Lessons from Luis Von Ahn, founder and CEO of Duolingo

On Education and Its Mission

Von Ahn's core philosophy revolves around the democratizing power of education and the immense challenge of keeping learners motivated.

"I co-founded Duolingo with the mission of bringing free language education to the world." [1]
"Education is the passport to a better future." [2]
"A lot of people talk about education as something that brings equality to different social classes. But I always saw it as the opposite, as something that brings inequality. Because what happens in practice is that people who have a lot of money can by themselves be really good education, and therefore continue having a lot of money, whereas people who don't have very much money barely learn how to read and write." [3]
"The hardest thing about learning something by yourself is staying motivated." [4]
"I would be very very happy if everybody who is working on an education app thought that way [that learning has to be hard] because then we will have no competitors. It just turns out that the hardest thing about learning is motivation." [5]
"We're a publicly traded company please if you're an investor. I am not retiring." [6]
"I wanted to do something that would give equal access to education to everyone." [3]
"Because education is such a broad area, I chose to focus on language learning." [7]
"Most of the people that are learning a foreign language, they're learning English in order to get out of poverty." [5]
"At some point, I believe that computers will be able to teach better than humans." [8]
"What I like about this model is that it is a small form of wealth redistribution, because we're basically getting the rich people to pay for the education of everyone." [3]
"I hope for a future in which screen time is not a bad thing, in which we can deliver high-quality education to everyone, rich or poor, using a mobile phone." [3]
"With Duolingo, if we increased the number of people that were able to learn English by five or ten percent in the world, that would be amazing. Moving the needle in how people are educated is a big thing." [9]
"The current business model for language education is the student pays — in particular, the student pays Rosetta Stone $500. The problem with this business model is that 95 percent of the world's population doesn't have $500." [1]
"We believe that the system that performs the best will be the system that dominates in the world. We're doing everything we can to create that system so that everyone, regardless of their economic status, can learn to speak to one another." [10]

On Technology, AI, and Innovation

A pioneer in crowdsourcing, von Ahn's insights into technology are both practical and forward-looking, with a keen eye on the potential of artificial intelligence.

"The basic idea of Games With a Purpose is that we are taking a problem that computers cannot yet solve, and we are getting people to solve it for us while they are playing a game." [11]
"Before the Internet, coordinating more than 100,000 people, let alone paying them, was essentially impossible. But now with the Internet, I've just shown you a project where we've gotten 750 million people to help us digitize human knowledge." [1]
"People are good at figuring out what's attractive, and computers are good at quickly searching and finding. You put them together, and bang!" [1]
"Technology should be a tool, not a distraction." [2]
"AI is completely transformative at least for our business... in particular for language learning I mean it's AI the big advance in AI over the last couple years is large language models. The middle L is language uh we are a language learning company majorly." [8]
"Our stance as a company is that if we can automate something, we will." [12]
"It may put one-on-one human tutors out of business. I understand that. But I think net-net it is better if everybody has access to one." [12]
"I don't believe there's a way to make an educational app as engaging as TikTok or Instagram because you have to teach people something, and it's hard to compete with cats and celebrities." [13]
"We have a model that can predict whether you're going to get an exercise right or wrong and we're actually extremely accurate... the right thing to do is to give you an exercise that you're about 83% chance of getting it." [5]
"I think it's going to be something where there's one teacher and like 30 students each teacher cannot give individualized attention to each student but the computer can." [5]
"Every time you buy tickets on Ticketmaster, you help to digitize a book." [10]
"Basically, I want to make all of humanity more efficient by exploiting the human cycles that get wasted." [11]

On Entrepreneurship and Building a Company

From bootstrapping to leading a global team, von Ahn's entrepreneurial journey offers a wealth of practical advice.

"I have multiple ideas per day, all the time. The vast majority of these are completely idiotic. Usually, I just sit on the idea for several months. And if I have not decided that it's idiotic, then it's... might be a good idea." [11]
"I think most importantly you should treat everybody well of hold your standards and and your principles... in the long term it is not a good strategy to take advantage of others." [7]
"I don't like celebrating raising funds you know in some sense it means you're not self-sustaining. and I think a lot of young interpreters equate success with fundraising." [7]
"I am always able to keep a laser focus on one thing at a time without getting distracted. It helps that I try to break everything I do into small, achievable tasks." [1]
"Our team at Duolingo is really cohesive, but this did not just happen. I made a concerted effort to hire people who are going to play nice." [11]
"Hiring mistakes are are very expensive." [14]
"Difficult problems attract good people." [14]
"The smaller the team, the better." [4]
"I'm interested in finding solutions for huge markets with very real needs. I'm primarily interested not in the money but in serving huge numbers of people." [15]
"To have sustainable impact, you have to have a model that generates sustainable economics." [15]
"My hope is that people will look at our platform and business model and figure out how to apply them to many other areas." [10]
"When we started Duolingo... we ran into this problem that we would go home, then the next day we would come into the office at 9:00 AM and I would ask him, did you do your Spanish lesson? He would say, no, man, so boring. And I had the same problem." [16]
"Nobody in the company wanted to make money because everybody who came to work for Duolingo came for the mission." [8]
"I think most everybody in the company believes that... if we do the right thing for our users... that is actually what's going to optimize our revenue in the long term." [17]

On Personal Philosophy and Life

Von Ahn's reflections on his own life and work reveal a down-to-earth and often humorous perspective.

"I watch a lot of TV. That's how I spend most of my time outside of work. If I had more time, I would fill it 100 percent with watching TV." [11]
"I really do think that it's all hard work. If you talk to anyone here, they'll tell you that I'm not all that smart. It's really hard work; I do work harder than everyone else." [9]
"So now that you've won the genius fellowship, every time you do something stupid—which happens all the time, with me—it's always the same joke: 'Haha, I thought you were a genius.' So you really can't do anything stupid anymore. But I do stupid stuff all the time." [9]
"I put a lot of weight on feelings and am weirdly in touch with them, which is not typical for an engineer." [11]
"I'm the human that can't read them. I can't read captchas." [18]
"The people who are... really good at languages... are very outgoing and okay sounding stupid." [4]
"It is a weird situation where I'm actually famous in the whole country [Guatemala]. People actually recognize me... I cannot go they can walk around not really not you're like actually kind of a celebrity." [4]
"My ultimate research goal is to transform our human existence to just eating, sleeping, drinking, playing - nevermind." [1]

Lessons from Luis Von Ahn, founder and CEO of Duolingo

On Education and Its Mission

On Technology, AI, and Innovation

On Entrepreneurship and Building a Company

On Personal Philosophy and Life

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Written by Antoine Buteau

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