Duolingo CEO: How to Make Learning as Addictive as Social Media! Stop Wasting Time!

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The hardest thing about learning something by yourself is staying motivated.

How do you make learning as addictive as social media?

What we want is that whenever you're using Duolingo, what you're doing there is. So it just takes some time to form a habit, but once you form it, it's pretty hard to get rid of it. So all these people that have like a 2000 day streak on Duolingo or a thousand day streak on Duolingo and they'll go through whatever to continue their streak. Hi, I'm Luis Von Ahn. I am the CEO and co founder of Duolingo. Welcome to the Burnouts.

We are so excited to have you here. It's crazy to have you on because I remember early on in me and Sophia, when we met as roommates at Stanford, used to write down what we loved from companies that we looked up to. And one of the biggest things that we always looked up to was your guys's marketing is insane. I remember listening to a podcast that you had and you were saying that you annually, you guys generate tens of millions of free dollars in ad value from the birds. So can you talk about how this happened? I know you were saying it was kind of accidental that you guys struck this golden community, but I'd love to dig in there a little bit.

The owl has been amazing for us. It started at first, very early when we launched Duolingo, which is now, I don't know, close to 15 years ago. We knew we wanted to have a mascot. That's, that's what we wanted to do. We came up with an owl because it's in western cultures at least it is a symbol of Knowledge, then it was green for it. The reason it's green is to troll our co founder, Severin. So Severin Hacker, who's our CTO and co founder, doesn't really care about design all that much. And we were. When we were deciding about the owl, the design team asked him, what do you. What do you want out of this? And he said, I don't care. And then he said, but there's just one thing. I hate the color green. And so they turned around and they thought it would be really funny to just make it green. So that's why it's a green owl to troll Severin. And then we've had this owl. And then at some point, somebody had the idea that the owl was gonna be the app icon. So the app icon to Duolingo is just the face of the owl. Okay. The next thing is we send notifications, but always notifications on a phone, put the app icon right next to it. So because it's the face of the owl, it looks like what is being said comes from the owl. So then people started ascribing the owl, all kinds of things, you know, all our notifications, essentially, it's as if it came from the owl. And then our notifications started getting more and more pushy. So the way our notifications work is that after, if you don't use the app, after five days, we stop sending you notifications. But the last notification we send you, somebody had the idea that we should tell you that we're stopping the send notification. So the last notification we send you says something like, these reminders don't seem to be working. I'm going to stop for now. What it turned out is that this was a very effective way to get people to come back because people felt guilty, like the owl was giving up on them. So everybody started being like, oh, the owl's passive aggressive. It's like an extremely passive aggressive. It feels like it's my parent telling me this. And so the Internet just started talking about the owl and they started making memes about how the owl would go through great lengths to, to get you to do your lesson. So, you know, it would kidnap your family to get you to do your lesson, etc. So that, that's kind of how it all started. And then we started leaning into it. I mean, we as a company decided, well, why not get in on the joke? And so we started posting things like we, in fact, we had a, we had a whole TV commercial where it was a. One of these kind of Shitty lawyer commercials that, that are like, you know, in local TV where they're like call blah, blah blah if you've, you know, had an accident or. We had, we made exactly that commercial, but it was supposed to be about if you've been kidnapped by an owl. And it was like a whole lawyer commercial. And we aired it and it was, I mean, it was pretty funny. By the way, the commercial, the way we created the commercial was we first went to one of these companies that makes the shitty lawyer commercials and we're like, hey, we want one of these commercials. Like, you know, like shitty lawyer commercials. And they were like, what do you mean shitty? Like they did not. This is when we realized we actually had to go to a very fancy development company that. And we told them about a shitty lawyer commercial and they, they were like, we got it. Yeah, we got it. We know what you mean. Yeah, the other ones. Yeah.

And when did you guys decide, for lack of a better word, to start being reckless with the owl? Because I saw recently one, it was like a tweet and it's like, this is what's under the green suit. It's a guy literally in like underwear, but now had some very nice abs. I will say, when did you guys decide to start, you know, really kind of breaking this layer and making it like more and more of a meme.

