#607: Luis von Ahn, Co-Founder and CEO of Duolingo — How to Be (Truly) Mission-Driven, Monetization Experiments, 10x Growth, Org Chart Iterations for Impacting Metrics, The Intricate Path to an IPO, Best Hiring Practices, Catching Exam Cheaters, The Allure of Toto Toilets, The Future of Duolingo, and How to Stand Out in Your Career

Brought to you by Athletic Greens https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim all-in-one nutritional supplement, Helix Sleep http://helixsleep.com/tim premium mattresses, and LinkedIn Jobs https://linkedin.com/Tim recruitment platform with 800M+ users. Luis von Ahn (@LuisvonAhn https://twitter.com/luisvonahn?lang=en) is an entrepreneur and consulting professor at Carnegie Mellon University, who is considered one of the pioneers of crowdsourcing. He is known for co-inventing CAPTCHAs, being a MacArthur fellow, and selling two companies to Google in his twenties. He is currently the co-founder and CEO of Duolingo https://www.duolingo.com/, a language-learning platform created to bring free language education to the world. With more than 500 million users, it is now the most popular language-learning platform and the most downloaded education app in the world. Luis has been named one of the Brilliant 10 https://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2006-09/fifth-annual-brilliant-10/ by Popular Science, one of the 50 Best Brains in Science https://web-preview.cs.cmu.edu/news/2008/von-ahn-named-one-best-brains-science by Discover, one of the Innovators Under 35 http://www2.technologyreview.com/tr35/profile.aspx? TRID=631 by MIT Technology Review, and one of the 100 Most Creative People in Business https://www.fastcompany.com/most-creative-people/2010 by Fast Company. Luis also won the 2018 Lemelson-MIT prize https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemelson%E2%80%93MIT_Prize, the largest cash prize for invention in the U. S. This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs https://linkedin.com/Tim. Whether you are looking to hire now for a critical role or thinking about needs that you may have in the future, LinkedIn Jobs https://linkedin.com/Tim can help. LinkedIn screens candidates for the hard and soft skills you’re looking for and puts your job in front of candidates looking for job opportunities that match what you have to offer. Using LinkedIn’s active community of more than 800 million professionals worldwide, LinkedIn Jobs https://linkedin.com/Tim can help you find and hire the right person faster. When your business is ready to make that next hire, find the right person with LinkedIn Jobs. And now, you can post a job for free. Just visit LinkedIn.com/Tim https://linkedin.com/Tim. * This episode is also brought to you by Athletic Greens https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim. I get asked all the time, “If you could use only one supplement, what would it be?” My answer is usually AG1 https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim by Athletic Greens https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim, my all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in The 4-Hour Body in 2010 and did not get paid to do so. I do my best with nutrient-dense meals, of course, but AG https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim further covers my bases with vitamins, minerals, and whole-food-sourced micronutrients that support gut health and the immune system. Right now, Athletic Greens https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim is offering you their Vitamin D Liquid Formula free with your first subscription purchase—a vital nutrient for a strong immune system and strong bones. Visit AthleticGreens.com/Tim https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim to claim this special offer today and receive the free Vitamin D Liquid Formula (and five free travel packs) with your first subscription purchase! That’s up to a one-year supply of Vitamin D as added value when you try their delicious and comprehensive all-in-one daily greens product. * This episode is also brought to you by Helix Sleep http://helixsleep.com/tim! Helix was selected as the #1 overall mattress of 2020 by GQ magazine, Wired, Apartment Therapy, and many others. With Helix http://helixsleep.com/tim, there’s a specific mattress to meet each and every body’s unique comfort needs. Just take their quiz—only two minutes to complete http://helixsleep.com/tim—that matches your body type and sleep preferences to the perfect mattress for you. They have a 10-year warranty, and you get to try it out for a hundred nights, risk-free. They’ll even pick it up from you if you don’t love it. And now, Helix is offering up to 200 dollars off all mattress orders plus two free pillows at HelixSleep.com/Tim http://helixsleep.com/tim. * [05:03] Why the Duolingo owl is green [06:47] The core cause behind Duolingo’s creation, and how Duolingo has evolved over the years [12:48] Duolingo’s monetization efforts that didn’t quite pan out [21:06] After initial reluctance, how was the Duolingo workforce convinced monetization needed to happen? [25:06] As machine-driven translation services get more sophisticated, will human beings still seek to learn other languages via Duolingo? [29:31] The most pursued/influential languages in the Duolingo system currently [39:14] The development of Duolingo’s org chart [45:40] Why Duolingo uses a daily metric [48:33] Book recommendations [50:26] Luis’ most worthwhile investments [52:20] New beliefs, behaviors, or habits [55:20] Recent life-changing purchases [1:02:39] What Luis’ updated 2022 billboard might say [1:06:14] What Luis means when he refers to Duolingo’s “mission,” and how the company’s long view affects decision making [1:12:34] How Duolingo hires good candidates for the long haul [1:18:50] Why and how Duolingo went public [1:25:42] The biggest challenges Luis faces as CEO of a public company [1:30:50] Duolingo is expanding to teach more than languages [1:36:18] The Duolingo English Test: proficiency testing from home accepted by 4,200 academic programs across the world [1:39:51] How Luis’ expertise at catching cheaters during his time as a professor at Carnegie Mellon makes Duolingo products more trustworthy as accredited sources [1:43:39] The brief conversation with Luis’ personal trainer that changed his routine breakfast — to a different routine breakfast [1:44:38] Advice to young, driven people entering the working world [1:48:07] How Luis has become better at saying “No.” [1:49:56] Luis’ request of the audience and parting thoughts * For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show http://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast https://tim.blog/podcast/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description. 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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tim Ferriss?

