Duolingo CEO: AI Won't Take Your Job — But Someone Using It Will (And Here's What to Do Now) | Luis von Ahn

📌 Try Granola — the AI notepad that turns meetings into action: https://www.granola.ai/marina or use code MARINA at checkout for 3 months free. Luis von Ahn built Duolingo into a company with 100M+ monthly active users and $1B in the bank — and he's never done a single layoff. While every other CEO is blaming AI for firing people, he's hiring more. In this episode, Luis breaks down exactly how his team used AI to build a chess course from scratch in 6 months — two people, no engineering background, no chess knowledge. It now has 7 million daily users. That's the real story of what AI can do for your career, if you know how to use it. We also get into: why "AI is taking your job" is mostly a lie companies tell to cover over-hiring, what happened when Duolingo's stock dropped 82% and why Luis has zero regrets, the one mindset shift that lets him not check the stock price every day, and his honest takes on which jobs are actually going away — translator, teacher, social media manager, strategist, project manager — gone in 5 years, gone in 10, or not going anywhere. If you're trying to figure out what to do with your career or business right now, this conversation will reset your thinking. Keywords: AI jobs future, career and AI, Duolingo CEO, Luis von Ahn, AI replacing jobs, future of work, AI startup, vibe coding, education AI, Silicon Valley Girl podcast More from the Silicon Valley Girl: Follow my Newsletter: ⁠⁠⁠https://siliconvalleygirl.beehiiv.com/⁠⁠⁠ https://siliconvalleygirl.beehiiv.com/ Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/siliconvalleygirl/ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.instagram.com/siliconvalleygirl/ YouTube: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@SiliconValleyGirl⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.youtube.com/@SiliconValleyGirl LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠linkedin.com/in/marinamogilko⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.linkedin.com/in/marinamogilko/ X: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://x.com/siliconvalleymm⁠⁠ https://x.com/siliconvalleymm

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:30Speaker 01

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• 0:59Marina Mogilko?

  Hey guys, welcome to Silicon Valley Girl. We are about to interview the founder of Duolingo.

• 1:07Marina Mogilko?

  Oh.

• 1:09Marina Mogilko?

  Oh, no, no, no. No, Duo, not you. No, no, no.

• 1:15Marina Mogilko?

  Do we have the actual founder?

• 1:17Speaker 03

  Hi.

• 1:17Marina Mogilko?

  Hi. Your employees are getting a little creative.

• 1:22Speaker 03

  We pay that guy and he has his own personality. He just does what he wants. AI is not going to take your job. Somebody using AI is going to take your job.

• 1:30Marina Mogilko?

  This is Luis Von An, CEO of Duolingo. Recently, two of his employees built a chess course with AI in six months. No engineering background, no knowledge of the subject. It became the fastest growing course in the company. There are a lot of rumors that large companies firing people. They say it's AI.

• 1:47Speaker 03

  We have never done a layoff. Despite what the internet may think, it is important to continue hiring people because a single employee is just way more productive now than they used to be.

• 1:56Marina Mogilko?

  I'm going to name five professions and you're going to make some predictions. Gone in five years or not going anywhere.

• 2:03Speaker 03

  There will be fewer and fewer.

• 2:07Marina Mogilko?

  Please. You told your team that nobody gets hired unless team proves AI can do the work first. Can you tell me how you actually track that as a founder?

• 2:19Speaker 03

  Our goal here is to use AI to benefit our users. Internally, we have this golden rule. We're only going to use AI to benefit our learners. Some people may imagine that, you know, some companies may be firing people and having AI do their job. That's not what we're doing whatsoever. Our team has gotten significantly better at using AI over the last, you know, couple of years. And that has allowed us to do a lot more. It has allowed us to put out a lot more content, a lot more learning content, et cetera. We, as a management team, are not necessarily tracking like, oh, are you doing something that AI can do or not? We're just really trying to tell everyone, try to be as efficient as possible with AI. And our employees are doing that.

• 3:02Marina Mogilko?

  And can you give me some of the best examples from team? For someone who's watching this and they're like, okay, my manager tells me to start using AI, but I have no idea how to do it. Do you have like best case examples?

• 3:12Speaker 03

  It depends on what your job role is. I think most of our engineers have basically really changed their workflows. They're using AI coding tools. A lot of our product managers, what they've decided to do is using AI to make prototypes of things. So the product manager may not be implementing the thing in the full production app, but rather than coming to us with a written document, they come with a prototype now. That's way better because it allows for much better decision making. So if somebody comes to me with a written proposal and says, you know, I'm going to do a way to teach Spanish better. It's hard for me to know what that actually means, but if they just show me the prototype and I can see that it really does seem to teach Spanish better,

• 3:56Speaker 03

  it's much easier to give approval to that type of thing. So it depends a lot in the role.

• 4:00Marina Mogilko?

  Do you give them any guidance? Like, okay, instead of doing this, do that next time? Or how do they even find out they can do these things with AI?

• 4:08Speaker 03

  We try to do some things in the whole company to try to, you know, we had, for example, A few months ago, we had a day where everybody in the company had to vibe code something, not just engineers, every single person, people from, you know, HR, people from the finance team, everybody had to vibe code something. So everybody could see the power of it. We also have a lot of documentation about best practices. But generally, people here in Duolingo are pretty smart. They're always finding new things. And I think what happens is rather than management telling them what to do, they tell each other what to do. There's, we have a lot of Slack channels that, you know, one of them is called Best AI Practices. And so people are just saying stuff. We also have another one that's called AI Fails,

• 4:53Speaker 03

  which is all the times, all the things that people try.

• 4:54Marina Mogilko?

  Such a great one.

• 4:55Speaker 03

  It is an incredible thing, very empowering for people who are like, oh my God, I made,

• 5:00Speaker 03

  you know, usually they're very small apps, but it's like, I made an app. One of the things that has happened inside this company is everybody has made their own dashboard.

• 5:08Marina Mogilko?

  For their KPIs or something?

