The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 123 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 3 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Kansu: Languages remain vast majority of Duolingo usage, math and music small
“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.”
Kansu: Cursor sees higher internal adoption and output than Windsurf at Duolingo
“Because internally at Duolingo, I'm seeing way more usage and way more creation come out of Cursor.”
Kansu: Duolingo competes with social media and gaming for screen time
“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.”
Kansu: Users reaching a 30-day Duolingo streak have near 100% retention
“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.”
Kansu: Merchandising will become a much larger revenue line for Duolingo
“We do have this revenue line, but it's incredibly small today, but I think it will be way bigger is merchandising.”
Hacker: CEO Luis von Ahn still attends most Duolingo product reviews
“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.”
Hacker: The future of educational content will be 100% multimodal
“I think it's going to be multimodal. A hundred percent.”
Hacker: Duolingo bypassed seed rounds using NSF university grants
“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.”
Hacker: Duolingo aims for its score to become standard language proficiency metric
“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.…”
Hacker: Duolingo's viral social media presence required hiring Gen Z talent
“Dueling wouldn't be where it is today in terms of you know, our social media presence if we never hired from Gen Z.”
Hacker: Duolingo was once bigger on TikTok than Nike
“I think at some point we were bigger on TikTok than Nike.”
Hacker: Duolingo continues hiring software engineers directly from universities
“And we're actually not doing that at Duolingo. We still hire from universities.”
Hacker: Duolingo had zero revenue for its first five years
“You know, we had zero dollar revenue for the first five years.”
Hacker: Content generation has been Duolingo's biggest AI win
“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.”
Hacker: Companies need big feature changes to avoid local maxima traps
“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,…”
Duolingo pays for any employee AI productivity tool without mandates
“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.”
Hacker: Duolingo took standard dilution deals and turned down higher valuations
“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.”
Hacker: Duolingo would have rejected chess course without working AI prototype
“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.”
Hacker: 80% of CTO focus at Duolingo is AI, remainder on M&A
“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…”
Severin Hacker: AI hallucinations are not a problem for Duolingo
“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 …”
Hacker: Maintaining user motivation is the hardest part of language learning
“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…”
Hacker: Product growth comes from continuous process, not single features
“That's the secret sauce. It's the process. It's not a single feature.”
Duolingo restricts AI features to top subscription tier over unit costs
“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…”
Malik: Duolingo achieves a world-class 50% 12-month user retention rate
“Yeah, that's 12 month retention at 50%. World-class. And the engine they have built is incredible.”
Content that goes viral on TikTok often fails on YouTube Shorts
“A lot of things that break the internet and trend on TikTok don't do well on shorts.”
Social media audiences will figure out brand lore if entertained
“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.”
Duolingo maintains omnipresence on social media to reflect its mascot's lore
“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.”
Duolingo's viral TikTok videos directly drive user acquisition
“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.”
Pair viral 'candy' hooks with brand 'medicine' in captions
“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…”
Duolingo rarely deletes underperforming social media posts
“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.”
A brand's social media comment section is its best creative brief
“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”
Brands need a one-sentence North Star for content evaluation
“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.”
Brand content is only good enough if shareable in personal group chats
“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?”
Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn accepts pushback on video removal requests
“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…”
Cultural moments drive far more social impact than scheduled programming
“Cultural moments has had way more impact than, like, regular scheduled programming, and we really try to adjust for that too.”
Duolingo never plans its social media content more than two weeks out
“So we never really plan more than like two weeks out and even two weeks is like a bit of a stretch”
Duolingo's TikTok succeeded because Parvez lacked traditional advertising experience
“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.”
Small human moments were key to Duolingo's viral TikTok growth
“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.”
Duolingo is currently going through a rough patch with content performance
“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”
Gotthilf: Daily Active Users was always Duolingo's sole North Star metric
“The north star metric for Duolingo at all times was daily active users. That's it. DAU.”
Gotthilf: Duolingo rejected paywalled press exclusives to maximize broad reach
“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.”
Gotthilf: Duolingo measured PR success directly using daily active users
“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 …”
Von Ahn: Duolingo was close to breakeven during Series E
“Yeah, we negotiated that down. It's because we didn't think we needed more money. I mean, Break even very soon.”
Ferriss held his Duolingo stock post-IPO to avoid repeating past selling mistakes
“Duolingo I held on to because I try to learn from my past mistakes”
Kansu: Over 50% of subscribers choose Duolingo's recommended middle option
“I don't remember the exact percentage, but certainly more than, it's the majority, more than 50%.”