Duolingo's Luis von Ahn: Building a Mission-Driven Company for the Long-Term

Duolingo has revolutionized language learning with its iconic green owl mascot and gamified approach. With over 100 million active users, it's the most downloaded education app in the world. Behind this success is an incredible story of innovation, resilience, and a company culture that truly embraces long-term vision.

In this interview, Duolingo co-founder and CEO Luis von Ahn shares insights into building a mission-driven company that balances monetization with purpose. He discusses how Duolingo resists the temptation of short-term profits in favor of a long-term vision, and the operational details of how they keep employees aligned while putting customers at the center.

The Origins of Duolingo

Luis von Ahn didn't set out to be an entrepreneur. His journey began as a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University. While there, he started an academic project called reCAPTCHA, which was eventually acquired by Google.

Duolingo also started as an academic project at Carnegie Mellon. As it grew, von Ahn realized they needed more resources to hire people and scale. Rather than writing an 80-page grant proposal, he met with investors Fred Wilson and Brad Burnham from Union Square Ventures, who offered $2 million in funding. This prompted the transition of Duolingo from an academic project to a company.

Von Ahn's motivation stemmed from his upbringing in Guatemala, where he witnessed the stark differences in opportunities between those with and without access to quality education. He wanted to create something that would provide equal access to education for everyone.

Building a Mission-Driven Culture

From the beginning, Duolingo has been a mission-driven company focused on providing free education. The first 10-15 employees were zealots for the mission, turning down higher-paying jobs at big tech companies to work at Duolingo.

This early commitment to the mission created a culture that has perpetuated over time. Even as the company has grown to nearly 1,000 employees, most people who work at Duolingo are big believers in the mission of education.

Von Ahn emphasizes the importance of having a clear purpose:

"Having a purpose to the company is such a critically important thing not just like morally and ethically but just as a matter of company performance. If you could say look we have a goal then that's like having a hypothesis in the scientific method. We're not just throwing chemicals around in the lab to see I wonder if anything will explode if I do this or do that. You're testing in line with some vision and that's critically important."

The Duolingo Handbook

To maintain their culture as they've scaled, Duolingo recently created a handbook that outlines their principles and approach. Some key elements include:

• Take the Long View: Resist short-term gimmicks or hacks in favor of what's best for the long-term health of the company.
• Raise the Bar: Strive for excellence, but recognize that excellence can take different forms.
• Make it Fun: Don't take themselves too seriously and lean into humor.
• The Green Machine: Their process for continuous iteration and improvement.

Von Ahn explains the motivation behind creating the handbook:

"We early on as a company, everybody's kind of in the same office or you know nearby and culture is just there like you absorb it because you're just sitting there and you're next to the next person and everybody just that's just the culture and and everybody kind of has the same the same set of of beliefs as you get bigger you have multiple offices etc that starts getting harder so we thought it would be a good idea to write this down."

He hopes the handbook will help with hiring by allowing candidates to self-select based on alignment with Duolingo's culture and approach.

Resisting Short-Term Pressures

As a public company, Duolingo faces pressure from investors to maximize short-term profits. Von Ahn discusses how they resist these pressures:

"We have these these it's five principles that are outlined in the handbook, one of them is called Take the Long View which basically says you know don't do don't do short-term gimmicks or short-term hacks. A great example of not doing a short-term hack is um you know we could make a lot more money tomorrow if we double the ad load, um but and and we would make a lot more money tomorrow and probably our stock would go up. The problem is that it's a short that short-term thinking because if we double the ad load our user growth would slow and therefore in five years we would probably pay for that and so we're more interested in what's going to happen in five for 20 years years rather than what's going to happen next quarter."

He admits it's not always easy to resist temptation, sharing an example of when they briefly doubled ad load to hit quarterly numbers. But overall, Duolingo takes a long-term view, which von Ahn believes is ultimately better for business:

"If you look at certainly education apps, um most education apps basically charge you to learn so they just they just charge for learning. We 90% of our users don't pay us about 10% pay us but we we make you know I just I it's something like this I don't know the exact number but it's it's about a 30% of the revenue of all education apps is dual lingo. So we and there's like there's like a million of these education apps so we make way more money than every other app and we are the ones that have 90% of our users kind of not paying us."

Continuous Experimentation and Improvement

A key part of Duolingo's success has been their rigorous approach to experimentation and optimization. Von Ahn shares that they've run over 16,000 A/B tests over the company's history.

Interestingly, almost exactly 50% of their experiments are successful. Von Ahn explains:

"Every every every product manager every designer every engineer that proposes an experiment you know sometimes we don't know if it's going to win but the majority of the times we're like yeah sure I don't know this is worth it's worth trying um and it's worth the effort because of course experiments are not free I mean each experiment takes us however long depending on the size of the experiment from a day to sometimes months um so it's not free so you know we have a we have a belief on it."

This approach of continuous experimentation and doubling down on what works has allowed Duolingo to dramatically improve metrics like user retention over time.

Balancing Human and Machine Intelligence

As AI and machine learning advance, von Ahn sees continued value in human creativity and ingenuity:

"Over the last few years some of the work can be done by computers now and in the next few years probably a larger fraction of the work will be able to you know computers will be able to do it but what I love about them and what I what you know I think they'll have a job for a long time is that computers can do kind of the the average thing. I I don't know I just can't imagine that we're there yet where the computer can really come up with a cool unexpected thing and I think artists are just really good at that."

He gives the example of an artist deciding to make the Duolingo owl look like a rainbow unicorn at the end of a lesson - an unexpected creative choice that ended up being very successful.

Embracing Mistakes and Humility

Despite his accolades (including winning a MacArthur "Genius" Grant), von Ahn emphasizes the importance of embracing mistakes and maintaining humility:

"Our culture at dual linguist is quite humble actually we really are quite open with our mistakes and and I think it's important that we're open with our mistakes you know in a way that is not pointing fingers but just like H you know we screwed that up can we do better next time."

He notes that they've made some mistakes multiple times, but the key is to keep learning and improving.

Looking to the Future

As Duolingo continues to grow and evolve, von Ahn remains committed to the long-term vision of providing free, high-quality education at scale. By resisting short-term pressures, continuously experimenting and improving, and maintaining a strong mission-driven culture, Duolingo aims to make a lasting impact on global education.

For entrepreneurs and leaders looking to build mission-driven companies that can thrive over the long-term, Duolingo's approach offers valuable lessons in balancing purpose and profit, embracing experimentation, and staying true to core values even as an organization scales.

Article created from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdWQ6-Gw4_0