• 5:09Speaker 03

  For whatever it is, whatever it is they're tracking. I mean, I see a few product managers that have vibe coded a whole thing with like, our users in every country and what they're doing.

• 5:17Marina Mogilko?

  That's, that's super impressive. And is that how you track AI proficiency? Cause now it's part of performance reviews, right? At Duolingo.

• 5:23Speaker 03

  For a while, it was part of performance reviews. We decided not to do that. And I'll tell you why. I sent them a memo to the company that said, you know, part of your performance review is going to be usage of AI. And we found that people were, I don't know if they were doing that, but they were kind of asking like, do you just want us to use AI for AI's sake? And at the end, we backtrack and we said, no, look, the most important thing in your performance is that you are doing, you know, whatever your job is as well as possible. A lot of times AI can help you with that, but if it can't, I'm not going to force you to do that. So I think we backtrack from that because it really, it felt like, rather than being held accountable for the actual outcome, we're trying to just push something that in some cases did not fit.

• 6:06Marina Mogilko?

  And do you have a specific example where somebody did something in a week without AI? And then with AI, they kind of multiplied the output.

• 6:14Speaker 03

  We now teach chess on Duolingo. So, you know, for a long time, we only taught languages. Now we teach a few other things. Chess is the latest course we added. This course got started by two people, neither of whom knew chess, neither of whom knew how to program. They basically vibe coded the first. Prototype of it. Now, the final version that is actually in the app, of course, we put some engineers in there, et cetera, but they really got very far. In a span of about six months, they created the whole curriculum for chess. They created a prototype of the app all entirely with AI. And again, these people did not know any chess.

• 6:50Marina Mogilko?

  And whose idea was that? Was it their idea?

• 6:52Speaker 03

  It was their idea to do that. They also, it was, well, they're the ones who wanted to add chess. By the way, they came to me a year earlier to say, we want to add chess. I said, I don't want to add chess. Because it's just a game and we're an education app. But what happened was that a few months later, I talked to the Minister of Education of my country. I'm from Guatemala. And she said to me, our education system, our public education system in Guatemala is so broken that I'm considering sending every student a chessboard so that at least they'll learn logical thinking. And when she said that to me, I thought, oh, wow. Okay, this is actually useful.

• 7:26Marina Mogilko?

  Part of education.

• 7:27Speaker 03

  Yes. So then, this is when I told them, okay, you can add the chess course. But I said to them, but I don't have any engineers to give you. So go ahead. And they, they figured it out.

• 7:37Marina Mogilko?

  Six months, right?

• 7:38Speaker 03

  About six months, yeah.

• 7:39Marina Mogilko?

  And now it's your fastest growing course?

• 7:41Speaker 03

  Yeah. It's, I mean, at this point, we have seven million daily active users that are learning chess.

• 7:46Marina Mogilko?

  Wow, this is fascinating. Can you tell me step by step, what was their process? So if somebody's watching and they're like, wow, if Duolingo is able to do such a spin off, which is kind of different from languages. If I want to start something with AI and build a fast growing product, what are the like five steps they need to take?

• 8:03Speaker 03

  These two guys, the first thing they did was probably learn chess. Probably because they didn't know any chess. And that's one of the reasons they wanted to add it because they themselves wanted to learn chess. But after that, what they did is they really started looking at, you know, kind of the different tools that are out there for learning chess. They're basically doing market research, trying to figure out what's out there for learning chess. They found that really what was out there was not all that great. And then they decided to start vibe coding something. To be fair, this person does have some technical knowledge. They're not an engineer, but they have some technical knowledge. And so they downloaded Cursor. And at first they made just chess puzzles. Then they realized that the AI was not very good at making chess puzzles.

• 8:47Speaker 03

  So then they decided to train it with some, there's a, there's an online. Database of a lot of different chess puzzles. So they trained the AI with that and it got a lot better. And then after that, what they started doing was just more and more mobile prototypes for me to play with. Until I told them that it was kind of good enough to to really put it in the app.

• 9:07Marina Mogilko?

  And then you put it in the app and then did you give it an external push? Or people just started discovering it and?

• 9:13Speaker 03

  By putting it in the app, very quickly, a lot of people came. But chess really has a big draw. I mean, we put other courses in the app that have not grown as as much. For example, it turns out chess is more fun than math.

• 9:22Marina Mogilko?

  So someone, a student who just heard about your chess course that was spun out so quickly. And they want to start building something with AI today. What advice would you give them?

• 9:34Speaker 03

  Well, the biggest advice I can give them is to start. You know, a lot of people talk a lot about starting. They they're like, oh, I have an idea, but I biggest thing is just sit down and do it. You will learn a lot by just trying to do it. So that's that's the biggest thing. Other than that, you know, try to learn how some of the best tools work. Certainly, vibe coding will help you a lot, but it's not just vibe coding. I mean, trying to make, you know, the initial designs for it. Now you can have AI tools to make the initial screens and everything. So use it all and try to make try to make the thing. I mean, I I haven't haven't quite yet seen somebody who knows nothing about programming to really make a good app.

• 10:16Speaker 03

  But I have seen people who know a little bit about programming make, you know, make apps. So I I would tell you, it's still worthwhile learning kind of the structure of programs. That seems important, even even though you may you may not actually need to program like word by word. It's just knowing how things work. For example, knowing the difference between the server and the client, like just these very basic things. I think that's important.

• 10:41Marina Mogilko?

  Did did it give you more ideas to add more courses that are non-language related?

• 10:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's given us a lot of ideas. We are not we are not yet working on other stuff, but we have a long list of things that we, you know, we want to teach all kinds of things. K through twelve science, we want to teach. Again, we're not yet working on that. We're going to teach K through twelve science. We want to teach how to draw. There's all kinds of things, but at the moment, we're not really working on them because we want to continue working on chess, math, music and languages.

• 11:03Marina Mogilko?

  Got it. But then any employee can just go and vibe code one of these courses and show you and maybe they make it to the app.