And leaning into happened over time. It wasn't like one day we went from 0 to 100. I think we just have tried to be a little more experimental with it and every time that we pushed, it was successful. So we just kept on pushing and pushing. Of course we have guidelines about things, but generally I would say between the years of 2019 and 2022 or so, you could see the Al just getting more and more unhinged. And it's because every time it worked.

And there was a Gen Z new hire, Zaria, who had just started and you guys entrusted her with your TikTok. Tell us about what happened.

Yeah, so we had just hired Zaria who had just graduated from college and you know, she was at the time our head of marketing. Our CMO was a woman that I loved, Kami. And she said I in my career, Cami had a very long and prestigious career. And she said I always learned that if that you should hire 21 year olds to do your marketing because they just know what the. What the kids like. She said, basically, I'm too old to know what the kids like. And so she hired a few people that were basically straight out of college. And Zaria came up with this idea that she would. That we would start a TikTok channel. And then I was shown the first few videos that we were going to post and truthfully I had. I didn't even understand them. And then after that, of course we had more Gen Z people in the team and then it just became a team. And they're all very good at it.

And what were the videos?

Man? It's just doing stuff. You know that one. At the time, I now know what it means. But at the time there was a saying that was like, no cap. At the time I had never heard this. And I'm like, what the hell does that even mean? What did you think it meant? I know I had no idea what it meant. But it was, it had something. It was something about no cap. And I guess a lot of people started looking at that. And then at some point they did another one where.

But when did they start wearing the costume?

Oh no, that was from the beginning. It was from the beginning. It was the costume.

How did that happen?

Like, did you go and make a costume?

We had a costume already. And the reason we had a costume was because we thought it would be useful for job fairs where we would send. During a job fair, we would go to all these schools to try to hire engineers. We thought it would be cool to have somebody in the costume. So that was the reason for the costume. So we had it.

Find the closet.

Yeah, it was like, it's somewhere in the closet. And they're like, whoa, we have this costume. Let's just do weird stuff with it. And that's, that's kind of what happened. And they started getting progressively weirder. At some point they did one where it was man, Scrub Daddy. And I had kids, I would like, I mean like mine own babies. What, like a million little Scrub Daddy sponges came out. And that was like the video. And I was very confused. But that thing got, I don't know how many, 20 million views or something. So.

And who was the person wearing the costume?

I mean, it varies. Anybody who starts their job at Duolingo thinks that this is a pretty amazing opportunity to be inside this owl. So all the new employees are like, can I be the owl? Can I be the owl? Once you've been the owl once or twice, you realize it's actually just a pretty sweaty job. It's not something you want to, you want to do. So yeah. So it varies. Now for very high stakes filmings, like if we have something like a large marketing campaign or something, and we Actually want the Owl to do some very specific stuff. We hire people that are not employees that usually are professional dancers. They know how to move much better for the Owl. Especially the Owl. I mean we have some where the owls like dancing. They're professional dancers. They're not duolingo employees. I can't imagine are great dancers.

We eat a mascot suit for our TikToks. I mean that's, that's what I'm taking away.

It's worked out pretty well for us. I mean it's really worked out really well.

I must say. The reason I'm obsessed with this is because every single time I'm on my, my Instagram TikTok there are so many accounts talking about you need to grow your personal brand. You need to grow your personal brand. But this idea of like if you're not a forward facing founder having a mascot that you can kind of have the company hide behind that becomes the community, like it doesn't need to be you as the founder's face. You can also have different like marketing, you know, vehicles. Is there any other companies you know, when you look at today that you think are doing marketing correctly in this vein?

I mean there's a lot of companies that I think do marketing very well. I mean, you know, there's the ones that do marketing really well on social media. Like, I mean historically there's just been like someone like Burger King and Taco Bell and Wendy's. They're just like historically have done that. But it doesn't have to be just social media. I mean I'm always a huge fan of Apple marketing, but that's a very different vein of doing it. So I think you just have to find your niche. And you know, it's true what you say. I mean in my case I am not, I don't particularly love attention and I am generally shy. So I am not gonna be the person who's gonna be out there on a social media account or something. So I'm very happy that we have the Owl doing the job.

We tried to book the Owl for this podcast but he was busy.

