Luis Von Ahn
Appearances
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Return-to-office mandates are more than "backdoor layoffs"
I just wholeheartedly believe that you can work better that way. I mean, most of what we do, not 100%, but most of what we do is creative stuff. It's just a lot harder to do so over Slack and Zoom. You know, that kind of worked out for about nine months during the pandemic. But it is actually impressive how, you know, when the pandemic started, we all had to go remote. We executed pretty well.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Return-to-office mandates are more than "backdoor layoffs"
Towards the end of it, our ideas had kind of run out. I mean, we were executing the ideas, but we kind of had run out of new ideas. And it was pretty amazing. As soon as we came back to the office, within like three months, you would just see like all these ideas popping up. And it's because, my God, first of all, you can't sit in front of a whiteboard and talk about stuff.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Return-to-office mandates are more than "backdoor layoffs"
Also, there's, you know, we have lunch together here every day. In the lunch line, you hear people being like, hey, I haven't seen you in a while. I thought of saying this to you. It's just something that you would never send a Slack for. I think the combination of all this just makes it a better company. I don't have that much proof, but I am extremely convinced of this.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
a Mexican person with a sombrero. Like, we try not to do that. I mean, we also have to be, you know, not offensive and stuff like that. But we try to add it a little bit. I would say it's not the primary goal.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
So let's see. It's been very much on purpose for us to not put humans in the app, as in human teachers. There's nothing wrong with human teachers. It's just the case that, you know, from the beginning, we've been a technology company and we've wanted to make it so that technology teaches you. There's a couple of reasons for that.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
One is just it's a lot cheaper to teach you with technology than with a human teacher. The other thing is it turns out somewhere between 80 and 90 percent of language learners just don't want to talk to another human. They may tell you they do, but they don't. And it's because when you're learning a language, you're pretty shy about it.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
And only the extreme extroverts are okay talking to a stranger on video in a language that they're not very good. The majority of people just won't do it. I mean, we've actually done these research studies over the years where, because over time, you know, we thought maybe we should add humans, maybe we should humans.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
And we've done these research studies that are in some of the most amazing things that I've seen. When you, you know, you talk to a user, you ask them, uh, what do you think could make Duolingo better? And, you know, historically in the past they have said, well, more practice conversation with a real person. They have said that.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
And then you asked the user, okay, so you're telling me if I put a human on Duolingo, you would do that? And then they say, yes, yes, I would. And you can even ask them, would you pay for it? And then they'll say, yes, I'll pay for it. And then you tell them, okay, do you want to do it right now? And the answer invariably is no, no, no, not right now. People just don't want to do that.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
So that's why we haven't put the humans there. And I think it's been a good decision, especially now that with large language models, we can do a pretty good job getting you to practice conversation without a human.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
That's exactly right. It is a really, really good application. I mean, there's a number of things. You said it right. It doesn't matter if it says something that is a little wrong. because you're just practicing your language. Also, it doesn't matter if it makes a small mistake. Sometimes it makes a small grammatical mistake.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
People can't even notice because they're usually kind of beginners at Spanish or beginners at French. You don't know. And it also can adapt to your level really well. Large language models are really good at adapting to your level. So we tell it, OK, adapt to a beginner Spanish.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
And by the way, we even tell it, hey, because we've seen this person learn on Duolingo, we actually know all the words they know. So we tell the language model, this person only knows these 200 words. So please, mostly use only these 200 words. So it works really well for that.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
We're investing a lot. Fortunately, it's actually been good for us in terms of profitability for two reasons. So there's two places where we invest in AI. The first is generating data that is going to be used in our lessons. That data used to be generated online. partly with humans, and now it's mostly generated with AI. And it turns out it's a lot cheaper to generate with AI than with humans.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Also, it's a lot faster to generate it with AI. So we're very happy with that. And then the other big use is real-time conversation. That one is expensive. It's actually expensive to provide a real-time conversation with a user. But what we had to do is we actually had to add a higher price plan. So we now have two subscription plans. We have Super Duolingo, which is our standard subscription.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
And we added a new one called Duolingo Max, which is about twice the price of Super Duolingo. That one gives you the conversation practice. And it's expensive, but people pay twice as much. So actually, it really doesn't cut into it. So it's actually worked out well for us.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Yeah, we use OpenAI.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
You know, I don't know the percentages, but I do know that we're, I mean, I at some point probably knew the percentages, but I don't know them off the top of my head. But I do know that we are basically, you know, it is good for us in terms of margins.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Yeah, the good news is at the moment, the AI features are not bringing us new users. What's going on is… Or new revenue. Yes, it is bringing us new revenue. There's a good margin there. I mean, we could… So, a couple of things. The price of the same exact call is going down over time.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Whether you do it to an open AI or whether you do it through Microsoft or whatever, the price is going down for a number of reasons. Everything's getting more efficient, and also chips are getting cheaper over time, et cetera. So the price is going down. At the moment, there's a good amount of cushion, but we expect that over time there will be an even larger amount of cushion.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
So at least for our application, I'm not particularly concerned in terms of margins. I think for our application, the margins work out.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
I think the answer is yes, but I think the operative term is somewhat. They are somewhat interchangeable. So we've tried to build our technology stacks so that you can interchange them. But the reality is that you interchange them and you start getting wonky stuff because you probably spent a lot of time really testing your way into the right queries. You may have done some fine-tuning, etc.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
So you can interchange them, but if you do, you probably need to spend a few months making sure that the wonkiness goes away.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
It's somewhere in between. Let's see, I do think that large language models are going to be very positive for Duolingo, already are, and I think they're going to continue being very positive. What is not true is that, oh my God, large language models just solve all our problems.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
I mean, one of the biggest issues that people don't seem to, or at least people are not talking about that, particularly with education when it comes to large language models, is large language models are good at teaching you stuff. They're not good at engagement. And that's the hardest thing with education.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
I mean, the hardest thing about me trying to teach you something is just keeping you engaged. Somehow people forget, you know, some people saying like, oh my God, you can learn quantum physics with ChatGPT. And yeah, sure. But that's just not that impressive. You can learn quantum physics with a book. The technology to learn this has been around for a long time. It's called a book and it works.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
It's just people don't really want to read a quantum physics book. And similarly, most people really probably don't want to go to chat GPT and start asking questions about quantum physics. And it's the same thing for language learning. You know, large language models are very good at getting you to practice, but keeping you engaged is pretty hard.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
And so, you know, that part, I just don't know if large language models are going to help all that much. And in the end, this is a sad thing, but the reality is, you know, Duolingo is very gamified, and I wholeheartedly believe most people would rather spend more time playing Candy Crush than talking to others. And that's maybe a sad truth. And, you know, there's some exceptions, right?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
I mean, you love talking to somebody that you're in love with. And sure, that's nice. But the reality is for most of the time, most people would just rather spend time playing Candy Crusher or scrolling on Instagram than talking to others. So all of that, I just don't think large language models are going to help with all that much.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Well, from the beginning, this is a central thesis that we believe here at Duolingo. The hardest thing about learning something by yourself is staying motivated. I mean, that is just it. In fact, that is probably the reason for the vast majority of our success is that we realized that early on. So from the beginning, we have tried to have a thing that is...
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
enjoyable to use and that keeps you coming back and we have probably spent more effort on that than anything else uh internally our feeling is like you know learning a language it's a lot like working out in that you know does it matter all that much whether you're doing the elliptical or a peloton or a treadmill like it probably matters but the reality is what matters by far the most is that you're doing it every day whatever the hell you're doing and it's kind of the same with Duolingo like you know we
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Whether you're doing this method or that method, maybe some methods are more efficient than others, but what matters is that you're doing it every day. And so we got very good at that. Now, once we got very good at that, we started trying to add more sophistication in what we teach, and we've been doing that for the last few years. But always, primarily, we are a motivation engine.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
I do, I spend effort on that, but it's not just me. I think at the company, it is pretty well understood that if it's not fun, it's not going to work. And so we spend a lot of effort trying to keep Duolingo enjoyable. And this is why we, you know, for example, when we did this thing where you can talk to an AI to practice conversation. You're not just talking to a random AI.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
You're talking to one of, you know, we have a cast of characters. You're talking to one of our cast of characters. It has a personality. And so we've just really, everything we do, every time we put something out, it's ingrained in our thinking that, oh, this has to be enjoyable. I spend effort pushing that agenda, but I don't have to all that much because it's just very ingrained in the company.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
It's the largest offices in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. We have about 400 people there. We have about 250 in New York. And then we have offices in a few cities. We have one in Detroit. We have one in Seattle, one in Berlin, and one in Beijing. All of those have like 30 people in them. But one key thing is we are not remote. We got to come to the office, to one of those offices.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
I just wholeheartedly believe that you can work better that way, especially when it comes to most of what we do, not 100%, but most of what we do is creative stuff. And it's just a lot harder to do so over Slack and Zoom. That kind of worked out for about nine months during the pandemic. But it is actually impressive how when the pandemic started, we all had to go remote. We executed pretty well.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Towards the end of it, our ideas had kind of run out. I mean, we were executing the ideas, but we kind of had run out of new ideas. And it was pretty amazing. As soon as we came back to the office, within like three months, you would just see like all these ideas popping up. And it's because, my God, first of all, you can't sit in front of a whiteboard and talk about stuff.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Also, there's, you know, we have lunch together here every day. In the lunch line, you hear people being like, hey, I've been seeing you a while. I thought of saying this to you. It's just something that you would never send a slack for. So I think the combination of all this just makes it a better company. I don't have that much proof, but I am extremely convinced of this.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
No. Fortunately not. Do your employees think that? No, no, no. Do they agree with you? You know why? You know why? This was... You know, we've done a lot of dumb things at Duolingo, but this was not one of the dumb things we did in retrospect. From my first message saying everybody's going to go work remote, in that message, I said, but we're going to come back to the office.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Like, I do not want Duolingo to turn into a remote company. We are not a remote company. And so we kept saying that the whole time. And when we would hire, you know, a lot of companies did this thing where during the pandemic, they would hire people all over the world because whatever, you're remote. We never did that.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Whenever we hired people, we would say, yeah, I get that you're not coming to the office right now, but your job is in New York and we expect you to be in New York. And because, you know, at some point, hopefully soon we will be back in the office. So we just never stopped repeating that. And so by the time we said, OK, time to go back to the office, this was not a surprise for anybody.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
And I don't think we lost a single employee for that.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
That's probably true. We are not in San Francisco, and that's probably true. Although the New York office is now the second largest, and we also didn't lose people in New York.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Sure. I mean, compared to before, I mean, for example, we do, we're not here five days a week. We're in the office. So we, the way we work is Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, you have to be in the office. Monday and Friday, it's optional. What happens in practice is Monday about half the people come in and Fridays is like 20% of the people come in.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
I am here in the office, though. I am here in the office. I come. But I would say I don't feel like I have the political power inside this company to say, all right, people, you've got to come in five days a week. I feel like that would not go over well.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
You know, travel is interesting. Now that we're a publicly traded company, people have hypothesized all kinds of stuff about travel with us. They're like, oh my God, travel's opening up. That may be good for Duolingo. Or travel's drying. That may be bad for Duolingo. The reality is travel does not affect us all that much.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
