Luis von Ahn spoke in the early 2010s—probably around 2014—at The LAB in Wynwood, Miami. He recounted how his fascination with crowd-sourcing led first to reCAPTCHA and then to his latest venture, Duolingo. He made it clear that his real passion wasn’t language per se, but building a crowd-sourced human translation service as a business model. At that point, Duolingo had roughly 24 employees—and, much to his surprise, only two were focused on the crowd-sourcing engine. He explained how they’d enlisted some of the world’s leading language-education researchers as consultants. Their very first question: “Which part of speech should learners tackle first?” The experts confessed they didn’t know, so the team gathered the data and used A/B testing coupled with statistical analysis to pinpoint the answer.
Today, it’s not only easier than ever to launch a platform to challenge Duolingo, but its core product—its crowd-sourced human translation service—has been distrupted.
This morning, I found myself thinking about how all those decade-old learning platforms—like Coursera, as reflected in its ever-falling stock price—are being distrupted.
Your product looks awesome and I hope you distrupt all the language learning platforms. Thank you for sharing.
(I had ChatGPT fix my grammatical errors and now this comment doesn't sound like me, sorry.)
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