He's way busier than I am. Not you. Instead, sorry.

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And I want to go back to talk to me about giving responsibility to Gen Z employees.

They had free reign. I mean, we just, there's very little oversight. There's, there's some amount of oversight and there's, there's, you know, somebody that manages them that is more of an adult, but they have, they have pretty free reign to, to do almost whatever they want. And that has worked out pretty well.

So you don't review the SIK talks anymore?

I don't, I, I, I, you know, I review the first two or three and it was pretty clear that it was useless for me to review them because I didn't even understand them. I'm like, I don't, I don't know what this is.

No cap?

Yeah, no cap, but I don't review them. But we have our head of marketing, Manu. The rule right now is if the, if the social media manager believes that it's going to be somewhat controversial, they should ask their manager. And so we have this person who is our head of brand who is awesome, Kat Chan. And then if she thinks it's going to be controversial, she should ask our cmo, Manu. And if he thinks it's going to be controversial, he asks me. But it has not gotten to the point where he asked me.

Never?

No, I don't think so. Really? Half of the stuff that gets posted, I'm like, I don't even know why this is funny or why it would be where anybody would not like it. So I'm not a good reviewer for.

This and I want to Talk about generally your kind of philosophy as a company because you've talked a lot about investing, particularly in new grad hires.

Yes.

Why did you make that decision? And how do you screen when so many young, talented people are coming out of college to actually figure out who gets, you know, a job at Duolingo?

Yeah. I mean, so we're, we're, we're. The whole time that we've been at Duolingo, we've hired people straight out of college, a lot of them. At first, I think it started because we started the company in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It was easier to hire new grads. New grads were willing to move to Pittsburgh, whereas I think, you know, more established people, a lot of times they had families, so it's kind of harder to move. So that's why we started hiring new grads. Also, it used to be the case that I used to be a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, and that's why we were in Pittsburgh. So I knew a lot of college students, I guess. So that's why we started. But over time, we just have this new grad program. About half of our employees have come to Duolingo.

As a new grad and as a former teacher, I mean, what advice do you give to students now that you did back then? Like, just generally in terms of what you want students to take away from, like your career, from your learnings? Like, well, what are your biggest pieces of advice?

Well, it depends on what it is for. I mean, if it's students, I mean, to learning. The most important thing about learning is just making a habit. You know, there's some stuff that you can learn in an hour or two, like fixing a faucet, but things, you know, like these subjects like math or whatever, it takes years to learn. Same with learning a language. It just takes years to learn a language. So the most important thing is just do what you can to build a habit. So that's, that's for students. Now for people who have recently graduated and that work at Duolingo, for example, I mean, my biggest advice is to find your find. Find a way to be useful that takes you pretty far. I have a. I have a story that I tell inside Duolingo to all the new employees, which happens to be a true story. Early on at Duolingo, there were two engineers. One of them kept on coming to me and saying, we don't have a blog. We should have a blog. Why don't we have a blog? And they kept on complaining. Like months of complaining. We didn't have a Blog. And then the second engineer one day just came to me and said, I noticed we didn't have a blog. So I started one. That's way better than complaining about not having a blog. So this is a kind of story that I use inside Duolingo for people just, just make yourself useful as opposed to trying to complain. Complainers, not useful.

And Duolingo is a multi billion dollar company. What do you look for when you're hiring?

Certainly good at their craft. So whatever it is your craft is, I mean, if you're a designer, we really look at your portfolio. If you're an engineer, we want to make sure that you're great at your craft. Certainly we look at that, but then on top of that we look at whether people are really believing our mission. Most of the people that work at Duolingo really believe in the mission. So we look at that. And then the other thing, we have this rule. It's kind of an informal rule, but whenever you're trying to hire somebody, it's because you have a hole in the organization that you're trying to fill. The informal rule is better to have a hole than an asshole. So we try very hard not to hire assholes. You can't always tell from an interview, but sometimes you can. And we're like, yeah, we're not going to hire that person.

And you famously have paid taxi drivers to, to tell you how your executives that you're interviewing have treated them.