• 11:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's what I tell the company, by the way. A lot of times people come to me and they're like, what course are you going to add next? And I, you know, what one of the things I tell them is I wanted to add K through twelve science. And then we added math. I I wanted to add K through twelve science and then we added music. I wanted to add K through twelve science and then we added chess. At this point, I also want to add K through twelve science. But it turns out that what people do here is somebody comes up with a really good idea. And if it's good and they're passionate about it, we let them do it.

• 11:34Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah, they do it. Let's go back to the actually the AI failure chat. Can you recall any examples of AI actually failing in a task?

• 11:43Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. I mean, there's a lot of things where it's where it's failing. I'll I'll tell you the biggest one, which I think we're starting to see a difference here. But it wasn't the case a year ago. If you were to look at Twitter and and just read what people are saying on Twitter. Two years ago, I should have fired all our engineers because on Twitter, they're like, AI is better at coding than engineers. This is kind of for the last two years is what they've been saying on Twitter. And it was an interesting thing because I would come here and I would not really see a speed up on engineering.

• 12:11Marina Mogilko?

  Hmm.

• 12:11Speaker 03

  Uh, I'm like, well, what's the disconnect? Why, you know, there's all these people saying that AI is better at coding than humans. And the reality is it's not yet the case that AI is better at coding than humans. I I think you still really need engineers and you're gonna need them for a long time, I think. But we've just seen a lot of cases where, uh, you know, you tell the AI to to program something. And sometimes it works. But the other, I don't know what fraction of time it doesn't work. But when it doesn't work, there's a real problem in that because you don't really know what it did. It's really hard to debug it. And that's kind of what has happened that you get into the the happy path is really fast. Okay, it worked. But the unhappy path makes it so that it takes so long that you end up spending more effort on that than the time you saved on the other thing. So we've seen that quite a bit.

• 12:54Speaker 03

  We've also seen AI not be able to generate things like narrative, like stories. Sometimes it does a good job. Sometimes it doesn't do a great job and it just comes up with things that don't make any sense. You know, it's interesting because when you see a demo and you ask it to come up with a story, somehow those demos always look amazing. But then when you try to come up with a hundred stories, you realize that only like thirty are good and the other seven are.

• 13:18Marina Mogilko?

  So humans still need to check and select.

• 13:20Speaker 03

  Oh, check, yeah, yeah. All our content needs to be there. There's a lot of steps to try to either check it or spot check it or or some. Thing to make sure that the quality is high.

• 13:30Marina Mogilko?

  So if we compare today and a year ago, how much more productive the company is with AI?

• 13:36Speaker 03

  I don't know. It's more in pockets. And I don't know of any larger company that has seen like a 10x speed up.

• 13:41Marina Mogilko?

  I don't think so. I think startups really see it because when you're a one person team, then you.

• 13:45Speaker 03

  A one person can do a lot of stuff. With a larger company, it's harder. It just turns out, for example, most engineers don't spend eight hours a day coding. They have to go to meetings, they have to. So there's a part of it that you just cannot speed up. Then there's the part that they spend coding. Okay, maybe you can speed that up, but you cannot speed it up, at least at the moment. You cannot speed it up by a thousand X. You can just maybe, I don't know, a little faster. So overall, we're not seeing, like, we're putting out 10 times as many features. We're not. We're seeing some speed ups here and there in different pockets of the company. But again, it's what you said, one person companies are a lot faster, but it's because you don't have to interface with all the other parts of the company, et cetera. Also, AI is not as good with existing code bases rather than with a brand new code base.

• 14:29Marina Mogilko?

  We've been talking a lot about how AI is changing the way people learn and retain information. And that got me thinking about something I changed in how I organize my own daily life and work. Someone told me once, if you're not capturing everything that happens in your calls with your team, you're actually losing to other companies. You're losing decisions that were made. You're losing context that gets dropped, things you're committed to, and then you just forgot. Team syncs, strategy sessions, call with investors, even a quick conversation with a contractor, it all disappears the moment the call ends. And I don't know about you, but I'm on calls every single day. Sometimes I forget to press record. Sometimes I don't think the conversation is worth recording, but then after the conversation, I realize I have to actually record that.

• 15:14Marina Mogilko?

  A lot of my friends told me, Marina, you should start using granola. You'll be blown away. And now I use it on every single call now. It is an AI notepad for meetings, but it's not a bot that joins your Zoom and makes everyone uncomfortable. It transcribes your computer's audio in the background while you stay completely present in the conversation. It listens to every call automatically, and if it's a recurring call, it merges them by folders. So by the time the meeting ends, you have clean structured notes ready to go. And after the call, I chat with my notes. I'm like, okay, we just had this conversation. Can you create a follow up email that I'm gonna send to Monica, my manager? We're gonna proceed with this, this and that. Creates the email and I just send it. Takes fifteen seconds. It works across Zoom, Google Meet and Teams.

• 15:59Marina Mogilko?

  It's one of those tools I genuinely can't work without anymore. And I don't think you'll be able to either, once you try it. Try it on your very first meeting after this episode. Head to granola.ai/marina to get three months of granola for free or enter the code MARINA at checkout. I left a link in the description. And now, back to my conversation with Lewis. What about you as a founder? Does AI help you make decisions or any workflows that work for you?

• 16:25Speaker 03

  Research, sure. It used to be the case that whenever I had something that needed to be researched, like, I don't know, what is the chess landscape in India, for example? You know, it used to be the case that I needed to either spend a lot of time myself or get a team of people to help me. Whereas now, I can, I can get a pretty good idea by just asking Gemini or something like that. So, research, I do a lot more by myself. That has helped me, but ultimately, the decisions are made by me. It's not like I asked the computer, what would you decide?

• 16:57Marina Mogilko?

  Okay.

• 16:57Speaker 03

  I haven't.

• 16:58Marina Mogilko?

  So you don't use it as a coach or you haven't vibe coded your own KPIs or whatever?

• 17:01Speaker 03

  I've done a bunch of vibe coding for things, but yeah, certainly my KPIs, but it's not decisions I still make myself.

• 17:08Marina Mogilko?

