Luis von Ahn, co-founder and CEO of Duolingo, references Supercell as an industry gold standard for mobile user retention.
Insight
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…”
Disclosure
Von Ahn: Duolingo negotiated down its Series E raise size
“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.”
Assertion Partly supported
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…”
Insight
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…”
Opinion
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 …”
Assertion Partly supported
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…”