I can have hypotheses for why that is, but we just have not seen traveling closing down or opening up affecting us all that much. The reason is probably because the majority of our learners, we have a lot of learners that that have different motivations. But the two big buckets are not travel. One of them is a hobby. And that's the biggest bucket in the US.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
So, you know, you ask people in the US, like, why are you using Duolingo? And the most common answer is like, well, you know, I used to play a lot of Candy Crush or I used to do a lot of Instagram and Now I'm doing Duolingo, and at least I'm learning some Spanish. It's just a hobby. And then the other huge group of people is people learning English. And for them, it's not about travel.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
They just actually, honest to God, need to learn English, either because it's for educational opportunities or for job opportunities, et cetera. And those two big buckets account for like 90%, 95% of our users. So travel just doesn't affect it very much.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
No. I mean, our marketing, we haven't thought about that. I mean – Most of our growth, it's like 90% of our users come in from word of mouth. And that just will keep happening, I think. We also spend very little in marketing comparatively.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
I mean, our marketing budget, our entire marketing budget for the whole world, and we really do operate in every single country in the world, is $50 million a year, which is quite small for a company with our revenue. But we just, you know, whatever we're doing with marketing seems to be working pretty well. And we don't spend a lot of money on it.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Ah, yeah. So we have functions. There's the marketing function. There's the engineering function. There is the product management function, design, et cetera. So we have functions, and each function has a function head. To give you a relative idea of sizes of functions, engineering, product management, and design combined account for about 70% of our employees.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Design is weirdly large for our company. Our number of employees total is 850. We have about 130 people in the design department. So design is large, but we have engineering, product, and design account for about 70%. So that's the people working on the product. And now, if you look at that group, the people working on the product, that is structured into these things we call areas.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
And each area is related to one of the things we're trying to optimize. So, for example, with language learning, the main three things we're trying to optimize are engagement, so how fun Duolingo is, teaching better, and how much money we make. And so we have an area for each one of these. And in each area, there are teams, and in each team, there are people. That's kind of how we're organized.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
It's a little bit of a matrix structure. But one important thing that I think has worked really well for us, our areas and our teams are not feature-based. And what I mean by that, in most software companies or most app companies or whatever, you usually have a team for each feature. So this is the login team. We own login. Or if you have a leaderboard, this is the leaderboard team.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
We own the leaderboard. We do not have that. Our teams don't own features. Our teams own metrics. So we have a team for subscription revenue. We have a team for daily active users. And they can touch whatever they want in the app. All they have to do is continually increase the metrics. There are positives to this, which is it's very aligned to metrics.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
There are negatives in that no team owns certain features. So when something breaks, there's a lot of people being like, not my feature. I don't know. So there's positives and negatives. But in all, this has actually worked out really well for us.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Yeah, we're already... We passed the point that there are collisions a while ago. I mean, there's definitely collisions. I'm sure, yeah. There's a couple of things that really... that help us here. One is every change to the app passes through this review process called product review, which is not just one person.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
There's a group of people that have a lot of knowledge about kind of how the whole thing works. So they serve as a little bit of a semaphore, a little bit of like, no, you should not do that, et cetera. And then the other thing that is really important is we have guardrail metrics. So here's how it works. So if you're in the team that's trying to improve subscription revenue,
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
your goal is to improve that metric. But we tell you, you cannot mess up any of the other metrics. So for example, if you do an experiment that improves subscription revenue by a million bucks or whatever, but it decreases daily active users, you cannot launch it. So that has really helped, you know, teams kind of police themselves.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
They at least won't go do anything that really messes something else up. The combination of these two has helped. You are right that if we had probably 100,000 employees, I don't think the structure would work. That said, I just don't think that a company like Duolingo, at least with the products that we have, I don't think we need 100,000 employees. I mean, I think we're, you know,
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
We'll grow and we'll continue growing. Maybe we'll get to, I don't know, 5,000 employees, but I doubt we'll ever get to something like 100,000 employees.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Not that often. Teams police themselves a lot. I mean, I do see every single change that passes through the app. I do see that, but usually I'm not making trade-off calls. The main thing that I'm looking for is making sure that everything's high quality.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Yeah, it's definitely true. The good news is... our employees stick around for a very long time. And our leadership, particularly in the product areas, it's been the same for the last, I don't know, eight years. It's the same people for the last eight years. So yes, I kind of have a view of everything, but the reality is that our head of product, Jem, has a view of everything too.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Our head of design, Simi, also has a view of pretty much everything. So yes, I am in that mode, but we have a number of people that... that could probably play that role as well.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
You know, the good news is there's little disagreement for, for a few reasons. The first one is that we're very metrics based company. So Usually we just let the metrics speak. You know, if we run an A-B test and the metrics say something, my opinion doesn't matter all that much, unless it's something that we think is, you know, really like a dark pattern or something.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
But generally my opinion or their opinion doesn't matter all that much. That's one reason. The other one is we've been working together for so long that we're just pretty aligned on everything. And then the last thing, you know, I have this saying, if we're going to go by opinion, let's go by mind. So generally, when we have disagreements, I kind of see how deeply they believe in their thing.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
And sometimes I just disagree and commit. But if we both believe with equal strength on something, I will just go with my thing.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
If we're going to go by opinion, let's go with mine.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
But I'm telling you, the majority of things, we don't really go by opinion. The majority of things is just by data.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
For the company or for me? They're similar, but they're not identical.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Okay. For the company, the decisions are very much tied to return on investment. Most things are, there's a return on investment calculation. Even if we don't sit there and write the numbers down, there's a, you know, how much effort you're going to put in something and how much you're going to get back. That drives most of our decision making.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
There's another thing that is not unique to Duolingo, but I think it is not the norm in most companies. But it is what happens to Duolingo. But it's not unique to Duolingo, which is usually when you're doing a project, there's kind of three things that matter, which is how much does it cost? How fast are you going to do it? And what's the quality?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
And at Duolingo, and usually there's trade-offs between these, at Duolingo, the most important thing is quality. The second most important thing is speed. And the third most important thing is whether we're on budget or not. That is different than many companies. In many companies, it's the other way around, where it's just the most important thing is budget, then speed, then quality.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Here, just quality is the most important thing. And so that's another thing in our decision making. That's for the company. For me, it's very gut feeling. And I have found myself, you know, I used to try to justify that. I have stopped. At this point, I'm like, look, This is what I think we should do.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
I can tell you reasons that I can probably coming up with after the fact, but the reality is my gut says we should do that. And at this point, because I've been at this for, you know, I've been working on Duolingo for like 13 years. My gut's pretty good. It's not 100% correct. Like surely I make mistakes, but it's pretty good. And so...
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
I mainly do things with gut feeling, and then I tell people a justification afterwards. But everybody around me knows that these justifications are after the fact. They're not rational thoughts.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Thank you for having me.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because that's, again, the majority of decisions that we have to make. There's a clear answer. The majority of things is just like, well, look, this is going to lose us money. Let's not do that.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
No. It's been very fortunate. First of all, we hired an amazing CFO before we went public, Matt Scarupa. And fortunately, he kind of deals with most public company stuff. I mean, I... I don't do a lot of that. And I'm very thankful for that because that's just, you know, I don't have a finance background. I have a PhD in computer science. That's what I'm good at, not finance. So there's that.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
The other thing is I think we've been fortunate that so far as a public company, we've executed well. So I think that has given us a little bit of latitude in that, you know, we basically don't get asked very tough questions because we've executed very well. I am sure this won't be the case forever. I'm sure at some point we're going to miss a quarter. We haven't so far, but I'm sure we will.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
And when that happens, I'll probably have to answer some questions and I'll probably have to tell people that, you know, sorry, we'll be more buttoned up from now on. But so far, you know, I show up to earnings calls in a t-shirt. The day you see me show up to earnings calls in a suit, you'll know that we fucked up.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Well, it's an app that teaches languages. That's what we're mostly well known for. As of the last couple of years, we also teach math and music. It's the most popular way to learn languages in the world. A few fun facts, for example, there are more people learning languages on Duolingo in the US than there are people learning languages across all US high schools combined.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
You know, like, oh, so sorry.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Yeah, I mean, you're right. Quality is not measurable. The way we, you know, the way we measure it and not measure it, but the way we kind of make decisions about that is we just have, particularly in our design department, we just have people who are very much sticklers about quality. And, you know, that's, we just like, nope, that's just not good enough. That's just not good enough.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
And so we just do that a lot. And in terms of investment, I mean, Honestly, with the public markets, we kind of just don't talk much about that. You know, we talk about the metrics. We kind of just don't talk too much about how the, you know... Turns out, we spent an extra month working on this feature just because we didn't really like the way the owl was animated.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
We just kind of don't talk too much about that. And I think that's fine. I don't think we're... I think that's fine. But my guess is if we went on earnings calls and spent all our time talking about how much effort we put into animating our OWL, I don't think people would like that.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Well, I would like that. I would like that, but yeah. I mean, but the reality is we do spend, I mean, we spend an inordinate amount of time. You know, if you look at our app, it's over time has just become very animated. We spend an inordinate amount of time looking at the precise frames of the animation. We're just like, oh, no, no, see, this is not smooth enough.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
And I'm not to claim that our app is perfect. It's not perfect, but we at least try really hard for it to get as close to perfect as possible.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
And this is actually true in most countries in the world. We teach languages to more people than the public school systems.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Can you measure that? Yeah, we can. We can, but... not as effectively as you would like to measure it. The answer is yes, Duolingo works. We have measurements. And I'll tell you how we measure it. Unfortunately, this is the only way we know how to measure it reliably. It's not that great of a way, but it is it.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
It is you take somebody who's just starting Duolingo, you ask them a bunch of questions about their previous knowledge, you also give them a test to measure how much they know. Then you have them use Duolingo for a long time. because it takes a while for you to actually learn stuff in the language, like use it for a year, use it for two years or something.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
And then at the end of that period, you ask them questions about whether they use other resources, and then you also give them a test to figure out how much better did they get. And it turns out that people who knew nothing before
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
and used Duolingo and did not use any other resources, and then take a test at the end, learn about as much, in some cases, it varies in the study, but either the same or more than the classroom. So we're pretty happy with that. The results actually work. The problem with this way of measuring is that it's very slow. I mean, it takes one or two years for us to get a new measurement.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Yeah, I really don't like that, but we have not been able to come up with a better way, despite the fact that we have tried a lot
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
of like you know kind of doing things in the app where we're like oh okay we can do kind of micro measurements of whether you've learned a little bit sword etc it's been super complicated to do that and never given great results so we just rely on these old school give you a test and then it's a pre-test post-test method that's it that's it
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Video call with Lily, yeah.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
We are using their measurements, and efficacy is really important. We spend a lot of effort trying to make sure that we're efficacious. And, you know, the other good news, even though we do this only –