  This podcast episode is brought to you by Helix Sleep. Sleep is super important to me. In the last few years, I've come to conclude it is the end all be all, that all good things, good mood, good performance, good everything seem to stem from good sleep. So I've tried a lot to optimize it. I've tried pills and potions, all sorts of different mattresses, you name it. And for the last few years, I've been sleeping on a Helix Midnight Luxe mattress. I also have one in the guest bedroom and feedback from friends has always been fantastic. It's something that they comment on. Helix Sleep has a quiz, takes about two minutes to complete, that matches your body type and sleep preferences to the perfect mattress for you. With Helix, there's a specific mattress

• 0:43Tim Ferriss?

  for each and every body. That is your body, also your taste. So let's say you sleep on your side in like a super soft bed, no problem. Or if you're a back sleeper who likes a mattress that's as firm as a rock, they've got a mattress for you too. Helix was selected as the number one best overall mattress pick of 2020 by GQ Magazine, Wired, Apartment Therapy, and many others. Just go to helixsleep.com/tim, take their two-minute sleep quiz, and they'll match you to a customized mattress that will give you the best sleep of your life. They have a 10-year warranty, and you get to try it out for 100 nights, risk-free. They'll even pick it up from you if you don't love it. And now, my dear listeners, Helix is offering

• 1:21Tim Ferriss?

  up to $200 off of all mattress orders and two free pillows at helixsleep.com/tim. These are not cheap pillows either, so getting two for free is an upgraded deal. So that's up to $200 off and two free pillows at helixsleep.com/tim. That's H-E-L-I-X, sleep.com/tim for up to $200 off. So, check it out one more time. Helix, H-E-L-I-X, sleep.com/tim.

• 1:58Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time what I would take if I could only take one supplement. The answer is invariably Athletic Greens. I view it as all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it, in fact, in The Four Hour Body. This is more than 10 years ago, and I did not get paid to do so. With approximately 75 vitamins, minerals, and whole-food sourced ingredients, you'd be very hard-pressed to find a more nutrient-dense and comprehensive formula on the market. It has multivitamins, multimineral, greens complex, probiotics and prebiotics for gut health, an immunity formula, digestive enzymes, adaptogens, and much more. I usually take it once or twice a day, just to make sure I've covered my bases if I miss anything I'm not aware of.

• 2:42Tim Ferriss?

  Of course, I focus on nutrient-dense meals to begin with, that's the basis. But Athletic Greens makes it easy to get a lot of nutrition when whole foods aren't readily available. From travel packets, I always have them in my bag when I'm zipping around. Right now, Athletic Greens is giving my audience a special offer on top of their all-in-one formula, which is a free vitamin D supplement and five free travel packs with your first subscription purchase. Many of us are deficient in vitamin D. I've found that true for myself, which is usually produced in our bodies from sun exposure. So adding a vitamin D supplement to your daily routine is a great option for additional immune support. Support your immunity, gut health, and energy by visiting athleticgreens.com/tim.

• 3:25Tim Ferriss?

  You'll receive up to a year's supply of vitamin D and five free travel packs with your subscription. Again, that's athleticgreens.com/tim.

• 3:36Speaker 01

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half-mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question?

• 3:43Speaker 02

  No, we're just sitting in a perfect time.

• 3:46Speaker 01

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 3:59Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. My guest today is Luis Von Ahn. You can find him on Twitter @Luis, L-U-I-S-V-O-N-A-H-N. Luis is an entrepreneur and consulting professor at Carnegie Mellon University, who is considered one of the pioneers of crowdsourcing. He is known for co-inventing CAPTCHAS, being a MacArthur Fellow, and selling two companies to Google in his twenties. He is currently the co-founder and CEO of Duolingo, a language learning platform created to bring free language education to the world. With more than 500 million users, it is now the most popular language learning platform and the most downloaded education app in the world.

• 4:40Tim Ferriss?

  Luis has been named one of the Brilliant 10 by Popular Science, one of the 50 Best Brains in Science by Discover, one of the Innovators Under 35 by MIT Technology Review, and one of the 100 Most Creative People in Business by Fast Company. Luis also won the 2018 Lemelson MIT Prize, the largest cash prize for invention in the United States. Luis, it has been a while since we spoke. Last, it was 2016 when we had a conversation on this podcast. Welcome back. It's nice to see you.

• 5:11Speaker 03

  Thank you for having me, Tim.

• 5:13Tim Ferriss?

  And I thought we could start with just a few bits of trivia, a little bit of history. And why don't we start with why the Duolingo owl is green? Would you mind just explaining that for people?

• 5:29Speaker 03

  Hopefully, most people have seen the Duolingo owl. It's our mascot. First of all, it's an owl because in most Western countries, owls represent knowledge. Turns out, this is just not true at all in Asia. And now that we've been expanding to Asia, people ask us, like, why the hell are you using an owl? Owls are just kind of vicious animals. But, okay, it's an owl, and it's green, and it is a ridiculous reason why it's green. When we were getting started, my co-founder Severin, who's an amazing guy, his last name is Hacker, Severin Hacker.

• 5:55Tim Ferriss?

  Best name ever.

• 5:58Speaker 03

  I still think it's made up. He swears it's not. This is a computer science person whose last name is Hacker. But he, you know, we were getting started and we had a design team that was that was working on our on our logo and everything. And we thought we wanted a mascot. We thought it was important to have a mascot because, well, it would kind of help people learn and it would make our brand iconic, et cetera. That turned out to be true. And we came up with the idea of an owl. And then, you know, we were just talking about things and then Severin was not very involved in the design process at all. And at some point, the designers asked him, well, is there anything you care about in terms of design? He said, look, there's only one thing I care about. And it is that I hate the color green. And so we thought it would be funny if he was the co-founder of a company where most of our colors were green.

• 6:43Speaker 03

  And he's had to live with that for, you know, 10 years.

• 6:46Tim Ferriss?

  All right. And we will try to not replicate too much of the first conversation, but I think a little connective tissue and context for folks would be helpful. So I'm going to try to do a quick recap of a few points and I want you to correct anything that I get wrong. And certainly add in any color that you think would be helpful. So you were born and raised in Guatemala and you were raised by two parents, both medical doctors. You ended up, I think it started with receiving a Commodore 64, much to your disappointment, instead of a Nintendo, becoming involved with taking things apart and learning computer science.

