Today, I’m talking with Luis von Ahn, the cofounder and CEO of Duolingo, the popular app that teaches languages. It’s an interesting time to be in the language business: if there’s anything the current state of AI tech can do, it’s babble distant in different languages with people who aren’t rather fluent in what they’re hearing.
That means there are lots of opportunities to enhance a product like Duolingo with AI, and Luis and I talked about the fresh features in something called Duolingo Max, which offers chat conversations with any characters and even video calls with an AI avatar named Lily.
I wanted to talk about all of that, but I besides wanted to talk to Luis about learning generally. If you’re like me, you’ve stopped and started utilizing Duolingo respective times; if you’re an overachiever, you’ve got a streak going and might even have a streak to keep today. That streak is the key, and you’ll hear Luis come back to that as a large thought respective times.
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Engagement is the key, he says, due to the fact that simply showing up is the cornerstone of actually making advancement with language learning. You can’t teach individual who isn’t there, so over time, Duolingo has become more and more of a game, due to the fact that people like to play games.
But there are real conflicts between gamification and actual learning. Luis is happy to admit that that conflict exists, and he’s given it quite a few thought. For him, the gamification is the crucial part due to the fact that not only does it bring you back to Duolingo, keeping the business humming along nicely, but he says it besides produces the results in language proficiency that Duolingo is aiming for.
Luis got beautiful deep into explaining where the money comes from. As you might guess, it’s from iPhone users in wealthier countries like the United States. And any method decisions Duolingo made very early on mean the iOS version takes precedence — it can take a year or more for features to rotation out on the Android version of the app.
But Duolingo is simply a global product, where the biggest chunk of learners are actually trying to learn English — and those users are way more likely to usage an Android telephone and to want or request a free version of the product. There are quite a few tensions here, and you’ll hear Luis talk about his own childhood in a poorer country and how that informs his decisions.
This is simply a good 1 — Luis is the founder, and he’s helped the company to go public and now is helping it to embrace a beautiful large technology shift. AI has a direct impact on the product he makes, and we talked about it all in a beautiful direct way, with only a fistful of jokes about founder mode. And of course, I asked him whether he approves of all the unhinged things the Duolingo owl says on social media.
Okay, Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn. Here we go.
This transcript has been lightly edited for dimension and clarity.
Luis von Ahn, you are the CEO and cofounder of Duolingo. Welcome to Decoder.
I frequently start by asking CEOs what their company is, but I feel like everybody knows what Duolingo is. How do you specify Duolingo?
It’s an app that teaches languages. That’s what we’re mostly known for. As of the last couple of years, we have besides taught math and music. It’s the most popular way to learn languages in the world. A fun fact: there are more people learning languages on Duolingo in the US than in all US advanced schools combined. This is actual in most countries in the world. We teach languages to more people than the public school systems.
You have any big announcements coming up at Duocon that will be public by the time this episode airs. 1 of them is the ability to chat with characters like Lily and others.
Yes, the ability to video call with Lily.
How does that work? How are you making that happen?
We have this cast of characters that our users love. 1 of them is an emo teen with purple hair who is very unimpressed by you. You can talk to her now and practice your conversation skills, and you can have truly good conversations with her. There are quite a few things that are amazing about her. First of all, she adapts to your level — we know your level due to the fact that you’ve been learning on Duolingo, so we have a beautiful good thought of what your level is.
The another thing is that she has memory, so she remembers the last time you talked about something. For example, I just had a conversation present where she remembered that, last time, we talked about the fact that I like Nirvana. She was telling me that her favourite song is “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”
Easy choice, I gotta say.
We’re dating ourselves on that one, but yes. These are beautiful enjoyable conversations, and you get to practice your language. It’s entirely spoken, and it just works truly well. We’re very happy due to the fact that this is the first time that you think, “We truly are not going to request humans for this.”
The animations and stuff, are those stock animations? Are they loops? How does that work? Is it in real time?
Yes. It’s animated in real time. We have a rig for her. We bought 2 animation studios in Detroit. This is why we have an office in Detroit. They’ve done a truly good job. Her mouth moves erstwhile she’s speaking, and it’s tied to what she’s saying. She rolls her eyes at you.
When you think about that investment — “We’re going to start building rigs and animations for characters. We’re going to do it all in real time” — I’m just coming back to cost. That’s a large investment. Do you think that’s going to make your existing users pay more money? Or is it going to get you fresh users?
I think it’s both. We see it as continuing to work on the app. There are quite a few places where we usage quite a few animation, and we see it as continuing to work on the app. And generally, as we proceed working on the app, we get more users and get more of them to pay.
The reason I ask that in this context specifically is that the economics of AI is just a series of question marks right now. I ask this of everybody who’s making the investments. How do you see it coming out on the another end?
For this peculiar feature, I think it’s an excellent usage of large language models, and on our end, it’s working beautiful well.
The another large announcement you have is called Adventures. It sounds like a video game. What’s going on there?
The way Duolingo works is that the homescreen is fundamentally a path, and you’re just doing lessons. any of the lessons are now going to be this thing we call an “adventure,” which is truly just 1 of those video games where you decision characters around. What’s cool about it is that you’re learning how to solve real-world situations on Duolingo.
For example, it’s like a small video game where you are 1 of the characters and you’re told, “Okay, go buy a pizza.” You decision and gotta ask around, and then you ask any people, and they tell you, “Oh, the pizza place is over there.” It’s super fun and it helps you learn to navigate the real world. So we’ve been working on that. What’s cool about that feature is that all the scenarios were mostly generated by AI. In the past, that feature would’ve taken a long time to scale, but we were able to scale it beautiful rapidly due to AI.
I played with Duolingo this morning. I have a long and complicated past with trying to learn Hindi. It’s free. I was utilizing it for free today. How does the app make money?
It is free. You can usage it entirely for free without always having to pay. If you don’t pay, you may gotta see any 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 gives you any extra features. We besides make money from the subscription, and actually, the majority of the gross comes from the subscription.
Is Duolingo profitable as a company?
Yes. As of relatively recently.
I’m curious about this. I hear about this divided from almost everyone we talk to: we start out, we want to grow our base of users, ads aid us do that. It helps us keep the product free. And then the real money is going to come erstwhile we add value and we add paid subscriptions. peculiarly with advertising lately with app tracking transparency on Apple platforms, with the massive influx of inventory from all the another platforms in the world, it seems like ads are even harder to make money on than ever. Has that been the case for you?
It’s most likely true. Ads have never been a precedence for us. I don’t know the exact number, but it’s something like 6 or 7 percent of our gross comes from ads. For us, as long as they’re there, they’re a good reason for people to subscribe. But generally, we make about 80 percent of our gross from subscriptions, even though, by the way, only a small under 10 percent of our monthly active users pay to subscribe. So 10 percent of our monthly active users give us more than 80 percent of our revenue.
