Luis von Ahn spoke in the early 2010s—probably around 2014—at The LAB in Wynwood, Miami

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. …