Luis von Ahn came from humble beginnings. He was born and raised in a tough area known as Guatemala City, Guatemala. However, this smart cookie found himself attending Duke University in 1996 and then eventually receiving his Phd. from Carnegie Mellon. Before hitting it big, Luis was just a computer science professor at his alma mater. He worked on several different projects along with teaching his first and notable being a thing called CAPTCHA.
CAPTCHA is something everyone would recognize, but might not have ever known what it was called. Anytime someone makes a purchase of some sort online there usually might be something that pops up saying “click the pictures with a dog in it” and there are usually 9 different pictures to select from and typically they vary heavily. Also, sometimes there might be an assortment of numbers and letters and the instructions might say something like “type what you see” and usually something one will type something strange and random like “Pu43Tq7”, and finally when you’ve performed either task you click the box saying “I am not a robot”. All of these examples are roughly what CAPTCHA is, the goal of CAPTCHA is to prevent things like robots and fake users to be able to compromise security of something such as making an order online. Eventually though, with the success of CAPTCHA Ahn sold it to Google and helped them create multiple other online companies such as, reCAPTCHA.
Right now Ahn’s moneymaker is in his product “Duolingo” an easy, fun, and free way to learning an array of languages. In 2011 Ahn created Duolingo; he used his background of growing up in a impoverish country as motivation for people to have the access to learn multiple languages. He believes like many education is the foundation to grow out of less than fortunate situations, so by allowing a free easy way to remember and use different phrases and words from different languages he has a great way to invoke change.
Mr. Luis von Ahn is an up and coming entrepreneur with a lot to his name in a relative short amount of time. He has had a great influence on countless routine activities that the average Joe does everyday and with the rise of Duolingo he has had a great influence on learning and and arguably possibly uniting such a diverse world a little more.
https://lifehacker.com/im-luis-von-ahn-ceo-of-duolingo-and-this-is-how-i-wor-1791884794