The Ledger
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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: 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.”
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…”
Von Ahn: Silicon Valley VCs consider a Pittsburgh location a downside
“So, you know, for most kind of Silicon Valley investors, you know, it's a downside that we're in Pittsburgh, and I understand that.”
Von Ahn: Many venture capital firms still have no female partners
“In particular, I find that the VC world is not very diverse. I mean, many, many firms that you see have no female partners.”
Von Ahn: Duolingo's revenues will justify going public by 2019
“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…”
Von Ahn: EdTech scaling is blocked by fragmented district budgets
“Education is usually at the district level, at the school district level, where, where things are spent, so it's not like you can have a contract with the whole U.S. School system, or anything like that, and different district levels teach differently, differe…”
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.”
Von Ahn: 1.2 billion people worldwide are learning a foreign language
“It's a huge audience, 1.2 billion people in the world learning a foreign language.”
Von Ahn: $80 billion is spent annually on language learning worldwide
“About eighty billion dollars a year, eight zero, eighty billion dollars a year are spent on language learning.”
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'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: Supercell achieves an impressive 20% Day 365 user retention
“We look a lot at companies like Supercell, who I admire a lot. They're making these amazing games where their D three 65 retention, like one year later, you know, they're looking at things like 20% on the three 65th day people are there.”