duolingo
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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.
Mario Schlosser and the Case of the Missing Minutes
Before he co-founded Oscar Health, Mario Schlosser studied trust, built social games, and learned to follow the data. Then he turned the same curiosity on his own calendar.
Sallie Krawcheck and the cost of being right
She ran the businesses that sold America its investments. Then Sallie Krawcheck began asking who those businesses were built for - and put her own company behind the answer.
Vicki Cheung and the Art of Building Before the Blueprint
Before the office, before the laptop, sometimes before the company, Vicki Cheung has made a career of arriving early - then listening closely enough to build what people actually need.
Emily Cosnotti Makes Taste Operational
From photo prints and subscription boxes to an owl loose in Roblox, Emily Cosnotti has built a career out of giving ambitious ideas a workable shape. Her other laboratory is a 1929 Pittsburgh house, where taste must survive budgets, tools and the occasional uncooperative ceiling.
Alex Nichols
Alex Nichols is a General Partner at CapitalG, Alphabet's independent growth fund. He invests in companies reinventing large markets through novel economic or distribution models, then compounding through scale - a thesis carved out across deals like Stripe, Duolingo, Whatnot, Rippling, UiPath, Waymo, Odoo and Zach Dell's Base Power. Promoted to GP in January 2026 alongside Jill Chase, the first time CapitalG named two GPs at once since the firm's 2013 founding.
Ali Abouelatta
Ali Abouelatta is an Egyptian-born product manager turned newsletter writer and founder who built First 1000 - a deep-dive Substack publication dissecting how famous startups acquired their first 1,000 customers - from zero to 90,000+ subscribers in under three years with no prior audience. After a stint at Duolingo where he generated an estimated $50-100M in incremental revenue through monetization experiments, he left in 2025 to build Lazyweb.com, an AI-powered design inspiration library, documenting his own journey to 1,000 paying customers in real time through the very newsletter that made him known.
Laela Sturdy
Laela Sturdy is the Managing Partner and CEO of CapitalG, Alphabet's $7 billion independent growth equity fund. A first-generation American born in Jamaica and raised in South Florida, she played Division I basketball at Harvard, earned an MBA from Stanford, and built a track record at CapitalG where every one of her early investments became a unicorn — including Stripe, Duolingo, UiPath, and Webflow. She became sole leader of CapitalG in March 2023, making her one of a tiny handful of women running an established multibillion-dollar venture firm.