Insight
Luis von Ahn: Do not bet early on unproven new tech platforms
“What we've learned
Is not to bet on these very new products, because you really never know if they're going to work. So it's not that Apple Watch didn't work. Apple Watch ended up working, but what didn't work was apps on Apple Watch. There's just.
That's ju…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Von Ahn: Duolingo could charge $150/year and users would pay
“The reality is it's not even 60 bucks a year. I mean, we can charge 150 and people will pay it.”
Assertion Partly supported
Von Ahn: Duolingo has 50x Rosetta Stone's users and 5x its revenue
“By now, I would say we probably have 50 times more users than they do. Our revenue is probably five X their revenue.”
Insight
Von Ahn: Education companies become marketing-driven because product improvement is hard
“A lot of companies in education eventually turn into marketing companies. For the following reason. You realize, man, making improvements in how well you teach is hard. And it really is very hard. It's, it takes years. So for every dollar you have, you quickly…”
Assertion Contradicted
Von Ahn: Duolingo captures 90% of mobile language app users
“If you take all people who are learning languages on mobile apps, 90% of them are using Duolingo.”
Insight
Luis von Ahn: Mission-focused founders usually make more money than profit-driven founders
“In my experience, that type of business usually is a lot more successful. Even if early, if the founder is not necessarily all that much into making money, et cetera, they end up making more money than the ones that are where the founder's like, I just want to…”
Insight
Von Ahn: Traditional education increases inequality rather than reducing it
“A lot of people talk about education as something that brings equality to different social classes, but I always saw it as the opposite, something that brings inequality, because what happened, at least, you know, in my case, those who have money can buy thems…”
Assertion Contradicted
Von Ahn: Knowing English doubles income potential in most countries
“And it turns out that in most countries in the world, if you know English, you can double your income potential.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Von Ahn: USV invested in Duolingo despite doubting the idea worked
“I mean, they've now told me, look, we'd never thought this would work, but you had a really good track record. So why not?”
Disclosure
Von Ahn: Duolingo promised investors it would never charge users
“And so when we talk to investors, the first thing I would tell them is, look, the one thing that will not change is I'm not going to charge for people to learn a language here.”
Assertion Contradicted
Von Ahn: Duolingo has 50x users and 5x revenue of Rosetta Stone
“By now, I would say we probably have 50 times more uses than they do. Our revenue is probably five X their revenue.”
Opinion
Luis von Ahn: Education drives socioeconomic inequality instead of equalizing society
“And a lot of people talk about education as something that brings Equality to different social classes, but I always saw it as the opposite, something that brings inequality, because what happened, at least, you know, in my case, those who have money can buy t…”
Assertion Contradicted
Von Ahn: Knowing English doubles income potential in most countries
“And it turns out that in most countries in the world, if you know English, you can double your income potential.”
Disclosure
Von Ahn: Duolingo canceled revenue contracts to rely solely on VC
“So I made the difficult decision to cancel those contracts and forget about trying to make money and just raise more venture capital.”
Assertion Supported
Von Ahn: Duolingo makes significantly more money from subscriptions than ads
“It turned out, and this is just, we really just didn't realize this subscriptions made us a ton more money than the ads.”
Insight
Von Ahn: Launching a second city clarifies a company's true business model
“As soon as you open your second city, you kind of start understanding a lot better what your business really is. You know, what is just Chicago and what is your business?”
Disclosure
Von Ahn: Early Duolingo team were 'communists' who viewed monetization as evil
“When we started Duolingo, I can best describe us as communists. We did not want to make money. Nobody in the company wanted to make money, and it was thought of as a, as an evil thing.”
Insight
Von Ahn: Requiring partners to pay filters for true venue commitment
“If these places are willing to put in the money for something, that means they care. And that, that's a way to suss out how much this place actually cares about having your machine versus a place that just doesn't care all that much.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Von Ahn: CapitalG partner warned Duolingo had to start making money
“And at some point, we raised money from Google. Capital G is one of their investment arms. And the partner from that firm sat me down and she said, nobody else will invest in this company if you don't figure out how to make money. You know, you're not going to…”
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
Von Ahn: reCAPTCHA charged the NYT $42,000 per archive year
“And we, the number we came up with was for every year of content, we will charge you 42,000 dollars.”
Opinion
Von Ahn: Translation is a bad business stuck in a race to the bottom
“Translations are, it's a pretty shitty business, translation. It's five cents a word, but then pretty soon, suddenly, you know, the people from BuzzFeed found somebody else that would do it for four cents a word, because, and then we're like, fine, we'll do it…”
Assertion Supported
Von Ahn: Duolingo reached a $10M run rate from one lesson-end ad
“As soon as we put that ad, our run rate went from zero to, like,
Ten million bucks a year.
One tiny ad.
It didn't even cover the whole screen.”
Assertion Partly supported
Von Ahn: Duolingo has 40M MAUs and a 3% paid conversion rate
“Active users right now, we have about forty million monthly active users, and about three percent of them are paying subscribers.”
Insight
Von Ahn: Maintaining motivation is the hardest part of language learning
“The hardest thing about learning a language is staying motivated. So we spend a lot of effort trying to make Duolingo more motivating and more fun, and the way we do that is just by adding game elements.”