• 7:32Tim Ferriss?

  And flash forward, you, and skipping a lot of steps here, but had developed a technology in a company, Recaptcha, which after about a year and a half sold to Google, most people have filled out a captcha or recaptcha to prove they are not a robot or a bot. And a year and a half later. This Severin hacker who you've already mentioned, who was then a PhD student of yours, was looking for a PhD project. And that led to a conversation, including the observation that, number one, language, or I should say, education, was important to both you and that in your home country of Guatemala, education was, in a sense,

• 8:16Tim Ferriss?

  an obstacle to overcoming socioeconomic barriers and to elevating your life because of the costs involved. So the rich were able to educate themselves and sort of perpetuate that cycle of wealth, whereas the poor were not. And there were many, many different facets of this, which led then to what would later become Duolingo. Is that roughly accurate?

• 8:41Speaker 03

  That's exactly right. That's exactly right. We can wrap up now. We're done.

• 8:45Tim Ferriss?

  We're done. All right. And you and I, I don't know when you and I, I can't recall offhand when we first connected. I want to say it was somewhere between 2010 and 2012. It must have been.

• 8:58Speaker 03

  I think it was around 2000. It was around 2010 or 2011.

• 9:01Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, so right in that range. And early, early days with respect to Duolingo. And the last time we spoke, you had, this was in 2016, last time we spoke on the podcast, roughly 60 employees. So could you just give us a then and now comparison of Duolingo then, Duolingo now, or what the biggest differences are?

• 9:25Speaker 03

  We've grown a lot as a company. Of course, we now have about 600 employees. So of course, 10x in employees. Back then, we were a privately held company, VC funded. We are now a publicly traded company. That was a big milestone for us. Another big thing that changed between 2016 and now is we really figured out how to monetize Duolingo. When we launched Duolingo, the thing we cared the most about is that it was a free way to learn languages. And at first, we just weren't concerned too much about figuring out how to make money. And the way we supported ourselves was through venture capital. We just kept on raising, you know, more and more venture capital. And at the time, the prevailing wisdom was, hey, don't worry too much about making money. Just grow your users. And this is what we did.

• 10:07Speaker 03

  And the way we grew our users, by the way, is not through marketing, because since we weren't making any money, we thought it was kind of a waste of our money to spend to acquire users if we weren't making money on the other side. So the way we grew our users was just by making the product better and better, and it grew through word of mouth. And I think one thing that happened is around 2015, 2016, we had raised a bunch of venture capital. I mean, probably around a hundred million dollars total at the time. And we still weren't monetizing at all, but we had grown to a pretty good amount of users, active users. We raised a round of funding from, at the time it was called Google Capital, and now it's called capital G. And the partner that was on our board, Leila Sturdy, took me out to a bar.

• 10:51Speaker 03

  And she said, listen, you've been raising a lot of capital and your valuation keeps going up and up. At the time, I think we were valued at something like half a billion dollars or something. But right now, you're just raising money from Google. And let me tell you, there is no bigger fool. Like, you're not going to find another bigger fool to raise money at a higher valuation with no revenue. You got to figure out how to make money. She gave me enough drinks that convinced me to promise her that next time we spoke in six months, I would have figured out how to make money. And so I went back and I'm like, all right, everybody, we got to figure out how to make money. The easiest way to make money when you're teaching somebody is just to charge them to learn. That's kind of how education monetizes.

• 11:32Speaker 03

  It was very important for us that we didn't do that because the mission of our company was really, you know, related to giving access to education to everybody for free. So we're a little constrained here. In the end, we ended up finding a monetization model that worked out really well, which is this freemium model that is similar to what the dating apps do or what Spotify does, which is you don't have to pay, but you may have to see some ads at the end of a lesson. We make money from the ads. And then if you don't like the ads, you can pay us to subscribe to a premium version of Duolingo. And then we turn off the ads and we give you a few extra perks. And that combo worked out really well. I mean, well enough that that is basically what we used to IPO. You know, it has grown to hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue.

• 12:15Speaker 03

  And so that worked out really well. And we're also very proud that because of that Duolingo, you know, it used to be that Duolingo was the most downloaded app in the education category. It still is, but now it's also the highest top grossing app in the education category. So make more money than all of their education apps. And we're very proud that you can still use Duolingo entirely for free. So even though, you know, most other education apps, you have to pay to use them, ours, in fact, something like 97% of our users, of our active users use Duolingo for free, still we make more money than all of the education app. So, so we're very proud of that. The monetization has, was a big shift in our company.

• 12:49Tim Ferriss?

  I have questions about monetization and then I want to come back to Leila and talk about org chart, maybe another conversation, maybe fewer drinks.

• 12:59Speaker 03

  I'm happy to talk. Also, you know, Leila is one of my favorite people. Leila is awesome.

• 13:03Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. So we're going to come back to Leila and give her more credit.

• 13:07Tim Ferriss?

  Do you remember what types of drinks she was feeding you? Do you have any idea? Or did the memory go out the window?

• 13:13Speaker 03

  You know, I don't know that much. Honestly, I don't know.

• 13:16Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, no problem, no problem.

• 13:17Speaker 03

  It was at a bar, it was at a bar near the Duolingo office. It's about a block away from the Duolingo office. Kelly's, Kelly's Bar.

• 13:24Tim Ferriss?

  Kelly's Bar. All right. It's the scene of the crime. So we're going to come back, we're going to come back to that. I wanted to return to monetization and I'll just mention to folks as foreshadowing, the reason I'm interested in talking about the org chart is because, again, this will test my memory of the first conversation, but as I recall, when you sold Recapcha to Google, you had maybe six, seven or eight employees, something like that. Is that roughly?

• 13:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, around 10.

• 13:50Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Okay. Around 10 employees.

• 13:51Speaker 03

  About 10.

• 13:52Tim Ferriss?

