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Luis von Ahn and the value of a few spare seconds
Before Duolingo, Luis von Ahn put the internet to work deciphering words and labeling pictures. His next problem was more personal: getting people to come back tomorrow.
Arkose Labs Put a Price on Being a Pest
The internet taught machines to behave like people. Arkose Labs built a business by making the badly behaved ones pay for the privilege.
Max Levchin
Max Levchin is a Ukrainian-American tech entrepreneur and co-founder of PayPal, where he served as CTO and helped build one of the world's first large-scale digital payment systems. He later founded Slide (acquired by Google for $182M), Glow (women's health app, 25M users), and most prominently Affirm - the publicly traded buy-now-pay-later leader with $3.22B in FY2025 revenue. Levchin is also a cryptography advocate (creator of the Levchin Prize), early Yelp investor and chairman, and co-founder of SciFi VC with his wife Nellie.