  Okay. Okay. I interview a lot of cool people on this podcast. In the past three weeks, I had Reid Hoffman and Bill Gurley, who are legendary investors. And I asked them a question, what is the first market that's gonna be completely changed by AI and market you should be looking at? And they told me language. Thank you so much. You know, it's been my thing for ten years. What do you think?

• 17:29Speaker 03

  I don't know what that means, change, so.

• 17:32Marina Mogilko?

  Like you don't have to learn a language because everything is translated?

• 17:35Speaker 03

  Oh, no, I just don't buy that.

• 17:38Speaker 03

  If you look at our users, we have more than a hundred million active users. Half of them are learning as a hobby.

• 17:47Speaker 03

  It's a hobby.

• 17:49Speaker 03

  Whether AI can do it or not, it's a hobby. Actually, chess is a great example. You know, computers have been better at chess than humans since nineteen ninety-seven.

• 17:58Speaker 03

  A lot more people are learning just today than they were in nineteen ninety seven. It's a hobby. So for half of our learners, it's a hobby. And I don't think whether computers can do it or not, I don't think it'll matter. The other half are learning English. And I think anybody who tells you that people don't want to learn a language has not had to learn English.

• 18:14Marina Mogilko?

  It's interesting how you say like fifty percent, they're probably learning other languages hobby.

• 18:18Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 18:18Marina Mogilko?

  English necessity.

• 18:20Speaker 03

  Yes, but that's how it is in the world. If you're learning, I'm sure there are, I'm generalizing here. But generally, if you're learning French, it's a hobby. It's not always true. I'm sure there are people who actually need to move to France. But it's a small fraction. The majority of people in the world that are learning French, well, you know, want to feel cool when they go to Paris so they can order a croissant. And that's our uses. And again, somebody who's lived their entire life in the U S has, you know, has never had to learn English because that's their native language, et cetera. Will say something like, well, languages are unnecessary, et cetera. But somebody who's had to learn English, it's a different thing. It's just, you just need to learn English and you may want to move to an English speaking country. You may need to do an educational, like you may need to go to a university.

• 19:01Speaker 03

  Nobody's gonna be allowing you to go to a university with like a, a phone that translates everything the professor says. Like, that's just not.

• 19:07Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah.

• 19:08Speaker 03

  So I, I'm just not particularly worried about that.

• 19:10Marina Mogilko?

  Is there a fraction of the market? So I'm thinking about translators, for example. Somebody spends like four years learning that. What would you say to those people?

• 19:17Speaker 03

  Depends on, on what it is. But there are fractions of the market that are probably going to change quite a bit. Also, in terms of the demand, I agree that some people may have wanted to learn a, a little bit of a language if they were gonna, you know, just visit Germany for two days, that maybe now they're just not gonna do that because they can just, but I, at least when you look at Duolingo's users, that's a very small minority of our users. The majority really are hobby or English. So I'm just not.

• 19:42Marina Mogilko?

  So you're not worried?

• 19:43Speaker 03

  I'm not. The other thing about language translation is that simultaneous language translation.

• 19:50Speaker 03

  Has been really good for, if this is not an L L M thing. Like L L Ms are good at it too, but Google Translate did not use L L Ms. And it was really good 10 years ago. So I just, you know, we've seen the demand to learn a language actually go up as opposed to go down. So this is not something that we internally are worried about. But I understand people say that.

• 20:08Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah, I'm also thinking like if you have glasses, for example, that are smart and they translate everything for you automatically. I haven't seen the case with the headphones. I don't think people really use the the AirPods to translate.

• 20:19Speaker 03

  No.

• 20:19Marina Mogilko?

  I'm thinking maybe it's glasses that translate the signs. I don't know. It's because when we came to Silicon Valley, I think 2015. We were pitching our company LinguaTrip that does like language travel, language courses. And I think 50%, but to your note, American investors were like, oh, this is not a market. Oh, this is gonna go down.

• 20:35Speaker 03

  We've had this problem and the entirety of the company of Duolingo, we are company based in the United States. You know, when we first pitched Duolingo to investors here, you know, I don't know, however, many years ago. The most common thing is like, nobody really wants to learn a language. Math, though, people want to learn math. And that's, you know, I'm sure investors think that because they are good at math and they wanted to learn math. But the reality is there are more people learning languages in the world than there are people learning math.

• 21:01Marina Mogilko?

  What was your mindset when the smartest people in the world tell you that? You're like, I don't care. I just.

• 21:06Speaker 03

  I mean, I, you know, I grew up in Guatemala. I could see what it was to have to learn English. Look, it is a huge thing to learn English. It changes people's lives.

• 21:13Marina Mogilko?

  I know. That's my my case as well.

• 21:16Speaker 03

  It changes people's lives. So. Ah, yeah.

• 21:19Marina Mogilko?

  Do you have another worry that, so you have an app, right? But now we're in the era when anyone can vibe code an app for themselves. What if I go to, like, I'm learning English, I go to Claude and ask, can you gamify my experience? Create me an app that's personalized to me, you know, my interests, you know, my hobbies. Do you worry about that?

• 21:37Speaker 03

  A little bit, but not not really. I mean, this is funny. Inside the company, we never talk about this. This is, you know, we see, again, we see Twitter talking about that or investors talking about that. But we internally don't talk about that. Look, ultimately, I think you can ask AI to make you an app. But making a really good app is not that easy. You know, ultimately, we, for example, have data from hundreds of millions of people about how they learn a language. Every single day, more than a billion exercises are answered on Duolingo, and we use that data to teach you better. And so we just have a lot of data on how to keep you motivated. You know, there's probably two, three thousand language learning apps in the world.

• 22:19Speaker 03

  They've been there, and now with vibe coding, now there will be probably twenty thousand rather than two, three thousand. But at the moment, we're just not particularly concerned. You know, something may happen.

• 22:27Marina Mogilko?

  Is there anything you're concerned, because I'm asking a question about it, because I talked to people and they're like, oh, this is going to be eliminated. There's going to be, we're done. And you're like, it's fine.