And all of that gross is in languages? Or is math growing?
The majority is languages. Math and music are growing. We launched those about a year ago, so they’re just getting started. It’s overwhelmingly languages.
What languages are the most popular?
English is the most popular by far. Forty-five percent of our active users are learning English. The second is Spanish, the 3rd is French, and then there’s a large drop-off after that.
Are the majority of your users outside of the United States? Or are they inside the US?
US is about 20 percent of our users, and 80 percent are international.
So are 80 percent of your users trying to learn English?
About 45 percent are trying to learn English. Within the global segment, they besides want to learn another languages.
There are quite a few languages offered in the app, and it seems like 1 way you could allocate resources would be by saying, “English is the most popular, we’re going to put the most resources there.” But that doesn’t feel like how the app works. How do you think about it?
We definitely do any of that. I was going to say we don’t do it 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 due to the fact that we would most likely spend all of our resources on English, Spanish, and French. We spend the majority of our resources in the top 8 languages to learn, and then we spend very small resources outside of that. The top 8 are English, Spanish, and French. Then there is German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, I think, and Chinese.
Mandarin. And after that, there truly is simply a immense drop-off. For example, Arabic is simply a large language, but there are not that many people learning Arabic. So we do put any resources there, but it’s much little than for the larger languages.
How do you think about that kind of demand? I open Duolingo, I look at it, I’m like, “I should most likely learn any Cantonese.” I think, “Man, I should be much better at Hindi than I am.” Those are real things that I think all the time. I imagine there are quite a few people in my peculiar diaspora who feel the same way. But that’s latent demand. Do you always go out and say to people, “You should learn any Spanish”?
Do you always say, “We should marketplace Spanish in the American South”?
We don’t. We have remained neutral about that, but it is an interesting thing that request for learning languages is not as correlated as you would like to see with the number of speakers or possibly even usefulness in a geopolitical world. For example, even though Chinese is 1 of our top 8 languages to learn, only about 2 percent of our users are learning it. It’s comparatively small, even as the most spoken language in the world.
One of the things that goes into people’s calculus is how hard a language is to learn. Chinese, at least for English speakers, is just a lot harder. We have data. To get to a beautiful good point in Spanish for English speakers takes, call it, 300 to 400 hours. That same level of cognition for Chinese takes about 2,000 hours. The reality is, in the United States, if you’re just going for pragmatism, return on investment, Spanish is most likely much better. In the US, you most likely should learn Spanish. It’s rather an easy language to learn.
In the US, you should most likely learn Spanish. That is simply a marketing message.
Well, we don’t say that. We’ve tried to stay neutral. We most likely would get in trouble, or I would get in problem inside the company, if we started pushing people on certain languages.
Maybe not inside the app, but as a way to grow, as a way to capture fresh users. It seems like quite a few what Duolingo is right now is people know they should be multilingual or bilingual at least, and so Duolingo is there. But there’s besides a immense condition of the population, at least in this country, who are like, “Screw it. I talk English.” The thought that there’s value in learning a second language is abroad to them.
There is, although I’m very happy with our results in the US. Historically, there hasn’t been a large desire to learn languages in the US and the UK. The reasoning has been, “You can learn English. We are very happy.” In the US, 80 percent of our users were not learning a language before Duolingo. We’re increasing the marketplace in the US. It’s the same number in the UK. I’m very happy with that.
I think back to learning French erstwhile I was in advanced school in Wisconsin. There’s learning the language and then there’s all of the culture that comes with a language, peculiarly any of the regional languages. advanced school French is simply quite a few looking at a image of a baguette. It’s totally abroad to whatever you’re doing. Do you think about that, inside of Duolingo, that there’s a immense cultural component here?
That’s more investment, right?
We do, and we effort to add the culture. We don’t do it as much as possibly we should. We effort to stick mostly with languages. It besides depends on the language. any languages are rather tight to the culture, and any are little so. Spanish is simply a good example. There are 20-some countries that talk Spanish, and any of them are beautiful different than others. We do a small bit of culture, but we effort not to be like, “Oh, you’re learning Spanish. You’re a Mexican individual with a sombrero.” We effort not to do that. I mean, we besides gotta not be offensive. But we effort to add it a small bit. I would say that it’s not the primary goal.
The reason I ask that is that Duolingo is instantiated for most people as its mascot. We should talk about the mascot’s personality and its social media presence, but it’s reasonably abstracted from a individual teaching you the language. There’s not individual on the another side that’s like, “I’m teaching you this. Here’s the culture that comes with it.” You might have another teachers who might teach you in another way.
There’s an abstraction there that just feels interesting, especially as we’re evidently going to talk about AI and how you’re utilizing that and how you’re expanding the platform. I want to push on that a small bit, that abstraction. Do you think it’s resulting in people who’ve learned a language or people who’ve learned how to communicate?
It’s been very much on intent for us to not put humans in the app, as in human teachers. There’s nothing incorrect with human teachers. It’s just the case that, from the beginning, we’ve been a technology company, and we’ve wanted to make it so that technology teaches you. There are a couple of reasons for that. 1 is that it’s a lot cheaper to teach you with technology than with a human teacher.
The another thing is, somewhere between 80 and 90 percent of language learners don’t want to talk to another human. They may tell you they do, but they don’t. It’s due to the fact that erstwhile you’re learning a language, you’re beautiful shy about it, and only the utmost extroverts are okay talking to a alien on video in a language that they’re not very good at. The majority of people won’t do it.
We’ve done investigation studies over the years because, over time, we thought possibly we should add humans. But these investigation studies are any of the most amazing things that I’ve seen. erstwhile you talk to a user, you ask them, “What do you think could make Duolingo better?” Historically, in the past, they have said, “Well, more practice conversation with a real person.” They have said that. And then you ask the user, “Okay, so you’re telling me if I put a human on Duolingo, you would do that?” And then they say, “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, not right now.” People just don’t want to do that.
That’s why we haven’t put humans in, and I think it’s been a good decision, especially now that we can do a beautiful good occupation of getting you to practice conversation without a human with large language models.
I want to ask about this due to the fact that I’ve been asking quite a few people on this show: what good are these large language models? What are the products you’re going to make? I realize you’re making the models, and it feels like Duolingo has a very natural solution, which is that you can talk to it and it’ll talk back. It doesn’t substance if everyone is hallucinating due to the fact that all you’re doing is practicing talking.
That’s precisely right. It is simply a truly good application. You said it. It doesn’t substance if it says something that is simply a small incorrect due to the fact that you’re just practicing your language. Also, it doesn’t substance if it makes a tiny mistake. Sometimes it makes a tiny grammatical mistake. People don’t even announcement due to the fact that they’re usually beginners in Spanish or French. It besides can adapt to your level truly well. Large language models are truly good at adapting to your level.