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
know the time scale here is years you can plot how effective duolingo is and if you look at it over the last 10 years duolingo is clearly more every year it is more effective than the previous year for sure on this test space yeah yeah basically more people are passing the test more people are getting higher scores in the test i mean basically people are learning more on duolingo every year.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
We have this cast of characters that our users love. One of them is an emo teen with purple hair. who is very unimpressed by you. And it turns out you can talk to her now and practice your conversation, and you can have really good conversations with her. There's a lot of things that are amazing about her.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
And there's a number of reasons for that. I mean, because we work a lot to try to teach you better, but it is definitely true. And at this point, you know, when we compare ourselves, we know we are as good or better than a classroom. We know we're not yet as good as a one on one human tutor, a good one on one human tutor. We know we're not yet as good at that.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
And but our goal and I think we can do that over the next three or five years, I think we'll be as good as a one on one human tutor in terms of efficacy. We're way better in terms of getting you to stick around. Getting to stick around, we're just way better at that. But efficacy, it just turned out, if you have the money and the strength to continue going, a one-on-one human tutor does better.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Very easily. Always go with engagement.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
I'll give you many arguments, but the one that works the most is this. Doesn't matter how effective you are, can't teach somebody that's not here.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Just that's it. People leave and then the reality is, it's not always true that engagement and learning outcomes are at odds. But when they are, we usually prefer going for engagement. And it's just, you know, I'll give you an example. There are some things that are frustrating and frustration makes you leave. What we do with that is we actually just smooth them.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
So there may be, and by that I mean, I may be able to teach it to you. If I could force you to sit there, I may be able to teach it to you in five minutes, but it'd be a very frustrating five minutes. Instead, what we do is, fine, we'll teach it to you in two hours. just way slower, but the whole time, you know, things are animating on the screen and you're getting dopamine hits or whatever.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
It may have taken you two hours, even though a really good teacher may have taught it to you in five minutes, watching you make mistakes. And it would be frustrating, but we much prefer to keep you around. And it's part of the reason is because we're in an app setting as opposed to a school setting. You know, in a school setting, the truth is the kids are held hostage there.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Like they sort of can't leave. With an app setting, The tiniest frustration, people are like, you know what? Going to go to TikTok now. So we just can't lose those users. So we always opt for engagement. But that doesn't mean we won't teach it to you. We'll just smooth it. We'll just take it a little slower.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
First of all, she adapts to your level, and we know your level because you've been learning on Duolingo, so we have a pretty good idea of what your level is. She adapts to your level. The other thing is she has memory, so she knows that last time we talked about something,
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Oh, no. We've spent years thinking about it.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Probably the thing you're losing is efficiency. By that I mean amount of content learned per unit time. You're probably losing efficiency. I mean, the truth of the matter is I grew up, first of all, I grew up in the third world a while ago. some of the stuff that I grew up being taught, my teachers were like hitting me and I'm not kidding. Like they would hit me.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
And the reality is that I probably learned really fast because I like, you know, like when you were learning penmanship, like if you did it the wrong thing, they kind of would hit you with a ruler. You have a real incentive to get that done very fast. You just learn really fast because you're like, whoa. You know, I think so. I think it's true.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
You can learn faster if you're in an environment where you're forced to, you know, just do so. And nobody cares about whether you're feeling good about it or not. You can probably learn faster. But, you know, in our case, I'm okay with slightly slower learning as long as you're still engaged.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Yeah, and there's probably a little bit of that. Very hard to measure, of course. But the reality is, I mean, ultimately, it works. Duolingo works. I mean, just an example. For me, I've been, for the last few years, only using Duolingo to learn French. At this point, I can watch Netflix shows in French. And with no subtitles on it, I just watch them. And it works. So you're right.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
There's probably a trade-off. It's probably pretty hard to measure. But what we're looking for here is, that people are actually using their time well.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
For example, I literally just had a conversation today where she remembered that last time we talked about the fact that I like Nirvana. And she was telling me that her favorite song is Smells Like Teen Spirit.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Yeah, it's a good point. I mean, well, first of all, math and music are about to be available on Android, or by the time this airs, they will be available on Android. So we are about a year behind on Android. The reality is this has been true on Duolingo almost since the beginning. Android has been... six months to a year behind iOS.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
There's a number of reasons for that, but probably the biggest one is actually it has been harder to find really good Android developers when compared to iOS developers. There's just more really good iOS developers. So we have more of them at Duolingo. So the way we work is... Most new features, we experiment them on iOS. Because a new feature is usually not that great off the bat.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
You usually kind of have to do trial and error and stuff and try to make it better. By the time it's good, we port it to Android. That's kind of how we operate. So we understand the importance of Android. You are right. There's more people with Android phones than iPhones. But we feel like it's OK that we're six months behind. Generally, all features are going to make it to Android.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
It's just six months behind. And we feel OK about that. It turns out to be easier to develop on iOS for a number of reasons, not just that there's more developers. So that's it. We're just ahead. In retrospect, given the technology that there is today, maybe we would be doing something that is cross-platform, where we develop on both platforms at the same time.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
But we're locked into being native on both. And so our apps are native. We have a native app for iPhones, and we have a native app for Android phones. And that was the best thing we could do, you know, whatever, 10 years ago. And we're locked into that.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Easy choice, by the way. Facile choice. We're dating ourselves on that one, but yes. And so, you know, these are pretty enjoyable conversations and you get to practice your language super well. And it is entirely spoken. And, you know, it just works really well. And we're very happy because it is the first time that you really think... We really, really are not going to need humans for this.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
It is, and we don't have one huge project where we're going to stop all development and be like, you know what, we're going to now be single platform kind of thing. But we are slowly getting there. I don't know how long it'll take. The hard part with this is, you are right, if we were to start from scratch right now, the decision would be clear. But you also have to keep the plane going.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
And it is such a big investment to do this that we will probably have to stop all development for, I don't know, a year and a half or something. I don't even know the timeline because it's just so big. So far, we have decided to do this piecemeal rather than all at once.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Literally, like, you know, in the last few days.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Yeah, four times as much.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
At least for Duolingo, a given user spends four times as much. Per capita, it's four times as much versus Android, yeah.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Yes. More of our money comes from iOS than from Android, even though we have more Android users than iOS users. It's just hard to overcome that 4X.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
No, it's not 4X the income. It's a user spends four times as much. We have more Android users, but it doesn't balance out. In the end, we make more money from iPhone. But I'm going to give you a number here that is... This is very rough, and it's not true, but it's just to give you an idea. The split of users is like 60-40, so 60% Android, 40% iOS. The split of revenue is the other way around.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
It's like basically 60% iOS, 40% Android. These are very rough, but yeah.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
It's a funny, I mean, it's one way of thinking about it. Well, first of all, it's not quite true that all our money is on iOS. It's just more money is on iOS. That's for sure. But it is a little bit true. Regardless of Android versus iOS, if you just look at our payers, who pays for Duolingo at the moment? These are usually people who are well off.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
And now they may not be millionaires, but they're, you know, people that live in countries like the US that are wealthy countries that have salaries like 100,000 bucks a year kind of thing. Like good, good, stable job in a wealthy country. That is who pays for Duolingo. The people who use Duolingo for free are usually in poor countries. They may not have a stable job, et cetera.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
So it is true that we're getting the wealthy people to subsidize the education for everybody. That is the case, and that'll probably always be the case. Now, on our end, we also need to get better as a business to get more people in some of these developing countries to pay. I mean, a really good example, Netflix has done a really good job at getting people in Brazil or India to pay.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
We have not done as good of a job. And part of the issue is that we're freemium. And again, I grew up in a poor country. In a poor country, Even if the price is scaled down to match the GDP per capita, which is much cheaper, the problem that you have is that in a poor country, the attitude is, I won't pay unless I have to. That's just the attitude. Like, it doesn't matter if it's just a dollar.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
And I do happen to have a dollar. I just won't pay unless I have to. So what you see is extreme tolerance for, for example, we can put 10 ads at the end of a lesson. You still, they still won't pay. And so this is why, for example, Netflix does so well in some of these countries, because in Netflix, there's just no free. They're just like, look, whatever you got to pay.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
And people are like, fine, fine, I'll pay. So we have to figure out what to do as a freemium product in these countries. And, you know, we have some ideas, but the reality is we have not really succeeded at, you know, strong monetization in countries like India. We haven't.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
For sure. We are spending a lot of effort on that. And it is growing, which is nice, but it's a massive opportunity. I mean, language learning is another funny thing where... You know, most markets, not language learning, but most markets, the largest market is, you know, a country like the U.S., like rich countries.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
No, no, no. We animate them. I mean, it's a combo.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Turns out language learning as a whole, not Duolingo, but language learning as a whole, the largest market is actually developing countries. Yeah. I mean, the Indias, Vietnams, Brazils, Mexicos of the world. They're learning English, and that's the largest language learning market, but we have not cracked it.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
We have cracked the smaller one, which is like US and Western Europe and richer countries. We've cracked that in terms of monetization. In terms of users, we have users. We have a lot of users in India. They just don't pay us.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's animated in real time. I mean, we have a rig for her. Turns out we've bought these two animation studios in Detroit. This is why we have an office in Detroit. And they've done a really good job. So everything, her mouth moves just, you know, when she's speaking and it is tied to what she's saying. You know, she rolls her eyes at you, et cetera.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
I don't know how to answer the question. It's in between. We started using social media with the owl a while ago. It grew mostly in the U.S. through TikTok because the owl does unhinged stuff on TikTok.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
No, no. Really? Actually, no. Most of them are in Pittsburgh.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
yes it started out with tick tock and it was mainly us okay and that was several years ago what has changed in the time is first of all we're no longer just relying on tick tock it is now you know it's kind of youtube youtube shorts instagram etc so everywhere on social media that's one big thing the other one is that we learned how to localize this to different markets
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
So, you know, we started Duolingo accounts for a bunch of countries, Mexico, well, Spanish speaking, Japan, Brazil, Germany, France, China, et cetera. And it turns out we have figured out how to make all of them succeed. And I was, you know, I was dubious at first when somebody told me we're going to open an account in Germany. I thought,
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
You know, no offense to Germans, but I thought, these people don't have a sense of humor. Oh, my gosh. But it turned out. They do.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
They do. And it is, in fact, one of our more successful accounts. They are a little different. So if you look at it, it's not that different, but they are a little different.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
No, no, no, no, no. Okay. We have global team, which is these five people. And in each country, we have a small number of people. It's probably one or two people that localize this stuff. And now, localized doesn't mean we take the exact same videos and, you know, in Mexico, put a sombrero on. That's not that.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
It's just we kind of have themes, and we have figured out what themes work globally and kind of also what themes work in certain countries. And so, for example, the German one, we had a really big thing on Oktoberfest. And also, at some point, because there's this kind of dance club scene in Berlin, I guess they all went to one of these 24-hour dance clubs.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
So in each country, it does different stuff, and it's worked out pretty well.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
It's a lot of that. It's a lot of that. I mean, it's relatively... By now, because we are such a presence online... By the way, I didn't know this until recently. There are weeks when our...
