'Normally, most people are just perfectly fine, but we have we have not made offers to very, very qualified, competent people because they were nasty to our driver.' 'That's part of your interview and people don't know it,' he says. When potential executive-level hires take a car from the airport to the office for job interviews, von Ahn pays the driver to give feedback on their interactions, to weed out toxic personalities. Von Ahn's continued success doesn't just come from his knack for building businesses - it also comes from from his ability to build cultures people want to inhabit. The company has a market capitalization of $2.79 billion, as of Thursday morning. Today, 6% of Duolingo's user base pays for subscriptions, allowing the company to keep some of its services free for millions of other users. student at Carnegie Melon University, where von Ahn is a consulting professor - landed on the idea for an educational app that would teach people how to learn new languages, for free. Instead, he and Severin Hacker - a standout Ph.D. Von Ahn says it was in the tens of millions of dollars.Īgain, he could have sat back. Google acquired reCAPTCHA in 2009 for an undisclosed sum. The lost productivity led him and a group of researchers to develop reCAPTCHA, which launched in 2007 as a quicker way to differentiate between humans and bots. Computers could not recognize these distorted characters.' 'During those 10 seconds, while you're typing a CAPTCHA, your brain was doing something that computers could not yet do. 'If you multiply 10 seconds by 200 million, I started thinking, OK, that turns out to be 500,000 hours every day,' von Ahn says. Instead, he says, he suffered pangs of guilt over the amount of time people were wasting filling out CAPTCHA forms. With millions in the bank, he could have sat back, happy. In 2006, von Ahn was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, also known as the 'genius' grant. He sold the game to Google for 'a couple million dollars,' he says. If their descriptions matched, they moved onto the next image. In 2003, he created a simple game pairing two players and showing them the same image. Around the same time, von Ahn was dabbling in entrepreneurship.

Google duo apk