So we tell it, “Okay, adapt to a beginner in Spanish.” We even tell it, “Hey, due to the fact that we’ve seen this individual learn on Duolingo, we actually know all the words they know.” So we tell the language model, “This individual only knows these 200 words, so delight mostly usage only these 200 words.” It works truly well for that.
How much investment into AI are you making? This is simply a fresh product. It’s very costly. Everyone is telling me about how much the Nvidia GPUs cost. You said you’ve only just become profitable. This feels like the thing that will immediately make you not profitable again as you invest in AI.
We’re investing a lot. Fortunately, it’s good for us in terms of profitability for 2 reasons. There are 2 places where we invest in AI. The first is generating data that is going to be utilized in our lessons. That data used to be generated partially with humans, and now it’s mostly generated with AI, and it’s a lot cheaper to make with AI than with humans. It’s besides a lot faster to make it with AI, so we’re very happy with that.
And then the another large usage is real-time conversation. That 1 is expensive. It’s costly to supply a real-time conversation with a user, but what we had to do is add a higher-priced plan. We now have 2 subscription plans. We have Super Duolingo, which is our standard subscription, and we added a fresh 1 called Duolingo Max, which is about twice the price of Super Duolingo and gives you the conversation practice. It’s expensive, but people pay twice as much, so it truly doesn’t cut into it. It’s worked out well for us.
Let me dive into the economics of that because, in general, I’m fascinated by whether any of this will consequence in profitable, sustainable companies. There’s quite a few money flowing into this. So, you charged twice the price to run inference. Is that individual else’s large language model?
So you’re buying any capacity from OpenAI, you’re buying any tokens from them, and you’re reselling them to users for twice the price of your standard plan. What’s your margin on that resale?
I don’t know the percentages off the top of my head, but I do know that it’s good for us in terms of margins.
That’s the thing I’m curious about. I don’t know if it’s good for OpenAI all the way at the bottom of that chain. I don’t know if that’s profitable for them. But as you build products on this stuff, it seems like your economics depend on their economics, in any way, due to the fact that you request to add a margin to that. That all seems very complicated and tenuous, especially if the AI features are what bring you fresh users.
The good news is, at the moment, the AI features are not bringing us fresh users.
Yes, it is bringing us fresh revenue. There’s a good margin there. So, for a number of reasons, the price of the same exact call is going down over time, whether you do it through an OpenAI or whether you do it through a Microsoft. Everything is getting more efficient, and chips are besides getting cheaper over time. At the moment, there’s a good amount of cushion, but we anticipate that there’ll be an even larger amount of cushion over time. At least for our application, I’m not peculiarly afraid in terms of margins. For our application, the margins work out beautiful well.
Do you think the models are somewhat interchangeable? This is simply a thing that I’ve been proceeding more and more is that the model business isn’t the thing; the product business is the thing.
I think the answer is yes, but the operative word is “somewhat.” They are “somewhat” interchangeable. We’ve tried to build our technology stacks so that you can interchange them, but the reality is that you start getting wonky stuff due to the fact that you most likely spent quite a few time investigating your way into the right queries. You may have done any fine-tuning. You can interchange them, but if you do, you most likely request to spend a fewer months making certain that the wonkiness goes away.
When you think about this investment over time, does it feel like you request to put the money in upfront and you’ll get more efficient on the back end? Or does it feel like, “Oh, this is going to be the future of the company, so we request to rebuild around the capabilities of a large language model”?
It’s somewhere in between. I do think that large language models are going to be very affirmative for Duolingo — they already are, and I think they’re going to proceed being very positive. What is not actual is that large language models solve all our problems. 1 of the biggest issues that people aren’t talking about, peculiarly with education, is that large language models are good at teaching you stuff. They’re not good at engagement. And that’s the hardest thing with education.
The hardest thing about me trying to teach you something is just keeping you engaged. Somehow, people forget. I see any people saying, “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 that has been around for a long time. It’s called a book and it works. It’s just that people don’t truly want to read a quantum physics book. And similarly, most people most likely don’t want to go to ChatGPT and start asking questions about quantum physics. It’s the same thing for language learning. Large language models are very good at getting you to practice, but keeping you engaged is beautiful hard.
I don’t know if large language models are going to aid all that much with that part. In the end, this is simply a sad thing, but the reality is that Duolingo is very gamified. I wholeheartedly believe most people would alternatively spend more time playing Candy Crush than talking to others. That’s possibly a sad truth. And there are any exceptions. I mean, people love talking to individual they’re in love with, and sure, that’s nice, but the reality is, most of the time, most people would alternatively spend time playing Candy Crush or scrolling on Instagram than talking to others. I just don’t think large language models are going to aid much with all of that.
You have a long past in gamification. Your first project, which you sold to Google, was a gamified thing. You did reCAPTCHA, which is fundamentally gamifying training data in a peculiar way.
Do you think there’s an evolution in Duolingo — that the first thing that you worked on was the engagement and bringing users back to the app and having the character, and then the underlying content was language lessons? erstwhile I first started utilizing Duolingo respective years ago, I was like, “Oh, this is very familiar. It’s just that this bird won’t leave me alone and that’s why I’m back again.” And now you’re talking about this full another spectrum of things: we’re going to usage AI; we’re going to have these natural language conversations; we’re going to grow to mathematics.
When did you feel like you were making the transition from “we’re gamifying this very acquainted thing” and “we’re utilizing this fresh engagement mechanism” to “this is now a wholly fresh thing”?
From the beginning, this is simply a central thesis that we believe here at Duolingo: the hardest thing about learning something by yourself is staying motivated. In fact, that is most likely the reason for the vast majority of our success is that we realized that early on. From the beginning, we have tried to have a thing that is enjoyable to usage and that keeps you coming back. We have most likely spent more effort on that than anything else.
Internally, our feeling is that learning a language is simply a lot like working out. It doesn’t substance all that much whether you’re doing the elliptical or a Peloton or a treadmill. By far, what matters the most is that you’re doing it all day, whatever the hell you’re doing. It’s kind of the same with Duolingo. possibly any methods are more efficient than others, but what matters is that you’re doing it all day. We got very good at that. Now, erstwhile 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 fewer years. But always, primarily, we are a motivation engine.
Is that the core of it still?
I’m going to end up asking you about founder mode, but you’re the founder. How do you keep the focus on that part alternatively of everything else?
I do. I spend effort on that. But it’s not just me. At the company, it is beautiful well understood that if it’s not fun, it’s not going to work. We spend quite a few effort trying to keep Duolingo enjoyable. This is why, for example, erstwhile we did this thing where you can talk to an AI to practice conversation, you’re not just talking to a random AI; you’re talking to 1 of our cast of characters. It has a personality. Really, everything we do, all time we put something out, it’s ingrained in our reasoning that, “Oh, this should be enjoyable.” I spend effort pushing that agenda, but I don’t gotta all that much due to the fact that it’s very ingrained in the company.