• 22:35Speaker 03

  No, I wouldn't say that it's like, all is fine. I do think a lot of things are going to change.

• 22:39Marina Mogilko?

  What do you think is going to change? What are you preparing for?

• 22:42Speaker 03

  I think that

• 22:46Speaker 03

  user expectations are going to change, and I think we have to stay ahead of it. So a good example is, you know, one of the things we have in the app is conversation practice with AI. When we first put that out there, the cost of it was high for us. So we put it behind the most expensive tier. So you have to pay a lot of subscription to get the conversation practice. At the moment, the cost of that has come down enough that we're going to start giving it to much cheaper tiers, and we are probably going to eventually give it away for free. We're doing that because I believe that customers are going to start expecting that. Like, I think there will be apps that start doing this for free. And if we don't do it now, we'll be forced to do it in a few years.

• 23:30Speaker 03

  So that's the type of stuff we're doing to prepare for this, because, again, I think we just need to stay ahead.

• 23:36Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah, so users will expect more.

• 23:37Speaker 03

  I think users will expect more. I think, I think users will expect the apps to be a lot more intelligent, which they should.

• 23:43Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah.

• 23:44Speaker 03

  We're undergoing kind of a platform shift here. And what ends up happening in platform shifts is that the companies who were the winner before the platform shift may or may not remain the winner after that. So I hope that we can do that.

• 23:57Marina Mogilko?

  Also, talking about AI and workforce, I just talked to Gary Vaynerchuk and I really like what he said. Like, there are a lot of rumors of people and news people firing, like the large companies firing people. And they say it's AI. Then Gary said something that struck me because he said like, if I fire a hundred people, my competitor hires them. And they still tend to accept it, but like, I'm dumb for firing them. How do you think about that?

• 24:21Speaker 03

  We have never laid anybody off here. We have never done a layoff, despite what the internet may think.

• 24:27Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah, they misunderstood you.

• 24:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, we've never done a layoff here. I think that it is important to continue hiring people because now, you know, the way I see it is a single employee is just way more productive now than they used to be. So, you know, I get better return on investment by having another employee. So that's how I see it. I mean, my sense, I of course cannot speak about the very specific companies, but my sense is that at least in some of the cases, AI is just an easy.

• 24:58Marina Mogilko?

  PR reason.

• 24:59Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, usually what happens is you over hired. And when you over hired, you're like, okay, because of AI, we're gonna do that. I don't, at least at Duolingo, the way we run the company, I, I am surprised that there are companies doing that because I see no reason.

• 25:16Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah, I talked, I was just at Davos and I was talking to somebody who releases their jobs report. All the layoffs are structural, like over hired during COVID, so it's not really.

• 25:24Speaker 03

  A lot of companies over hired during COVID. And I understand that. And then, you know, if you over hired, you probably don't need these people. But, you know, blaming AI is an, is an easy scapegoat.

• 25:34Marina Mogilko?

  It is, it is. What he just said actually worries me the most. Everyone's talking about like AI replacing jobs and big companies firing people. This is not what's happening here, right? He's actually hiring people, but he's hiring those who know AI. Same for me, where we're just hiring a social media manager. And the questions I was asking them during the interview, how are you gonna automate this? How are you gonna use AI? This process founders are looking for people who utilize AI in their work. And this is actually what my newsletter is about. It's called Future Proof and every week I share what we learned with AI. Like my PR person just vibe coded the whole website with all the transcripts from this podcast. And we share things like that in the newsletter.

• 26:16Marina Mogilko?

  So first of all, subscribe to this channel and second, subscribe to the newsletter. Can we talk about the stock price? Cause I, when I was preparing for this, I saw the 82% collapse of the stock. But what I really want to talk about, cause you explained that to your shareholders. Can you walk me through your mindset as a founder when you make such decisions? Who make your users happy, but they don't make your investors happy?

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• 27:41Speaker 03

  Well, the decision was made by AI, so I'm kidding. That is a joke. That is not what happened. I made that decision. My look.

• 27:50Speaker 03

  We made a conscious shift in how we run the company. I made a conscious shift and certainly the executive team was behind me. But we got to a point where, you know, if you look at over the last five years, we've grown a lot. We became a public company in 2021. We have grown our user base by more, like our active users by more than 5X since then. So we've grown a lot. We've also grown our revenue by a similar amount, etc. We've grown a lot, but two things happened. One is that throughout 2025, we've been still growing, but we were growing slower than we were growing in previous years. So that's one thing that happened, like our user base was growing slower than in previous years.

• 28:32Speaker 03

  The second thing that happened is because of AI, I really do believe that education is going to change quite a bit. And we are a really, you know, important player in the education category. And I want to be in a situation where we're going to lead some of that change through AI. So the combination of I want to lead through that change in AI and our user growth slowing down told me we need to do something important, change how we operate so that we continue grabbing as many users as possible. Now that comes with a cost, which is we are not going to be monetizing our user base as much as we were before. And investors don't love that. But we knew, you know, when we made this decision, we talked to, of course, all internally, our finance team.

• 29:17Speaker 03

  Everybody agreed this is going to decrease our stock price.

• 29:20Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah. Did you expect that number, like 80, 82%?

• 29:23Speaker 03

  I didn't know exactly what to expect, honestly, but I knew that it was going to be a lot.

• 29:27Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah.

• 29:28Speaker 03

  So we knew that, but we made the decision consciously because we think that if we continued operating the way we were operating, you know, we probably could have continued growing a little bit, etc. But at some point, it was going to be capped. Whereas I think if we really try to get a much larger user base, we're going to be a much larger company in the long term. And the thing is, I'm operating this company. I mean, I'm hoping that this is my last job and this is the last thing that I do. And I have many more years of energy left.

• 29:55Marina Mogilko?

  And you never regretted the decision?

• 29:57Speaker 03

  Oh, no, no.

• 29:58Marina Mogilko?

  That is amazing because as a founder, like again, hearing from the market, what they think about your decision is tough. It's tough. Wow.