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
video on tick tock is the most watched video in all of tick tock that week that happens i mean and so by now our account is so well known and so uh or our accounts are so well known etc that we have we have our pick in terms of you know a lot of people want to work for that team and And typically we just look at what they've done before.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
And so we're able, it's a small group of really good creators. And so we hire from that group. And usually these are pretty funny people. that are even funnier online, but when they're offline, they're not as funny. I mean, they're still funny, but when they're offline, you're like, it's you? It's you who came up with that?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
FRANCESC CAMPOY FLORES- Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. This works. the way this is not paid so we make all that all that all that social marketing is not paid it's we it's free it's like we make our videos and they just kind of go viral if you look at
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
number of users that are a fraction of users that are coming in from social media it's about 15 of our users are coming in from social media now if you look at social media views which we measure in the billions uh of of our content there's an equal number of social media roughly equal number of social media views of our content versus the content that is about us but not made by us
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
So there's a lot of other people just making content about Duolingo, but they're not us. And they combined have about as many views as we do.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Yeah. There's a review. There's an approval process. You know, we're close to the line in some of the stuff that we put out. And we have, in fact, gone across the line and published things that we shouldn't have. We have. And since we did that, we now have a pretty strict approval process And, you know, this is a whole layer. And the last step is basically me.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
But basically, stuff doesn't come to me. Because there's usually, before me, there's the CMO. So there's a lot of steps.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
I'm trying to remember what that one was. There...
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
I also, I mean, it's been such a long ago. I'll tell you a couple of things. I don't remember the exact video what it was, but I know that the last one that I approved, I was wrong. As in, I shouldn't have approved it. In retrospect, and a lot of this is you don't know in retrospect. You don't know until it happens because you put it out and then you just see this reaction.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
And I just, I don't remember what it was, but I know I approved it and I know I was wrong. Because I just didn't imagine that it was going to have that reaction. We haven't had that many full posts. I mean, it's been like three or four videos. That's just like, you probably shouldn't have done that. I'll tell you the other thing was we, about a year ago, we had made this crazy video.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
It was insane. We were a little hesitant about it. And we ended up cutting it. We cut it. You know, there's all these memes online about how the owl really wants you to learn a language. And it goes through great lengths, including kidnapping your family. this was a video about kidnapping. And we were a little hesitant about it, and then the October 7 attack happened, and then we cut it.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
And then we cut it last year, and we thought, well, you know what, we may use it next year. This year came along, again, we cut it. It just, you know, and then we came up with an internal thing that, like, a year when we can play that, it's probably been a good year for humanity. Yeah. Yeah. We're probably never going to play that.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
I think it's both. We just see it as continuing to work on the app. I mean, there's a lot of places where we use a lot of animation, and we just see it as continuing to work on the app. And generally, as we continue working on the app, we both get more users and get more of them to pay.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
You're asking for languages. That's a hard one. It's a huge language. I know, I know. It's the native language of Gandhi, the current prime minister of India. There is this unfortunate thing about being a huge language versus desire to learn it. It's a pretty big difference. Hindi is probably the one that has the most desire to learn it in terms of Indian languages.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
It's a tiny number of people that are learning it. It's got to be, I don't know exactly off the top of my head, but it's certainly well below 1% of our learners are learning Hindi. I'm going to guess 0.1% of our learners are learning Hindi. That's a guess that I have.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
So that's the hard part about adding languages, that we have to maintain them, we have to do a really good job with them, and then in the end, we just don't get a lot of usage. So, sorry.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Well, it's just really hard to say yes. You know, in the past, I used to say yes to this stuff. And we made a lot of mistakes adding languages that, in retrospect, we probably shouldn't have added.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
We have. We cut, I think it was Afrikaans. Yeah, we have. But the cut, in part, was because there was very little demand. But the biggest reason was it was just a low-quality course. And at some point, we thought this was a bigger brand risk than anything else. And we made the decision. We're like, well, could we improve it or what? And we made the decision that it was not worth improving.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Unfortunately, maybe. But unfortunately, at the moment, AI is really good for big languages and really bad for smaller languages. So there's a pretty high correlation with the languages we have. I mean, AI is very good at the languages we have. The Spanish and the French, not super good at your Esperanto or Navajo or kind of smaller languages.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
The good news is that in the constrained environment that we have, it can help quite a bit. It's been helping quite a bit. I mean, a lot of the data that we generate for it. our math course is with AI. The other thing is, some of it is without AI, but it turns out just computers are good at math.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
I mean, computers are good at math. And, you know, I understand AI is not so good at like, you know, they're like, whatever, follow this pattern or whatever. It may not be so good at that. But the data that we generate for a math course is a lot of stuff like fractions and multiplications. Computers are pretty good at generating that data.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Well, thank you. Thank you for having me. Great questions.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
I think for this feature, for this particular feature, I think it's just an excellent use of large language models. And I think it's, you know, on our end, it's working pretty well.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
It is, basically. So some of the lessons in Duolingo, you know, the way Duolingo works is the home screen is basically a path. And you're just kind of doing lessons. Some of the lessons are now going to be this thing we call an adventure, which is really just like it is just like one of these video games where you move characters around.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
And what's cool about it is that you're learning how to solve kind of real world situations on Duolingo. So, for example, it's just like a little video game where, you know, you are one of the characters and you're told, OK, go buy a pizza.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
and you're like kind of move and uh have to ask around and you ask some people and then the people tell you all the pizza places over there etc so it's like it's super fun and uh it helps you learn kind of navigate the real world so yeah we've been working on that what's cool about that feature is most of the scenarios or all the scenarios were mostly generated by ai
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
That feature in the past would have taken a long time to scale, but we were able to scale it pretty quickly because of AI.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Well, it is free. You can use it entirely for free without ever having to pay. But if you don't pay, you may have to see some ads, and we make money from the ads. But also, if you want to turn off the ads, you can pay to subscribe, and it turns off the ads, and it gives you some extra features, and we also make money from the subscription.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
And actually, the majority of the revenue comes from the subscription.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Yes, as of relatively recent. Yes, we are.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
It's probably true. Ads have never been a priority for us. I don't know the exact number, but it's something like 6% or 7% of our revenue comes from ads. And so for us, as long as they're there, they are a good reason for people to subscribe. But yeah, generally, we make about 80% of our revenue from subscriptions.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
And even though, by the way, only about 10% of our monthly active users pay to subscribe. We're a little under 10% of our monthly active users pay to subscribe. So that 10% of our monthly active users give us more than 80% of our revenue.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
It's the majority of languages. I mean, math and music are growing. They're just getting started. I mean, we really launched those about a year ago. And so they're just getting started. It's overwhelmingly languages.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
By far, English is the most popular. 45% of our active users are learning English. The second is Spanish, and the third is French. And then there's a big drop-off after that.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Yeah. I mean, the US is about 20% of our users, and 80% is international.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
About 45% are trying to learn English. It turns out in international, they also want to learn other languages.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
We definitely do some of that. We don't do it as, I don't know, I was going to say as much as we should, but I don't know if that's the case. We don't do it commensurately with the number of users, because then we would probably spend all our resources on English and Spanish and French. So certainly, you know, we spend the majority of our resources in the top eight languages to learn.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
And then we spend very little resource outside of that. The top eight are English, Spanish, and French. Then there is German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, I think, and Chinese. I think those are the top eight. Hopefully that's eight.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Mandarin, Mandarin. And that's it. That's the top eight. And after that, there really is a huge drop-off. So we have languages, even large languages. For example, we have Arabic. Arabic is a large language. Not that many people are learning Arabic. So we do put some resources there, but it's much less than for the larger languages.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
We don't. We have remained neutral about that. But it is an interesting thing that demand for learning languages is not as correlated as you would like with number of speakers or maybe even... usefulness in a geopolitical world. So, for example, Chinese, even though it is one of our top eight languages to learn, only about 2% of our users are learning Chinese.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
It's relatively small, even though that's the most spoken language in the world. So if I were to tell people, they're like, you know, maybe more of you should be learning Chinese. You know, one of the things that goes into people's calculus is how hard the language is to learn. Turns out Chinese, at least for English speakers, is just a lot harder.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
I mean, we have data to get to, you know, to get to a pretty good point in Spanish for English speakers takes call it three to 400 hours. That same level of knowledge for Chinese takes about 2000 hours. So, you know, the realities in the United States, if you're just going for pragmatism, return on investment, Spanish is probably a much better.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
I mean, in the U.S., you probably should learn Spanish. I mean, it's just, it's quite an easy language to learn.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Yeah. Well, we don't say that. We've tried to remain neutral. We probably would get in trouble, or I would get in trouble inside the company if we started pushing people for certain languages. We try to remain neutral.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
Yeah, there is. Although I'm very happy with our results in the U.S. The U.S. and the U.K. are pretty interesting because historically there hasn't been a big desire to learn languages in the U.S. and the U.K. The thinking has been whatever you can learn English. In the U.S., 80% of our users were not learning a language before Duolingo. So we're growing the market in the U.S.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
and the same number in the U.K. So I'm very happy with that.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
We do, and we try to add the culture. We don't
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
we don't do it as much as maybe we should you know we try to stick mostly with languages and it depends also on the language that we're doing some languages are quite tight to the culture some are less you know spanish is a good example i mean there are i don't know the number but 20 some countries that speak spanish and some of them are pretty different than others so you know we do a little bit of culture but we try not to be like oh you're learning spanish you're uh you know
Planet Money
If AI is so good, why are there still so many jobs for translators?
Completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart. It's a mouthful. It's basically a test to distinguish whether you're a human or a computer.
Planet Money
If AI is so good, why are there still so many jobs for translators?
I don't know. I don't know if I am humbled, but.
Planet Money
If AI is so good, why are there still so many jobs for translators?
You know, I don't know about staying humble, but I mean, there's a lot left to do.
Planet Money
If AI is so good, why are there still so many jobs for translators?
Nowadays, computers are about as good as humans at reading historic characters, which is why CAPTCHAs have moved onto basically really blurry images of bicycles or whatever.
