YouSaid · the spoken record

Luis Von Ahn

lines on the record: 152
first: 2016-01-26
most recent: 2016-01-26
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, I've heard of a lot of people listening to that and movies in the language that they're learning. Those are pretty great because usually, you know, even if you're watching the, you know, not like a movie made originally in that language, but just watching the Hollywood blockbusters, it was pretty great for learning a language.”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like a flashcard. Yeah, so some people do that. So some form of flashcards is something that people do. Another thing that I've heard a lot of people complimenting it with are a couple of things. Podcasts in the language that they're learning. There's one that's like news in slow Spanish or something like that that I've heard.”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm kidding. No, actually, we see a lot of people binging when they start. That is not a good strategy. So these people that when they start, they go on for like several hours. That's usually not a good strategy. For learning anything. So what we see is most successful. This is from our data, just kind of looking at traces, we see about between 20 and 30 minutes a day. between at least five times a week, that seems to do a pretty good job. If you want to kind of really be serious about it.”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so here's what you need to do, 48 straight hours when you start is a winner. Do not stop for 48 hours and you often.”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's crazy because when the first time I met him, he showed up to my office and he said to me, hi, I'm Severin Hacker. And I just looked at it with such confusion. And I said, wow, you're hired. I did not make a mistake, fortunately, but yeah, he's, so he was a PhD student while I was at Google. And in that time, I was working on, as a PhD, it was his PhD thesis, Duolingo. But at the time, you know, we weren't really going to turn it into a company. At first, it was just really his PhD project. But then at some point, after I had been at Google for about a year and a half, we had a meeting and we thought, yeah, we see a lot of future on this. Let's do it. But in order to actually develop it, I had to leave Google. I was actually quite happy at Google. I loved Google as a company. And now there are investors and I really love them. But I was much more excited by this next thing.”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because of Duolingo, I was very excited about it and it was something that was, so my student was, so I was at Carnegie Mellon for a while as a professor. Then I started Recapture and I went on leave from Carnegie Mellon to have this startup. Then I went to Google and I was still on leave at Carnegie Mellon, but I had a PhD student, Severin, who this whole time he was a PhD student there.”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, the stay bonus is often less than 50%. It's from my experience, but not a lot less. Let's say this I'm just going to throw out. But let's say it's 40%. But I've heard enough variants. And this is something that gets negotiated. I mean, of course, the startup that is being sold would like that state bonus to be zero. And the big company that is buying it would like that stay bonus to be 100%. And so some sort of negotiation happens. But that's usually the case.”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I don't know, I have sample size of, well, of the ones that I actually have knowledge of. I have sample size of three. And there is variance. So I don't know. I mean,”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and especially for a multimillion dollar acquisitions where there's several tens of millions of dollars and especially the founders, usually after the next day they see themselves sitting there with several tens of millions of bucks in the bank, you wouldn't want them to leave the next day. So that's why you hold out for another large chunk that says, you know, if you stick around for one year, you get this much. If you stick around for two years, you get this much. If you stick around for three years, you get this much, et cetera.”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, usually when companies get acquired, so when you hear of an acquisition price, and this is, by the way, I'm going to generalize a lot here because every deal is a little different. But when you hear of an acquisition price, let's say your company was acquired for $100 million by a larger company like a Google or a Facebook or something, usually that acquisition has usually two components, kind of an upfront payment that is some fraction of it. And then the other component is what they call a stay bonus, which is basically you get it over time if you stick around for a while. And it makes a lot of sense for companies to do this because when they acquire another company, they don't want everybody to”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“what are really kind of gamified mobile native app to teach you something. We think that that approach is a pretty good approach. And we're going to try to replicate it with other things. It's not going to look just like Duolingo. They're going to look like each subject requires different things. I have no idea how you would teach philosophy. But I can give you a pretty good ideas of how you would teach certain areas of math, certain areas of physics or reading and writing. A lot of these things can be taught pretty well with an interactive app.”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Irish philosophy of the 17th century. No, it's not that. But we are going to launch another app this year. That's for sure. So we're definitely going to get into other areas of education. And, you know, the way we see this, for one, if you look at education, the education category of either the iTunes or Google Play, we're consistently in the vast majority of countries where the number one app in all of education. And we only teach languages. Whereas I think there are many of these education apps that teach like everything, basically. And with just languages, we've been able to do a pretty good job. So we think that this approach of not a MOOC, not a video lecture.”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, we do have plans. We definitely have plans. From the beginning, our goal was to do all of education. We've stuck around with only languages for a while, but we do have plans. So we're on it. I can tell you we are going to launch another app this year. I cannot tell you what the app is about, but we are definitely going to launch another one. It is not philosophy. That is not the second subject that we are going to teach.”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I'm hoping, so this is gonna be one of those things that's gonna get better over time. I think that we're gonna have something in Q2.”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it's going to be, I'm very excited about it because it's really, I think that's the main thing that Duolingo is lacking right now, like the ability to actually practice real conversations. And I think we're going to be able to do it pretty well.”