• 30:07Speaker 03

  I know, I agree. I agree. Look, it's not that it hasn't been tough. I mean, I don't regret the decision because I believe that it is the right decision, but it's, you know. Yeah, it's been tough. I really still, I'm very convinced this is the right decision.

• 30:19Marina Mogilko?

  Do you feel like, because you're founder of publicly traded company, does your mood defend your stock price?

• 30:25Speaker 03

  It used to.

• 30:26Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah.

• 30:26Speaker 03

  When we first went public, it used to. I learned to stop looking, like at least every day. I mean, it's not that I don't, it's not that I don't know the ballpark, but I don't look every day. It used to be the case. The first, the first year or so, it'd be like, it went up by a dollar, it went down by a dollar. Now.

• 30:45Marina Mogilko?

  Like you're used to it?

• 30:46Speaker 03

  I'm used to it.

• 30:47Marina Mogilko?

  As a creator, my self-worth depends on how my last video is performing, which is not right, which is not good for my mental health. I'm learning how to not look at it.

• 30:57Speaker 03

  Uh, well, I will tell you this, uh, the same is true for me, but not with our stock price. It's with daily active users.

• 31:04Marina Mogilko?

  Uh, so you still have the same.

• 31:06Speaker 03

  I just moved it to daily active users. So every, every morning, yes, it's growing and everything, but every morning, I, you know, our daily active user report for the previous day comes at five AM exactly. I am, I wake up very early. Every morning at five oh one AM, my mood gets set.

• 31:22Speaker 03

  It's not good.

• 31:22Marina Mogilko?

  Do you think you should adjust it for some?

• 31:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's not good mentally, but hey, I prefer this than the stock price, though. This, this makes more sense at least.

• 31:30Marina Mogilko?

  This is something you can control.

• 31:31Speaker 03

  This is something I can control and it's an actual measure of the health of this company. The stock price, some of it is, you know, over the long term, it is a good measure of the health of this company. But on a day-to-day basis, you know, we used to, there used to be days that the stock price went down because like oil prices changed. And I'm like, okay.

• 31:49Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah.

• 31:49Speaker 03

  How is that related to me?

• 31:51Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah.

• 31:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 31:52Marina Mogilko?

  Any other mental hacks? Because I'm, I'm talking to you again. You're not really worried about AI. You learned how to make stock price not control your mood. Do you have any mental life hacks that you developed as a founder during these years? What helps you? What do you think? What, what do you do when something goes bad? Do you go on walks to create ideas?

• 32:13Speaker 03

  I mean, don't get me wrong. When something goes bad, I, you know, it gets to me. I, it definitely gets to me. Um, I try to really think about the long term. One of the things that has helped me the most is really thinking about this. This is not just about the company. This is in general. And of course I didn't invent this. This is, a lot of people say this. Thinking about anything, will this matter in six months?

• 32:35Speaker 03

  The vast majority of things will not matter in six months. The vast majority of things. So sometimes I get really upset and I think about it. Will this matter in six months? Some things will, but the vast majority of things will not matter in six months. And that that makes me feel a lot better because I think, okay, I'm upset for no reason. Because this is gonna fizzle out.

• 32:52Marina Mogilko?

  What about other things like marketing or content? Do you think it matters for a founder?

• 32:59Speaker 03

  Depending on what type of company you're doing. Certainly, if you're doing a consumer company, marketing is gonna end up mattering.

• 33:06Marina Mogilko?

  One of the most important things.

• 33:07Speaker 03

  It's gonna end up mattering a lot. I mean, I love our marketing team. They are excellent. They've done some really creative things over the years and have helped us grow a lot. I don't know of any hacks. I mean, ultimately, you need to figure out how to get the word out for your product. I will say, I have seen many people try to cover a bad product with good marketing. And that can only get you so far. The reality is, if you want to really succeed, your product has to be good.

• 33:33Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah.

• 33:34Speaker 03

  I think good product, bad marketing is not very good. But bad product, good marketing is worse.

• 33:40Marina Mogilko?

  Do you have time set for yourself every week when you play with the new AI tools? Or you just discover on the go?

• 33:45Speaker 03

  No, I don't know if I have time that I've set for myself like that. But I mean, basically what happens is I talk to some of the employees. I know who in the company is at the forefront. And I talk to them and then they tell me, oh, you should try that. You should try that. And then I go, you know, I try it and.

• 34:00Marina Mogilko?

  And for someone who's employed at a company and they want to hear advice from a founder whose company is using AI, what would you say to them? How do they start implementing AI in their job?

• 34:10Speaker 03

  Again, it depends a lot on their job. A lot of different tools for a lot of different things. It's not that hard to find the right tool for your job. And then try to use it and see if you can automate parts of your job with it. I mean, a lot of our employees have automated part of parts of their job. Not the whole thing, but parts of their job.

• 34:24Marina Mogilko?

  I like that they're doing this by themselves. That actually says a lot about the way you hire.

• 34:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, people are doing this by themselves.

• 34:30Marina Mogilko?

  And when you're doing interviews now, are you asking about like?

• 34:33Speaker 03

  We do ask. We want people here is to be open to it. I mean, we really are, you know, you do see the people who are just a lot more open to using AI versus the people who are like nah. We want people who are more open. I mean, there's a good thing that somebody said that I pretty much believe AI is not going to take your job. Somebody using AI is going to take your job, and I believe that is mostly true.

• 34:56Marina Mogilko?

  Is 10x more productive?

• 34:57Speaker 03

  This is way more productive.

• 34:58Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah. Do you believe that in 10 years we'll have millions of AI agents in our companies?

• 35:05Speaker 03

  Probably. I mean, what I've learned in the last, especially the last few years, is that predicting the future is has gotten much harder because of AI. If you talked to me 10 years ago, I sort of could have told you what the next year was going to look like or what the next three years were going to look like. It's probably we're going to have a new version of the iPhone. It's going to have a better screen. It's like, it was just not that hard to predict. It was kind of boring. It was not that hard to predict. Whereas now, I'm very bad at predicting what's going to happen.

• 35:31Marina Mogilko?

  But you're not nervous?