Planet Money
If AI is so good, why are there still so many jobs for translators?
Well, so, okay, a couple of things. This is not new. Translation by computers between, for example, English and Spanish or English and German, like between the large languages, has been really good, you know, starting with Google Translate for about 10 years. Mm-hmm. And it keeps getting better and better and better.
Planet Money
If AI is so good, why are there still so many jobs for translators?
And, you know, what I don't think is going to happen is one day suddenly, you know, translation was completely ****. And then the next day is perfect. And then all translators get fired. This is a gradual process, which started out years and years ago. And today, a lot of translation is already done by computers. I mean, that's already happening.
Planet Money
If AI is so good, why are there still so many jobs for translators?
Now, at the same time, I think there's also more and more demand for translation. Because translation is a lot cheaper, a lot faster because computers are there, there's a lot more demand. So what you're seeing today, at least for translation in particular, is this combo, this hybrid between humans and computers.
Planet Money
If AI is so good, why are there still so many jobs for translators?
I mean, maybe the computer takes the first pass and then a human kind of fixes it up a little bit, et cetera. And over time, it is probably the case that computers will be as good as humans at language translation, maybe even better because they're faster. We're not quite there yet. It's still the case that computers make some mistakes.
Planet Money
If AI is so good, why are there still so many jobs for translators?
And I think companies are hiring humans or governments are hiring humans. When you want somebody to actually have a real opinion, because it may be a life or death situation, for example. I don't think you want to fully rely on a computer if you're a translator for the army or something like that. And you're talking to an enemy combatant. I don't think you want to fully do that yet.
Planet Money
If AI is so good, why are there still so many jobs for translators?
or companies who just want to make sure that no mistakes are made. But even translators that are hired, most of them use computer translation as a first step. And I think you're going to see something like that.
Planet Money
If AI is so good, why are there still so many jobs for translators?
Interpreters, we don't because we don't do what you would see on the UN, doing real-time interpretation like that. But translators, we do. Not very many. We have been reducing that number for a while. And at this point, it's dozens. It's not a lot.
Planet Money
If AI is so good, why are there still so many jobs for translators?
Generally, they're going over the things that computers have done. Because most of the stuff we do with computers, yeah, double-checking, making sure. Now, it depends on what for, by the way, I should say. There are certain, you know, there's a difference in importance in text.
Planet Money
If AI is so good, why are there still so many jobs for translators?
For example, if it's our content, as in like our learning content, there's so much of that, thousands and thousands and thousands of kind of sentences and words and paragraphs. That is mostly done by computers, and we probably spot-check it. But if it's things like the user interface of Duolingo, where we say like, you know, the button says quick,
Planet Money
If AI is so good, why are there still so many jobs for translators?
and we have to translate that is all done with humans. And we spend a lot of effort on that, but that's because each one of those is highly valuable. Like we cannot have a mistake in the quit button or in the button that says purchase now or whatever. We just cannot have a mistake.
Planet Money
If AI is so good, why are there still so many jobs for translators?
And not only, it's not just about mistakes is we want to make sure that the voice is consistent throughout the app, et cetera.
Planet Money
If AI is so good, why are there still so many jobs for translators?
Yeah. For example, in our app, we have made the decision that in Spanish, we use the informal second person pronoun. So when we refer to somebody in the app, we refer to the user informally. When we say you, we say the informal you. It's like usted versus... Tú is informal. Usted is formal. We don't use usted. We use tú. The people that do our user interface in Spanish know that.
Planet Money
If AI is so good, why are there still so many jobs for translators?
I know that very well. If you were to just ask a computer to do it, It may be inconsistent in different screens. It may be something. So we just want to make sure that it's all consistent, that it has the same voice. same playful voice, et cetera. And so for that, we still employ humans.
Planet Money
If AI is so good, why are there still so many jobs for translators?
Yeah, there's a lot of exaggeration that happened there. I mean, there was all these articles that said we did major layoffs. This is not true. We did not lay off.
Planet Money
If AI is so good, why are there still so many jobs for translators?
Yeah, no, this is just not true. First of all, no full-time employees were affected here. We've had a contractor force of a few hundred contractors. And what happened at the end of last year is we did not renew the contract for some of them because we looked at the work that was going to be required over time. And we just didn't need as many of them.
Planet Money
If AI is so good, why are there still so many jobs for translators?
It is true that one of the reasons we didn't need as many of them is because some of the stuff that they were doing, we could now automate. But these were, you know, you got to understand this type of worker. I mean, these were not all of them, but a lot of them were people who were working a couple of hours a week from a very remote location.
Planet Money
If AI is so good, why are there still so many jobs for translators?
And, you know, that type of work is probably a lot more susceptible.
Planet Money
If AI is so good, why are there still so many jobs for translators?
for being substituted with ai than somebody who is kind of in the office every day you know doing more creative stuff or anything like that this was you know a lot of that was just kind of stuff so i gotta ask do you have any plans to lay off more contractors or employees and replace them with ai and why or why not no plans no plans for that um what what is true is that we're
Planet Money
If AI is so good, why are there still so many jobs for translators?
You know, we're going to, as a company, and I think most tech companies, we're leaning into AI quite a bit. And we're going to continue doing that. And you know what we're seeing? I'll tell you, I'll give you a really good example of what we're seeing with AI. About five years ago, somebody pitched a feature idea to me, which was basically in the app, some of the lessons.
Planet Money
If AI is so good, why are there still so many jobs for translators?
You were basically going to see a little animated, kind of like a little two-minute cartoon where you got to listen in the language that you were learning. It was a really cool feature. And then I asked, how long is the data for this going to take to create? Because we need to make the data for basically all the episodes. They said five years. And I said, no, you're crazy.
Planet Money
If AI is so good, why are there still so many jobs for translators?
We're not going to make that feature. I don't want to spend five years on this. This is ridiculous. About a year ago, that same person came back to me and basically said, hey, we can do that. But the data now takes like three months to make. With AI. There's some human involvement, but it takes like three months to make with AI. And then I'm like, sure, just do it.
Planet Money
If AI is so good, why are there still so many jobs for translators?
And you know what's beautiful about it? Not only can you do it in three months as opposed to five years, even if you mess up and you do it in three months and at the end you don't love the outcome, you can redo it. And it'll only take three months. So you can do it and mess up and do it again and still do it way faster than five years.
Planet Money
If AI is so good, why are there still so many jobs for translators?
That's the type of stuff that you're seeing where things just, by the way, we're still going to need the humans. We're just going to be able to do way more and way cheaper. The things that we just couldn't do before.
Planet Money
If AI is so good, why are there still so many jobs for translators?
Yeah, the productivity is like 10x. And that's more the direction we're going to go. We're going to lean into AI quite a bit, but we're just going to be doing things that before were just prohibitive because they were going to require a thousand people working for years. Whereas now 20 people working for a few months can do what was required before.
Planet Money
If AI is so good, why are there still so many jobs for translators?
So I think on our end, that's probably more what you're going to see.
Planet Money
If AI is so good, why are there still so many jobs for translators?
Oh, since the beginning. I mean, when we launched Duolingo, we knew that we wanted to have a computer that was going to teach you. So we didn't want to have humans teach you. We wanted to have computers. So from the beginning, we were using AI. Now, of course, AI has gotten a completely different... and definition in the last couple of years because of large language models.
Planet Money
If AI is so good, why are there still so many jobs for translators?
But AI has been around for, you know, the concept of AI has been around for whatever, 60 years, maybe longer than that.
Planet Money
If AI is so good, why are there still so many jobs for translators?
Well, large language models, almost two years ago, a little less than two years ago, we started playing with GPT-4. We got early access to it. And so we started playing with it. We officially launched the first features related to it last year.
Planet Money
If AI is so good, why are there still so many jobs for translators?
We have an official partnership with OpenAI.
Planet Money
If AI is so good, why are there still so many jobs for translators?
Yeah, conversation. That's the biggest thing. Learning a language requires a number of different aspects. You've got to learn vocabulary. You've got to learn how to read. You've got to learn a bunch of stuff. We, historically, have been really good at teaching you all aspects of language except for one, which is conversation. Mm-hmm.
Planet Money
If AI is so good, why are there still so many jobs for translators?
And in particular, the kind of multi-turn, you know, think on your feet kind of conversation. We just couldn't do that with technology up until large language models. But now we can. And so that's what we're doing, where we're basically really adding a lot of features to teach you how to converse a lot better.
Planet Money
If AI is so good, why are there still so many jobs for translators?
We are not seeing a decline in people wanting to learn a language with Duolingo, even though this has been true. If you look at our users, we have two big chunks of users. One is actually Americans or British people who are doing so as a hobby. It's just a hobby. And when you ask them, like, why are you learning on Duolingo? They're like, well, you know, I used to play Candy Crush.
Planet Money
If AI is so good, why are there still so many jobs for translators?
And now at least I'm getting pretty good at Spanish. Those people are going to continue doing so because it's a hobby again. I mean, people are doing chess as a hobby, even though computers have been better than humans at chess for the last 20 years. So that's kind of one big group of people. And the other big group of people is people learning English for a number of reasons.
Planet Money
If AI is so good, why are there still so many jobs for translators?
Not only is it for possible education opportunities or employment opportunities, but it's just even to get around. I mean, if you go to many other countries, this is true in many Latin American countries, a lot of stuff is just in English. And like ads are in English and stuff like that. And people just want to say, well, you know. Yeah, music. So English is a unique language in that respect.
Planet Money
If AI is so good, why are there still so many jobs for translators?
Because it is the lingua franca, etc. People actually, honest to God, want to learn English. And that's the other big chunk of our users. So, you know, historically, we just have not been concerned about this.
Planet Money
If AI is so good, why are there still so many jobs for translators?
My name is Luis Fonan, and I am the CEO and co-founder of Duolingo.
Planet Money
If AI is so good, why are there still so many jobs for translators?
I'm mostly optimistic. I'm mostly optimistic, but I am anxious. And I think the anxiety comes from the fact that it's just really hard to know what will happen and how fast it will happen. And in addition to that, I can see a place where maybe the end thing will be really good. Imagine we have AI can do everything, et cetera, whatever you want.
Planet Money
If AI is so good, why are there still so many jobs for translators?
And the end thing is, well, we just have a life of leisure. Maybe that's the end thing. It's great. I worry that the transition may not be so good, especially if it's very fast, because it may be the case that a lot of people could lose their job. It's that I just don't know. My sense is that what we probably want is probably a slower transition rather than a faster transition.
Planet Money
If AI is so good, why are there still so many jobs for translators?
And it's taken a long time. The good news is that even with things that are clearly obvious, societies take a while to change. Even with things that are like, we just all agree that this is the right thing to do. It just takes years. And so I think in general, if you give humanity, you know, a couple of decades of notice that I think we'll probably figure it out.