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, yes, we have plans. It is not what you would think. Everybody would like us to do this one thing, which is basically pair up our users with each other or pair up our users with teachers of some sort and do kind of a video, you know, like a Skype type thing. A lot of people have asked us for this. A lot of people inside the company have thought that this would be a good idea, but that is not what we're going to do. But we are going to do conversation. I think within, we've been working on this for a while and we're pretty happy with where we're at. And I think we're going to, you know, we've been working on it mainly in terms of the hardest part has been just coming up with the right way to do this. And we think we have a pretty good way of doing it that we're probably going to launch in maybe, I don't know, three, four months.”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we spend time, we actually have quite a bit of time measuring how well Duolingo works. We have a team whose job it is to do that. We have a lot of internal studies. The one that we have that's external, so done by somebody else, not Duolingo people. What they did is they measured how much people learn on Duolingo. And the way you measure how people learn is basically you do this thing called pre and post test. So you have people take a test before they start doing Duolingo, then they do Duolingo for a while, then you take the test again, and then you see how much they improved. And the measurement they got was that if you use Dualing over 34 hours, you learn the equivalent of one semester of college, the first semester of college of instruction in that language. So that's the semester.”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I know, and we thought we probably thought we could anyways do it, but we didn't really want to get into trouble, so whatever.”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we've thought about that. We thought about doing, I mean, we have a few, well, you know, one of the funny ones we're working on is, well, not us, but volunteers that Klingon's, that's an interesting one.”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So if we put something there, a lot of times we can actually have a big impact on the language itself just by putting it there.”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. Well, it was very easy was the point. That was actually done by volunteers, not by us. And we didn't have to make a single change to the app. That was just our system just allowed it to just go through with the volunteer. So it was just done by volunteer. So we didn't have to be involved almost at all. So that was the reason was just because it was relatively easy. But one of the funny things is when we launched it, there's 94,000 native Irish speakers, but we have about a million people learning Irish on Duolingo, like actively.”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's good to know. You know, sometimes when we do things, we've done some things that are a little kind of unexpected and we end up getting really good results. I mean, for example, we started teaching Irish, which I think a lot of people were very surprised by the fact that we launched Irish before, I don't know, Turkish or Russian or”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Much easier though. I mean, it's only about 15 letters that are different. So you basically just have to learn 15 letters. But we've started doing this. We basically have started teaching romanizations for people who don't want to learn the alphabet. We just romanize it. And that seems to be working out relatively well. So we may end up doing that, something like that for Chinese, like pinyin. We may end up doing that”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah, and we've seen that. We've actually started. So, you know, what we have started doing. So we did this with Russian. So Russian, you also have to teach the alphabet. It's much easier because this is related.”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Orthography is tricky. Yeah, and it's pretty tricky, particularly for the ones that don't have an alphabet. I mean, like Chinese, that is pretty tough. And so that's just, we just, you know, we have a long list of priorities. This is somewhere in there, but it is not the highest one.”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it does. And we've done that for a lot of languages. So we do already teach English to Chinese speakers. We teach English to Japanese speakers and to Korean speakers and Vietnamese speakers and Indonesian speakers. So we do teach English to most Asian, large Asian languages. So that makes it easier to go the other way around. I mean, truthfully, the main problem that we have not yet really worked on solving, it's not that it's not impossible to solve it in terms of ideas. It's just we just haven't gotten to it. It's teaching you the writing system.”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's because it's harder to teach them. We're working on it, but it's just, it has not been our highest priority because it's kind of low ROI in the following respect. The investment is high because they're actually harder to teach them, and the return is not very high, because if you actually look at for English speakers, for example, for English speakers, of the people who are learning a language that are English speakers, 52% of them are learning Spanish. 26% of them are learning French. Then the next big one is German at 6%, and Chinese is somewhere at 4% or so. So, you know, ROI is not super high. And this is why we haven't done it. But we want to do it. A lot of my...”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Speakers to learn. There's a bunch. You know, I used to know them all. Now I don't. So, you know, we have the big ones like Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese. We have some lesser known ones. We have like Irish, Esperanto is a funny one, Danish, Swedish, Russian, Ukrainian, Turkish. You'll notice we have no Asian languages right now.”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“test in addition to the other one. So we're doing that. We've been also doing a lot of work with different companies. So Uber, for example, is a good one. They have in many countries they're starting to roll out a new Uber service called Uber English, which is your driver speaks English. And we have a partnership with them where the idea is that in order to certify that the drivers speak English, they have to take the Duolingo test. So we're doing a few of these companies. And the way we're getting it done is basically by going at first to kind of the blue chip places, you know, the Harvards of the world. And after that, the sale is much easier because you say, look, it's good enough for Harvard. It probably should be good enough for you.”