Luis Von Ahn

Oh, by the way, this is what I want to talk to you about today, giving equal access to education to everyone.

At the time, I was a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, and I decided to work on this with my PhD student, Severin.

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.