Planet Money
If AI is so good, why are there still so many jobs for translators?
But I do worry about a short transition because, you know, if a lot of people lose their job at the same time, particularly, you know, this is kind of this is all this research in large groups of unemployed young males leads to basically war. You kind of don't want that. You know, as long as that doesn't happen, I think we'll be OK.
Planet Money
If AI is so good, why are there still so many jobs for translators?
Thank you, Greg. Thank you.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
Well, the biggest thing I keep telling people and nobody seems to listen to me, first person I ever had to fire, we're adding another subject. And it is not one that many people have expected. You could see his butt crack. And then it started growing, like his butt started growing. Started really realizing, okay, we can be a little more savage.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
We started really realizing, okay, we can be a little more savage. Yeah. I mean, before that, it was all very technical. And also that notification started giving rise to all these memes about how the owl really wants you back. And that's all the owl wants is for you to do the language.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
And he's willing to go through great lengths, including kidnapping your family or whatever it is for you to do your lesson. But it all came from that notification. And then there's all these memes that came about. And our voice really was found. And at this point, we have a pretty quirky voice that is a little savage and makes fun of you sometimes, but it generally works to get you to come back.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
Luis, thanks for being with us. Thank you for having me. That's quite an intro.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
No. It's universal. We have heard so much from people who tell us that there are differences. And we also employ country marketing managers in every country, not every country, in every large country. And they tell us all kinds of things like, oh, you know, Brazilians, they're different for the following reason. And they tell us all this stuff.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
But people in China, they are different for this reason. Nope. It turns out pretty similar. The things that work...
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
work pretty much everywhere generally and we just have not found things that are that are very different everywhere there's a little bit of at least not in the app the app is the same everywhere our social media you have to be a little different in Japan Japan's a little different in our social media but every other country is pretty much the same
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
Yeah, there's inspiration. There's what people want to accomplish. I mean, we have found different parts of the life cycle. Usually when people just sign up to the app, you should be very inspirational. And they're usually very much like, They have dreams about what's going to happen.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
Then reality hits after a few days when you realize, oh, this is going to, it's going to take me years to learn a language because the reality is it takes years to learn a language. And this is when you start having to apply other things. But yes, you know, motivating messages helps. Friends, you know, of the last few years, Duolingo has become a lot more social.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
Social connections and social pressure helps quite a bit. And also completionistic stuff like you've done the last five days. Are you going to really miss the sixth one? Kind of completionistics really, really helps.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
Yeah, we do. I mean, by now, Duolingo, about a third of our users use our social features quite a bit. Those are people that have at least three mutual follows, so three people that they follow and follow them back. And then on Duolingo, you can send congratulations, you can have friend streaks, so a streak together with your friend, et cetera.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
About a third of our users use this pretty heavily, and that has network effect.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
It's hard to say that these are not. However, what I will tell you is that we really are trying to get people. I mean, our ultimate goal is to teach people something. And if you think about it, what we're doing is we're using the same techniques that are used by social media apps or mobile games, et cetera, because you have to use them. Otherwise, you've lost the competition.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
I mean, there is a major competition for attention. We ourselves, you know, what I tell people is our competitors are Instagram and TikTok and mobile games. That is who we compete with because we compete for time.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
If you look at active users of language learning apps, we have somewhere between 90% and 95% of them, of all active users of language learning apps. So when we see that somebody leaves Duolingo, they don't go to another language learning app. They just spend more time on Instagram. That's the reality.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
And so our competitors are TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, all the places where people are spending time. And they are heavily using all of these techniques. If you don't use them, you're... You're fighting fire with a squirt gun. these days. You're just not.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
I mean, that's how we feel. And, you know, again, obviously there's all kinds of things, but, you know, Duolingo, we're far from... what would be like a TikTok or whatever. Not only are people learning languages, the reality is people spend a lot less time there, etc.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
I don't think this is a legitimate threat. People say that. That's not what the metrics say.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
This is, I mean, people may say that, but the reality is that this is kind of unstoppable. It's the same as, you know, people saying kids shouldn't watch TV. I mean, like many years ago, I don't know. And like when I was growing up, TV was rotting your brain and you shouldn't watch TV. And I don't think that worked. I think people watch TV.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
In a similar way, I mean, I think, you know, this is just what the future is. This is the present even. The genie's out of the bottle. Yeah.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
I don't know if it's, we have these other operating principles that are actually our operating principles, but it is a belief that people will be on their screen. That's just a belief.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
We chose an owl because it is, at least in Western cultures, a symbol of knowledge. Turns out actual owls are probably not all that smart and they're vicious. But that's a symbol of knowledge.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
Very early, before we launched, we thought that having a mascot would make us friendly as an education company. And so we decided to have a mascot. Then we decided it was going to be an owl. Then we decided it was going to be green because Severin, my co-founder, hates the color green. And we thought it would be funny if it was green. So we've had it all along.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
And a lot of it, you know, it became so popular. A lot of luck. I mean, we did some stuff. We kind of found our voice that it was a little unhinged and it was a little... guilt trippy, et cetera. But it was a little luck that all these things happened. For example, the fact that the memes started with the owl, we didn't start the memes.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
What we started was that notification that said, it seems like these reminders are not working. We're going to stop sending them. That got the memes to go. And that was not us. Then we ourselves leaned into the memes. We saw that that was happening. So we started, you know, we started making fun of ourselves.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
We did. And so we produced, for example, we produced an April Fool's video, a lawyer's commercial. You know those really shitty lawyer commercials that you see on TV?
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
Yeah. So we made one of those, but it was a lawyer saying, if your family has been hurt or kidnapped by an owl…
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
I'm not entirely sure. I'm sure it has something to do with how I was brought up, but I always wanted to please people.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
It's not necessarily learning a language, but it's learning. Look, the best characters out there, they all have something in common. And it is that they want something and they have an obstacle to get it. Duo, the owl, the only thing he wants in life is for you to do your lesson. Wow. And the obstacle is that you're lazy. So it is related to learning.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
I mean, we really, that guy just wants you to do your lesson and he will go through great lengths to do that. That's what makes them a good character. But a lot of this, again, a lot of this just kind of evolved through time. It's not like when we started the company, we're like, and we're going to have this owl that's going to do crazy dances on TikTok or whatever. So there was that.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
The other thing that happened is a few years ago, you know, already the owl was pretty popular. But a few years ago, we started a social media strategy that honestly started despite me. I didn't want to do that, which was doing these videos with the owl suit. I thought, the first one I saw, I thought, this is pretty low production.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
We spent so much effort on an app being very high production, like millions of dollars on the app being high production. And then we saw these videos that were like super low, low fidelity and low production. I'm like, what is this? But it turned out people really, really liked this. And that has made it It's super popular on TikTok.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
I actually believe that as AI matures, what's going to be most valuable, the only thing he wants in life is for you to do your lesson. And the obstacle is that you're lazy.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
At this point, our owl is so popular that it internally, it has an agent.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
Yes, internally. We have a person in our marketing team. There is an agent. But what's amazing about it is it's so popular now that famous people... want to interact with the owl without us paying. So we just get all these famous people wanting to do collabs with the owl because sometimes the owl has more followers than they do or our videos become more popular, et cetera.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
One of the big problems for me is I've gotten a lot better, but as somebody who runs their own company and I'm a people pleaser, I sometimes have to tell people things they don't want to hear. So I've gotten really good at sugarcoating stuff, but that's not good. It's not good. I've had to unlearn that.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
So it's been a pretty big deal for us.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
It really is this thing. I mean, before people were coming to us to try to pay them to hang out with us, that is no longer the case.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
They still are.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
Yeah, I mean, the first thing is that, you know, it's free to use Duolingo. You can use it and you really don't have to pay us. We don't really block you from anything or anything. You just use it. And that has made it so that it's really the whole socioeconomic spectrum uses Duolingo. Like Syrian refugees in Europe are using Duolingo to learn the language of the country that they relocated to.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
At the same time, on the other side, we have a bunch of famous people or billionaires that use Duolingo. And it really is because it's accessible to everybody. And this really is what we wanted to achieve. We wanted it to be the case that if you had more money, you couldn't get a better system. It's the same system as being used by people who have no money versus billionaires. So that's usage.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
Now, we have to make money somehow. And it turns out the way we make money is quite compatible with this because the way we make money is we have this freemium model, which is if you don't pay us... You can use tooling as much as you want, but you have to see an ad at the end of a lesson.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
We make some money from the ads, but if you don't like ads, you can turn off the ads by paying us to subscribe. Turns out a small fraction of our users pay us to subscribe. So if you look at our monthly active users, only about 10% of them pay us to subscribe. But this 10% gives us 80 to 90% of our revenue comes from this 10%. So we don't make that much money from ads.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
We make most of our money from the subscription.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
Much higher. You just, yes, that's where the money comes from. Now, what is interesting for us is because the app is freemium, what ends up happening is that people who don't have a lot of money just don't pay. The people who pay are usually relatively wealthy. And I'm not talking, they may not be millionaires, but, you know, people with stable jobs in well-to-do countries. That's who pays us.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
And the people who don't pay us are usually people who don't, may not have a job or who live in a poor country, like, you know, in a
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
Brazil or Vietnam or something so what we like about this is that it really is the case that the wealthy people are paying for the education of everybody and they probably don't even realize it probably not but it is something that we like a lot have you ever thought about making these wealthy users realize it? Yeah, I mean, we tell them, actually.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
Sometimes we say, by subscribing, you're helping support free education for everyone. So we say that, and that does get people to buy, but the main thing that gets people to buy is turning off the ads.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
Yes. English is a unique language. It really is very different from all the other languages in terms of the desire to learn it. Some people sometimes say that they worry that Chinese is going to be like that. I can tell you we have the numbers now. English is a unique language that everybody wants to learn. Not very many people want to learn Chinese.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
No, I mean, at this point, I don't do this, but I will tell you, for example, the first person I ever had to fire didn't understand that they were being fired because I sugarcoated it so much that they showed up the next day. They showed up the next day and I'm like, I thought I fired them. So I've gotten a lot better at being direct, but that has taken a lot of training.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
The reason it's unique is because it is the one language where really knowing it makes you more money. Most other languages, knowing them, unless you want to move to that country, but generally... it's usually a hobby. So generally when we talk to people that use Duolingo that are learning any language that is not English, you ask them why are they learning the language.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
The most common answers are like, oh, I used to play a lot of Candy Crush and now, you know, at least I'm learning a little bit of Spanish. Like that's that. But for English, it's different. When you ask them why are you using the app, they're like, well, I need to learn English.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
And I need to learn English because I need to make more money. So English learners, people who are learning English, are just dramatically different from people who are learning other languages in every aspect.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
