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How Duolingo Broke All Language Barriers and Won the World

A deep dive into the language learning phenomenon founded by Luis von Ahn and Severin Hacker.

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Today we’ve got a deep dive on the $22B education giant, Duolingo, and there’s a lot to get into. Please let me know at the end what you thought of this piece, I’d really appreciate any feedback 🙂 

Let’s dive in!

Over 100 million people across the world use Duolingo month after month.

And if you speak more than one language, you probably have used it too.

There are more people learning languages on Duolingo in the United States than there are foreign language learners in all US high schools combined.

Luis von Ahn, TED

In fact, there’s a pretty good chance that some of you reading this are simultaneously avoiding a snarky notification on your phone from the little green owl, urging you to complete today’s lesson (which you should, by the way).

Led by Luis von Ahn and Severin Hacker, Duolingo has put a spin on language learning under the belief that education is what truly changes people’s lives.

A lot of people talk about education as some thing 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 buy themselves a 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, right? And therefore, never make a lot of money. This is especially true in poor countries. […]

Now because of all of this, about 10 years ago I decided I wanted to do something that would give equal access to education to everyone.

Luis von Ahn, TED

Almost 14 years later, it’s safe to safe to say, they have done just that.

Duolingo has reached nearly every corner of the world. But despite being of all different ages, races and nationalities, one thing about Duolingo users—they will do anything not to break their hard earned streak.

KEY TAKEAWAYS FROM DUOLINGO

Don’t have time to read the whole piece?

Here’s what you need to know from the founding story of Duolingo, tying its lessons into ones we’ve previously learned from other founders we’ve covered:

  • Make the broccoli taste like dessert. Duolingo turned the hardest part of learning into a game. Streaks, rewards, and guilt-based nudges keep users coming back every day. Founders building habit-forming products should prioritize motivation as much as content.

  • Build a product so good people can’t help but share it. Duolingo reached 10 million downloads without any marketing spend. The app actually worked, felt fun, and delivered real value. If people love it, they will spread it.

  • Treat growth like product. Duolingo ran hundreds of small experiments across notifications, branding, and content. They doubled down on whatever worked and cut what didn’t. This test-and-learn approach helped them scale both product and marketing in sync.

  • Let your mascot carry the brand. Duo the Owl is a fully developed character that drives attention, emotion, and engagement. If you are building a consumer brand, consider how a mascot or consistent brand identity can drive growth across product and social.

  • Align your business model with your mission. Duolingo kept education free by monetizing through a small set of paying users. This structure allows global impact while still building a massive business. Your business model should amplify your mission, not compromise it.

  • Hire slowly and protect the culture. Duolingo waited years to fill key leadership roles because they refused to lower the bar. While it created early chaos, it paid off long term. Founders should hire for alignment and excellence, not speed.

Read Online

Before founding Duolingo brought them together, Luis von Ahn and Severin Hacker lived very different lives in quite opposite places of the world.

Luis grew up in Guatemala. Though he came into the world under unique circumstances, he had a smooth upbringing as an only child, raised by his single mother in Guatemala City.

That is until his senior year in high school, when the kidnapping of his aunt forever scarred his teenage-hood. It was quite the turning point in his future, since it made the idea of leaving the country all the more possible.

But by then, another major event for Luis had taken place—he had decided to major in Math, which was no easy thing in Guatemala back in the late nineties. Backed by his strong academic record and his intuitive mother, he moved his entire life to the US to pursue his dream.

I’m pretty sure that my mom knew way before me that I should probably come study in the U.S. I was the best student, you know, the whole time I was in school. I think my mom kinda knew that. I don’t know if we ever had a conversation.

Luis von Ahn, Kleiner Perkins

Luis grew up bilingual; though he already attended an American school back home, his mother made it a point to maintain a strong command of both Spanish and English in the household.

When he applied to college in the U.S., the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) wasn’t as much of challenge because of his language level, but more so in terms of accessibility. Taking the exam cost several hundred dollars, and since all the spots in Guatemala were full, he had to fly to neighboring El Salvador just to sit for it. Altogether, the process cost over a thousand dollars—an expensive and frustrating hurdle before even knowing if he’d be accepted.

The memory of this whole experience would certainly not go unnoticed by Luis when the idea of Duolingo first sparked. They now offer the Duolingo English Test that is 100% remote, accepted by top institutions around the world and for only a fraction of the TOEFL cost.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here.

