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 82 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 4 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 could not have raised any funding in Europe
“But I can guarantee you Duolingo would not have been able to raise any money in Europe.”
Severin Hacker: AGI and UBI will replace human jobs in 20 years
“I believe that's gonna happen. Again, the big question is, is when is it gonna be? I don't think it's gonna be next five years. It's not going to be, maybe it's going to be next 10 years if you really see a broad adoption of these technologies, more likely may…”
Hacker: Many edtech companies are 'homework cheating' businesses hit by ChatGPT
“When ChatGPT came out, one of the first killer use cases for it was homework cheating, for the lack of a better term, okay? So if you were in the homework cheating business, That was devastating. That was really bad. So, so some of our, I'm not going to name t…”
Hacker: European AI founders should 100% move to Silicon Valley
“If a young founder, European founder came to me, it's like, Hey, I have this brilliant idea of how to use AI or like a new model or something like that. What should I do? It's like a hundred percent. Go to Silicon Valley. A hundred percent. You absolutely maxi…”
Hacker: European skepticism toward founder ambition harms its tech ecosystem
“I think a lot in, a lot of people in, in Europe, you just like, you're kind of like, why are you doing this? Like, why, why, you know, like, or they look at it as like, oh yeah, you know, they're just doing it for the money or there's this suspicion. Almost of…”
Hacker: Strict US immigration rules would benefit European tech
“In a way, the best thing that could happen to Europe is if the U.S. Made it really hard to immigrate for founders. You know, if they made it really hard, if they restricted immigration such that you know, people like me couldn't, couldn't move there anymore, t…”
Hacker: The EU AI Act is among the dumbest regulation ever written
“I can work with the EU regulation on AI, which is, I think, some of the dumbest regulation ever written. It's literally like, you know, the Ottoman Empire, they had when, you know, they invented the printing press, it's like, oh, this is not good. It's not goo…”
Hacker: Raising $3M in venture funding is harder than raising $100M
“It's harder to raise three million than it is to raise a hundred million.”
Hacker: Silicon Valley overhypes rapid AI replacement of software engineers
“I think there's a lot of Silicon Valley hyperbole around software engineering getting replaced very quickly. I'm less sure about that.”
Hacker: AI coding tools perform poorly on large codebases and create unfixable tech debt
“On the software engineering side, I think what they're really good at is going from zero to 80% for a simple app. You know, it's like, it's the replet, the lovable, and then the larger the code base, even the one that generates itself, the larger the code base…”
Hacker: Lower software production costs will lead to more app creation
“And then the other thing it does, it just lowers the cost of lines of code, of software, right? So production, producing software. And then there's the Jervin's paradox, which says, you know, if you, the cost of a good goes down, you will actually have more de…”
Hacker: AI will cause product, engineering, and design roles to converge
“But with AI, you can see that there's maybe like a new role, kind of a product engineer designer, like one person who can do all of these roles to certain, you know, degree, like they can build a prototype and then maybe at some point they need to hand it off …”
Hacker: Computer science degrees will remain a good investment for five years
“I would say for the next five years, probably still like a Good investment.”
Hacker: AI handles 70% to 80% of Duolingo customer support tickets
“And we have found for a lot of the, you know, AI can do 70 to 80% of the tickets that we get.”
Hacker: AI tutors will become the primary learning method in the future
“And by the way, the other thing is like, so I do believe that the AI tutors will become really, really, really good. And it's gonna be the way most people learn most things in the future.”
Severin Hacker: AI will enable companies built with 10x fewer employees
“We're in the middle of this massive transformation. You can build companies with probably 10 times fewer employees.”
Hacker: Opening an SF satellite office creates a talent drain to local giants
“It creates this internal funnel of your best employees moving from your HQ to Silicon Valley. Which by itself is not a problem. The problem is then they get recruited away by the whatever the hot Silicon Valley company is at the time. You know, like it could b…”
Hacker: Silicon Valley VCs passed on Duolingo over Pittsburgh location
“We actually did get a lot of interest from Silicon Valley VCs at a time, but they all made it a requirement To move to Silicon Valley. So we're like, you've got to move here, right? Like, when are you going to move here? That was the, always the question. Okay…”
Hacker: Public markets value predictability over profit margins and growth
“The financial markets, they really care about predictability. So in fact, I feel like they care even more about that than they care about the actual. You know, profit margins or growth or whatever.”
Hacker: Pre-2022 art will increase in value as verified human creation
“In, in the art world, I believe that art that was made before 20, 22 is gonna increase in value because it's verified human.”
