Luis Von Ahn

The way my brain works, all of education is just too general of a problem.

So I decided, let's start by teaching one thing.

And then I started thinking, okay, well, what should we teach first?

Should we teach math?

I mean, we both love math.

Me and my co-founder, we both love math.

And, you know, we didn't decide to do math.

Then we started thinking, well, maybe we should teach computer science.

But eventually ...

and this is maybe surprising to people in North America, eventually we decided that the best subject to start with was teaching foreign languages.

And let me tell you why.

There's a number of reasons.

One of them is that there's a huge audience for it.

There's about two billion people in the world learning a foreign language.

both in school and outside of schools.

Most of these people, by the way, are learning English.

About 80 percent of them are learning English.

And the reason for that is because English can truly transform your life.

In most countries in the world, knowledge of English can significantly increase your income potential.

So this is another reason why we decided to start with foreign languages, and it's because you can directly make more money if you learn another language, in particular English.