He got into Duke and, as planned, majored in Mathematics. He then got a PhD on Computer Science in Carnegie Mellon University, where he later started teaching his own class.

I actually liked being in front of a classroom. It turned out I did not like being a professor, because I didn’t realize what the job of a professor was.

When I was growing up, I always wanted to be a professor, but it’s because I watched these movies of like, these math professors… Kind of like in A Beautiful Mind or whatever. You watch these movies and you’re like ‘oh my God. These people are daydreaming in Gothic buildings all day long. That sounds awesome.’ […] It turns out the job of a professor today is mostly to raise funding to support graduate students. So you’re applying for grants all day long, and I did not realize that. So after being a professor for about seven years at Carnegie Mellon, I would not want to go back.

Luis von Ahn, Kleiner Perkins

Once a professor, always a professor, though—it may not have been in the same traditional way, but that would not be his last time teaching. Duolingo was unquestionably built upon Luis’ years of experience in the field, and under the belief that education plays a main role in transforming people’s lives for the better.

The way my brain works, all of education is just too general of a problem. So I decided: ‘let’s start by teaching one thing’. Eventually, we decided that the best subject to start with was teaching foreign languages. And let me tell you why: […] English can truly transform your life. In most countries in the world, knowledge of English can significantly increase your income potential.

Luis von Ahn, TED

While at Carnegie Mellon, Luis came up with a little thing called CAPTCHA. Yes, the same guy behind your daily language lessons is also the reason you’ve had to prove you're not a robot before visiting half the internet. And he did it at just 21 years old.

They gave -not sold- the idea out to Yahoo. Seven years later, along with a few of his students he built a 2.0 version of CAPTCHA, one that simultaneously worked on digitalizing books while you proved yourself as a human by typing a word. This new system was called reCAPTCHA and acquired by Google—only for tens of millions of dollars, this time.

Believe it or not, this was not even the most life-changing thing to come out of Luis’ time at Carnegie Mellon. He met Severin Hacker there, his co-founder at what would later be the world’s most popular educational app.

Severin grew up just outside of Zurich, in a little town called Zug, Switzerland.

His upbringing explains a lot of what his career turned out to be. For one, his interest in business was always in his blood.

My dad is an entrepreneur, and it was always a dream of mine to start a company at some point, but I didn’t know what that was going to be.

Severin Hacker, CSQ

On the other hand, he recalls being one of the few families in his neighborhood to have Internet, so he spent good part of his childhood fascinated by computers; so much so, that he taught himself programming at the age of 12.

What originally drew me to computers was video games and the desire to build your own games and understand how those games are built. I was somewhat obsessed.

Severin Hacker, CSQ

And yes, he's well aware of the irony in his name.

By the way, my name is Severin Hacker. Like, severing without a “G”, and Hacker, like “computer hacker”. It’s my real name, in case you were wondering.

Severin Hacker, Fortune Magazine

Naturally, he decided to major in Computer Science in ETH University in Zurich, but had his life truly turned upside down when he moved to Pittsburgh for an exchange in Carnegie Mellon.

Luis von Ahn was his professor, the youngest in Computer Science at the time, and Severin was eager to meet him.

I had a list of people I wanted to meet, and [Luis von Ahn] was near the top of that list. I’m not sure if he was on the top, but I wanted to meet him. […] I went to his office and introduced myself. […] I pitched a project to him, and he said like, “you should stay here. You should come to Carnegie Mellon University and become my PhD student”. So I did that.

Severin Hacker, Fortune Magazine

Two years into the program, the idea for Duolingo was born.

It all started as a research project.

They got research funding while still in Carnegie Mellon and started working on an educational mobile app. In the early 2010’s, smartphones were taking over the market and everyone was in the lookout for the next big app.

They settled on one subject: foreign languages. Firstly, because there was a huge audience for it—about 2 billion people around the world are learning another language, in and outside of schools. But most importantly, because both Luis and Severin had lived firsthand the impact a second language can have in someone’s life, and they wanted to make that opportunity available to anyone through something as ordinary as a smartphone.

The most challenging part was hiring people—this was around 2011 or 2012 when it was Luis and me. We were still at the university back then, but it was so hard to get people to work for Duolingo. At the time, startups weren’t nearly as attractive as today, and people at Carnegie Mellon wanted to go work at Google or Facebook—one of the big tech companies. We heavily relied on friends and referrals in the early days.