  Right. So let's, let's round it, round it to 10. And then for a while, I want to say maybe into the 30 to 40 employee range, you had a very flat organizational structure, so to speak, effectively a lack of hierarchy at Duolingo. And although you had a lot of experience with computer science, certainly, and product development and thinking about the technical side of things. Building a company of 600 people was not one of them at that point in time.

• 14:23Speaker 03

  I had no previous knowledge of how to do this.

• 14:25Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, right. So that's why I want to come back to the org chart. But first, on the monetization side, what are some of the things that you tried that didn't quite work? And why did they not work? Just in terms of whether primary or ancillary models? Because that I recall as someone who is one of the pioneers of crowdsourcing, you certainly have come up with many different ideas for how you might approach this.

• 14:53Speaker 03

  The first thing we tried, and this is before the Leila talk, and it was just very early on, we tried this. And it was a really clever idea, but ultimately, I just don't think it's a very good way to monetize. Very early on, when we had started Duolingo, what we said we would do is, look, there were all these people that were learning a language on Duolingo for free. We thought, rather than giving them ads or charging them, we would get them to do some work for us in exchange of the learning. And so the idea was the following, in fact, we built this and it worked. The idea was the following. Imagine you were a Spanish speaker who was learning English on Duolingo. You know, you would learn for free, et cetera. At the end of your lesson, we would say, hey, you just practiced food words. Do you want to practice with a real world news article about food?

• 15:39Speaker 03

  That is in English, you're learning English. And to practice, can you help us translate that into your native language of Spanish? And, you know, we would give you like a paragraph of that or something. And then we would give many people the same paragraph and try to get them to translate it. And it turned out that actually got really good translations. So what ended up happening is we signed a contract with CNN, where CNN would send us all their news in English. Then our users, to practice their English, would translate those articles into Spanish. And then, you know, we kind of combined all of the different translations into one translation. And we had all this kind of multi-step process to clean up the translation, et cetera. And then we would send back a translated version to CNN into Spanish that they could post in their Spanish site, and they would pay us for that.

• 16:24Speaker 03

  So we signed a contract with CNN, we signed a contract with BuzzFeed, and this worked. And it sounds very clever. The problem is that as a monetization technique, first of all, translation is a bad business to be in. Computers are getting better and better at it. And even without computers, it's just kind of a race to the bottom in terms of price, because you can always just find somebody else to do it cheaper for you. So that was kind of one thing. And then we just, we just ended up realizing this was not an easy way to make too much money. The other thing is, we started realizing, because that's where the money was coming from, we started realizing we were spending a lot of our thinking time and a lot of our development time on making sure the translations were accurate. Whereas, to begin with, what we wanted to do was make an education company. And we wanted to spend most of our time teaching better, rather than cleaning up translations.

• 17:08Speaker 03

  And so, at some point, very early in the company, we weren't making very much. We were making, I mean, it's like thousands of dollars, not a lot of money. We decided, we took this, this hard decision, this was, must have been like 2013 or something. We took the hard decision to stop that. We're like, we're not gonna do that, and we're not gonna worry about making money. And we're just gonna do venture capital for a while, like, don't worry about it. So that was one. The other one is after the Leila conversation, when we needed to really figure out how to make a lot of money. Now, the thing is, when you have a half a billion dollar valuation, you gotta make a lot of money. Like, when you're making zero, you can't make it so that you're only gonna make a hundred thousand dollars a year. Like, for a half a, to justify a half a billion dollar valuation, you have to make- You can't turn it into a lifestyle business for yourself? No, no, you gotta be making, you know, at least tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue to have that.

• 17:51Speaker 03

  So, we thought, okay, the first thing we thought, by the way, when, when Leila said you have to monetize, I went back to the, to the company, and, you know, at the time, we had maybe sixty, seventy employees. And I said, okay, well, we had to figure out how to make money. And the first question everybody had was like, why? I was like, well, companies make money, that's how they support themselves. And they're, and they're like, well, we've been fine without that. Then I had to explain, you just cannot raise venture capital forever. Then, it's like, okay, fine, we understand, we have to make money, so how are we gonna do it? And then I would say, well, you know, maybe we can put an ad at the end of our license. And they're like, no, no, no, ads are evil, don't, don't put an ad. Okay, have a subscription now. You can't charge people. You can't, you can't do that. And so it's like the whole company was basically against monetizing.

• 18:32Speaker 03

  And it took us about six months to finally convince everybody that monetization was not a bad thing. And that in reality, what it would allow is if we could make a lot of money, we could use that to invest it and to teach better. And people actually finally understood, but it took a while. And in that time, at some point, one of the first few things that changed was people were like, okay, you know what? We could do ads. We could do ads, but they can't be the crappy ads that are all out there. Let's do a clever idea. And the clever idea was, and it's a great idea. We just never made it work. And I don't know if at some point I do want to go back to it. Can we show ads in the language that the people are learning? So if you're learning Spanish, could we show you some ads in Spanish? And I think that's a really good idea.

• 19:13Speaker 03

  Because it's, it's kind of like a, like a win-win situation, like the person wants to actually hear the ad or see the ad. They practice and then we make money off of it. There's one big problem for that, which is that usually companies, their budget doesn't work that way. So for example, in the U S and you're advertising to American consumers. Coca-Cola, I'm sure has an ad in German, but they just do not want to show the German ad. That's just not what they want to show because they're like, no, no, no, no. In German, we have a very different narrative. That's just not what we want to do. We want to show the American ad. And we're like, ah, can we show the German ad? That just, we never got it to work. I thought it was a good idea, never got it to work. In the end, now we reverted to showing standard

• 19:54Speaker 03

  app ads that we show that are, you know, what you're supposed to get if you are in, in the U S, you get the English.

• 20:00Tim Ferriss?

  May I, just because I'm over-caffeinated, just throw something out there really quickly, which is,

• 20:04Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 20:05Tim Ferriss?

  And I'm sure with your technical abilities, you could figure this out, or, or the advertiser could just supply the raw text, of course, for closed captioning that they would use otherwise, but you could show the translated subtitles in the target language, say of German.