No, not in the US. For example, it's Spanish because most people already know English here. But in non-English speaking countries, English is the top language to learn.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
Yes, I'm very happy to announce this. Like you said, we are done Duolingo. Now you can learn languages and math and music. We're adding another subject. And it is not one that many people have expected. And it is that you will be able to learn chess on Duolingo. Chess. You know, it's a game, but it is, you know, it's an after school program. And it is a game that really can make you smarter.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
We know there's just a lot of people who tell you very similar as with Spanish. We're just like, I've always wanted to learn chess, but I'm kind of never really had the time or seems intimidating, etc. So our goal is to get a lot of people into chess. And the idea is to let them learn how to think logically and
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
One of the reasons why we started, there's a number of reasons why we started, but one of the reasons I greenlit the project, by the way, was not my idea to teach chess. But I greenlit it. And one of the reasons was because in my country, in Guatemala, our education system in Guatemala is just not working.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
One of the things that the Minister of Education told me was, look, we're failing so much that at this point, I just want them to learn how to think somewhat. So you know what we're going to do? We're going to start teaching them chess. Because it's at the very least, they learn how to think logically. Wow.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
And that's the thing about chess. It lets you learn this kind of if-then-else statements. If I move here, you will do that, and then I'll do that. And so it just really gets you to think logically. And so we're pretty excited about it. We also think there's a large audience for it. I don't have a very precise date for it, but it's coming pretty soon. Yeah, and it's an amazing project.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
It's all kinds of good things that have happened since we started working on it.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
There's a number of things that happen. But in terms of how we chose chess, we're looking for subjects to teach that have very large audiences. I mean, hundreds of millions of people want to learn them. Chess, I believe, is one of those things. We also are looking for things that will somehow make you smarter, that we actually really want you to improve yourself.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
And we're also looking for things that take years to learn. We're not so interested in things that you can learn in like a month. Then we'll lose you as a user. So we want to do years to learn. And chess is something that you can really get better at for years.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
This is the things that we're looking at. And one other thing, that we can do a good job with a mobile product.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
Yeah. And chess is perfect for a mobile. So all of those things were true. Then what happened was we have a person internally we love. His name is Tyler, Tyler Murphy. He's been here forever and he's really, he's started a lot of really our major initiatives. Tyler came to me and he said, I want to do chess. And, you know, I went through the list and I'm like, it satisfies everything that we want.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
Let's do this. And so Tyler started working on chess with this other guy, Edwin, two very long-term employees, long-time employees of Duolingo. And neither of them is an engineer. Tyler's a designer and Edwin's a product manager. And what was amazing about chess is all other projects that we started in the past, we needed to put like a team on them with engineers and everything.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
In this case, we did not. We just let them, we're like, okay, you know what? At the moment, I have no engineers to give you. You figure it out.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
And what they did is they basically started messing with large language models. And for the first several months, they made an entire chess course through large language models, no engineering required. And they came to me with prototypes that they had made, even though these people are not engineers, of like how to learn chess on Duolingo.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
And it was just the two of them, and it took them a few months. Now, of course, by now, we're about to launch. We now have a team that has actual engineers to put the stuff in the app, et cetera. But for the first several months, normally, we would have put a much larger team. It would have taken us much longer.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
But this really is a case that with large language models, we were able to do this really fast, actually.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
That is what happened. Again, I do want to emphasize, we now have engineers and a team and everything. But this is what happened for the first, call it, six months.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
Why'd you ask that? Because I know these two dudes are going to be listening to this podcast and now they're going to be like, yo, where's my bonus? Why'd you do that?
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
What is this? Don't do that. Don't do that. Anyways, they deserve huge bonuses. They're amazing. And what they did was amazing.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
It's pretty clear you did not know how to play, but now you can learn on Duolingo.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
I'm telling you, what's amazing about, you know, I've been using it, of course, it really gets you from zero. Not only do you learn how to move the pieces, which is important, but also you learn strategy. And you get to a pretty good spot.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
This is it. I mean, eventually we'll probably do higher levels, but at the moment we're targeting entry point. I mean, if you either don't know anything about chess or roughly know how to move the pieces, but don't feel very comfortable playing chess with anybody because you think you're going to get beaten, this is a great product for you to use. And that's a lot of people.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
I should say one other thing, which is really interesting, and it's a big belief we have at Duolingo. You know, the first 20 employees of Duolingo were not very good at learning languages, but... We were not language nerds. None of that. I'm not very good at learning a language. I'm not a language nerd. I'm not particularly interested in learning languages.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
And what that did is it made us create a product for the average person. Had we been language nerds, we would have made a product for language nerds. Interesting. And I think this is true. And by the way, Tyler and Edwin, they are not excellent chess players at all. I am not an excellent chess player, but I'm pretty sure I'm significantly better than they are.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
These people, I think a few months ago, were still kind of figuring out, you know, how the knight moves. But it's amazing because I really do think they are making a product for the actual beginner.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
No, no, no, hold on. Love these guys. Love these guys. I'm not saying anything they don't know, okay? Okay.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
Lily, yeah.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
Oh, for us, it's a major positive. Okay. From the beginning. And this is, by the way, it's the last couple of years that AI, it's like AI is the next crypto. It's like, it's a big thing. But, you know, when we started Duolingo a million years ago, AI already existed. It's not that the large language models, but we were big believers that it will be a computer that teaches you.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
And I think in the future... the more and more this will happen, that the primary way of teaching is going to, or learning is going to be learning through a computer.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
I'm just kidding. No, no, no. You don't understand how many times that was read. You don't understand how many times that was read. If there was a typo...
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
We were. And we've been for a long time. I mean, the reality is we really have thought that a computer can teach you. We still believe that. There's so many good things about a computer teaching you. It's infinitely patient. It is way cheaper to teach you through a computer. And if you're practicing conversation,
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
The beautiful thing is you don't feel bad practicing conversation with a computer in a language that you're not very comfortable with. But if you're practicing with another human, a lot of people are shy about that. And so this is just better.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
It just is.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
The same thing happens to me. When I speak a language that I'm not very comfortable, I mumble it. Because I'm like... Because I'm shy. I'm shy about it.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
Yes. But when you're talking to a computer, you don't feel foolish. So I really do think it can be a positive. You know, in terms of the threats, I, you know... People say all kinds of stuff. Like, for example, you know, like you said, there's going to be real-time translation. Why do you need to learn a language? The reality is that real-time translation has been around.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
You know, Google Translate has worked really well, and it has been very fast, and it's been around for a long time. It's actually quite useful for things like traveling. If you don't really want to learn a language at all, and you're traveling to a country that for some random reason nobody speaks English, which, by the way, these days is very rare,
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
You can use this to kind of get around real-time translation, and it's great. But if you look at our users, the two buckets of users, one is people who are learning as a hobby. I don't think they're going to be affected by real-time translation. It's a hobby. It's the same reason why people learn chess, for example. Computers have been really good at chess for at least 20 years.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
People still learn chess. So it's this hobby. And then the other big group of people that are learning a language here are learning English. And they actually want to learn. It's not going to be good enough for them to be walking around with airports all the time. They actually want to learn English.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
I really believe that this is something that has differentiated Duolingo. We call it the design department. It's mostly art. There are a lot of artists in there. About 150 people in there. Wow. By the way, bear in mind, the entire company has 900 people. So about 150 people are, you know, artists. Art majors. And they really, it's amazing because they come up with all the unexpected stuff.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
They're the ones who come up with, for example, we did a Super Bowl commercial last time, last Super Bowl, not this one. What it was, it was the owl and he was sitting backwards. You could just see his back, but you could see his butt crack. And then it started growing, like his butt started growing. Yeah. And then suddenly what it was, it was another owl grew out of the owl's butt.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
And then it just said, do your Duolingo.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
This was, you know, internally, internally, our artists just came up with that. And it made no sense and what the hell, but it was, you know, it was one of the most talked about. It may have been the most talked about or one of the most talked about Super Bowl commercials. It was only five seconds and it was just the owl, the owl's butt growing into another owl.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
But this is an example of the stuff they come up with. They come up with really weird stuff. And I actually believe that as AI matures, what's going to be most valuable is taste. Because you could just do all kinds of things. For example, coding is getting easier and easier. And so probably a lot of the engineers are going to become kind of conductors of coding.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
And I think just having all these artists here is very valuable because they have a lot of taste. I mean, they have... They really kind of have an idea of what's weird and what's quirky and what's unhinged that lets us go move the brand forward.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
Well, I don't know if it'll make us more artistic. I think the artists are going to do better. And by the way, that's something that one of our engineers, I was talking to one of our engineers who pointed this out. Before like 50 years ago, math nerds were not in a good spot. They were just, they kind of were ostracized.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
At some point, because of technology, math nerds, like the richest people in the world are math nerds. And like, they got a boon. It's likely that because of AI, math nerds are not going to be all that valuable anymore. It's cyclical. So basically, we had a good 50-year run. Like us math nerds, I am a math nerd. We had a good 50-year run.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
It's probably over, and it's going to be back to the artists.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
Look, I don't know, but I'll tell you one thing. It is our belief at Duolingo. You know, I've told this to people because sometimes people here ask me, you know, a computer is going to take my job. What I tell everyone is a computer is not going to take your job. A person that can use AI will take your job if you don't use AI.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
So the one thing that I'll tell you is no matter what, do not stick your hand in the sand and not use AI. Get as good as possible with these tools as you can. Do everything you can with these tools. And that's what we're telling people internally. That, I think, is a no-brainer. You should just do that. Now, in terms of what to concentrate on, that's very hard to say.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
But it's inevitable. AI will come and you cannot stop it. And it is coming and who knows at what speed and who knows, but it is inevitable. So best thing you can do is jump on that.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
I thought you were going to say make AI great again.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
That's your words, not mine.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
Intrinsic motivation is your motivation to actually do the thing. And extrinsic is you're getting rewards for doing the thing, for example. Most people are very lazy, even the motivated ones. This is something we embrace a lot at Duolingo. For example, one of the things we do is in all our screens,
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
There's very little text in them outside of what the actual exercise is because the mantra of Duolingo is people don't read. It's because most people are very lazy. And so our belief is that there's some intrinsic motivation that humans have for doing things, but it's not large enough to get them to do the things that would really benefit them.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
And this is why we spend a lot of effort trying to motivate them to learn. The reality is most of us are motivated to do things that give us quick dopamine hits like TikTok.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
You know what the problem is? We got scientific and we got really good at figuring out how to take your attention. Not just, not Duolingo, like humanity. Like, you know, a hundred years ago, it was a book. And then we're like, we discovered TV. TV is just way more engaging than books. Okay, good. Then we discovered like social media is way more engaging than TV.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