Where are you all located?
The largest office is in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. We have about 400 people there. We have about 250 in fresh York, and then we have offices in a fewer cities. We have 1 in Detroit, we have 1 in Seattle, 1 in Berlin, and 1 in Beijing. All of those offices have 30 people in them. But 1 key thing is we are not remote. We’ve got to come to 1 of those offices.
I just wholeheartedly believe that you can work better that way. Most of what we do, not 100 percent, but most of what we do, is creative stuff. It’s a lot harder to do so over Slack and Zoom. That worked out for about 9 months during the pandemic, but it is actually awesome how erstwhile the pandemic started and we all had to go remote, we executed beautiful well. But toward the end of it, our ideas had run out. We were executing the ideas, but we had run out of fresh ideas. It’s beautiful amazing, as shortly as we came back to the office, within 3 months, you would see all these ideas popping up, and it’s because, erstwhile you’re remote, you can’t sit in front of a whiteboard and talk about stuff. Also, we have lunch together here all 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 you would never send a Slack message for.
I think the combination of all of that makes it a better company. I don’t have much proof, but I am highly convinced.
Sundar Pichai at Google told me at the very beginning of the pandemic that he was worried that the company would run out of ideas if they stayed distant besides long. He said, “We know what we request to do for the next turn. I’m worried about what happens at the next turn.” Did you have controversy erstwhile you reimplemented return to office?
Do your employees think that?
We’ve done quite a few dumb things at Duolingo, but this was not 1 of the dumb things we have done, in retrospect. In my first message saying, “Everybody’s going to work remote,” I said, “But we’re going to come back to the office. I do not want Duolingo to turn into a distant company. We are not a distant company.” We kept saying that the full time. quite a few companies did this thing where during the pandemic, they would hire people all over the planet because, whatever, you’re remote. We never did that. erstwhile we hired people, we would say, “I get that you’re not coming to the office right now, but your occupation is in fresh York, and we anticipate you to be in fresh York due to the fact that at any point hopefully soon, we will be back in the office.” We never stopped repeating that. By the time we said, “Okay, time to go back to the office,” this was not a surprise for anybody. I don’t think we lost a single worker from that.
Do you think that the markets you’re in aid you with that — being in Pittsburgh and Detroit? If you were in San Francisco, I think quite a few people would say, “Screw you, I can go get another job.”
That’s most likely true. We are not in San Francisco, and that’s most likely true. Although the fresh York office is now the second largest office, and we besides didn’t lose people in fresh York.
Do you find that people are demanding more flexibility even with a full return to office?
Sure. I mean, compared to before. For example, we’re not here 5 days a week in the office. The way we work is Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, you should be in the office. Monday and Friday, it’s optional. What happens, in practice, is that about half the people come in on Mondays, and around 20 percent of the people come in on Fridays.
We are talking on a Friday.
I am here. I am here in the office, though.
Oh, you’re there. Oh, very good.
I am here in the office. I come. But I don’t feel like I have the political power inside this company to say, “All right, people, you’ve got to come in 5 days a week.” I feel like that would not go over well.
One of the another pieces of the pandemic puzzle and return to office is that there was a suppression of request to travel and explore. I have friends who, at least from their Instagrams, haven’t set ft back in the United States in 2 or 3 years. Have you connected to that group of people who want to learn languages on the go? Has the reexplosion of travel had an impact on your business?
Travel is interesting. Now that we’re a publically traded company, people have hypothesized all kinds of stuff about travel with us.
They’re like, “Travel’s beginning up. That may be good for Duolingo.” Or they say, “Travel’s drying up. That may be bad for Duolingo.” The reality is that travel does not affect us all that much. I can have hypotheses for why that is, but we have not seen traveling closing down or beginning up affect us all that much.
We have quite a few learners that have different motivations, but the 2 large buckets are not travel. 1 of them is simply a hobby, and that’s the biggest bucket in the US. If you ask people in the US why they’re utilizing Duolingo, the most common answer is, “Well, I utilized to play quite a few Candy Crush or I utilized to do quite a few Instagram and now I’m doing Duolingo and at least I’m learning any Spanish. It’s just a hobby.”
And then the another immense group is people learning English. For them, it’s not about travel. They just request to learn English either for educational opportunities or for occupation opportunities. Those 2 large buckets account for 90–95 percent of our users. Travel just doesn’t affect it very much.
We started talking about latent demand. What are people coming to you for? And then there’s growth, which is, “how do we go make any demand?” erstwhile you think about the structure of the company, would you always say, “We’ve got to go do marketing to make travel happen”? Or is that just not how you think about it?
No. In our marketing, we haven’t thought about that. Ninety percent of our users come in from word of mouth, and that will keep happening, I think. We besides spend very small in marketing comparatively. Our full marketing budget for the full world, and we truly do operate in all single country in the world, is 50 million a year, which is rather tiny for a company with our revenue. But whatever we’re doing with marketing seems to be working beautiful well, and we don’t spend quite a few money on it.
I feel like I have yet to ask you the Decoder question. So, as long as we’re talking about your marketing spend, how is the company structured?
We have functions. There’s the marketing function, there’s the engineering function, there is the product management function, design, etc. We have functions and each function has a function head. To give you a comparative thought of the sizes of the functions: engineering, product management, and plan combined account for about 70 percent of our employees. plan is weirdly large for our company. We have 850 full employees but about 130 people in the plan department. So plan is large, but we have engineering, product, and plan account for about 70 percent.
Those are the people working on the product. If you look at that group, it’s structured into areas, and each area is related to 1 of the things we’re trying to optimize. For example, with language learning, the 3 main things we’re trying to optimize are: engagement, so how fun Duolingo is; teaching [the material] better; and how much money we make. We have an area for each 1 of those things. Then, in each area, there are teams, and in each team, there are people. It’s a small bit of a matrix structure.
One crucial thing that I think has worked truly well for us — but it’s not that easy to do — is that our areas and our teams are not feature-based. What I mean by that is that most software or app companies usually have a squad for each feature. So this is the login team, which owns login. Or if you have a leaderboard, this is the leaderboard squad and they own the leaderboard. We do not have that. Our teams don’t own features. Our teams own metrics. So we have a squad for subscription revenue. We have a squad for regular active users. And they can contact whatever they want in the app. All they gotta do is continually increase the metrics. There are positives to this, which are very aligned to metrics. There are negatives in that no squad owns certain features. erstwhile something breaks, there are quite a few people being like, “It’s not my feature. I don’t know.” There are positives and negatives, but all in all, this has actually worked out truly well for us.
This sounds, one, like a reaction to working at Google where teams do own things like the login screen and they endlessly communicate about how they’re going to change logins. But it besides seems like it might work for a tiny company where 1 individual can see the full product or realize the full product and how it all works together. And then you’re going to get inevitable collisions as 2 people effort to change something to increase 2 different metrics in different directions. How do you resolve those collisions?