• 20:22Speaker 03

  Yeah. And in fact, that is a good idea and we probably should that at some point. There's one other complication with this, which is right now, the ads we show, they're programmatic ads that come from like Google and Facebook. We show Google and Facebook ads and Google and Facebook are the ones who serve us the ads. If we wanted to do something like this, we would have to have our own ad sales force. So we would have to go and contact companies and ask them to do that. That's doable and probably you can make more money per ad impression if you do that. But it's the pain in the ass of having your, basically, an ad sales team. Because our monetization, particularly subscription, has done so well. We haven't felt the need to do that. I mean, at some point, maybe we'll do it, but we just, we just haven't felt the need to do that.

• 21:06Tim Ferriss?

  So I want to give you credit where credit is due on, I'm sure there are many things I could give you credit for. Well, one is a relentless focus and ability to refocus. And I want to mention an article for folks, it's very short, that they might find interesting. It's called "The Top Idea in Your Mind." It's by Paul Graham, which relates back to the point you made of realizing that you're not in the business of tidying up the last 5% of translations that you have sourced from your users. And in fact, you're an education company first and foremost.

• 21:45Tim Ferriss?

  To being able to say no to a good, even a profitable, activity in order to remain focused, just as you would not want to necessarily build your internal sales team, right? Because it would just detract from the focus and resources. I want to return with a question about the months it took to convince the team, the employees, to get behind monetization of some form or another. How did you do that? And how much of it was like, here is the mission? Because presumably, they care about the mission of the company, but they also care about the value of their equity and want liquidity at some point.

• 22:29Tim Ferriss?

  So you could just say like, hey, guys, if we keep raising venture capital, like, there might be secondary sales, but at some point, both the investors and employees will want to be able to cash in on at least some of the value of their equity. That's part of the reason you came to this company, rather than going to work for someone else. What was the conversation or the process of persuasion?

• 22:52Speaker 03

  You know, it's interesting. The first few employees that we hired at Duolingo, by the way, I think a lot of it has to do with... With the fact that we have a really good company culture, but also that we're in Pittsburgh. Our employee churn is very low. Employees stay for a very long time at Duolingo. So the majority of people that started at Duolingo ten years ago, they're still around. Yeah. And the thing about these people was the first few employees that we hired were people from Carnegie Mellon University. Because I was a professor there and I basically, I just knew who the best students were. And I'm like, you, you want to come work for us? All these people at the time had offers for, you know, the usual suspects, you know, Google and Facebook and the usual suspects. And at the time, we had just raised our Series A, but we could not compete salary wise with Google or Facebook or anything like that.

• 23:36Speaker 03

  Now we can compete, you know, our salaries are comparable to Google or Facebook, but back then we just couldn't. So the people that took a job with Duolingo were taking a major pay cut, sometimes like a fifty percent pay cut, like the half. We're paying half the salary that they would have gotten at Google and they had offers at Google. And they took the job and the reason they took the job was they really cared about the mission. So, you know, I like to tell Severin and I care about the mission. These first few employees were zealots. They were like, look, this is the main thing that matters to me. And so these people for years have been kind of the guardians of the culture. And so Duolingo was a very mission driven company and of course it has to do with Severin and I. But I think it also has to do with this first few employees who just really care and they're still around.

• 24:20Speaker 03

  And so when we were starting to monetize, the discussion was really never about like, hey, you could make a lot of money off of, you know, your shares or whatever that. That that just didn't resonate all that well. What ended up resonating the most was, hey, look, right now we have about sixty employees. We could hire way more employees if we can make a lot of money. And the majority of them can be working on improving how well we teach. And that really resonated and it became true. I mean, today, most of our employees are actually working on making our product better in terms of how well we teach, how engaging it is. And it is because we make hundreds of millions of dollars per year, we use that to fuel the mission. So I think, I think there was just a shift in thinking that really worked and we believe it.

• 25:04Speaker 03

  I mean, I think the company now believes that.

• 25:06Tim Ferriss?

  I'm glad I asked. I'm glad I asked. These are, these stories matter. And I don't know the answers, by the way, if people listening, I mean, Luis has been busy, to put it mildly, so we don't always catch up very, very frequently. So this is, this is an excuse for us to catch up as well. Let me ask you a question that I would ask if we were just having drinks over dinner. Would not ask you to make any promises about monetization to me. But the broader question, since you mentioned computers getting better at translation. So this doesn't directly relate to Duolingo, I don't think, but it might in some indirect way. And for people who don't know a bit of the history, if we look back at, say, recaptcha, part of what fascinated me about recaptcha is like, all right, if you, and I think you

• 25:48Tim Ferriss?

  did, run the kind of basic arithmetic on how many human hours were going into verifying that each individual is not in fact a bot, began to wonder, is there a way to put these human hours to work for some benevolent purpose or a positive purpose? And at least one facet of that ended up being helping to digitize books. So using, using human eyes and then just kind of law of large numbers to ultimately get a good transcription of digital books that machines were having a hard time with. What are some of the most

• 26:29Tim Ferriss?

  interesting things or interesting developments that you are seeing with respect to crowdsourcing versus just raw computing power or new technological, pure kind of machine-driven technologies?

• 26:45Speaker 03

  Well, you know, computers are just getting a lot better at things compared to 10 years ago, 20 years ago. AI is just a lot better. For example, at this point, it used to be that captchas were mainly these distorted characters. At this point, computers are almost as good, if not better than humans, at reading these distorted characters. So showing some distorted characters is not a good test to distinguish humans from computers anymore. If you've seen with recaptcha lately, what they show you is these kind of images of like, find the traffic light, or find the stop sign, or find- What they're doing there is they're crowdsourcing things for like mapping software or self-driving cars. Where self-driving cars may take a lot of pictures for things and they may see ninety percent, I don't know the exact fraction,

• 27:28Speaker 03

  but they may see ninety percent of traffic lights and realize that it's a traffic light. But for some of them, they just can't quite tell. And so what Recapture is doing is it's taking some of the things where the computer's not super sure about, and it's getting people to kind of tell them. That's helping to improve the technology. That's something, you know, I I really like that application. I I think it's it's it's worked out pretty well. So that's helping to improve technology. Now, in case of language translation, that's gotten pretty good. I mean, if you if you try it, and it's kind of good enough to go and if you're gonna go to Germany or something, it's kind of good enough to like, if you don't know any German, to just kind of, you know, you speak to it and it speaks out something and it it you sort of can communicate. You know, people have asked us about Duolingo, it's like, well, are people still gonna need to learn a language, given that translation is getting better and better?