Severin Hacker, CSQ

The project grew bigger and bigger though; they even got 8 other students involved. It grew a little too big, however, to the point where they had to be kicked out of Carnegie Mellon.

They said: “hey, you’re building a company within the university, and the university is a non-profit. If you build a commercial business within the university… you can’t do that, we would lose our non-profit status. So you gotta go”.

Severin Hacker, Swisspreneur

From then on, they began their journey into venture capital.

Duolingo didn’t have it tough raising their first round, since they had a lot of users guaranteed even before launch day—the waitlist for the private beta had over 300,000 people signed up. And within the first year, the app gathered 10 million downloads.

The secret? A truly good product.

[Duolingo] was not the first app to learn a language, but it was the first good one. And I think that just made it so that people downloaded it and told their friends. And for the first several years, the entirety of the growth was through word of mouth, where people just told their friends. We didn't really do any marketing up until about 2019.

Luis von Ahn, World Knowledge Forum

With these crazy user numbers, they raised over $3.3M in Series A in October 2011. And through the years they kept raising millions, only it was not reflecting on revenue, not one bit—for the first five years, Duolingo made $0.

The weird thing at the time was—this was a different era, you know, when profitability was not that important for venture-backed companies. It was all growth, growth, growth. And, I was always surprised by this, our investors—they never urged us to, you know, make money or run more profitably. […] They were just like “keep growing”. And that’s what we did.

Severin Hacker, Fortune Magazine

Most of their investors, according to Severin, believed Duolingo would eventually follow reCAPTCHA’s footsteps and be sold to Google. Yet both Luis and Severin had quite a different vision for Duolingo, and they were starting to see how it could someday become big; like, 2013-Apple’s-app-of-the-year kind of big.

They took their time to monetize, which Severin identifies as one of Duolingo’s biggest mistakes. But basically, they just had’t figured out how to monetize Duolingo in a way that felt true to its essence.

Duolingo was always after one mission—transforming education for good. But in order to do so, they knew they needed to reach people from across all ages, classes and nationalities.

Duolingo at first… it was not a way for us to get rich. It was a way for us to do something with impact. [...] I think that really made a big difference with how we operated the company. [...] It was not a rich quick scheme. It was always like ‘no, we really are gonna do something that transforms education’.

Unfortunately for education it’s not like you can do like with a social network, that just gets popular from one day to the next because everybody contributes photographs or whatever. You can’t do that for education. Transforming education is a multi-decade thing. And I kind of knew that. And so, we always knew that. We took the long view for it.”

Luis von Ahn, Kleiner Perkins 

Eventually, to maintain the promise of an open and accessible app, they developed a “freemium” model that combines ad-supported access for the free tier and an ad-free experience with some extra features for the paid “Super” tier.

However, all content is available for free. No lessons are gatekept—you can learn one, two or multiple languages in Duolingo without ever paying one cent, which is what most users are doing.

According to the 2024 shareholders letter, over 90% of the users use the free version, while roughly 8% of Duolingo users pay for a subscription and contribute to 80% of the company’s revenue, which was nearly $750M in total this past year.

It might have taken them some time to get here, but unlocking the “freemium” model was key to crack monetization while staying aligned with Duolingo’s mission.

Who are these people who pay to subscribe to turn off the ads? Well, they’re usually well-off people in rich countries like the US and Canada. Who are the people who don’t pay to subscribe? They usually come from poor countries like Brazil or Vietnam or Guatemala. So 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. So I like that.

Luis von Ahn, TED

THE MOST PUSHY APP ON EARTH

By 2014, only two years after launching, Duolingo had already reached 30 million downloads.

As it turned out, users were never lacking for Duolingo; they just kept coming and coming. But there was still something left to figure out—how to make them come back.

If you’re trying to deliver education with a smartphone, you run into a humongous problem. And it is that smartphones come equipped with some of the most addictive drugs that humanity has ever engineered—TikTok, Instagram, mobile games. See, delivering education over a smartphone is like hoping that people will eat their broccoli but right next to it you put the most delicious dessert ever made.

If you really want to deliver education to everyone, not only do you have to make it accessible, but also you have to make it so that people want to actually learn. And with Duolingo we’ve been able to do this, and at the highest level the way we’ve done this is by making the broccoli taste like dessert.