By now, this is the word is out. So people, people treat their drivers very well. But one, but it doesn't work anymore. But one part of the interview for us was, was how they treated their driver. I mean, and there was a one hire that we were going to make. We had been looking for a chief financial officer for like a year and there was this one person that we all really liked, had a really strong resume. And then it turned out that they were pretty mean to their driver from the airport to the, to, to the office. And that made us not, not hire them because, you know, our belief is, and I really believe in this, is that, you know, if they're going to be mean to the driver, it probably going to be mean to other people, particularly people under them. And so I, we did not want that.

And 16% of your workforce is focused on design. Can you talk about that? When you said you and your co founder are not big designers, you care about design, but neither of you are designers by trade. You have an incredible educational background, but none of it's in design. How did you guys make that decision. And what does a giant design workforce like that look like?

Yeah, we have, our design team is large. It's something like 16% of our, of our, of our entire company is designed. We hire a lot of fresh grad designers, but we also hire some more experienced ones. It started out because we had a couple of employees, very early employees who were very influential at Duolingo that were just really good designers. One of them is Tyler Murphy, who's still with us. And they just attracted other really good designers. And it just became this kind of snowball that it just really good talent attracted more really good talent and that just grew a lot. The other thing that happened is a few years ago we bought a design studio in Detroit which is, you know, it was a world renowned design studio. And now, so now we have this office in Detroit with about 40 people. They're all either artists or designers. And that, I mean that has done wonders for us. I mean if you look at the Duolingo app, it's all very well designed, but not just very well designed, very well animated. If you look at the animations, I mean, if you actually pay attention, the animations are incredible. And they're all done by hand with, you know, by artists.

So when you guys are testing or doing different experiments, is that the design team running that or is that a separate team?

So we have three, three separate functions that run product. It's engineering, product management and design. We call it epd. Those three functions together do all of that. Usually Duolingo is split up in a bunch of teams. I don't even know how many teams we have now. It's probably more than 50. And each team has engineers, designers and product managers. And they all decide what to do. But each team operates pretty independently from the other teams and they come up with what to do. But designers have a huge say in this.

And I want to kind of pivot the direction of this conversation to focus more on learning and education at large. That's the mission really of Duolingo. And I had watched your TED talk about basically wanting to make learning as addictive as social media. What does that mean? And what can people take away from that lesson?

Yeah, I mean the, the, the hardest thing about learning something by yourself is staying motivated. I mean we learned this a long time ago that, that just, you know, it. There's a way to learn. For example, before Duolingo, there are many ways to learn languages, there's many ways to learn anything you want to. But the hard thing is staying motivated. For example, you really can just learn quantum physics for free by just reading Wikipedia, but most people don't do that. You really need to find a way to get to stay motivated. So that's been the main thing we've worked on at Duolingo is making the app to be as engaging as we can. Now, we know it's not as engaging as TikTok. I mean, it's hard to compete with Cats or, you know, all the other memes. But I think, you know, it's. I don't know what fraction. 80% as engaging, some. Some amount as engaging. And I think that people also, internally, a lot of them feel bad when they're using something like TikTok or social media, but they don't feel bad when they're using Duolingo. So our hope is that we just have to be kind of close to as fun as social media. And then the last 10 to 20% people's internal drive gets them. But, yeah, we really spent a lot of time trying to make Duolingo more engaging.

How do you counterbalance this idea of wanting to have people learn a language, but then also spending a lot of time on their phones, like getting addicted to an app? Like, where. Where do you draw the line?

I mean, the way we see it is what we want is that whenever you're using Duolingo, what you're doing there is positive for you. So everything we have on Duolingo, we don't just teach languages, by the way, that's the main thing we teach. But we now have math, music, and also chess. And just. We want it to be the case that everything that you can do there is positive. That's. That's what we're trying to do. Chess was an interesting one because I actually at first said that we should not have chess on Duolingo because I thought it's just a game I wanted to have. You know, I'm like, let's have math, not chess. But then I talked to the person who was the Minister of Education of Guatemala, this woman who said to me, look, the education system, the public education system in Guatemala is not working very well. And it is doing so badly that I am considering sending a chess set to every student because at least they'll learn logical thinking. And when she said that to me, I'm like, oh, maybe we should have Duolingo chess on Duolingo. And that's why we added. So we just want. We want it to be the case that a parent feels good giving it to their children and saying, go nuts. On Duolingo. I mean, that's kind of what we want.