There are definitely collisions. There are a couple of things that aid us here. 1 is, all change to the app passes through this review process called product review, which is not just 1 person. There’s a group of people that have quite a few cognition about how the full thing works. They service as a small bit of a semaphore, a small bit of like, “No, you should not do that.”
And then the another thing that is truly crucial is we have guardrail metrics. So here’s how that works: If you are on the squad that’s trying to improve subscription revenue, your goal is to improve that metric. But we tell you, “You can’t mess up any of the another metrics.” For example, if you do an experimentation that improves subscription gross by a million bucks or whatever but it decreases regular active users, you can’t launch it. That has truly helped teams police themselves. They at least won’t go do anything that truly messes something else up. The combination of these 2 things has helped.
You are right that if we had 100,000 employees, I don’t think the structure would work. That said, I don’t think that a company like Duolingo, at least with the products that we have, needs 100,000 employees. I think we’ll grow and we’ll proceed growing. possibly we’ll get to, I don’t know, 5,000 employees, but I uncertainty we’ll always get to something like 100,000 employees.
How frequently do these collisions come all the way up to you? How frequently do you gotta make a tradeoff?
Not that often. Teams police themselves a lot. I do see all single change that passes through the app. I do see that, but usually, I’m not making tradeoff calls. The main thing that I’m looking for is making certain that everything’s advanced quality.
At the beginning of the show, you were joking about founder mode due to the fact that I called you the cofounder. That’s Brian Chesky, who has been on the show. He’s talked a lot about how he refactored Airbnb. He was the conductor of the orchestra. That has gotten whatever amount of attention it’s gotten.
Do you see yourself in that kind of role, that you’re the individual who can see the full app, that you are the individual who understands how all these tradeoffs are getting made?
Yeah, it’s definitely true. The good news is our employees stick around for a very long time, and our leadership, peculiarly in the product areas, has been the same for the last 8 years. I have a view of everything, but the reality is that our head of product, Cem [Kansu], has a view of everything, too. Our head of design, [Ryan] Sims, besides has a view of beautiful much everything. Yes, I am in that mode, but we have a number of people who could most likely play that function as well.
When the 3 of you disagree, how do you resolve it?
The good news is there’s small disagreement, which happens for a fewer reasons. The first is that we’re a very metrics-based company, so usually, we just let the metrics speak. If we run an A/B test and the metrics say something, my opinion doesn’t substance all that much unless it’s something that we think is truly like a dark pattern or something. But generally, my opinion or their opinion doesn’t substance all that much. That’s 1 reason. The another is that we’ve been working together for so long that we’re beautiful aligned on everything. And then the last thing, I have the saying, “If we’re going to go by opinion, let’s go by mine” Generally, erstwhile we have disagreements, I see how profoundly they believe in their thing, and sometimes I just disagree and commit. But if we believe with equal strength on something, I will just go with my thing.
That might be the most succinct definition of founder mode I’ve heard yet, actually.
What is — that “if we’re going to go with an opinion, let’s go with mine”?
“Just do what I say” is truly the answer to what founder mode is.
But the majority of things, we don’t truly go by opinion. The majority of things are just by data.
So here’s the another Decoder question. This is simply a good foundation for it. How do you make decisions? What’s your framework?
For the company or for me? They’re similar, but they’re not identical.
Some people don’t think they’re different and any people think they are very different, so answer whichever way you want.
For the company, the decisions are very much tied to return on investment. With most things, there’s a return on investment calculation. Even if we don’t sit there and compose the numbers down, there’s how much effort you’re going to put into something and how much you’re going to get back. That drives most of our decision-making. There’s another thing that is not unique to Duolingo but I think is not the norm at most companies, which is, usually, erstwhile you’re doing a project, there are 3 things that matter: how much does it cost?; how fast are you going to do it?; and what’s the quality? usually there are tradeoffs between these things. At Duolingo, the most crucial thing is quality, the second most crucial thing is speed, and the 3rd most crucial thing is whether we’re on budget. In many companies, it’s the another way around, where the most crucial thing is budget, then speed, then quality. Here, quality is the most crucial thing. So that’s another component of our decision-making.
That’s for the company. For me, it’s very gut feeling-driven, which I utilized to find myself trying to justify. I have stopped doing that because, at this point, I’m like, “Look, this is what I think we should do. I can tell you reasons that I can most likely come up with after the fact, but the reality is that my gut says we should do that.” due to the fact that I’ve been working on Duolingo for 13 years, my gut’s beautiful good. It’s not 100 percent correct. I make mistakes, but it’s beautiful good. I mainly do things based on gut feelings, and then I tell people the justification afterward. But everybody around me knows that these justifications are after the fact. They’re not rational thoughts.
That evidently works for a startup founder for a private company. You’ve been a public company CEO for over 3 years. Is that working for you as a public company CEO?
Yes, due to the fact that again, the majority of decisions that we gotta make, there’s a clear answer. It’s just like, “Well, look, this is going to lose us money. Let’s not do that.”
But do you gotta change the way you communicate? I’ve heard this from a fistful of CEOs who’ve taken their companies public and now they’re on the quarterly reports cadence and they have investors. Elliott Investment Management might show up on your doorstep and be unhappy that you’re not marketing to more Chinese speakers or whatever. Have you had to change that attitude now that you run a public company?
No, it’s been very fortunate. First of all, we hired an amazing CFO before we went public, Matt Skaruppa, and fortunately, he deals with most public company stuff. I don’t do quite a few that, and I’m very thankful for that due to the fact that 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.
The another thing we’ve been fortunate about so far as a public company is that we’ve executed well. I think that has given us a small bit of latitude in that fundamentally we don’t get asked very tough questions due to the fact that we’ve executed very well. I am certain that won’t be the case forever. I’m certain at any point we’re going to miss a quarter. We haven’t so far, but I’m certain we will. And erstwhile that happens, I’ll most likely gotta answer any questions and I’ll most likely gotta tell people, “Sorry, we’ll be more buttoned up from now on.” But so far, I show up to earnings calls in a T-shirt. The day you see me show up to an earnings call in a suit, you’ll know that we fucked up.
Yeah, it’s time to get out.
[Laughs] Like, “Oh, so sorry.”
The another thing I hear from public company CEOs is something that relates to your emphasis on quality first. You have quite a few metrics, which means your investors can see quite a few your metrics or request quite a few your metrics in different ways. Quality is not measurable in that way, right?
At least in the current market, it’s not a large communicative to investors if you’re saying, “Okay, we’re going to invest a bunch of money in AI, and we think in this usage case, it’s going to be truly successful for us or we can charge more for it but we gotta spend a bunch of money upfront and we gotta wait to make it good.” How are you managing that now?
You’re right, quality is not measurable. The way we make decisions about that is that, peculiarly in our plan department, we have people who are very much sticklers about quality. We’re like, “Nope, that’s just not good enough.” We do that a lot.