• 35:35Speaker 03

  I am nervous not for the immediate term and not necessarily for this company, but I am nervous about. I do believe that some shift is going to happen, and I I'm nervous in that I just don't know what that's going to be. I mean, there's, if you listen to different founders, everybody's telling you things that are pretty self-serving. Like, you know, if if you work in a company that makes AI for lawyers, they'll tell you lawyers are going to disappear. Like, everybody's saying all these self-serving things. I don't know what they are, but I do think something's going to change, and I'm nervous because I don't know what that is.

• 36:04Marina Mogilko?

  Nobody knows.

• 36:05Speaker 03

  Nobody does.

• 36:06Marina Mogilko?

  Go with the flow.

• 36:06Speaker 03

  Nobody does, and I think the best thing you can do is try to adapt as fast as possible. And by the way, I am glad that I'm not having to choose a college career right now because I have no idea what I would choose.

• 36:19Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah, it's even tougher now.

• 36:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, I have no idea what I would choose.

• 36:22Marina Mogilko?

  I have a blitz for you, so I'm going to name five professions and you're gonna make some predictions, what you think.

• 36:28Speaker 03

  Oh, man, predicts, I'm very bad at that.

• 36:31Marina Mogilko?

  But like what your gut tells you, gone in five years, gone in 10 years, or not going anywhere. Let's try. Social media manager.

• 36:39Speaker 03

  You mean for like a company?

• 36:40Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah, like coming up with scripts and.

• 36:43Speaker 03

  I don't think that's going anywhere. That's what I think. I don't.

• 36:47Marina Mogilko?

  Translator?

• 36:48Speaker 03

  I think there will be cer- see, gone is a hard term. Because I think there will still be cases where we're going to want real human translation. But there will be fewer and fewer. But I do think that for certain situations, we're gonna want that.

• 37:02Marina Mogilko?

  Like a premium, premium service.

• 37:04Speaker 03

  It's a very, it's gonna turn into very premium.

• 37:06Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah.

• 37:08Speaker 03

  But for most, you know, everyday uses, yeah, it's gonna go away.

• 37:13Marina Mogilko?

  Okay. Teacher?

• 37:15Speaker 03

  Oh, not going away. I mean.

• 37:17Marina Mogilko?

  Are we gonna have more language teachers, you think?

• 37:19Speaker 03

  Teachers serve a lot of things. And I cannot imagine they're gonna go away. So I have a lot of thoughts about this. I mean, I'm a former teacher. I used to be a professor. I think AI is going to be great at teaching certain parts, certainly giving you a lot of repetition, maybe even adapting to what you learn. But ultimately, teachers are great at putting things into context. They're also really great at

• 37:47Speaker 03

  making people wanna do something. They're very inspiring. When I was growing up, I wanted to be like my teachers. And it's kind of hard to wanna be like an AI. Like, I don't, I don't really wanna be like an AI, but a teacher, they're very inspiring. They're, um, they put into, things into context. I mean, at the moment, I'm pretty certain that if you have a really great teacher, that is better than not having a really, than not having a teacher. Again, not all teachers are equally good, et cetera, et cetera. But by the way, today, computers are not as good at teaching as a really great teacher. That has not yet happened. I think it may start getting to a point where in certain aspects, they're about as good. But I think having a teacher will always be better than not.

• 38:25Marina Mogilko?

  I agree.

• 38:26Speaker 03

  That's what I think. So I, I don't believe that it's going anywhere.

• 38:29Marina Mogilko?

  We're gonna learn with AI, like do some stuff, but we still need someone human to reply to.

• 38:35Speaker 03

  This is what I think. This is what I think. I, I, it's also, it's incredibly hard to keep people motivated. And teachers are, have ways to get people motivated to do certain things. Uh, and, and just, you know, they start noticing things like, oh, that student feels left out. I'm gonna do something about it.

• 38:51Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah.

• 38:51Speaker 03

  This is pretty hard to do with AI. So I, I just can't imagine this is gonna go away, but.

• 38:56Marina Mogilko?

  Makes sense. Strategist. I don't know if you tried AI for strategy, but for me.

• 39:00Speaker 03

  It's good.

• 39:01Marina Mogilko?

  So good. Sometimes it notices things I wouldn't even think about. Like, it was like you were not working on geo for your podcast. I'm like, oh shoot, yes, I am not. And I'm not appearing in any searches.

• 39:14Speaker 03

  I recently asked, the Slack has a Slack bot and sees all my conversations. And I asked it to give me what are my areas for improvement? And it was excellent.

• 39:24Marina Mogilko?

  That's a very good prompt.

• 39:25Speaker 03

  It told me exactly what I like. It basically told me exactly what my three sixty told me, but in a much more concise way. And certain things is really excellent. Um, strategy, I don't know. I don't, I don't know the answer to that question. I, I would say there's probably still some. You know, thing about AI is that it's really good at kind of known things. I still think that there's going to be some amount of human ingenuity necessary for certain types of strategy. So again, it may be that it just becomes a very premium thing.

• 39:56Marina Mogilko?

  Okay, project manager.

• 39:57Speaker 03

  Oh, no, I don't think that's going to go away. In my experience, project managers, if you need multiple people working on something, really good project managers have really good EQ and end up figuring out why a project is not working. And a lot of times the project is not working because that person doesn't get along with that person, like stuff like that. I think that's going to be hard. Again, there's parts of the, of the process that are, that can be automated. But in general, I, I can't imagine that the AI is going to be really good at, you know, sitting two people there and being like, you two are not getting along. You need to start getting along. That seems hard.

• 40:37Marina Mogilko?

  So as someone who's running a company, do you think there, there are any positions that are going away in the near future? Or are they just going to be transformed?

• 40:45Speaker 03

  I think most of it is going to be transformed. And I think, what I think will happen is that some companies, particularly companies that are not growing a lot. Are going to find that they can do the same with fewer people. So it may not be very specific professions, but it will be like, do we need a hundred people doing customer service? Or can we do so with only ten? I think that will have happen. The entire profession going away is kind of hard. I mean, even customer service, where a lot of people say like, ah, customer service is gonna go away. You probably still need a couple of humans there being. Yeah, you probably still need some people to orchestrate it. So I do think that you'll find some companies that will need fewer people over time.