• 28:11Speaker 03

  And it's one of those where like, I don't think this is gonna affect us at all. There are these use cases, like if you're gonna go on a business trip for two days and you really have no interest in learning a language, yeah, sure. Use Google Translate or use whatever whatever it is you you you need to use. But there's a couple of things. First of all, no matter how perfect the translation is, there's this thing that happens that there's always going to be a delay, even if it's like super computing power, etc., because word order changes. So German is a good example. In German, usually the verb is at the end. So a German sentence, the way you would say it kind of in English is like, I did something yesterday. I did it really fast. I did it with my friend and what I did was run.

• 28:51Speaker 03

  And so you kind of have to wait until the verb comes out to start saying it in English, because in English you would say, I ran with my friend yesterday really fast. So there's always this kind of like pause that makes conversations pretty awkward, like you just, this is just, you can't really live your life that way. And the majority of language learning is either to learn English and actually say, move to the US or actually learn English for for business reasons, etc., you actually want to learn English. And then the other big chunk is hobby. And, you know, people are still gonna learn as a hobby, because it's the same reason why we learn, you know, all kinds of things that computers could do really well, like music.

• 29:26Tim Ferriss?

  So I just don't think that's gonna affect us as a company in terms of language learning. Yeah, I don't either. I mean, I have been incredibly impressed specifically with Google Translate with respect to, in my case, East Asian languages, because I do still communicate a fair amount in Japanese and to a lesser extent Mandarin, but the translation specifically in Japanese has improved tremendously from even It's good. Yeah, yeah, it's incredible. You want to talk about the sentence construction and word order changing, certainly in Japanese, that is true, because it's just for people who are interested in this kind of thing, but don't know very much about it. If you have, say,

• 30:05Tim Ferriss?

  "I eat the apple" in English, subject, verb, object. In Japanese, generally speaking, it's gonna be subject, object, verb. So, "I the apple eat." "I to the school go," that kind of thing. And it's improved a lot, but there is that delay, as you mentioned. And if I look at the, I'm looking at duolingo.com/courses right now, and this may not be the best representation of use on the platform, but I'm curious to know who the primary users are in the pie chart, if you're just gonna break down the top few categories, and what

• 30:49Tim Ferriss?

  they're learning. And I was surprised to look at Courses for English Speakers. It looks like Spanish is number one. Okay, not too surprised there. Then French, okay, interesting. Very interesting, because French is certainly spoken by the French diaspora and other places, not just in France, but It's a result of colonialism. Right, exactly. So that's what I figured. French is a result of colonialism. Colonialism. But then you have Japanese, Korean, German, Italian, Hindi, Chinese. So Hindi, Chinese, I think specifically Chinese, I would have expected to be a little larger, and I'm astonished that Japanese and Korean, especially Korean, because I could

• 31:30Tim Ferriss?

  even chalk up Japanese to like nerdy tech folks who are Japanophiles and love Japanimation and so on. I could chalk up some of that to that, which may not have any accuracy to it at all. But then Korea It's 100% accurate. Okay, all right, great. And then Korean, though, I was like, why Korean? Why is Korean number four? K-pop. Ah, K-pop.

• 31:55Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 31:55Speaker 03

  K-pop is humongous. I mean, K-pop and also Korean TV shows, you know, on Netflix, there's just been Korean entertainment is really gaining a lot.

• 32:05Tim Ferriss?

  Yep, Squid Game.

• 32:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, Squid Game, that movie, what was it called, the one that won the Oscar?

• 32:10Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, I know the one you're talking about.

• 32:11Speaker 03

  Basement, a parasite, parasite. So stuff like that, it's just Korean influence just keeps growing and growing. And so it is interesting, more people on Duolingo are learning Japanese or Korean than Chinese. And Chinese is an interesting one. There's the size of the language in terms of native speakers.

• 32:26Tim Ferriss?

  And in this case, we're talking about Mandarin, right?

• 32:29Speaker 03

  Mandarin, Mandarin Chinese, you know, it's the largest language in terms of native speakers. And then there's a different number, which is the number of people who want to learn it. We have a pretty good idea of the people who want to learn it because when we offer it on Duolingo, we can see the people, you know, how many people actually learn it. There are some that are flipped. I mean, Chinese is flipped in that, Mandarin Chinese is flipped in that. There's a lot of people who speak it natively, not that many people are learning it. So I don't know exactly off the top of my head, but about one percent of our active users are learning Chinese, which I would have expected it to be higher. And in particular, part of the reason why I would have expected it to be higher is because the circles that we move in, I assume they're similar to the circles you move in, it's kind of educated people, tech people, they always have their kids learning Chinese.

• 33:10Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, this is the thing. This is the thing. You go to Palo Alto, it's like every other parent has their kids in bilingual nursery school or whatever. Yeah.

• 33:18Speaker 03

  So you think the whole world's learning Chinese, but this is actually not the case. I think if you go, if you go anywhere in middle America, you know, the school only offers Spanish.

• 33:26Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 33:26Speaker 03

  Like that's just to begin with. And so this is, and I think there's this a number of reasons, but I think probably the biggest reason for Chinese that not as many people are learning it is it's just a very hard language to learn. And people know it and they're like, ah, it's hard. So in the US, our top languages are exactly as you said, Spanish, which makes sense. We're very close to Mexico and Latin America and it's just a very large language. French, which I think is a beautiful language and everything, but I think a lot of it, that one is the opposite of Chinese in that the number of people learning it versus the number of people who are native speakers. You know, it's just a lot of interest for French, given the number of native speakers. And then Chinese and Korean are pretty high up and Italian and German. Now, you know, you were asking about the types of users in Duolingo. I think we have two big buckets of users.