I want to talk about education and its role in your life and how that affected you. Starting Duolingo.

Yeah, I mean, so I was born and I grew up in Guatemala, which is a poor country. I was very fortunate that I received the education of a rich person, even though, I mean, it was just me and my mother. And my mother was not rich. My mother was a doctor, but she worked for the, for the state. And in Guatemala, a doctor that works for the state doesn't make a lot of money. But I was fortunate that I was only child. And so she spent essentially all of her extra income, or that she didn't spend on like food, on my education. So I went to a fancy school and I could see the difference between what I was learning and what my neighbors were learning. Who, because of the neighborhood that I lived in, which was a middle class neighborhood, none of them. They were all going to like your average school in Guatemala, which is not particularly good. And then of course, because of that, I was able to come to the United States for college, et cetera, et cetera. So it's just, it just really made a humongous difference. And I saw it not just with my neighbors and everything, but in the, you know, by just growing up in Guatemala. You really see a lot of people talk about education as something that can bring equality to different social classes. But I always saw it as the opposite because what ended up happening, and you see this in the US too, is people who have a lot of money can buy themselves really fancy educations. And therefore, because they have such fancy educations, they can get really good jobs and keep making a lot of money. Whereas people who don't have a lot of money don't learn very much in poor countries. They barely learn how to read and write. And because of that, they can, they can never really make a lot of money. So that's the reason why Duolingo is such a mission driven company. That's why we have a free product and that's why we want to make sure that the free product is always available for everybody. Because what we want to do is really try to give equal access to education to everyone. And I think for sure we have users in the whole spectrum of Duolingo. So on the one side of the spectrum, I mean, we have again, Syrian refugees or people who really don't have a lot of money, who are trying to learn English to get a, a slightly better job, etc. And on the other side of the spectrum we have, you know, billionaires, famous people, etc. One of the latest ones that I saw was George Clooney is like a big user of Duolingo. So, you know, but, but it's pretty awesome that it's the, the same educational system is being used by people who don't have very much money versus, like, billionaires. It's usually that, that's rare. Usually people who are very rich have, you know, private tutors, better stuff. Um, so that, that's what we wanted to achieve.

And at what point during your educational journey did you learn about the importance of habits?

I think I actually just started learning about that, really realizing that when I was working on Duolingo. I mean, I, I, I, I just turned out that I had made a lot of habits, but I didn't really think about it until I started working on Duolingo. By working on Duolingo, I've learned all kinds of things. You know, another thing that I've learned is people don't read anything. We sometimes work really hard on the specific copy in the app that people don't read. And now this is a big thing that we say inside Duolingo, which is like as few words as you can anywhere in the app. Whenever there's something, a message, we just try really hard to make it shorter and shorter and shorter, because every extra word is. You lose like another 10% of users that are not going to read the thing. You know, we've learned animations really matter and in winning moments. So whenever you just did really well, et cetera, longer animations are better than shorter animations because people kind of want to celebrate. So when you just did something pretty awesome on Duolingo, you'll see that the animation ends up being about seven seconds long because people actually want to celebrate that. That's another thing that we internally know. The other one, if you haven't done this for your app, which I assume you have, but it took us a really long time to start doing it, is film completely average users and watch them use your app? My God, they are like. They are. This is where you realize how broken your app is or how confusing it is because you think that it is perfectly not confusing. And then you know, the average person is confused from the first second. So we do a lot of that.

And how do you think about AI and the moat you guys have around brand and marketing and people having streaks? How do you think about it advancing the company and the work that you guys are doing?

Yeah, I mean, look, with AI we have this internal golden rule, which is anytime we use AI, it should be for the benefit of our users. That is the golden rule we have. And, you know, there are some companies that are like, oh, we can use AI to save cost. You know, that's not what we do internally. We just. If it's something that we can use it to help our users, it's good. So, for example, with AI, it used to be the case that throughout Duolingo, up until about three years ago, we could not get you to practice conversation because this is just not something we could really teach. We could teach vocabulary, we could teach how to read, but practicing conversation, the technology was just not there to do that. So the only way we knew how to get you to practice conversation was to pair you up with another human, which some people want to do. But about 90% of the world's population does not want to talk to another human in the language. In a language that they're not very good at because they're too shy. So most people didn't want to do that. So this is why we stopped doing that. But over the last three years, because of AI, you can actually practice conversation by talking to an AI, and people are not shy about that. So that's. You know, we're very. We're very happy with doing that.

