Duolingo

“Well, we want to be a publicly traded company. I don't know when that'll happen. It's kind of very early to tell. We're gearing up towards that. I think our revenues are going to justify it in maybe, I'm hoping that in 2019 our revenues would justify a publicl…”

“Yeah, we negotiated that down. It's because we didn't think we needed more money. I mean, Break even very soon.”

“Most of the people that are learning a foreign language, about two thirds of them, satisfy three properties. First, they're learning English. Second, the reason they're learning English is in order to get a job. And third, they are of low socioeconomic conditi…”

“Ah, for us, on, returning on D-seven, so on the seventh day, probably, you know, it's north of 30%.”

“I mean, there's a lot of studies in educational psychology that show, you know, the most famous one is something called the Bloom's Two Sigma study. It shows the following. It compares a student In a standard classroom, let's say with 30 other students or 20 o…”

“We did not want to raise a lot of money, so in a weird situation, we actually were negotiating down on how much money we needed to raise as opposed to up.”

“No, I do not agree with that. We're actually doing quite the opposite. We're, Very picky at hiring. I mean, we have raised quite a bit of money. We have raised about a hundred and eight million dollars. So we would be able, we only have about a hundred employe…”

“We have raised about a hundred and eight million dollars. So we would be able, we only have about a hundred employees.”

“Of the people who sign up on Duolingo, about 55% come back the next day. That's a number that is comparable to pretty good games, and if you look at usually education companies, the numbers that you get there are, you know, 10% come back the next day, or 15% c…”

“I have turned down companies before because there is an amazing founder, but it's in ed tech, which just hell or high water. The churn is a complete bitch and Duolingo is the leader, but it's still not a hugely valuable company”

“There's now a Duolingo that's, I would just want to stress this, in this current macro, they have a much higher multiple on their revenue run rate than comparable SaaS companies.”

“The north star metric for Duolingo at all times was daily active users. That's it. DAU.”

“We did not give exclusives, especially to publications that had a paywall, because that would really limit our breadth, and we were going for breadth.”

“I worked with the Colombian government, the Mintic, which is the ministry of technology there to get Duolingo into public schools. You would think, wow, Gina, that's amazing. You got Duolingo into public schools. You've got the whole population. No, it actuall…”

“So for Duolingo, it was DAUs. Like if we were actually able to get new users that became active users, that was our success metric, because then we knew that we were reaching the right audience and that, you know, the story that was told was the story that we …”

“Yeah, I didn't, with Duolingo, we never wrote it down on a Google Doc. It's just, it was like shared knowledge. I worked very closely with Luis Van An, the CEO and co-founder of Duolingo in the early days, and so I just heard him tell the story over and over, …”

“It was just me and one engineer. That's all they gave me and one backend engineer.”

“It ended up being the most effective thing that we did and collected collection of experiments where we were, we could impact not just growth numbers, but every single metric across the company, like monetization, et cetera.”

“When I was doing press for Duolingo and we were doing these global launches, I was personally writing over a hundred emails at a time, like, to get, like, and it had to be within a window of time because this launch was coming up.”

“And it honestly was the most important lever that helped Tumblr grow in Latin America and that helped Duolingo grow.”

“Candidly, most I would say about 95% of our impressions are completely organic and they're for the cost of like maybe duo's costume and like the sushi I had for dinner while like filming and like staying late a little bit.”

“A lot of things that break the internet and trend on TikTok don't do well on shorts.”

“And I think it's trusting that our consumers are much smarter than we think they are. And even if we make them dive in deep, like, they can figure it out. They'll scroll back if they want to scroll back. If it's entertaining enough, people will figure it out.”

“Because Duo is everywhere, and we want Duo to be everywhere, reminding you to do your lesson, then I'm going to be on every platform as much as I can to my best ability.”

“So if we have a viral video, we'll actually see an uptick in users. Based off the timing of it and people saying, yeah, we heard about you from TikTok.”

“The strategy that I love to call candy to the medicine, where essentially the candy is going to be the Dua Lipa thirst trap, but the medicine, you might find it in the comment section. You might find it in the caption of us being like, doing, mentioning someth…”

“I think it's, if it's been, like, really freaking bad, then yeah, but also, I think it's more of, like, a judgment on that, but not, not usually. We kind of just keep it up.”

