Duolingo's reCAPTCHA Origins
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A story about how Luis von Ahn, the creator of reCAPTCHA, innovatively designed Duolingo to serve dual purposes.
"The inventor of reCAPTCHA, Luis von Ahn, started Duolingo for two reasons. First, he cared about helping people learn languages. Second, when users are learning the language on Duolingo, they're actually translating content that third-party services are paying to have translated.
This was similar to his approach with reCAPTCHA, where Google would pay for the image classification data that users were providing while verifying they weren't bots. With reCAPTCHA, users were helping classify images for things like self-driving cars while simply trying to log into websites.
The original CAPTCHA helped digitize books by having users transcribe text from scanned book pages that computers couldn't read well due to wrinkles or fuzzy text. This ended up transcribing millions of books while simultaneously preventing spam bots from accessing websites."
Sam Parr
Host of MFM and fitness influencer
Sam Parr is a serial entrepreneur and business media pioneer.
In 2016, he founded The Hustle, a business news media company that started in his kitchen with just $12 and grew to eight figures in revenue.
Sam led the charge in making newsletters popular when few believed in their potential.
After four successful years, he sold The Hustle to HubSpot, a publicly traded company. Now operating as HubSpot Media, The Hustle reaches 3 million readers daily, employs a team of nearly 100, and has been the launchpad for dozens of its staff to found their own media companies and newsletters.
Sam remains the host of the popular business podcast, My First Million, and continues to start and sell companies. He also co-founded Hampton, a highly vetted community for entrepreneurs, founders, and CEOs, and teaches people to write better through his platform, Copy That.