• 34:10Speaker 03

  In my head, I classify them as kind of two big buckets. One big bucket, which is about, call it fifty to sixty percent of our users, is people learning English. These are people who are usually not in the US. I mean, some of them in the are in the US, but they're usually not in the US. They're usually, you know, in a non-English speaking country and they're learning English. The reason they're learning English is they actually want to learn English. Then the reason is because they want to get ahead in life. So either they want to get into a better educational institution or they just want to get a better job. The thing about English that is so magical is that anywhere you live, if you speak English, just by speaking English, you can make more money. It's like direct. So for example, if you used to be a waiter, now you can be a waiter at a hotel, makes more money. If you used to be a personal assistant, now you can be a personal assistant

• 34:55Speaker 03

  for somebody in a multinational corporation or something. So it's just knowing English just gives you better opportunities in life. And it's by far the most learned language in the world, certainly by far the most learned language on Duolingo. And those people are very committed. And then the other big bucket of people are people who are English speakers already, who are learning another language. So think of this as a person in the US who's learning Spanish or French, et cetera. They're pretty different. It's more of a hobby. Obviously, I'm generalizing here. I mean, there are some people, obviously, who need to move to Spain and they're going to learn Spanish for that. But for the majority, it's kind of more of a hobby that they're learning Japanese or Spanish or whatever. The funny thing about these people is when you ask them, what would you do if Duolingo went away?

• 35:39Speaker 03

  The most common answer is I would spend more time on Instagram. They're not that committed. They're like, ah, you know what? I like it. The reason I'm learning Spanish on Duolingo is because I used to play a lot of whatever Clash Royale or a lot of some game and it was a complete waste of my time. Now I'm using Duolingo, it's pretty fun. And at the very least, at the end of the day, I'm learning some Spanish. They're an interesting group of people. The other thing to say is in the US, 80% of our users were not learning a language before Duolingo. So we're completely growing the market. That is not true in a country like Brazil, where people are mainly learning English. These people were learning English before Duolingo. They'll continue learning English even if Duolingo were to go away. These are the two big groups of people, I'd say.

• 36:26Tim Ferriss?

  Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs. It's summer 2022 and many small business owners are busier than ever. Finding the right candidate to join your business can be the leverage you need to be able to ignore the trivial, delegate some of the urgent stuff and focus on longer term strategic decisions. The big picture. LinkedIn Jobs makes it easier to grow your team by helping you find the people you want to interview faster and for free. Create a free job post in minutes on LinkedIn Jobs to reach your network and beyond to the world's largest professional network of more than 800 million people. Then add your job and the purple hashtag hiring frame to your LinkedIn profile to spread the word that you're hiring so your network can help you find the right people.

• 37:11Tim Ferriss?

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• 37:47Tim Ferriss?

  I would love to just get a fact check if you know here. I mean, maybe the math is so easy that it's almost self evident, but I recall someone saying to me, which kind of makes sense, although I haven't done the math on it, that there are more people who speak English or are learning English in China as Chinese nationals than all of the native speakers of English in the world combined.

• 38:13Speaker 03

  That's probably close.

• 38:14Tim Ferriss?

  Close to true. Yeah, I would imagine that that might be something like India as well. I mean, although you do have the British history, so maybe there are.

• 38:21Speaker 03

  It's probably close. Native speakers of English, let's think about that. That's 300 millionish in the US, but then there's the UK too.

• 38:28Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 38:29Speaker 03

  And you know, Australia, Canada, etc. They probably combined at another hundred million-ish.

• 38:33Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 38:34Speaker 03

  So very rough numbers here. We're talking about four hundred million-ish.

• 38:37Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it seems like China's probably not quite there.

• 38:40Speaker 03

  Well, it could, but there's a big, big but here. They may all be claiming to be learning English. And in reality, they may be learning English, but the learning outcomes may not be so good. So it's like, yes, they're learning English, but maybe they know how to say hello and good morning. And you know, where's the bathroom? But that's about it. So it's not clear that they're really good in English. I do not believe that in China, there are four hundred million really, really fluent native speakers. I don't believe that to be true.

• 39:06Tim Ferriss?

  I don't believe that either. And anyone who travels widely in China, I think, would probably come to that conclusion.

• 39:11Speaker 03

  That's just not the case. Yeah.

• 39:14Tim Ferriss?

  So let's, as I promised earlier, come back because I'd love to talk about some of your lessons learned, key decisions in growing company of this size for the first time. And there are many ways we can tackle this. We'll talk about the personal. So just in terms of kind of personal management, work-life balance, if that exists, lessons learned. But let's also come back to the org chart. And Leila, could you describe how that was done? What it ended up looking like? What were the implications? And just kind of walk us through that. And I remember in our first conversation, I told the story of maybe not the best example,

• 39:56Tim Ferriss?

  since it is ultimately has been superseded by Netflix and superior technology. But Blockbuster, back in the day when Blockbuster as a company was about to become a blockbuster, brought in, I believe, someone from McDonald's, an exec, to specifically help them with org chart design. I've never designed an org chart. So could you just describe what happened and where you landed with it?

• 40:20Speaker 03

  I mean, we've gone through a bunch of different org charts. When we were from zero to call it thirty employees, our chat was was very flat, as in I was managing everybody.

• 40:32Speaker 03

  That was that. And I actually think, you know, maybe I took it a little too far. But I actually think for the first zero to N, where N is around maybe twenty to thirty people. The best thing you can do as a CEO is be a micromanager. I actually believe that. When you are such a small company, usually you don't quite yet have product market fit. You haven't really figured everything out. You have one goal, get to product market fit. And I don't think you should be in the business of coaching people for this or that. No, just I think you just micromanage people to like get to product market fit. I actually believe that. At some point, it really shifts, even if you love micromanaging, which I love micromanaging, but I've learned not to do that anymore. Even if you love it, at some point, this is just becomes, you just can't do it as well. And it is in your best interest to start actually developing people.

