Union Square Ventures just announced their investment in Duolingo.com. The company founder Luis Von Ahn is so smart and has a track record of really creating valuable solutions on the time people spending doing boring tasks on the internet. As Brad Feld says, the machines have taken over, they are just making us enter information about ourselves into them, they are being patient and eventually the machines will run the asylum. Luis invented CAPTCHA and re CAPTCHA two technologies on the internet that everyone who is reading this blog had to do many times while signing up for service or posting a link to Facebook or Google or Twitter or any of the Web Services that we use to let the machines know that we are human. What we all probably did not know is that this “data entry” is used to digitize all the books in the world! How cool is that? Here is the TED talk that Luis gave which explains how they did this, more importantly he explains subtly WHY he did this. 

I believe this is incredibly smart investment by USV. The next frontier is language and sound, I have written about my investment thesis around sound and voice. The biggest problem we have with language is that machines don’t understand the semantics of translations and Luis is solving that using powerful motivators and incentives on the internet, the need of people to want to learn another language and making that affordable (read FREE) to everyone on the internet. Luis is nothing if not ambitious, but I have a feeling that he will be successful in translating the entire web. If you always wanted to learn another language and did not want to spend $500 to do it, Duolingo.com is the place to do it and BTW, you will be helping in translating the web which is 50% in english into a language that you are learning.

To Brad Burnham and the rest of the partners in USV, Congratulations! this ones a winner and keeper! you are really showing why USV is the top VC firm in the world.

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