And do you guys use AI in your workforce, too, to expedite productivity? What does that look like?

Sure we do. You know it from every. Every function uses it differently. I mean, engineers are. You know, some of the stuff that they're coding is being coded by AI in all cases. Again, we're not trying to substitute people. We're trying to just get people to be more effective. So engineers use it that way. Designers use. Some of the illustrations are now being done by AI, but we're finding that it's only the simpler illustrations that can be done by AI. So just every function uses it themselves. But there's an interesting thing with AI, and I've talked to many other CEOs that have a similar experience, which is, if you poll our engineers, for example, close to 100% of them say they use AI heavily to code. Good. If you ask them if they like it, they'll tell you, yes, I like it. But somehow we have not measured an improvement in speed in our coding, and many CEOs have not seen that. And it's not because we don't have good engineers. We have truly excellent engineers. But. So there's this paradox that. And weirdly, if you look at particularly X, or if you look at social media or particularly X, if you were to read that, you would just think that at this point computers are better than humans at programming or you should just fire all your engineers. But this is just far from the truth. And when you go and ask, because I was confused, I'm like, well, you all use AI, you should be going, I don't know, 20% faster at least or twice as fast or something. And you go and talk to the engineers, they'll tell you, look, AI really helps. And in some cases, whenever I want to do something, I tell it to do it and it does it exactly as I want it to and it saves me time. But there are some other cases where I tell it to do something and it just does the wrong thing. And then I spend all this time trying to figure out why it did the wrong thing and how to do the right thing. And unfortunately I spend as much time on that as I saved on the other thing. So ultimately it's a bit of a wash. I think this will get better over time, but at this point we're still at a point where the productivity is just not that much better than without it. For performance marketing, we do use AI for the creative to try to change the creative. One of the things that matters is you just have to try a lot of different creatives and so that gets done with AI so that, you know, we use it that way. But I would say the most important thing for our marketing at the moment is certainly not AI. I mean, it's just getting our message right and also having the right strategy in each country. I mean, we have, we have users in every single country in the world. We have specific marketing campaigns in about 12 to 15 countries that we actually, you know, kind of the larger countries and you know, each one is localized so that that matters a lot.

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How do you think AI is going to impact education?

I mean, I think, I think it's going to eventually change quite a bit. It's going to take some time. I mean, there's some people that are like, well, next year education is going to be completely different. Education changes slowly. But I do think that the way we learn will change a lot. Now, I really have to say something important here. I am a former teacher, I'm a former professor. The goal is not, certainly not with us. And I just don't think that'll ever happen to substitute teachers. I think teachers do an incredible job at motivating people. It's very hard to be motivated by an AI, but you can be motivated by a teacher, by, I mean, when I was growing up, all my role models were basically teachers. So nobody, at least we don't want to substitute teachers. And I just don't think society will substitute teachers. But I do think that there's a lot of individualized attention that can be given to each student with AI, a lot of drills. And the nice thing about AI is it can very quickly figure out what you know and what you don't and start drilling you on the things you don't. So I think that's, that's going to change quite a bit. The other thing that's important to mention is a lot of people don't have access to a good teacher. A significant fraction of the world doesn't have access to a teacher at all or a good teacher. So I think for those people, we can do quite a bit. And that's something that we're very proud of with duolingo, that a lot of people throughout the world, you know, like Syrian refugees or, you know, people that don't have access to a good teacher have used duolingo to learn a language, usually the language of the country they had to move to. And we're very proud of that.

I think about this a lot because so many people talk about, oh, you know, we're terrified here that people are going to lose their jobs from AI. I'm scared more about you know, the divide between the first and Third World just continuing to separate and separate, it.

Will make it worse.