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's the hardest part probably. The technology we figure that out relatively easily, the hardest part has been getting accepted by universities and companies, et cetera. But we're making good traction. Let's see. So in terms of universities, so some departments of Harvard University take it, some departments of Carnegie Mellon University are starting to take it. Some departments of the Max Planck Institute in Germany are starting to take it. Yale and that type of name. 12 of them are going to be running a study where all of their applicants are going to be taking both the standard test that they're taking and our test. And the idea is they're going to look at the correlation between that. And if it's high enough, then all these universities are also going to start accepting our test.”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Could show up with a bunch of books. So the way we, you know, we had to prevent cheating with our test. And the way we've decided to prevent cheating is or we're able to do it. And it turns out this works.”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To take the test. So for me, this cost $1,000 and it involved a trip outside of the country. So we thought, you know, when we saw that, we thought, man, we can do a lot better than that. That's really ridiculous. It seems like technology from 100 years ago. So we launched this thing called the Duolingo Test Center, which is basically an app, it's also a website that helps you certify your knowledge of English. And the idea is that it's only $20. It's not $250. And also, you take it from a device. You don't have to go somewhere to take it. So you don't have to go to a testing center. Now, the tricky thing here was that the reason people have to go to a testing center to take the test is to make sure that they're not cheating because, you know, you, for example, instead of, you could, for example, send your cousin to take the test instead of you.”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it also cost you money. So this actually happened to me when I was applying to come to school here in the US. I had to take this test to prove that I knew English. What happened is Guatemala ran out of tests. There were no more seats for that year in the testing centers. So I had to fly to the neighboring country of El Salvador.”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So you have to go to a place to take the test. Because of that, you usually have to make an appointment several weeks in advance. And so several weeks in advance, you make an appointment, you pay $250, you go somewhere, you take a test, and you get your results another before weeks later. So at the end, you spend eight weeks. You spend 250 bucks, and you have a certificate that says, you know, this is your test score for English. And there's this measures your English proficiency. So that's the process. And this sounds kind of annoying, but it's actually way worse because most of the people that are taking this are in developing countries. Now there, the thing is 250 bucks in a developing country is a month's salary. Also, the testing centers are not in every city. They're just in certain cities. So you have to travel to take a test to prove that you know English.”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You use that, for example, if you're from outside of the US and you want to apply to enroll in a US university, you have to take a test that proves that you speak English. A test is called the TOFUL. If you want to get a job at a multinational corporation in a non-English-speaking country, you usually have to take a test to prove that you know English. If you want to get a work visa in the UK, you have to take a test that proves that you know English. So there's these standardized tests. In total, $15 billion are spent a year on these tests. They're all very similar to each other. There's a few of them. There's like three or four that are big ones. The way this process works is you have to, it's kind of similar to taking the SAT. You have to take this test. You pay about $250 for it. You usually have to take it, well, you always have to take it at a testing center.”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so the thing is this with certification. So, you know, exactly with English, people need to learn English, but after they've learned English, they also need to prove that they know English, in particular to get a job or to go to school, et cetera. So about two years ago, we started getting a lot of emails like that with people saying, thank you for teaching me English. I did not have the resources to pay for English software or for classes or something, and now I can learn it because of Duolingo. But now I have a problem. I need a certificate that says that I know English because I need to apply for a university or I need to get a job, et cetera. And they're requiring some sort of certificate that says that I know English. And so we thought, well, let's look into this whole certifying that people know English, this whole market. It turns out this is a humongous market. It's about $15 billion a year are spent on people certifying that they know English.”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Learning English is humongous, right? I mean, this is for teaching languages, that is what you want to teach. I mean, there are, you know, it's funny, there are companies in China that are venture funded that only teach English and that only teach English to hotel employees. That is a big enough market for a startup. So, I mean, that's how big the market is in China for learning English.”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure, we have two now. The main one, the one that we've been at it for longer, it's the English language certification. Well, generally language certification, but what matters here is English. So the idea is this. There are...”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The more we worked on it, the more we realized we started turning into a translations company as opposed to an education company. Because that's kind of where the money came from. So we started just more and more developing translation and translation and not working on the education side. And at the same time, we realized that also translation is a crappy business to be in because it's kind of a race to the bottom how much you charge for translations. If you can do it for one cent a word, you can always find somebody else that can do it for half a cent a word. So we decided to move away from that. Yeah. So we decided to move away from that. And now we have different business models, but that was our original one.”