In terms of investment, I mean, honestly, with the public markets, we don’t talk much about that. We talk about the metrics. We don’t talk besides much about how it turns out we spent an extra period working on this feature just due to the fact that we didn’t truly like the way the owl was animated. We don’t talk besides much about that. I think that’s fine. But my guess is that if we went on earnings calls and spent all of our time talking about how much effort we put into animating our owl, I don’t think people would like that.
I honestly think more companies should spend more time talking about how much time they spend making things good. That would be, I think, a crucial upgrade to American capitalism.
I would like that. But yeah, the reality is we do spend an inordinate amount of time on things. If you look at our app, it, over time, has become very animated. We spend an inordinate amount of time looking at the precise frames of the animation. We’re like, “See, this is not smooth enough.” I’m not claiming that our app is perfect, but we at least effort truly hard for it to get as close to perfect as possible.
One thing that besides seems hard to measure, or a metric that might lead you in different directions, is how successful Duolingo is. possibly the most crucial metric of all is: Are people getting good at Spanish? Are they leaving this experience with the ability to communicate in Spanish? Do they not just know the language but can actually communicate? Can you measurement that?
Yes, we can, but not as effectively as you would like to measurement it. So the answer is, yes, Duolingo works. We have measurements. I’ll tell you how we measurement it. Unfortunately, this is the only way we know how to measurement it reliably. It’s not that large of a way, but it’s this: You take individual who’s just starting Duolingo, you ask them a bunch of questions about their erstwhile knowledge, and you besides give them a test to measurement how much they know. Then you have them usage Duolingo for a long time due to the fact that it takes a while for you to actually learn stuff in the language. You have them usage it for a year or two. And then, at the end of that period, you ask them questions about whether they utilized another resources and you besides give them a test to figure out how much better they got. It turns out that people who knew nothing before and utilized Duolingo and did not usage another resources learn about as much as or more than in a classroom. It varies by the study, but we’re beautiful happy with that. The results actually work.
The problem with this way of measuring is that it’s very slow. It takes 1 or 2 years for us to get a fresh measurement, and I truly don’t like that. But we have not been able to come up with a better way despite the fact that we have tried. We’ve done things in the app where we’re like, “Okay, we can do micro-measurements of whether you’ve learned this word.” It’s been super complicated to do that and never given large results. So we just trust on these old-school, “pre-test, post-test” methods. That’s it.
This is where you veer right into lengthy society-level debates about education and how we measurement the performance of schools and teachers. Do you feel like you’re participating in that system? You’re utilizing their measurements, right? This is how schools do it. They test you.
We are utilizing their measurements, and efficacy is truly important. We spend quite a few effort trying to make certain that we’re efficacious. The another good news, even though the timescale here is in years, is that you can game how effective Duolingo is. If you look at it over the last 10 years, all year it is more effective than the erstwhile year, for sure.
That’s on this test-based measure. More people are passing the test?
Yes, more people are getting higher scores on the test. Basically, people are learning more on Duolingo all year. And there are a number of reasons for that due to the fact that we work to effort to teach [the content] better. But it is definitely true.
At this point, erstwhile we compare ourselves, we know we are as good as or better than a schoolroom environment. We know we’re not yet as good as a good one-on-one human tutor. Our goal is that we can do that over the next 3 to 5 years: be as good as a one-on-one human tutor in terms of efficacy. But we’re way better in terms of getting you to stick around. But in terms of efficacy, if you have the money and the strength to proceed going, a one-on-one human tutor does better.
Do you think that there’s a conflict between gamification and engagement — the things that you’re historically successful at — and education?
How do you manage that conflict?
Very easily. Always go with engagement.
I mean, presumably, you’ve heard both sides of the argument. Why have you made this decision?
I’ll give you many arguments, but the 1 that works the most is this: It doesn’t substance how effective you are. You can’t teach individual who’s not there.
That’s it. People leave. The reality is it’s not always actual that engagement and learning outcomes are at odds. But erstwhile they are, we usually like going for engagement. I’ll give you an example. There are any things that are frustrating, and frustration makes you leave. We actually just smooth them. By that I mean, if I could force you to sit there, I may be able to teach the material to you in 5 minutes, but it’d be a very frustrating 5 minutes. Instead, what we do is teach it to you in 2 hours — just way slower, but the full time, things are animating on the screen and you’re getting dopamine hits or whatever. Even though a truly good teacher could have taught it to you in 5 minutes, watching you make mistakes, it would have been frustrating. We much like to keep you around.
Part of the reason is due to the fact that we’re in an app setting as opposed to a school setting. In a school setting, the fact is the kids are held hostage there. They can’t leave. With an app setting, the tiniest frustration, people are like, “You know what? I’m going to go to TikTok now.” We just can’t lose those users. So we always opt for engagement, but that doesn’t mean we won’t teach the material to you. We’ll just take it a small slower.
It’s clear that you have thought about this a lot.
We’ve spent years reasoning about this.
I want to circular this out a small bit due to the fact that you have a very clear answer and a very clear point of view. What do you think the circumstantial tension between gamification and education is? What are you losing erstwhile you always choice gamification?
Probably the thing you’re losing is efficiency — by that I mean, the amount of content learned per unit time. The fact of the substance is, I grew up in the 3rd planet a while ago. any of the stuff that I grew up being taught, my teachers were hitting me while teaching it. I’m not kidding. They would hit me. The reality is that I most likely learned truly fast due to the fact that erstwhile you were learning penmanship, if you did the incorrect thing, they hit you with a ruler. You have a real incentive to get that done very fast. You just learn truly fast due to the fact that you’re like, “Whoa.” So I think it’s true: you can learn faster if you’re in an environment where you’re forced to do so and nobody cares whether you feel good about it. But in our case, I’m okay with somewhat slower learning as long as you’re inactive engaged.
Efficiency, I realize that one. I had any beautiful strict teachers in my time, but I was truly good at taking the tests. My wife and I went to college together. She’s much smarter than me.
But you’re a good test taker.
She was always mad at me due to the fact that I could just show up at the end and take the test. This is truly most likely why she didn’t date me for years, due to that core frustration. This is what I mean by education. That human teacher can measure whether you’re good at taking a test or whether you’ve actually learned something. That’s the tradeoff that I was getting at, is that if it’s all a gamification engagement, people might just learn to play the game. They might not have learned anything.
There’s most likely a small bit of that. It’s very hard to measure, of course. But the reality is, ultimately, it works. Duolingo works. Just as an example, for me, I’ve been utilizing only Duolingo to learn French for the past fewer years. At this point, I can watch Netflix shows in French — with no subtitles or anything. I just watch them, and it works. So you’re right, there’s most likely a tradeoff. It’s most likely beautiful hard to measure. But what we’re looking for here is that people are actually utilizing their time well.