And my concern is that AI is just going to get us, you know, the same way the Industrial Revolution did light years ahead. And then we're going to have this entire population in the world that doesn't have access to cell phones or computers, that is completely left behind. But I do completely agree with your point. It's not replacing the humans. But if there's a way to supercharge. I remember during my time, like, working in Rwanda with Partners Health, they were doing this really cool thing where you could have, instead of a doctor doing it, you could instantly have an AI take a photo of someone's C section wounds, and it would tell you, you know, does she need to come in and see the doctor or does she not? Which would help a woman, you know, from walking nine hours. It could predetermine that and this idea of, okay, if you have an incredible teacher, can you supercharge them to help, you know, a wider population or to touch a wider population? Where, you know, if the students, you know, interacting, it can give them a report on how they're doing or what needs to be improved. Does duolingo today ever partner with schools or what does that look like?

Yeah, we do have, you know, a significant number of the people who are learning in a language in schools are also using duolingo. Our belief is that about half of the students in language classrooms in the US are using duolingo. Now, we don't have formal partnerships with the majority of them, in part because we have found it pretty hard to partner with schools. They have different requirements than what we have. For example, one of the things that most schools will tell you is that the school has to own the account of the student, whereas we're like, no, no, no. See, we want the student to own their account. And so that, you know, so that's been. You know, we just don't do that very much, but we try as much as we can to just, well, duolingo's free, so you can just use it wherever you want. The UN has used duolingo quite a bit for their refugee camps to teach them the languages of the countries they had moved to. Actually, there's a pretty funny story that at some point we got wind that there was some refugee camp in Turkey that was using duolingo for their Syrian refugees. And we wanted to send the team to just go look at what was going on, just for us to learn. And they were very scared for us to go there, they're like, I don't know if you should come. But eventually they agreed and then we sent the team there. And the reason they were really scared is because they thought what they were doing is whenever people completed the duolingo course, they were printing a certificate that said, you've completed the duolingo course. And it had like our owl in there and they thought we were going to go there to sue them for usage of the howl. And this is absolutely not what we wanted to. But yeah, that's the type of stuff we've seen.

That's incredible. Have you ever gotten, you know, user stories of, of people who've used duolingo and how it's affected their life once they've mastered a language?

Oh my God, we get a lot of them and it's, you know, for some of the people, it's that they master the language and you know, we see a lot of like, oh, I got a job because of this or. But it's not just that, it's for a lot of people it gives them meaning and, and they may not master the language, but it gives them meaning. I mean, we see a lot. For example, the ones that really get to me is older people. Like a lot of times we see somebody sense like, oh, my dad is 87 years old, always wanted to learn Italian, has a 2000 day streak, is now in the hospital, can you guys freeze their streak or something? And those are very heartwarming to me. But yeah, we get user stories every single day.

And how can people rewire their brains to learn instead of kind of using social media and having these unhealthy habits?

I mean that's, I wish everybody would do that. That's what we're trying to do. You know, the most important thing is I think, just trying to set yourself a time to do it. One of the things that we have found with duolingo is if you tie the, your usage of duolingo with a daily habit, like I always do my duolingo after brushing my teeth or something or like first thing when I wake up. If you're able to tie it to that, it's a lot more effective. We're finding.

Yeah, because I'm curious just generally about habit formation, consumer psychology, how does that kind of tie into whether or not people will successfully learn a language or a healthy habit?

A hundred percent. That's really important. I mean, whenever somebody signs up to duolingo, we know what really matters is how much you use it in the first 20 days and we try really hard to get you to use it a lot in the first 20 days, we send you as many push notifications as we can, et cetera. If we can get you to use duolingo straight for 20 days, you'll stay around for a long time. And you know, it's not exactly 20. It depends some on the countries, et cetera, but around 20 days we're trying really hard to get you to do. And so it just takes some time to form a habit. But once you form it, it's pretty hard to get rid of it. So all these people that have like a 2000 day streak on duolingo or a thousand day streak on Duolingo, they'll go through whatever to continue the streak. And so you see all these social media stories of people doing Duolingo at 11:59 in the club or like, you know, we get all these things. There was actually an interesting thing that there was a reality TV show that was going to be filmed somewhere in some island and they were going to cut off Internet access and take people's phones away. And then we got emails from the producers being like, look, we're trying to take the phones away of some of these people, but the only thing they want is that they can keep doing their duolingo. So can you help us out and like make sure that they don't lose their streak. So this is the type of stuff, once you have a long streak, you'll continue doing it.

