Search results
Jan 27, 2020 · Luis and co-founder Severin Hacker started work on the app in 2009. At the time Luis was a professor at Carnegie Mellon, and Severin was one of his students.
- Captcha’Ing A Market
- Duolingo’s First Words
- Crowdsourced Translation
- Monolingo Vcs: All Valley, No EdTech
- The Interns Who Pivoted A Startup
- Canceling Monetization
Von Ahn grew up in Guatemala City, where he saw firsthand the wretched state of public schools in impoverished countries. His mother spent most of her income sending him to “fancy private school” as he puts it, and he estimates she spent over $1 million on his education over his lifetime. The price tag weighed on him, and he knew he wanted to broad...
In 2011, edtech startups such as Coursera and Codecademywere popping up — companies that today are valued as multibillion-dollar businesses. The rise of iPads and tablets in classrooms gave permission to founders who believed the future of education was on the internet. Enthusiasm was boiling, and virtual instruction felt like a nascent, but ambiti...
In front of more than a thousand people at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2012, von Ahn presented a trailer of their new product, “Duolingo: Learn a language by translating the website.” The company was launching its first product out of private beta, which alone had attracted an exclusive group of 125,000 people. “Since the dawn of humanity we’ve been pass...
Before that demo and the crowds though, Duolingo had set out to raise a $3.5 million Series A in 2011. Even for a second-time founder with a recent exit to Google, von Ahn had to overcome the hesitation of VCs around education endeavors — and also startups based outside of Silicon Valley. Edtech-focused venture capital funds such as Reach Capital, ...
Duolingo’s app has garnered many awards, and it’s more well known than any of Duolingo’s other products, such as its proficiency tests. Yet, its iOS app was an accidental success pioneered by two then-interns. Back in 2011, websites remained the dominant platform for tech startups, with mobile apps just becoming the mainstream success we know well ...
While the wins were energizing, one of von Ahn’s early concerns was quietly becoming true. Since he thought that people wouldn’t want to type out translations or long sentences on their phones, he nixed the website translation monetization model from the app. At the same time though, nearly 80% of Duolingo’s traffic was coming from mobile. With the...
Severin Hacker (born July 6, 1984) is a Swiss computer scientist who is the co-founder and CTO of Duolingo, the world's most popular language-learning platform. [1] [2] [3] [4]
But experiments show that when people work with the adaptive robots we have designed, they can complete their task faster, with less idle time, and they even feel safer and more comfortable.
Severin Hacker knows what he’s talking about: the co-founder and CTO of Duolingo joined us for an interview and shared his thoughts about innovative ideas, the entrepreneurial spirit and unexpected connections.
In less than 10 years, Duolingo Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer Severin Hacker has helped his company amass a loyal base of more than 300 million users around the world. Even with talks of an IPO on the horizon, the 36-year-old has no plans to slow down.
People also ask
Who is Severin Hacker?
Who are Severin Hacker & Luis von Ahn?
How did Hacker become a computer scientist?
Severin Hacker is Chief Technology Officer/Co-founder at Duolingo Inc. See Severin Hacker's compensation, career history, education, & memberships.