I want to effort to tie all of these themes and ideas together. You have a large imagination for Duolingo. You’ve talked about it a lot. Being available to teach everybody languages around the world, being in a number of countries. And then there’s the fact that you’re a public company. You’ve got to make money. You’re inactive showing up in T-shirts. The first thing that comes immediately to my head is, you’re launching fresh things like math and music, and they’re not available on Android, which is the single most popular operating strategy in the world. It’s utilized by the majority of lower-income people in the world. That feels like an immediate tension, that the best experience of Duolingo is on the platform that wealthier people use. How do you resolve that?
It’s a good point. 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. We are about a year behind on Android. This has been actual on Duolingo almost since the beginning. Android has been six months to a year behind iOS. There are a number of reasons for that, but most likely the biggest 1 is that it has been harder to find truly good Android developers erstwhile compared to iOS developers. There are just more truly good iOS developers, so we have more of them at Duolingo.
The way we work is that we experimentation with most fresh features on iOS. due to the fact that a fresh feature is usually not that large off the bat, you usually gotta do trial and mistake to effort to make it better. By the time it’s good, we port it to Android. That’s how we operate.
We realize the importance of Android. You are right. There are more people with Android phones than iPhones. Generally, all features are going to make it to Android, just about six months behind, and we feel okay about that. It’s besides easier to make on iOS for a number of reasons, not just that there are more developers. So that’s it, we’re just ahead.
In retrospect, given the technology that there is today, possibly we would be doing something that is cross-platform where we make on all platforms at the same time, but we’re locked into being native on both ends. We have a native app for iPhones and we have a native app for Android phones. That was the best thing we could do 10 years ago, and we’re locked into that.
When you think about increasing the company, supporting multiple platforms, that’s just double the effort all the time. Is it on your head that, “Okay, we’re going to intentionally slow down improvement here so we can keep this squad smaller”?
It is, and we don’t have 1 immense task where we’re going to halt all improvement and be like, “You know what? We’re going to now be in a single platform kind of thing.” But we are slow getting there. I don’t know how long it’ll take. The hard part with this is that if we were to start from scratch right now, the decision would be clear, but you besides gotta keep the plane going. It’s specified a large investment to do this that we will most likely gotta halt all improvement for a year and a half or something. I don’t really know the timeline due to the fact that it’s just so big. So far, we have decided to do this piecemeal alternatively than all at once.
Your premium subscription tier, the Max tier, only just arrived on Android.
Literally in the last fewer days.
One thing I’ve heard over and over again since the dawn of the modern smartphone is that iOS users spend more money.
Yes, 4 times as much. At least for Duolingo, a given user spends 4 times as much per capita.
So the majority of your money is coming from iOS users, is what I’m getting from this.
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.
Is that demographically that they have 4x the income? Or is it that demographically, iOS users are spending 4 times the money in your app?
No, it’s 4x the income. It’s that a user spends 4 times as much. We have more Android users, but it doesn’t balance out in the end. We make more money from iPhone. I’m going to give you a number here just to give you an idea. The divided of users is 60 / 40, so 60 percent Android, 40 percent iOS. The divided of gross is the another way around. It’s fundamentally 60 percent iOS, 40 percent Android. Those are very rough estimates.
So erstwhile you think about expansion, again, a public company, if most of your users are on Android and Android is the biggest operating strategy in the planet but all of your money is on iOS, how do you resolve that tension?
Is it that we’re going to make our money on iOS and not Android? The large mission is to bring free language education to all of those another people, so is the iOS user subsidizing the free mission?
I mean, that’s 1 way of reasoning about it. It’s not rather actual that all our money is on iOS. It’s just that more money is on iOS, that’s for sure. But it is simply a small bit true, regardless of Android versus iOS, if you just look at who pays for Duolingo at the moment, they are usually people who are well off. They may not be millionaires, but they are people who live in countries like the US that are wealthy, countries that have salaries like $100,000 a year. A individual with a good, unchangeable occupation in a wealthy country, that is who pays for Duolingo. The people who usage Duolingo for free are usually in mediocre countries. They may not have a unchangeable job, so it is actual that we’re getting the wealthy people to subsidize the education for everybody. That is the case, and that’ll most likely always be the case.
Now, on our end, we besides request to get better as a business to get more people in any of these developing countries to pay. As a good example, Netflix has done a truly good occupation of getting people in Brazil and India to pay. We have not done as good of a job, and part of the issue is that we’re freemium. Again, I grew up in a mediocre country. Even if the price is scaled down to match the GDP per capita and it’s much cheaper, the problem that you have in a mediocre country is that the attitude is, “I won’t pay unless I have to.” That’s just the attitude. It doesn’t substance if it’s just a dollar, and I do happen to have a dollar. I just won’t pay unless I have to.
What you see is utmost tolerance for ads. For example, we can put 10 ads at the end of a lesson and they inactive won’t pay. This is why, for example, Netflix does so well in any of these countries because, with Netflix, there’s no free. They’re just like, “Look, whatever, you gotta pay.” And people are like, “Fine, fine. I’ll pay.” So we gotta figure out what to do as a freemium product in these countries, and we have any ideas, but the reality is, we have not truly succeeded at strong monetization in countries like India.
Do you think that that is the next logical place for you to grow as you think about English education?
For sure, we are spending quite a few effort on that. And it is growing, which is nice, but it’s a massive opportunity. Language learning is another comic thing where the largest marketplace is simply a country like the US: rich countries. Language learning as a whole, not Duolingo, but language learning as a whole, the largest marketplace is actually developing countries: the Indias, Vietnams, Brazils, and Mexicos of the world. They’re learning English, and that’s the largest language-learning market, but we have not cracked it. We have cracked the smaller one, which is the US and Western Europe and richer countries. We’ve cracked that in terms of monetization and in terms of users. We have quite a few users in India; they just don’t pay us.
I feel like I gotta ask you about the owl. It’s very crucial to everyone that I ask you about the owl. At least as expressed in this country, the owl is a very online, very culturally defined character. If you took the owl outside of United States social networks and dropped it anywhere else, it wouldn’t make any sense. Is the owl expressed culturally in different markets, or is it just 1 owl?
I don’t know how to answer the question. It’s in between. We started utilizing social media with the owl a while ago. It grew mostly in the US through TikTok due to the fact that the owl does unhinged stuff on TikTok.
Wait, hold on. The owl doesn’t do anything. How large is the squad that writes and performs the owl?
Okay. And they work at Duolingo?
I’m assuming they’re in fresh York City?
Actually, no. Most of them are in Pittsburgh.
Okay. I didn’t realize Pittsburgh had this many terminally online people. Godspeed.