“I would say at this rate of where we are, I would say about 75% is rip and replace. And what the other 25% is us trying to actually think through, like, what would work better on Reels versus TikTok.”

“The comment section is your social brief. Like, People will say stuff, like, lean into that. Like, if they're telling you they want to see X, Y, Z, give them X, Y, Z, and it can be that simple”

“Candidly, like, I've commented on something that I probably shouldn't have before, and I got checked and balanced for that, and it was one of the biggest learning moments where, like, if I didn't cross the line, I wouldn't have known where the line was”

“I actually, my dream is to hire a standup comedian for my team.”

“I started off For a whole year of just doing normal, like happy Earth Day posts and things you'd expect a language learning app to do. And it wasn't until a little bit later that we started taking more risks and creating the content we do now.”

“I'm very adamant about having, like, one or two sentences of what you know you're doing, so that just becomes, like, the, like, the North Star for every single piece of content you put out there, because it makes things just easier.”

“And if I didn't work at Duolingo and if I didn't give a crap about brands, would I want to post this in my group chat? And that's kind of my litmus test of like, is this entertaining or good enough?”

“And this is my first job out of college.”

“When we're hiring for our teams, for example, like I don't really care about your advertising experience. I don't really care about like what agencies you worked at. I care more about if I give you like a concept, can you find a trending audio? Tell me what to…”

“He does DM me and there's these open conversations and he's open to hearing pushback as well. There's been times where he's told us to take down a video and I was like, okay, cool. But what if I like change the audio, fix up the text a little bit, can I repost…”

“We haven't seen direct correlation, if I'm being honest. I would say more of, like, a one million view thing on TikTok might, would actually have more correlation with, like, app downloads but it kind of stays within its own little realm.”

“I don't think so. And I say that as someone who is a homebody and loves being remote, but like, it's honestly like having even, I mean, if you have a suit, maybe, but having the suit and just the random quirkiness and the thing, like the things around our work…”

“I always say our TikTok is like a sitcom. Everything we put out there is an episode. Some are amazing and go super viral. Some are just there to build the storylines, but it's something that can live and function as short form video content, even if it was to …”

“Cultural moments has had way more impact than, like, regular scheduled programming, and we really try to adjust for that too.”

“So we never really plan more than like two weeks out and even two weeks is like a bit of a stretch”

“I always say the reason why our TikTok was so successful is because I didn't really know all that much about advertising, if I'm being honest.”

“One million views for us is like a viral video that is successful. That is what is like written down as like green check.”

“No brand was doing it yet. And I think that was kind of our insight. And it was like these small human moments that I think has made our TikTok kind of blow up.”

“When we first launched our TikTok, we hired an agency to work with us. Before I was kind of in the weeds, like I was just kind of like observing or whatever, and the content didn't hit. And it wasn't until an internal team like me took over that it started to …”

“Right now we're kind of at a rough patch, like with our content, like we're trying to figure out how to like go on YouTube shorts, how to make things viral”

“And I'm a firm believer, and I know our CEO said this too, that I don't think like Babbel or Rosetta Stone or other language learning places are our actual competitors. Like our real competitors are like TikTok. And other social media platforms that are like t…”

“I don't think ChatGPT itself is going to become a language tutor. I think it'll have the full capability to be a language tutor at the model level.”

“But I don't think consumer subscription as an asset class, as a subcategory or category, is a venture-backable large enough category. There might be one like Duolingo, and maybe a couple more? But that make it to venture scale returns.”

“Dropbox, Dropbox, like with the referral program, Groupon and email, Pinterest and SEO, Duolingo, and just like a totally unhinged social media, right? All of them were kind of first to this concept and it really, really worked.”

“Yeah, that's 12 month retention at 50%. World-class. And the engine they have built is incredible.”

“He was able to build this first version just using cursor and a bunch of AI tools. And the prototype is what convinced us that we should do this.”

“He still does. So that's a founder mode for him. It's like he's still in most of the product reviews. And I think that's rare for a company CEO of a company like our size, where the CEO sits in most of the product reviews.”

“Because of AI, again, we were able to build this within nine months. This is fastest way ever created a new course.”

“I think it's going to be multimodal. A hundred percent.”

“We never raised seed or pre-seed. This was because we had these NSF grants. So we built this project inside the university. So Series A was our first round.”