Luis von Ahn, TED

By having users compete against friends to receive all kinds of rewards, Duolingo has mastered the learn-but-make-it-fun genre. And what's made it all the more engaging are the two main traits of the app—the streak and the notifications.

The hardest thing about learning something by yourself is staying motivated. I believe that is where we stand out as a company. I believe most educational apps or educational software… They may tell you that, but they don’t act like that. If you look at their product, you can see that their number one thing is to teach, and they pay very little attention to keep people motivated. I think it should be the opposite.

Luis von Ahn, Kleiner Perkins 

To fight the fact that will-power is limited, Duolingo has taken a different route—straight-up guilt-tripping.

Completing only one lesson in Duolingo is enough to get you on a streak. You will easily complete the second, the third, and even all the way to the tenth might not be a hassle. But the further you get, the less you wanna break the streak, so you might as well do your lesson for one more day, right?

Some may call it manipulative; Luis and Severin call it effective.

Over 3 million daily active users have a streak longer than 365 days. And according to the Duolingo Hall of Fame, the longest streak on the platform is over 4300 days in a row, which is equivalent to nearly 12 years of uninterrupted learning.

“Passive aggressive. Works for my mother, works for Duolingo”

Luis von Ahn, TED

Sometimes it’s not about will-power, though. Sometimes breaking your streak can be a genuine mistake—you’ve started a new job. You’re traveling. Life’s just gotten busy. But if that’s the case, then get ready to start receiving some ominous notifications on your phone.

Notifications play a huge role in your individual Duolingo experience, because they’re trained to work specifically for you.

The team developed a sophisticated AI system to make notifications just annoying enough to maximize the chances you'll come back.

Usually, you’ll get your reminder exactly 24 hours since you last used the app, so that it’s somewhat guaranteed that it’ll catch you on your free time. But as far as the actual message goes… it’s become a bit of a meme at this point. And it’s all thanks to Duo.

These passive aggressive notifications are really good at getting people to come back, because they feel like our green owl mascot has given up on them. So they come back.

Luis von Ahn, TED

INTRODUCING DUO THE OWL

Luis knew it from the beginning—Duolingo needed a mascot. A colorful design and a pair of cute eyes never fail to draw people in.

They were between two final options: a little robot and a green owl. They decided to put it to a vote, and the whole team went with the robot; it was a software teaching you a language, after all.

They decided to ask outside people too, just to get a second opinion. Not that it could ever change their minds about the robot.

Except, it did. And that’s how Duo the owl was born.

The thing with Duo is that however sweet his green feathers and big eyes may look, he’s actually got quite of an attitude. One thing about Duo and all other Duolingo characters—they will make you do your daily lesson, one way or another.

Duo isn't shy about checking in or laying on a guilt trip. He's like a parent: you never want to disappoint Duo. The shame is real...and very effective for open rates and retention. Duo is social, a great communicator, and rather emotional. In a word, Duo is extra. And people love him for it.

And people truly do love him—1 million people follow Duolingo on X, only to tune in to Duo’s unhinged tweets.

Another 5 million people follow Duolingo’s Instagram account to be fed some more weird posts.

And as if Duolingo’s bizarre content wasn’t enough already, nearly 17 million people follow their TikTok page.

@duolingo

congrats on your new bundle of joy!!! #duolingo

Our mascot was initially designed to encourage regular practice. But once the internet got their hands on him, he grew into a more complicated — even menacing — character with his own lore. He's still cute and cuddly. But he's also willing to temporarily relocate your family to ensure you finish your lessons.

Duolingo, CBS News

Just like in A24’s case, Duo’s online presence has only been perfected by dominating online pop culture, a now proven mechanism to organically and effectively reach out to the broadest of audiences—millennials and Gen Z.

In this state of things, don’t be surprised when you go on social media and see Duo somehow involved in whatever topic is trending, whether it’s a popular movie, an on-going TV show or a meme that’s just gone viral.

As of today, Duo’s reached celebrity status, believe it or not. A sassy green owl that teaches languages now rubs shoulders with charlieXCX, Olivia Rodrigo, and his namesake and bestie, Dua Lipa.

Through the years, Duo becoming an A-lister has only pushed Duolingo higher and higher in popularity—it’s now been over a decade since it first rose to the top of educational apps.

