Von Ahn: Duolingo negotiated down its Series E raise size
Luis von Ahn · 20VC: Duolingo's Luis von Ahn on How CEO's Can Scale With The Company, How VC Herd Mentality In The Valley Really Works and How Chatbots & AI Play A Role In The Future of EdTech · Oct 13, 2017 · at 17:45
Luis von Ahn, co-founder and CEO of Duolingo, discusses the mechanics behind Duolingo's $25 million Series E funding round at a $700 million valuation.
0:00 / 0:08exact quote · 8.7s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“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.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Luis von Ahn
Von Ahn: Duolingo rejects Silicon Valley's 'hire fast, fire fast' philosophy
“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…”
Von Ahn: Two-thirds of language learners study English to escape poverty
“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…”
Von Ahn: Core EdTech apps cannot rely on crowdsourced content
“If you're going to decide to teach something, there is a big problem, which is, I don't believe there's an easy way to do a really simple app where in some way kind of you crowdsource the teaching from one side to the other. Like, for example, think of Instagr…”
Von Ahn: Chatbots Work for Language Learning but Not for Math
“I don't think it's all that useful to have something like teaching math where you have a chatbot because the conversation is not the real element. You know, you're somehow trying to teach math. Whereas in languages, you're trying to teach the conversation. So …”
Von Ahn: MOOC platforms like Coursera have abysmal 1.5% completion rates
“A lot of the MOOC companies, they're the massively online course companies like Coursera and Udacity, et cetera. The retention numbers for their courses are abysmal. I mean, of the number of people that sign up, something like one and a half percent or two per…”
Von Ahn: Duolingo achieves 55% Day 1 retention, crushing typical edtech
“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…”