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
Hacker: Duolingo's streak feature relies on loss aversion mechanics
“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?”
Hacker: Duolingo sees massive engagement drops whenever push notification services fail
“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.”
Hacker: Duolingo waited too long to hire senior managers
“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.”
Hacker: Duolingo founders only meet one-on-one biweekly, sometimes for just 10 minutes
“I only meet with Luis every other week for, and sometimes the meeting is last 10 minutes”
Hacker: Duolingo's marketing team consists of approximately 40 people
“And I have, I think, 40 or so, 40 people or so.”
Hacker: Duolingo operated with a zero-dollar marketing budget during early growth
“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.”
Duolingo uses ElevenLabs for AI voice generation
“For our voices, we also work with 11 labs and they're just amazing models, amazing voices.”
Hacker: Duolingo proactively restored user streaks during Iberian power outages
“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.”
Duolingo was an launch partner for OpenAI's GPT-4 release
“We were one of the launch partners of OpenAI when they first launched GPT-IV”
Hacker: Duolingo founders signed a brief written contract outlining roles and decisions
“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…”
Product, Engineering, and Design Account for 70%-80% of Duolingo's Workforce
“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.”
Duolingo cross-posts 75% of its TikTok content directly to Instagram Reels
“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.”
Duolingo posted standard corporate content for a year before its viral shift
“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.”
Duolingo sets one million views as its benchmark for TikTok success
“One million views for us is like a viral video that is successful. That is what is like written down as like green check.”
Gotthilf: Duolingo relied on shared oral knowledge rather than written brand docs
“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, …”
Gotthilf: Personally wrote 100+ press emails per Duolingo global launch
“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.”
Von Ahn: Duolingo's Day 7 user retention is north of 30%
“Ah, for us, on, returning on D-seven, so on the seventh day, probably, you know, it's north of 30%.”
Von Ahn: One-on-one tutoring outperforms 98% of standard classroom students
“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…”
Von Ahn: Duolingo raised $108M while keeping headcount to just 100 employees
“We have raised about a hundred and eight million dollars. So we would be able, we only have about a hundred employees.”
Kansu: Duolingo enforces specific design language and pixel-perfect details on every screen
“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.”
Hacker: Duolingo spent five years finding a business model aligned with its mission
“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.”
Hacker: Duolingo has no offices in Silicon Valley or California
“Duolingo does not have an office in Silicon Valley or anywhere in California”
Malik: Early adoption of unique channels drove growth for Dropbox and Pinterest
“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.”
Duolingo's social media team aims to hire a standup comedian
“I actually, my dream is to hire a standup comedian for my team.”