“The one company I'm scared of is one that has higher retention than Duolingo.”

“It's not a single day, but it's the first five years we had. We just didn't know how to, you know, find a business model that aligns with our mission. It was hard.”

“We actually did get a lot of interest from Silicon Valley VCs at a time, but they all made it a requirement To move to Silicon Valley. So we're like, you've got to move here, right? Like, when are you going to move here? That was the, always the question. Okay…”

“One thing we're also very passionate about is, is the Duolingo score. I'm not sure if you notice it within Duolingo, but we now give you a score, like how good you are at this language. And we want this to become the way people talk about language proficiency.…”

“If you ask our users, what do you do if Duolingo went away? They never mentioned any of our language learning competitors. They say, oh, I would spend more time on social media.”

“Before we went public, our finance team, for example, was two people. Now it's, I think, 25 or so.”

“Dueling wouldn't be where it is today in terms of you know, our social media presence if we never hired from Gen Z.”

“I think at some point we were bigger on TikTok than Nike.”

“And we're actually not doing that at Duolingo. We still hire from universities.”

“You know, we had zero dollar revenue for the first five years.”

“The streak is exactly this loss aversion mechanic, right? So it's like, it's motivating to build up your streak, but it's like, I absolutely do not want to lose my streak, right?”

“It creates this internal funnel of your best employees moving from your HQ to Silicon Valley. Which by itself is not a problem. The problem is then they get recruited away by the whatever the hot Silicon Valley company is at the time. You know, like it could b…”

“We use AI in three ways at Duolingo. Number one is content generation, and that's where we've seen, you know, the biggest success. It's just completely changed it, like how we produce content.”

“The trap you can run into is you only run tiny experiments, right? Like on, on your purchase page or you run these tiny experiments on, on copy or something. And I think it's very important that you have your portfolio of changes. So you have lots of low risk,…”

“Still makes a huge difference, and we know because whenever the service goes down that sends the push notifications, you can see the dip. Yeah, yeah, yeah, a hundred percent. It's huge. It's massive.”

“But really, I think the future is going to be quite different where you say like, hey, you know, you might be interested in, in rugby, and you have a trip planned to, I don't know, France. I think France also is, is big into rugby. And, you know, you could the…”

“We don't mandate. Duolingo is surprisingly egalitarian and bottom up, and we just say, use AI tool or use whatever makes you more productive, and we pay for it.”

“No, no, no. No more new apps. If it's education, it goes into the main app.”

“We never did the third type. We always got pretty much a standard deal. I think the last couple were more competitive. And, you know, by the way, we could have raised a lot more at higher valuations, but we didn't do it for the reasons mentioned before.”

“Duolingo does not have an office in Silicon Valley or anywhere in California”

“If it had just been a Figma design, we probably was like, ah, you know, ah, maybe, maybe not. But the prototype was. So good that it convinced everyone.”

“Number two is what we also waited for too long hiring more senior managers. So we just, for, you know, up, up until 30 employees or so, it was completely flat. It was a lot of people from new grad. It was pretty chaotic.”

“By the way, we also never had a layoff.”

“We use Tekagon.”

“I only meet with Luis every other week for, and sometimes the meeting is last 10 minutes”

“And I have, I think, 40 or so, 40 people or so.”

“But I can guarantee you Duolingo would not have been able to raise any money in Europe.”

“I think that the two mistakes we've made at Duolingo, they were not fatal, but obviously the two big, big ones were one, we waited too long with monetization. So we just didn't take it seriously enough early on.”

“I'm now a little bit out of the weeds, and I'm thinking more, right now, actually, I'm only focused on two things. One is like, this question is with AI, like, what's gonna happen? Like, what does the future look like in, you know, in our space? What is the im…”

“For a very long time, we had no marketing budget. So we didn't advertise Nothing like zero dollar marketing budget because we're also not profitable. We also didn't have any revenue.”

“For our voices, we also work with 11 labs and they're just amazing models, amazing voices.”

“By the way, also when there's, you know, there was a power outage in, in Portugal and Spain, we proactively extended their streak, so, so they don't lose it.”