Hacker: Founders should prioritize top-tier VCs even on worse terms
“You should always try to raise money from the best tier one VCs, even if the terms are slightly worse, because so much signaling.”
Duolingo created 148 courses in one year using AI
“It took us, I think, 12 years to build the first hundred courses or so. And now, within one year, we built another 148 courses.”
Hacker: Future learning apps will generate personalized exercises on the fly
“But really, I think the future is going to be quite different where you say like, hey, you know, you might be interested in, in rugby, and you have a trip planned to, I don't know, France. I think France also is, is big into rugby. And, you know, you could the…”
Severin Hacker: Tech leaders fear AI because they risk losing purpose
“For a lot of people, The job is just, they do it for the income. They don't derive purpose from it. And then I think, you know, we are in, in, in this the people that derive purpose from their job who work the most, et cetera, you know, the tech people and the…”
Hacker: Duolingo users would switch to social media over competing apps
“If you ask our users, what do you do if Duolingo went away? They never mentioned any of our language learning competitors. They say, oh, I would spend more time on social media.”
Hacker: OpenAI should target search and social media over language learning
“If I was Sam Altman, you know I would go after the big trillion dollar companies. Like, why go, go into, you know, language learning when you can go into search or social media?”
Hacker: Duolingo will not launch standalone apps for new subjects
“No, no, no. No more new apps. If it's education, it goes into the main app.”
Hacker: Duolingo PM built initial chess course prototype using Cursor
“He was able to build this first version just using cursor and a bunch of AI tools. And the prototype is what convinced us that we should do this.”
Hacker: Duolingo built its chess course in a record nine months
“Because of AI, again, we were able to build this within nine months. This is fastest way ever created a new course.”
Hacker: K-12 schools are fundamentally childcare, which AI tutors cannot replace
“In fact, you know, a lot of K-II is childcare, you know, and so even if you solve one aspect of it, like, let's say you have an AI tutor that is really, really good, you still need to solve the childcare problem.”
Hacker: AI will never motivate students on why learning matters
“It's like an AI will never tell you like why you should learn this. It's like the help you learn it, but it's not going to tell you know, why should I learn this? Why is this important?”
Hacker: Luis von Ahn initially resisted hiring product managers at Duolingo
“I was the one who pushed for hiring our first product manager. It was actually interesting because Luis at the time, he's like, oh, we don't need product managers. He's, he had seen some of them at Google. His previous company was acquired by Google. So he had…”
Severin Hacker: Flat organizations without hierarchy cannot scale
“There was like this belief that you can run a completely flat organization, right? No, no managers. No hierarchies, no levels. And. I think that's not really possible. At a certain scale, you need to have managers or layers, or you need to have some sort of hi…”
Hacker: User retention is the only metric that ultimately matters
“Ultimately, the only thing that matters in our space is retention. So if you can spend as much money as you want. If you don't have retention, it's a leaky bucket. All these people are going to leave.”
Hacker: Duolingo only fears competitors with higher user retention
“The one company I'm scared of is one that has higher retention than Duolingo.”
Hacker: Duolingo's biggest early mistake was delaying monetization
“I think that the two mistakes we've made at Duolingo, they were not fatal, but obviously the two big, big ones were one, we waited too long with monetization. So we just didn't take it seriously enough early on.”
Hacker: Duolingo had only one Series A offer, from Union Square Ventures
“We may have to cut this afterwards, but I think we only had one offer. It was Union Square or back to university.”
Hacker: Duolingo ran ~300 A/B experiments on its streak mechanic
“We've probably run 300 experiments fine-tuning the streak mechanic, and that's where you get the gains in retention, and that's what ultimately drives the growth of Duolingo”
Hacker: Human-to-human interaction value will rise significantly despite AI
“No, I, that, that I don't believe, I don't, in fact, I think, no, I think the human to human interaction, the value of that will go up significantly.”
Hacker: Purpose-driven founders build more successful companies than money-focused ones
“I think that the counterintuitively, the founders that start with a purpose and a mission and are not focused too much on money end up usually doing better”
Hacker: Duolingo had zero revenue for its first five years
“You know, we had zero dollar revenue for the first five years.”
Hacker: Technology can deliver the efficacy of 1-on-1 tutoring universally
“With technology, there's a way we believe that anyone can have access to a, the equivalent of a one-on-one tutor with the same efficacy.”
Hacker: The future of educational content will be 100% multimodal
“I think it's going to be multimodal. A hundred percent.”
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.”
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.”
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 …”