Founders: Duolingo's billionaire boss on rejecting Bill Gates

**Leanna Byrne** (0:01)
Welcome to Founders from Business Daily on the BBC World Service. I'm Leanna Byrne, and today I'm talking to Luis von Ahn, founder of Duolingo. Millions use the app every day, but the idea behind it began long before the green owl.
Luis, you grew up in Guatemala. Education is a huge part of your story. So 15 years ago, you co-founded Duolingo, and today the company's mission is to give people free and high quality education. Now more than 100 million people use it every month, and it's a multi-billion dollar public company and a global cultural phenomenon. So Luis von Ahn, Chief Executive and Founder of Duolingo, it's a pleasure to welcome you to meet the founders.

**Luis von Ahn** (0:42)
Thank you for having me here.

**Leanna Byrne** (0:44)
Do you ever just spot people using Duolingo on the street and smile a bit?

**Luis von Ahn** (0:48)
All the time. Yeah, I mean, a lot of times I see them in, there's a lot of them in airports preparing for their trip. I look at people's phones to see if it's Duolingo, but whenever you get an answer right, there's this dinging sound. I hear it all the time.
Sometimes I'm not sure if I actually heard it or if it's just in my mind, but I hear it all the time.

**Leanna Byrne** (1:08)
So you think you're like, possibly you're just paranoid. Where is this going on?

**Luis von Ahn** (1:13)
Yeah, but I do see it quite a bit.

**Leanna Byrne** (1:14)
Of course, you have a target of hitting 100 million daily active users by 2028 How do you even come up with a target like that?

**Luis von Ahn** (1:23)
Well, at the moment, we have north of 50 million daily active users, so every single day, more than 50 million people use Duolingo. But I believe that in the next couple of years, we can double that. And so it was basically doubling where we were at.

**Leanna Byrne** (1:36)
Now you began as an academic solving problems. Do you still feel like you're that academic at heart and you're just trying to solve problems out here?

**Luis von Ahn** (1:43)
Yes, I feel like, I mean, ever since I was about 13 years old, I wanted to become a university professor. I ended up becoming a university professor. I was one for several years. So I do think that I am an academic at heart.

**Leanna Byrne** (1:56)
You grew up in Guatemala City. What were you like as a child? What subjects were you drawn to?

**Luis von Ahn** (2:01)
I liked math. I think that should tell you a lot. I was basically a math nerd. I was very lucky that I had a computer very early. I got a computer when I was age seven because I asked my mother for a Nintendo and somehow she got a better price on a used computer and she thought it was the same thing.
And she gave me that and I had to learn how to use it. So that was, I mean, that made me also a computer nerd. But other than that, I played in the streets a lot with my friends. I mean, this was, these were different times. It was okay to be a child unsupervised in the street.

**Leanna Byrne** (2:32)
Yeah.
You mentioned your mom, obviously. Yeah, she bought you that computer. But she also, she was a public sector doctor. She was. And she spent most of her money she earned on your education. Did that give you a sense of responsibility that you wanted to make something of yourself?

**Luis von Ahn** (2:48)
It did. So first of all, I was an only child, which is rare in Guatemala. People usually had a lot of kids.
So I was an only child and my mom was a single mother. And she was a doctor. And all her extra money she spent on my education. So what that did is I went to the fanciest school in Guatemala, even though we were not rich. So I went to school with a bunch of rich kids.
But the people that lived in my neighborhood went to usually either public schools or not as fancy for school. And it was very clear how much more I was learning than they were. From then on, I remained wanting to do something that would give equal access to education to everybody, because I just saw the difference. Some of the kids that were living in my neighborhood barely learned how to read and write. I mean, they could read and write, but it was not very good at it. And meanwhile, I was learning, I don't know, whatever, advanced math. So later in life, so what ended up happening is, of course, I went to the US., I've made a lot of money, et cetera, and these people didn't. So I think that's a huge thing. A lot of people talk about education as something that brings equality to different social classes, but I always saw it as the opposite.