“Not a problem if they hallucinate, because we teach languages. As long as the language is correct, grammatically correct, it is okay, you know, if it makes up a historical fact. It's, we don't teach history. It's like, hallucinations are not a problem for our …”

“We were one of the launch partners of OpenAI when they first launched GPT-IV”

“We've probably run 300 experiments fine-tuning the streak mechanic, and that's where you get the gains in retention, and that's what ultimately drives the growth of Duolingo”

“We may have to cut this afterwards, but I think we only had one offer. It was Union Square or back to university.”

“It took us, I think, 12 years to build the first hundred courses or so. And now, within one year, we built another 148 courses.”

“So, you know, we, I wrote down a little contract between the two of us. I still have a copy at home. Where we outline exactly like, you know, this is how we're going to make decisions. It's like this short. This is how we're going to make decisions. This is, y…”

“So it's the actual motivation. And, you know, by the way, this is one of the key insights of Duolingo. It's like, and we've been sharing this with the entire world for the last 10 years, and still nobody seems to believe us. And so the hardest part is motivati…”

“That's the secret sauce. It's the process. It's not a single feature.”

“Ultimately, the only thing that matters in our space is retention. So if you can spend as much money as you want. If you don't have retention, it's a leaky bucket. All these people are going to leave.”

“Right now, vertical ability is, is in our, so we have three tiers. We have you know, the free tier, there's super, and there's max, and it's mostly in our max, the higher tier subscription because of that reason, right? So, so we would like to give this to eve…”

“Inside Duolingo, we have the three biggest functions within Duolingo are product, Engineering and design. Okay. Those compose probably about. 80%, 70 to 80% of our workforce.”

“And we have found for a lot of the, you know, AI can do 70 to 80% of the tickets that we get.”

“I was the one who pushed for hiring our first product manager. It was actually interesting because Luis at the time, he's like, oh, we don't need product managers. He's, he had seen some of them at Google. His previous company was acquired by Google. So he had…”

“In 10 years they made a 140 courses with humans, and in a year they made a 140 courses. So 10 years of work took them one year with AI.”

“Product managers are sometimes viewed as these like, I'm the mini CEO. I decide strategy and then people execute. That is like the worst definition of a product manager that I've ever heard.”

“The goal is not to get to 40 subjects and do them all equally the same. I think make what we have, Tenex, better is the primary goal.”

“If you write multiple zeros, and you hint at the fact that there's a free trial with multiple zeros, conversion goes up a significant amount.”

“If we give you more than three packages on one page, it's too much, like too much choice. You also convert way less. I think two to three is, we've seen as a sweet spot.”

“Our experience with doing this is, was with math and music before. It was triple the amount of people and double the amount of time it takes to get a course out.”

“Majority of our users are doing languages. Chess is very new, like counted as kind of zero still. It just rolled out like a few days ago. So, but math and music are a small percent of our business.”

“We schedule a notification Almost exactly at 23 and a half hours later from that time, and we've tested many different timing, and the notification will remind you to practice your Spanish, because we, you just did a Spanish lesson. We've tested many different…”

“I don't remember the exact percentage, but certainly more than, it's the majority, more than 50%.”

“There was a short lived moment where we had a high tier subscription, which was basically an Uber for a Spanish tutor. So you could press a button to speak Spanish to a Spanish speaker. Immediately.”

“Putting ads on Duolingo, if you do it tastefully, doesn't kill your retention.”

“Daily retention is the king of all metrics for consumer products.”

“Because internally at Duolingo, I'm seeing way more usage and way more creation come out of Cursor.”

“Everything that takes up your screen time, that might be social media, that might be gaming, that might be streaming, whatever it is, at the end is what Duolingo competes for.”

“Consumer products live and die in the pixels. Meaning if you are working on a consumer product, you have to figure out how to make your change pixel perfect for the user.”

“No, we take pride a lot in the pixel perfect details. Like, I think you'll see that in the product, right? It's like every screen will have a very specific design language. Characters will be very specific, etc.”

“AI is way better for this, because you can stumble, you can talk shitty Spanish, you're not embarrassed. A lot of users found it embarrassing to stumble when there's a human looking at them on video.”

“What we intend to see is if you've reached a 30 day streak, so you've built up a 30 day streak, your retention is very close to a hundred percent.”

“Today it's more than 80%.”

“We do have this revenue line, but it's incredibly small today, but I think it will be way bigger is merchandising.”

“Duolingo I held on to because I try to learn from my past mistakes”