And it has simultaneously led to major promotional deals—last year, Duolingo partnered with one of Netflix’s most popular TV shows of all time, Squid Game, to launch ‘Learn Korean or else’.

We saw a 40% increase in Korean learners just after Squid Game Season 1, underscoring the powerful connection between entertainment, culture, and language learning. This campaign allows us to continue that momentum in a way only Duolingo can—with humor, intensity, and a bit of chaos! We hope fans will accept Duo’s challenge to learn Korean and immerse themselves in the experience.

Manu Orssaud (CMO), Duolingo

The year prior, in an early April fools day prank, Duolingo partnered with Peacock to announce a new Love Island inspired reality TV show—Love Language. The show, sadly fake, had real business incentives:

As part of the promotion for “Love Language,” visitors are offered 50% off three months of Peacock Premium (for a one-time payment of $7.49) through April 19. The ad-supported version of Peacock is regularly $4.99/month. In addition, you can sign up for one month free access to the Super Duolingo service (regularly priced at $12.99/month).

The notifications, memes and deals, however, don’t even begin to explain the lengths Duolingo will get to make you learn a new language.

See, on February 11th, 2025, Duo the owl died.

The news shocked the world. Major brands like KitKat, Subway, BuzzFeed, Hilton, and T-Mobile jumped into the comments to pay their respects; even the World Health Organization came forward to make it clear that, at the very least, we didn't need to worry about it being smallpox.

The world’s most popular YouTuber, Mr. Beast, made his own TikTok about Duo’s death, that has now gathered over 100 million views. The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, weighed in as well

Official statements were made, condolences were sent and there was even a call to find a potential culprit. But there was still a huge question hanging in the air—how can a fictional mascot really die?

Well, it doesn't. Obviously.

As everyone expected, Duo was very much alive. He just wanted you to complete your daily lesson.

The stunt had an unthinkable reach of over 1.7 billion impressions across all social media platforms, and made Duo’s green feathers and absolute lunacy known to the whole world.

THE DUOLINGO FORMULA

Luis attributes Duolingo’s success to two key strategies: hiring the best and constantly experimenting.

Firstly, they took their time to hire senior leaders, which to Severin was one of their biggest mistakes because it made the office very chaotic. It was the first 20 employees’ first job, including Severin himself.

But all in all, they truly prioritize hiring smart. They just don’t want to settle, so much so that they went two years without a CFO simply because they couldn’t find the right person. Their first CMO, Cammie Dunoway, was also difficult to find, and she wasn’t hired until 2018.

It paid off big time, however. They carefully curated their team and made sure everyone in Duolingo was up to its mission’s standards: the current Head of Engineering came straight from Google, and their CMO had prior experience in Yahoo and Nintendo.

Cammie was also crucial to the Duolingo formula, since it was the first time they had a multi-millionaire budget to spend on marketing after seven years of only focusing on PR.

Dunoway set up a team of youngsters and Luis and Severin gave them free will to test out strategies to their liking, as long as it didn’t compromise the product.

Throughout this whole process, they’ve perfected their marketing strategy—influencers work in certain countries, and performance marketing in some others. But for a market as wide and competitive as the American, they figured out that Duo the owl with his obnoxious antics on socials were the way to go.

[The marketing team] kind of use the scientific method on things where just kinda… they run a lot of experiments, and then they start seeing what works and they double down on what works. That is how we got to such a good product; that is how we got to such a good marketing.

By running so many experiments, we kinda stumble on what works, and turned out that for marketing, what worked is our mascot doing weird sh*t. This is what works for marketing. But we didn’t start out thinking that that’s what was gonna work. We tried all kinds of crap. Most of it didn’t work. But when we started seeing that that was working, we double down on it. And at this point we really have honed into that.

Luis von Ahn, Kleiner Perkins 

Lastly, Duolingo’s co-founders believe in always taking the long view.

We try really hard for anything that we’re doing, even in the experiments or things that we double down on, to not do anything that is kind of short-term thinking.

Luis von Ahn, Kleiner Perkins 

Notifications, for example. They could easily go harder on notifications and try to draw more people and attention in. But once it gets too spammy, it’s done—the user is prone to never get back to the app, and rightfully so.