Do you see differences between age groups in terms of how committed they are to learning a language?

It's pretty similar between the age groups, but yeah, different groups of people have it different younger people Korean because of K pop and K dramas. I mean we see it, we see it a hundred percent. So K Pop Demon hunters. Great for our Korean usage.

Throughout your journey, what have been the biggest lessons you've learned, especially from mistakes that you've made?

One of the things that really helped me, certainly you know where you guys are. Congratulations on your series A, by the way. That is awesome. Your series A is 10 times larger than our Series A. So congratulations to you.

It's also over 10 years later.

Inflation is real. Inflation is real. These ML engineers are not cheap.

Congratulations though. When you're raising funds, you know, one of the things that I really learned and it, it really helped me out is whenever I raise funds, I would talk to the investor. Right before signing the deal we, we had agreed, everything was agreed upon and then, but right before signing I would call them and I would say I have something very important to talk to you about, and it is that there are certain things that I'm going to continue doing at Duolingo, and no matter what you say, we are going to continue doing them. In our case was our free product really matters. Because a lot of times investors were like, why the hell do you have the free product? This is kind of wasted. You know, you should just charge everybody. And so I would tell them, a free product really matters, you can't touch it. Like, I sorry, if later you come and tell me that I need to start charging all our users, I'm going to tell you, no deal. And everybody agreed. So that's good. But it really helped me in the future because sometimes there would be some investor who would come in and say, hey, have you thought about charging the free product? And I would remind them, we talked about this. That really helped. So making things super clear, particularly with investors, was a big lesson for me. You know, another one, I'll tell you another lesson that was a good one for me. Hard stuff, hard conversations that you're supposed to have. Start by saying the thing. So, for example, the first person that I ever had to fire did not know that they were being fired. And they came the next day, like, to work, because I am, first of all, I'm conflict avoidant. And secondly, what I did was I basically sugarcoated it so much that by the time they left, they just thought that I was telling them maybe they should do a better job. And then they came the next day. What I've learned is if you're going to do something like let somebody go, is you start by saying, no, I'm very sorry, but I'm going to have to let you go. And then you explain, as opposed to the other way around, which is like, work up to it. That kind of doesn't work super well. That was a big lesson for me. But it's not just for firing, it's for hard conversations. You start by saying, hey, this is happening. And then you explain, that was at least a learning for me.

And a question that I had is like, when you look at Duolingo and you break down, what are the most important goals of the company? What are they? And how did you come up with them?

Yeah, we do. We do yearly goals for the whole company, and then each team does quarterly goals for the whole company. Usually these are goals on number of users, on teaching, content and revenue, et cetera. Usually the numbers that you put in there, they're always supposed to be stretch goals. So for example, if we really think that we're only going to make $15 million, you should put 20 million because it kind of pushes people to do a little more. So generally we try to get to 70% of whatever we put is as the number in our objectives.

Can you talk about what's next for Duolingo this year and why your bull on the continued rise of Duolingo over time?

Yeah, I mean, I'm very excited about everything that's coming up next. Um, so some of the things are for sure, Duolingo is just going to be teaching better. Thanks to AI, we really can teach all our subjects better. So over the next year or two, you're just going to see basically learning outcomes get a lot better. So I'm excited about that. I'm excited that we're, we're going to be adding more subjects. I mean, I can't really say specifically and it's not because I don't want to say this. I just don't exactly know what other new subjects we're going to have, but I would really love to include a K through 12 science. So there's that. And then just generally I think Duolingo is going to be a lot more social and a lot more fun. I mean, we're adding a lot of social components to Duolingo and that has continually made it more and more fun. You're going to see more of that.

Well, thank you so much for coming on the Burnouts. We couldn't be more grateful for your time. I personally have learned so much today. I'm excited for our audience to see this.

Thank you. Thank you very much for having me.

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