Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn wants you addicted to learning
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Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm talking with Luis Van An, the co-founder and CEO of Duolingo, the popular app that teaches languages. It's an interesting time to be in the business of languages. After all, if there's anything the current state of AI tech can do, it's babble away in different languages with people who can't quite understand what they're hearing. So there are lots of opportunities to enhance a product like Duolingo with AI. And Luis and I talked about the new features in something called Duolingo Max, which now offers AI chat conversations with some characters and even video calls with an AI avatar called Lily. I was obviously curious about all that, but I also wanted to talk to Luis about learning generally. If you're like me, you've started and stopped Duolingo several times.
If you're an overachiever, you've gotten a streak going. You might even have a streak to maintain today. And it's that streak that's key. You'll hear Luis come back to a big idea here several times. Engagement is the thing, he says, because simply showing up is the cornerstone of making progress with language learning over time. His point is that you can't teach someone who isn't there. And so over time, Duolingo has become more and more of a game because people like to play games. But there are some real conflicts between games and actual learning. As you'll hear, Luis is happy to admit that that conflict exists, and he's given it a lot of thought. For him, the gamification is the most important thing, because not only does it bring you back to Duolingo, keeping the business humming along nicely, but he says it also produces the results in language proficiency that Duolingo is aiming for. We talked about this in detail. I think you're going to find it really interesting.
We also talked about the money in detail, and we just got pretty deep into explaining where it comes from. As you might guess, the people who spend the most money on Duolingo are iPhone users in wealthier countries like the United States. And some technical decisions that Duolingo made very early on means the iOS version takes priority. It can take a year or more for features to roll out in the Android version of the app. But here's the hard part. Duolingo is a global product. And the biggest chunk of learners on the platform are actually trying to learn English in poor countries. And those users are way more likely to have an Android phone and to want or need a free version of Duolingo. That's a lot of tensions to balance out.
And you'll hear Luis talk about his own childhood in a poorer country and how that informs his decisions. I've got to say, this is one of my favorite Decoder conversations in quite a while. Luis is the co-founder, and he has seen the company through from being a startup to going public and now embracing a pretty big technology shift in AI that has a direct impact on the product he makes.
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