Yes. But it started out with TikTok and it was mainly in the US. That was respective years ago. What has changed in that time is, first of all, we are no longer just relying on TikTok. It is now on YouTube, YouTube Shorts,
, etc. So it’s everywhere on social media. That’s 1 large thing. The another 1 is that we learned how to localize this to different markets. So we started Duolingo accounts for a bunch of countries: Mexico — well, Spanish speaking — Japan, Brazil, Germany, France, China, etc. We have figured out how to make all of them succeed. I was dubious at first erstwhile individual told me we were going to open an account in Germany. No offense to Germans, but I thought, “These people don’t have a sense of humor.”
They do! In fact, it’s 1 of our more successful accounts. [The global accounts] are a small different. It’s not that different, but they are a small different.
And these are the same 5 people locally?
No, we have a global team, which is these 5 people, and in each country, we have a tiny number of people, most likely 1 or 2 people, that localize this stuff. And “localize” doesn’t mean we take the exact same videos and in Mexico put a sombrero on. That’s not that. We have themes and we have figured out what themes work globally and besides what themes work in certain countries. For example, the German one, we had a truly large thing on Oktoberfest. Also, at any point, due to the fact that there’s this dance club scene in Berlin, I guess they all went to 1 of those 24-hour dance clubs. Each country does different stuff, and it’s worked out beautiful well.
What’s the hiring process like to be the author for the Duolingo owl? Do you just read people’s Twitter accounts and say, “You’re unhinged adequate to do this”?
It’s quite a few that by now due to the fact that we are specified a presence online. By the way, I didn’t know this until late but there are weeks erstwhile our video on TikTok is the most watched video on all of TikTok that week. That happens. By now, our accounts are so well known that we have our choice in terms of [recruitment], and quite a few people want to work for that team. Typically, we just look at what they’ve done before. It’s a tiny group of truly good creators, so we hire from that group. Usually, these are beautiful comic people that are even funnier online, but erstwhile they’re offline, they’re not as funny. They’re inactive funny, but erstwhile they’re offline, you’re like, “It’s you? It’s you who came up with that?”
And you measurement everything, it sounds like. Is this working? Are you getting lots of fresh users due to the owl?
Yes, this works. By the way, this is not paid. All that social marketing is not paid. It’s free. We make our videos and they go viral. About 15 percent of our users are coming in from social media. Now, if you look at social media views of our content, which we measurement in the billions, there’s a about equal number of social media views of our content versus the content that is about us but not made by us. Also, there are quite a few another people just making content about Duolingo, but they’re not us, and they combined have about as many views as we do.
Have you always told the squad to pump the brakes? Have you always looked at something they’ve made and said, “We just can’t do this”?
Yeah. There’s our review. There’s an approval process. We’re close to the line in any of the stuff that we have put out, and we have in fact gone across the line and published things that we shouldn’t have. Since we did that, we now have a beautiful strict approval process. This is simply a full layer, and the last step is fundamentally me. But stuff doesn’t come to me frequently due to the fact that there are people before me, like the CMO, so there are quite a few steps.
What’s the last 1 the CMO was like, “I don’t know. Luis has to approve this one”?
I’m trying to remember what that 1 was.
What’s the last 1 they convinced you to do even though you were skeptical?
I don’t remember the exact video, what it was, but I know that the last 1 that I approved, I was wrong, as in, I shouldn’t have approved it. quite a few this you only know in retrospect. You don’t know until it happens due to the fact that you put it out and then you see this reaction. I don’t remember what it was, but I know I approved it and I know I was incorrect due to the fact that I didn’t imagine that it was going to have that reaction. We haven’t had that many faux pas. It’s been like 3 or 4 videos that were like, “You probably shouldn’t have done that.”
The another thing happened about a year ago. We had made this crazy video. It was insane. We were a small hesitant about it, and we ended up cutting it. There are all these memes online about how the owl truly wants you to learn a language, and it goes to large lengths, including kidnapping your family. This was a video about kidnapping, and we were a small hesitant about it, and then the October 7th attack happened, and we cut it. And then we cut it last year, and we thought, “Well, you know what? We may usage it next year.” This year came along and again we cut it. And then we came up with an interior thing that a year erstwhile we can play that, it’s most likely been a good year for humanity.
Yeah. We’re most likely never going to play that.
The planet context of that 1 needs to be substantially improved, I think. All right, I gotta end with a feature request. You’ve given us quite a few time, and then I’ll let you get out of here. We talked a lot about India. We talked a lot about emerging languages. Can you put Gujarātī in this app?
This is the language that I can realize and talk like a baby, but I can’t read or compose it, and I would love to close the loop.
You’re asking for languages. That’s a hard one.
It’s the native language of Gandhi, of the current prime minister of India.
There is this unfortunate thing about being a immense language versus the desire to learn it. It’s a beautiful large difference. Hindi is most likely the 1 that has the most desire to learn it in terms of Indian languages. It’s a tiny number of people who are learning it. It’s got to be, I don’t know precisely off the top of my head, but it’s surely well below 1 percent of our learners are learning Hindi. I’m going to guess 0.1 percent of our learners are learning Hindi. That’s the hard part about adding languages, that we gotta keep them, we gotta do a truly good occupation with them, and then, in the end, we just don’t get quite a few usage. So, sorry.
All right. That’s a hard no. It’s 1 of the first times a CEO has given me a hard no. That’s again, founder mode.
Well, it’s just truly hard to say yes to. In the past, I utilized to say yes to this stuff, and we made quite a few mistakes adding languages that, in retrospect, we most likely shouldn’t have added.
Have you always cut languages?
We have. We cut, what was it? I think it was Afrikaans. But the cut in part was due to the fact that there was very small demand. The biggest reason was it was just a low-quality course, and at any point, we thought this was a bigger brand hazard than anything else. We made the decision, we’re like, “Well, could we improve it or what?” And we made the decision it was not worth improving.
Do you think AI is going to aid you add languages?
Maybe, but unfortunately, at the moment, AI is truly good for large languages and truly bad for smaller languages. There’s a beautiful advanced correlation with the languages we offer. AI is very good at the languages we have: the Spanish and the French. It’s not super good at your Esperanto or Navajo or smaller languages.
AI is notoriously bad at math, or at least the current LLMs are beautiful bad at math. Are they going to aid you with that?
The good news is that, in the constrained environment that we have, it can aid rather a bit. It’s been helping rather a bit. quite a few the data that we make for our math course is with AI. The another thing is, any of it is without AI, but it turns out, just computers are good at math.
It’s comic how many times I’ve asked this question and individual fails to bring up the thought that there’s a computer. I’m happy you did that.
Computers are good at math! And I realize AI is not so good at following a pattern or whatever. It may not be so good at that. But the data that we make for our math course is simply quite a few stuff like fractions and multiplication. Computers are beautiful good at generating that data.
All right. Well, Luis, you’ve given us quite a few time. Thank you so much for being on Decoder.
Thank you for having me. And large questions.
Decoder with Nilay Patel /
A podcast from The Verge about large ideas and another problems.