The same goes for Duo the owl’s content. There’s a fine line between edgy and straight-up raunchy. They could easily cross it once or twice to gain more traction every now and then; but they rather not do things impulsively only to later find themselves in need of damage control.

It goes hand in hand with hiring slow—Duolingo is a mission-driven company: making education accessible for everyone, everywhere. And in order to keep walking towards that goal, every decision matters.

How can you maximize impact 5, 10, 15, 20, 50 years from now? That’s, I think, one thing that resonates with me a lot. And I think a lot of people at Duolingo.

Severin Hacker, Fortune Magazine

Ever since launch day, Duolingo has consistently and exponentially grown in every possible aspect—downloads, subscribers, daily and monthly users, valuation and revenue.

Despite all of this, of one thing Luis and Severin are certain—Duolingo’s only at 1% of what they can achieve as a company.

With over 40 languages and more than 100 courses now available, Duolingo is ready to branch out into new and exciting learning territory.

In 2023 they launched their Music Learning Program. Furthermore, they’re looking to deep their toes into math courses.

The Duolingo learning method —learning by doing and through a phone— has been proved effective for more than a decade now: according to Luis von Ahn, users who complete half a course on Duolingo learn as much as students taking four university semesters of language education.

Math and music, therefore, were at the top of their picks, because the learning method lends itself well to these subjects. But after that, there are no plans to stop.

We only teach a little more than a 100 million, so there’s a lot more there. I also wanna do for math the same thing we did for languages. And then after math, I probably wanna do physics. And so, generally, we just wanna do as many subjects as possible and really have hundreds of millions of people learning on their phone.

Luis von Ahn, World Knowledge Forum

In terms of geographic expansion, there’s also plenty of potential.

We’re headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Called the City of Bridges, it’s where we’re making language learning a bridge to opportunity for millions around the world.

They have offices in New York, Seattle, Beijing, and Berlin, but they’re looking into Japan, Korea, China and India to increase their presence in Asian markets.

In just over a decade, Duolingo has come to dominate language learning. By all accounts, there’s little doubt it will slowly but surely find a way to dominate all other fields.

If accessible, universal education is the goal, then the sky’s the limit for Duolingo.

I want to continue working on Duolingo. We have a lot to accomplish. I think we’re only scratching the surface so far.

Luis von Ahn, World Knowledge Forum

“Reduce, Automate, Delegate”:

For everything you have to do, think of whether you actually have to do it. I think a lot of the times you realize that, if you think about it you’re like: ‘no, this actually doesn’t need to be done’ or ‘it’s not important, and nobody actually should be working on this’. So try to reduce that stuff.

What you can’t reduce or remove or eliminate, that try to automate it. Like, try to see if you can… now with AI, whether you can write software or like, whether it can be automated, so no human has to do it.

And then, the stuff that you cannot automate, that you should try to see whether you can delegate. And then, really only work on the things only you yourself can do, or where you are the best person in the company.

Severin Hacker, Fortune Magazine

On focusing on the product:

I think in general for most businesses, the most important thing is to have a really good product. Whatever it is you’re making, make it really good. I think people get distracted a lot of times by spending most of their efforts on the wrong thing. For example, if you’re making a restaurant, you should make sure that you can make the best food possible, as opposed to having a really nice sign outside. [...]

The restaurant analogy is a really good one. If you can concentrate on having really really good food, it may take a long time for people to discover you, but once they discover you, they really will tell their friends and then, over a long period of time, you will be the most popular restaurant. Whereas if you make a really good sign outside, maybe a lot of people discover you very fast, but then nobody will come back. So I think, if you actually want long-term success, you should make sure that you have a really good product, and in our case that is the language learning app.

Luis von Ahn, World Knowledge Forum

On Duolingo’s social impact:

We get a lot of emails or letters every single day, so there’s a lot. Things that have been impactful for me? The fact that we help refugees in different countries learn the language of the country that they had to relocate to, particularly Syrian refugees in Europe. That was impactful for me. 

But we get all kinds of things, I mean–very old people who say they are using Duolingo to keep their brain healthy; or people who say [that] because of Duolingo they were able to get a job. That’s all very impactful to me.

Luis von Ahn, World Knowledge Forum

In the past two years, we’ve published dozens of deep dives on world-class founders, sharing how they built their companies. These typically take 20-30 hours to research and write. The most recent ones are below:

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Founder of Just Go Grind

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