The thing is, and we get more and more scientific and better at keeping your attention. I think, unfortunately, the boring stuff is gone because there's just so much amazing things that just keeps your attention. We just got scientific about it and we got good at it.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
And so at this point, you know, my sense is you just have to really fight for people's attention and you have to be using the techniques that are now best understood. It's kind of a similar, you know, you could have said TV is really bad. But, you know, when I grew up, there was the Discovery Channel before it turned into like reality TV. It was like science.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
But, you know, they were trying to use the same medium that all the other stuff was, but for teaching you. It's kind of a similar thing that we're trying to do here with Duolingo. Yeah.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
Well, the first step is that you should like it and people around you should like it. It's hard to make fun things. It's hard to make fun things, first of all. The second piece of advice that I have is, and I like to tell this to a lot of people here at Duolingo, I have never seen a successful product that got really successful in under, like, call it three to four years. Wow. Of work.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
I mean, you may not have launched it, but everything takes—good products take, you know, three, four years. And this is a fast one. You just need the time in the oven. I use this line here internally. You just need the time in the oven. Yeah.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
It just takes a while. And no product has had overnight success that remains. As in, if it's long-term success, if you're talking about whatever products, Instagram, ChatGPT, all of these things that have a lot of success, they were years in the making.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
Good, yes, in a good way. For something useful.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
You need to take back that illegal move, probably.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
Well, the biggest thing I keep telling people and nobody seems to listen to me, but I tell people the hardest thing about learning something by yourself is staying motivated. For some reason, there are a lot of education companies where, you know, at the moment, and of course, this can change the stock market and everything.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
But at the moment, we're by a margin, the most valuable education company out there. And the main insight for us is not that we teach better, etc. I do believe we teach better. But the main insight is we keep people learning. And I think that's a big takeaway for Duolingo.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
Well, we were here and we wanted to stay here. I mean, I was here because I was a professor at Carnegie Mellon. Severin was also here because he was a PhD student here. And so we were here and we decided to... We saw no reason to move at the time. And then we just started growing and growing. And at some point, we were kind of too big to move.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
In retrospect, a lot of people have asked me what would have happened had I started Duolingo in Silicon Valley. And of course... It's impossible to tell what really could have happened. Like, I don't know. There's pros and cons of having created it here. Some of the good things are, one is the people that you hire here stick around for a very long time.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
In fact, if you look at right now our employees, I mean, the average tenure is pretty high. I mean, a lot of people have been around for a long time. That's a good thing. Because you get these people that get really good at what they do because they've been doing it for eight years or however long. So that's a good thing.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
The other thing that I think was good was in terms of hiring executives, it allowed us to hire executives. We punched above our weight because we ended up hiring an executive team, many of whom for one reason or another had had long careers, for example, in Silicon Valley, but had to be here in Pittsburgh either because they had aging parents here in Pittsburgh or something.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
And they had to be here for one reason or another. And we were the best game in town. And so had we been in Silicon Valley, they wouldn't have worked for us. They were kind of outside of our league. So this allowed us to hire really good executives. That's another thing.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
Yes, we were the biggest fish in this pond. That was good. That helped us. And then the last thing that helped us, I think, is when we started in 2011, Education has never been hot in terms of, you know, funding or whatever. It's just what it allowed us to do here in Pittsburgh is it allowed us to not get distracted by the latest fads.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
I'm pretty sure that had we been in Silicon Valley, we would have... Quickly, at the time it was like hyper local apps and then it was like social apps and then it was like crypto. And then it was like, I'm pretty sure that we would have gone through all of this.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
And, you know, it's not that it's that obviously Silicon Valley is amazing. There's all kinds of good things about it. But for something like education, I think you want to stay for a long time just concentrated on what you're doing and growing it and growing it and growing it. And I think being outside of Silicon Valley helped us for that. Of course, there are many downsides.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
I mean, sometimes hiring here was slow. I mean, we couldn't hire. We couldn't find the right person. Most of the people that we've hired didn't. to work here in our Pittsburgh office. We've moved from other cities to work here, which is why we've opened an office in New York.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
I mean, we have a few offices, but we have a relatively large one in New York, and that actually helped us hire quite a bit. We're pretty happy with our location strategy at the moment, which, by the way, our location strategy at the moment seems to be to have offices in gray places. Not great, gray. LAUGHTER Like Seattle, we have an office in Seattle. We have an office in Berlin.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
We have an office in Detroit. We have an office in Pittsburgh. We're masters of great places. And that was not on purpose. That's just what ended up happening.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
We don't, but we may as well. We may as well. It really is. And we also have an office in Beijing, which is great for different reasons because of pollution. Basically, we have an office in great places. So very quickly, we became the most downloaded app in education. This is even before we became iPhone app of the year. We were the most downloaded app in the education category.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
I just didn't know we were here to stay, but we became the most downloaded app in the education category. And it was because it was free and it was fun and you could actually learn some languages with it. And so that made us kind of stand out, mainly that it was free and fun. And so we were the most downloaded app in the education category. But the next big thing that happened was around 2017,
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
2016, 2017, we started monetizing. Before that, before 2016, 2017, we were not making any money. Duolingo was just free. There were no ads. It was just free. There was no way for us to make money because we didn't have ads in the platform. We didn't have subscription, nothing. We started to make money in 2017. It was actually hard to make money, not because nobody wanted to pay.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
It was because internally, our employees didn't want to make money.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
Yeah, no, we had hired, everybody that we had hired was very mission-oriented. And then when I told the company, it went to figure out a way to make money, everybody was like, why? And I'm like, well, let me tell you, we need to pay your salaries, for example. And they would say, But you've been paying our salaries this whole time. What's the problem?
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
And, you know, of course, what we had done is we had raised venture capital, more and more venture capital. You can't raise venture capital forever. And so we started trying to figure out how to make money. But it took about six months to convince the employees that it was okay to work on this. In fact, the people that had chosen to work on this were kind of boycotting the work.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
They didn't want to work on it. They were like, I don't really want to work on that. Eventually, what worked...
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
is that we are able to convince everybody, and I do believe this to be true, we are able to convince everybody that, A, making money is not evil, and B, that if you make money, you can use that to reinvest in your mission and actually grow a lot more and really fulfill your mission a lot faster.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
That is true. And in fact, that's exactly what happened. As soon as we started making money, we could scale our impact. But I think that the big part of this is when I started seeing that it ended up being relatively easy to monetize Duolingo. I mean, it was hard for the employees, but once we decided to do this, just every year we started making more and more and more and more money.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
And that, you know, that was a big boost for us.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
The main thing that has set us apart, and especially as an education company, is that our product is engaging. And that is the most important thing. It is also, I believe, the most important thing. If you're trying to learn something by yourself, the hardest thing is staying motivated. So what we do is teach you. And, you know, sometimes people get confused about this.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
People are sometimes like, well, did you know you can learn whatever it is? And not just languages. You can learn whatever on your phone. And I'm like, that's not impressive. You can learn anything on books. Like the reality is you can learn things. There's been hundreds of years where you can learn things by yourself. The hard thing is keeping people motivated. That's the hard part. And...
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
The first thing that happened was when we were before we launched.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
Well, people use it every day. If you just look at retention as in the number of people that start and come back the next day, is much higher than a book, I would say. And it's also the word of mouth that we have. Retention gives you scale. And we also look at how much time is spent by people doing it. Essentially, people get quite engaged.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
We don't like to use the word addicted, but it's kind of like many people, you could say that they're addicted to it.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
In certain ways, it is. I mean, it's extremely engaging. It really gets you to continue doing it and use it every day.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
Well, the first thing we did was to turn it as much into a game as possible. And this is something that came up even before we launched, and it was because we couldn't get ourselves to use our own app. Before, it was a game. I was trying to learn German because Severin's native language is German and he was trying to learn Spanish because my native language is Spanish. I made the Spanish course.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
He made the German course. We were learning each other's language. We couldn't get ourselves to use it.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
Yeah, this was not good. So then we decided, okay, well, we need to do something about that. And this is when we decided to make it as much into a game as possible. So the first thing we did is, you know, lessons used to be 30 minutes long. We turned them into like three minutes long. We added progress bars everywhere. We started giving points.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
So all of that, it just kind of turned a little bit into a game. That is kind of step one. The next thing we did related to that, this is after we launched, but we added this notion of a streak, which was really powerful, which is a streak just counts the number of days that you've used the app consecutively. And if you stop on a given day, it goes to zero. That
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
has really been transformative for us, the streak. Now, with the streak, you would think that it's just a number that you put in there and it is, it's just a counter, but it's actually extremely sophisticated. You would not imagine how sophisticated things are. For example, it's not quite true that you can never miss a day.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
We give you these things that are called streak freezes in case you miss a day.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
We do that, but there's a lot of science behind when to give you a streak freeze so as not to cheapen the streak, but actually get you to keep going. So we give you streak freezes. The other thing about the streak that is really important is the notifications. We cannot let you forget to do your Duolingo. And so we have notifications that tell you, hey, you're going to lose your streak.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
And there's a lot that goes into what we should say and when we should say it to you so that you don't lose your streak. And at this point, we have a pretty sophisticated, it's basically mostly chosen by AI, you know, when to send the messages. But we also have a very quirky voice. The messages that you get from Duolingo are pretty quirky. And we've A, B tested them like crazy.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
And they're personalized to you in terms of what works to bring you back. So for some people, we use Gilt. For some people, we use different things and then it really works at bringing you back. So the combination of these two.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
It ends up being actually quite complicated. But I can tell you some things that we've learned generally. Generally, the time to send in a notification is about 23 and a half hours after you last used Duolingo.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
The way to understand that is if you use Duolingo today at 3 p.m., it probably means you're kind of free at 3 p.m. And likely, you're kind of free tomorrow at 3 p.m. too. Unless it's a weekend. Weekends are a little different. But weekdays... No, you're right. In terms of what to say, I mean, we have found all kinds of things.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
But, you know, one of the most powerful things we found is many years ago. So we send you a notification. And then if you don't use Duolingo, we send it to you the next day and the next day. After five days of inactivity, we stop sending you notifications because we think, you know, we're not going to spam you forever.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
One of the things that we found is, you know, we thought, well, if we're going to stop sending notifications after five days, we may as well tell you that we're stopping. You know, we're being nice to you. We're not going to spam you forever. We may as well tell you. We didn't think this was going to bring people back.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
But what we did is we started sending the last notification that we send says something like, these reminders don't seem to be working. We're going to stop sending them for now. We thought we were just being nice. I didn't realize. Yeah, you're being honest. Yeah, but I didn't realize this was an extremely passive-aggressive way to get you to come back.
The Best One Yet
Exclusive 🦉 “Education Super App” — Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announces next product on TBOY
It works really well. It works really well. And that notification, not only did that notification work really well, it also kind of became the basis of our voice.