• 41:27Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah, I totally, I totally feel that we wanted to hire someone who would do my scripting for Instagram. But then I'm like, okay, I'll just try Claude. And then I created a Claude project and it was so good. I'm like, okay, I don't need to hire anyone that we can. My social media manager can just do that now. So it's basically doing more with less people. Would you want to start again in two thousand twenty six? If you could, like if you could go back to your, how old you were when you started.

• 41:54Speaker 03

  I probably would start again. But if you ask me to choose between whether I want to start today or fifteen years ago, I'm very happy we started fifteen years ago.

• 42:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, because we, we now got to this point where, you know, with Duolingo, we have, we have a lot of money because we're profitable. We have like, I don't know, more than a billion dollars in the bank. We have a large user base, we have a large install base. So I, I feel pretty good about the situation that we're in. Whereas if we were to start today, boy, I don't know. I mean, it's pretty hard to start today, I think. I mean, I would do it, but I.

• 42:28Marina Mogilko?

  What would you start? Same thing?

• 42:31Speaker 03

  If Duolingo didn't exist, yeah. I mean, given that Duolingo exists, I don't know if I would start that.

• 42:36Marina Mogilko?

  Would it be languages or something else, like teaching people AI or chess?

• 42:39Speaker 03

  No, I would start with languages. Interestingly, I am personally not a major language learning nerd. I'm not, neither is my co-founder Severin.

• 42:50Speaker 03

  What is interesting is that in retrospect, I'm very happy we started with languages. I don't know of another subject, even though we've done a lot of research. I don't know of another subject that gets learned as much. If you look, it's about two billion people in the world learning languages. That's the number. There's any other subject, there's less.

• 43:06Marina Mogilko?

  Not even math?

• 43:07Speaker 03

  Math is a billion. One billion people, it's math is basically, you know, the number of people learning math in the world is.

• 43:14Speaker 03

  Highly, highly correlated, like identical almost as the number of people in the world that are in K through 12 education. There's about a billion. Nobody has the

• 43:22Marina Mogilko?

  So nobody's learning math for pleasure as a hobby?

• 43:24Speaker 03

  I mean, I'm sure there are, but this is a tiny fraction of the population. So math has about a billion, uh, anything, you know, chess is like a hundred million, something like that. Any subject, K through 12, science is a few hundred million. Programming is like 20 million.

• 43:40Marina Mogilko?

  And when it comes to spending money, is

• 43:42Speaker 03

  So language is 60 billion. It depends on who's spending the money.

• 43:46Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah.

• 43:47Speaker 03

  Governments are spending a ton teaching math, but it's governments. And that's hard, that money is hard to get to because governments are, but so there's probably more spend on math, but it's because it's the governments.

• 43:59Marina Mogilko?

  And what about, so consumers, it's still language?

• 44:02Speaker 03

  Consumers, I think so. By the way, of those 2 billion people that are learning language, about 1.8 billion are learning English.

• 44:07Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah.

• 44:07Speaker 03

  So English is just really big.

• 44:09Marina Mogilko?

  It's crazy. I didn't realize that because I thought it would be like math or now AI, maybe software engineering.

• 44:16Speaker 03

  You and I live in a bubble.

• 44:18Marina Mogilko?

  We do. That's true because we got out of their cultures into this bubble and now we're here and forget.

• 44:24Speaker 03

  I mean, maybe programming right now with AI coding, who knows what's gonna happen, but a few years ago, whenever we would meet investors, they would be like, you know, the thing everybody wants to learn is coding.

• 44:33Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah.

• 44:34Speaker 03

  It's about 20 million people in the world that were learning coding. That's it. That's it.

• 44:37Marina Mogilko?

  Maybe they're willing to pay more. Like if you want to take a programming course, you probably pay like a thousand, 2000 because you know you can get a job.

• 44:44Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 44:44Marina Mogilko?

  With language, it's a long, long journey.

• 44:46Speaker 03

  Yes, 100%. Now, if we're an app, this is one of the things, one of the reasons we never did programming. We as an app cannot charge $10,000. It's an app.

• 44:56Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah.

• 44:57Speaker 03

  Like we charge $6 a month. That is how much we charge. Maybe we could charge $20 a month. We can't charge 10,000. So this is why we go for things that have hundreds of millions of people learning them because we need to be a larger business. And so these, these things that require people paying

• 45:12Marina Mogilko?

  Like service business.

• 45:14Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 45:16Marina Mogilko?

  Wow, that's fascinating. Thank you so much. Thank you for being positive in two thousand twenty six. That's really rare.

• 45:23Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 45:23Marina Mogilko?

  Thank you so much.

• 45:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, thank you. I'm nervous, but it's no use to be thinking like the world's gonna.

• 45:29Marina Mogilko?

  Going outside Silicon Valley, you see, like, I was expecting you to say, oh, I use Open Claw to automate all the reports. I'm not writing my emails. You're not saying that. Same Gary Vaynerchuk. I was expecting him to do like, oh, my account is full automation. But he said, I just hired two copywriters.

• 45:47Marina Mogilko?

  I'm like, okay, New York is very different from Silicon Valley, and it's very refreshing. And for everyone who's watching, it's a great idea to start a business like helping people learn AI.

• 45:57Speaker 03

  I think so, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 45:59Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah. Thank you so much.

• 46:01Speaker 03

  Thank you, thank you.

• 46:01Marina Mogilko?

  I mentioned Gary Wee several times throughout this episode. I actually filmed a podcast with him on the same trip when I filmed Lewis. He's thinking positively about everything that's happening right now. So if you're someone who wants to start a business now, but if you're afraid that a bigger company is going to take over, watch that episode. It's going to give you a lot of enthusiasm about starting in two thousand twenty six.

• 46:25Speaker 04

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• 46:56Speaker 05

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