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And what would happen is some people said yes to that. And a number of people would get the same document and they would kind of all translate it together, kind of edit each other's translations, et cetera. And they were translating from the language that they're learning to their native language. And at the end, we would come up with one translation, and that was a translation. And in some of the cases, those documents came from, for example, CNN. CNN is one of our clients. They wrote all their news in English. They sent it to us. And we had our people who were learning English translated into their native languages. And then we would send the translations back to CNN, and CNN would pay us for having translated their documents. This is still going on. CNN is still one of our clients. So it's been about two years and they're still at it. So that means the quality of the translations is high enough that they have inspired us. So that was the business model. And it was a pretty good business model. But we moved away from it because we realized”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“a lesson about food like they would learn all the food words at the end we would say hey if you want to practice the things you just learned here's this document that comes from the web that is related to what you just learned so in this case it may be like a”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think that's about right. So yeah, that's not our business model. But at first we had a business model which we've actually moved away from. I thought a pretty clever business model, but there are reasons for which we moved away from which I'll tell you about. But our first business model that we thought was, okay, here's what we're going to do. Much like the idea with recapture, where as people are typing captures, we're actually capturing some value from them. Could we do the same for learning a language? Could we get people to give us something of value while they're learning a language? And what we thought the answer to that was yes, and we thought we could get people to help us translate stuff while they were learning a language. So the idea, and this still works, and we're still doing it. So the idea is the following. After somebody would learn a lesson on Duolingo, they would learn.”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we hadn't discovered what we now know, which is you can always raise more VC funding. I'm kidding. That's not a good way to pay for things.”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of the people learning a foreign language, 800 million of them satisfied three properties. First of all, they're learning English. Second, the reason they're learning English is to get a job or a better job. And third, they're of low socioeconomic conditions. So most people are trying to learn English in order to get out of poverty. That's the people who are learning a language. But at the same time, most of the ways there are to learn a language are usually very expensive, like especially before Duolingo came around, like Rosetta Stone, for example, think about that. It's like between 500 and $1,000. So this was kind of the irony. It seemed like you needed a thousand bucks in order to get out of poverty. And so we thought we could do better. And that was the idea with Duoling was to give 100% free way to learn languages. That's what we wanted to do.”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“actually was something that brought inequality because what happens is the people who have money can buy themselves the best education in the world and because of that they remain having a lot of money whereas the people who don't have very much money barely learn how to read and write and therefore remain not having very much money so I wanted to do something with education that would give equal access to everybody that's that's what I wanted now education is very general so we decided to concentrate on just one type of education which is learning a foreign language which you know if you're in the US it doesn't sound like that big of a deal but outside of the US or generally outside of English speaking countries this is a massive deal generally learning English there's there's one point two billion people in the world learning a foreign language and so you know we decided that we wanted to do something to teach foreign languages but this is a funny market the the language learning market um the majority”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That started right after the acquisition with Google. I mean, I was in a pretty good place in my life where I didn't really have to work anymore. And I wanted to do something that was related to education. And I started at the same time, I had a PhD student, Severin, who's my co-founder. He was my PhD student. We wanted a PhD project for him. And I thought, well, you know, I really am passionate about education. Let's try to do something related to education. Now, my views on education have always been very influenced by where I'm from because I'm from Guatemala. And it's a very poor country. Now, the thing about Guatemala is and poor countries. A lot of people say that education is the thing that can bring equality to the different social classes. But I always saw it as quite the opposite. I always thought that education, what...”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And they're there. They're working off of the Google Capital Office for now, but they're getting their own office pretty soon. And I think we're probably going to have about, in the next year, we're probably going to staff it with about 15 people. So, you know, it's not going to be super tiny, but it's still not going to be the biggest one.”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that's pretty high. We just started an office, well, if you could call it an office, we just started an office with two people in San Francisco. You met one of them, Gina.”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you should. You're also one of our investors. You have not had us in any of your events, okay? So Union Square Ventures, they have these great events where they bring in everybody, for example, they have a marketing event and it's all the people that are in the portfolio companies that do marketing or they have a design event and it's all the people that do design in the portfolio companies. And so we send people to all of these events and it's pretty amazing how when you're talking to people, it really does seem like the average tenure of a person in one of these companies and a lot of them is like a year and a half. After a year and a half, it's like going to the next one. Whereas for us, I mean, people really don't leave. I mean, it's just that because we really are the, in terms of startups, we're not exactly the only game in town. I mean, that's unfair to say, but there's not very many games in town.”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because that's who they rent to, you know, 10-year leases. And we're like, yeah, we cannot take a 10-year lease. I assure you that in 10 years, we will either have gone away or massively grown, but we're not going to be the same size. So, you know, the infrastructure here is just not the same. And the other thing that we're having a harder time is with people with previous startup experience, there's not very many here. Google don't know this. Google has a pretty big office here. It's about 600 engineers. And so we can hire good engineers from Google, for example, even seasoned engineers from Google. But people with previous startup experience, especially outside of engineering, there's not very many here.”
2016-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #135: Luis Von Ahn on Learning Languages, Building Companies, and Changing the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT