, computers were very difficult to use. It wasn't like today where you just turn it on and there are apps and everything; it was simply a screen with text. It took me several months to get the hang of it. It came with a book, a manual, and I had to read the manual. Eventually, I learned how to use the computer and started learning to program. That's how it happened. But I really had a very happy childhood in Guatemala.
I've tried starting several companies. There are two that have done the best. The one I'm working on today is Duolingo, which is a publicly traded company here in the United States on the stock exchange. It has done quite well, valued—depending on the day, it changes quite a bit every day—at around 7 billion dollars. What the company does is teach languages; it's an app for learning languages. Now we're getting into teaching math and music, but mostly what we do is teach languages. We have users in every country in the world. We have around 100 million active users who actively use Duolingo. We have offices—we're here in Pittsburgh, but we have offices in Pittsburgh, New York, Beijing, Berlin, and Detroit. The previous company that also did well was called reCAPTCHA. It was a smaller company than Duolingo, with around 20 people. But we made a product called reCAPTCHA that most people in the world have seen. At first, it was those distorted letters you had to type. Today, it's that box with nine or sixteen images of traffic lights, bicycles, or something similar, and you have to click all the ones that are traffic lights, bicycles, cars, or whatever. That company is used by most major websites on the internet. I started it, and after about three years of building it, Google acquired it. After Google bought it, I worked for a year and a half at Google so all the systems that existed before Google were integrated into the entire Google system. That's what I worked on during that year and a half. Those are the two big ones. Besides those, I've had a bunch of failures, but those are the two big ones.
Yes, my companies usually have social purposes, especially Duolingo. As time goes on and as I get older, I have more of a social mission. That's why Duolingo, my newest company, has a strong social purpose. Several things inspired me, but what inspired me the most was having grown up in Guatemala. Simply having seen—well, when I was there, I didn't realize it, but after leaving Guatemala, I realized the amount of poverty that exists in Guatemala and how much the country can improve. Later, I began to realize that there are other countries like Guatemala in the world that really need to improve a lot. That's why I believe I've tried to make sure my companies can help the world. In the case of Duolingo, we are trying to help with education, and that's why what we try to do with Duolingo is provide free education to as many people as we can. The other thing is that we've hired a lot of people at Duolingo who come to work for us specifically because of our social mission. So today, even if I wanted to change it—if today I decided, "You know what? What we're going to do is just make money and forget everything else," more than half of the employees would quit.
I never imagined I would even start a company. That wasn't the plan; I never thought I would. I thought I was going to be a mathematics university professor for my entire life. The first time I really thought I was making it with a company was when I saw that reCAPTCHA was being used by Facebook whenever people created a Facebook account, which was around 2006 or so. I thought, "Okay, this is working." With Duolingo, the first time I really thought it was working was when Apple chose Duolingo as App of the Year. Out of all the apps that existed, they chose Duolingo as App of the Year. That was when I realized, "Hmm, this is probably going to work." Then, when everything truly became real for Duolingo was when we became a public company on the stock exchange here in 2021. Everything changed because before being a public company, when it was simply a private company—all the people who work at Duolingo, by the way, have shares in Duolingo. The owners of Duolingo are all of us; everyone who works at Duolingo has shares. I have more shares than the others because I started it, but everyone has shares. Before becoming a public company, the shares weren't worth much. They had value, but it was very difficult to sell them; it wasn't real money. Once it became a public company, anyone could liquidate and sell their shares at any time, and everyone who held shares immediately became millionaires. Most Duolingo employees became millionaires the day we went public. That really—I don't know if it changed my life, but it did change my mindset and everything. Many were my friends or people I had worked with for a long time, and it made me very proud that people who had been working with me for five years, for seven years, suddenly went from being middle class to having a tremendous amount of money. That made me feel very good.
The food and the weather are the things I like most about Guatemala. My favorite place—Antigua is my favorite place. I also love Lake Atitlán, I love Cobán, and I love Río Dulce.
In Guatemala, what I did was start a foundation. I started thinking about starting a foundation several years ago. The reason was that I really wanted to help the country where I grew up, and fortunately, through the work I've done, I reached a position where I had more money than I could spend for the rest of my life. I started thinking about how I could use it, and I thought, "Well, why not help Guatemala?" I started thinking about this seriously around 2019, but I didn't do much about it because I was busy. But a couple of years ago, in early 2021, I decided to do something to get started. What I did was use an agency—the agency we use at Duolingo to hire our employees internationally, not the ones we hire here in the United States, but internationally for executive searches. I contacted them and said, "I need you to find me an executive director for a foundation in Guatemala." They conducted a search and found Rodrigo, who is the executive director of my foundation. They found several people, but Rodrigo was the person I decided to hire. What a great hire; he is incredible. He and I met, and I told him, "Okay, Rodrigo, what I want to do is eventually give all my money to a foundation in Guatemala. Now, I'm not going to give you all my money tomorrow, but over several years, I want to do that. Let's start with 3 million dollars a year and increase it over time. What should we do?" Together, we determined that we could help in three major areas. The first is girls' education in Guatemala, especially girls. The second is environmental conservation, and the third is democracy. In the case of education for children, some people in Guatemala have criticized us, asking, "Why not boys?" Of course, we want to educate boys as well, but we focus heavily on girls for two reasons. The first is that, especially in impoverished areas of Guatemala, if a family doesn't have enough money to educate all their children, they prioritize the boy over the girl, which isn't right. But the second reason, which is even more important, is that if priority had to be given to only one gender, it should be given to women rather than men. What ends up happening is that when they grow up, the boy becomes a father and the girl becomes a mother. It is much more important for the mother to be educated than the father because the mother interacts more with the children. So, for two generations down the road, it is much more important to educate girls than boys. That's why we decided to place a heavy focus on educating girls in Guatemala in particular. The environment is obviously something that is extremely important in Guatemala. And regarding democracy, I don't know if today Guatemala can be called a true democracy, but we're trying, and that's the idea.
Many are captured—at Duolingo, we have something called our operating principles. Some of my favorites include: one is to always strive for excellence. In English, it's "strive for excellence." The idea is that everything we do should be truly excellent. It's very difficult to make excellent things. Most things in the world are mediocre. The vast majority of things in the world—restaurants, for instance—most restaurants are mediocre. Most clothing is mediocre; most things are mediocre. Usually, the first version of anything you make is quite bad, but afterward, you have to keep improving it and improving it. That's something we do a lot at Duolingo: we improve everything continuously. Another one is to take a long-term view, which in English is "take the long view." Everything we do here, we always think about what impact it will have in five years, in ten years, rather than what impact it will have tomorrow. Another one in the case of Duolingo is that our learners are what matter most. That has helped us a lot. Sometimes we're trying to decide whether to do something or not, and what we do to decide is ask what will help our learners or our users the most. That has helped considerably. Most great things in the world take years. So I have patience with that, and the idea is to work a little bit every day and make it better every day. That's what I try to do with everything in my life: make it a little better every day. For example, writing a book takes a tremendous amount of effort, but writing one page a day isn't that hard. And if you write one page a day, in a year, you write a book.