• 41:17Speaker 03

  You know, that shift should happen maybe at around twenty. I don't know the exact number. That is when you should really start having kind of a couple of managers. I think splitting things up into teams. What we did then is not like we had a pretty good idea of exactly what our org chart should look like. But what we did was we hired our first manager. That wasn't me. It's a woman that this was May, I don't know, seven years ago, something like that. It's a woman that's still with us. She's now the head of all of engineering. She used to be a director of engineering at Google. And I knew her because after selling Recap, I spent some time at Google. I knew her. I really liked her. Her name is Natalie Glance. She's she's amazing. And she took a much smaller job at Duolingo. She was managing, you know, just a larger job that she had. And she took a smaller job at Duolingo. I think she really believed in us.

• 42:02Speaker 03

  And she helped us from her eyes where I learned how to manage people really much better. She actually knew how to manage people. And she really helped us kind of start having a structure of, well, we have some managers. That really made a big difference, starting to have teams. Then the thing that we did after that is we discovered this idea of metrics based teams, which to this day we use, and I think has been a really, really good thing. I think this is not the common thing, although some companies do do it. It's not the common thing. So the standard thing that you would have in a company, for example, at Duolingo, we have the app has a bunch of different features. One of the features could be like we have a leaderboard, for example, and a leaderboard, that's a feature. In many companies, come on, the normal thing to do is that you have a leaderboard team, a team that owns that big feature.

• 42:47Speaker 03

  So just kind of you you split it up by feature. These are feature based teams. We do not do feature based teams. We do metrics based teams. So we don't have a team that owns the leaderboard. Instead, we have a bunch of teams that own each a single metric. So for example, a metric that we have is time spent learning. What they own is the number of minutes per day that the average user uses Duolingo for. And it turns out that changes to the leaderboard can increase or decrease time spent learning if you do the kind of the right or the wrong thing. So that team messes with the leaderboard a lot, but they don't own it. The only thing they do is they have this one metric and every quarter it has to increase. And so they just work on increasing this one metric and they run hundreds of A B tests to increase this metric.

• 43:30Speaker 03

  So we discovered that, you know, soon after Natalie showed up, we discovered these metric based teams. And we started at first, our first metric based team was a retention team, which is all you have to do is make sure that users come back every day. And that team, you know, has has done all kinds of things, really optimized the streak on Duolingo. So this, this, this notion of a streak that people have.

• 43:48Tim Ferriss?

  If people have used it, what, every day for seven years? I was looking at the streak.

• 43:52Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. The streak is crazy and we have, well, the number is a little larger, but now that we're a public company, we can't reveal numbers as the, the latest number we've revealed is that we have one and a half million daily active users that have a streak longer than a year. Meaning they have not missed a single day in the last year or longer. That's a very powerful mechanic. The retention team has worked on that. So basically what we did is we discovered these metric based teams. And what we do now at Duolingo is when we care about a metric that we want to optimize. So a metric could be daily revenue or, you know, whatever it is, we form a team around that metric. That has worked out pretty well. So that's, that's kind of one big shift with us that happened. So that, that worked out pretty well.

• 44:33Speaker 03

  At some point we, we had like 50 teams, I don't know, maybe a little less, maybe like 40 teams. That was starting to become, we use the term goat rodeo. It started to become this craziness. And so what we did is we, we decided to pool the teams together that were similar to each other into this thing called areas. So now, for example, we have a monetization area. Inside the monetization area, we have a team that owns ad revenue per day. We have a team that owns subscription revenue per day. And then we have another area called the growth area where it's just growing our active users. We have a team that owns time spent learning. We have a team that owns retention. We have another team that owns new user retention, et cetera. And so we split up into areas and that's how we're split up now.

• 45:16Speaker 03

  And what has been really good is, and the shift for me has been, it went from micromanager to kind of learning how to manage to now what I do is I, you know, I'm a manager of managers. Well, I'm a manager of managers of managers of managers, but at some point that kind of doesn't matter that much. You're just a manager of managers is kind of what matters. And I've learned how to start managing managers much better. I've gotten good at it.

• 45:40Tim Ferriss?

  All right. Last time we spoke, I have a number of follow-ups here. Let me ask the easy one, might not be the easy one to answer, but the easy, simple question first, which is, why a daily metric as opposed to a different time interval, like a weekly, for instance, in terms of revenue or something else?

• 46:00Speaker 03

  There's two reasons for daily stuff. One is we're really big believers that you should be using Duolingo every day. You don't have to use Duolingo every day to learn a language, but we really want to build a habit. And the best habits are daily, I think, because it's kind of hard to have these habits that are like, well, every three days I do something like that's just kind of hard. It's much better to have a habit like brush my teeth. Just do it every day. So we try to build habits every day. And so for us, this is one of the reasons why we look daily. The other reason why we look daily is that we run a lot of A B tests. And looking at the daily timeframe allows us to move faster because imagine that our timeframe was a month. We say, look, how many people do X in a month? We have to wait a whole month to figure out what that number is.

• 46:44Tim Ferriss?

  And that's, is that because you're just controlling for confounding factors if you're running, if you're changing multiple variables at the same time, it just becomes too difficult to attribute causation. So the lag time just becomes long.

• 46:57Speaker 03

  That's exactly right. So whereas if you look at daily stuff, it's much faster. So for example, for revenue, we look at daily bookings to be precise is basically the amount of money that comes into Duolingo. We look at that a lot and we optimize that. And it really is nice because you can see, for example, if we make a change, you can see tomorrow. What happened in the change day? You can, you can already see, ah, yes, daily bookings increased by, you know, 10%. You can see it in one day. Those are the two reasons why we look at the daily. I mean, we've talked about starting to do hourly. We haven't quite done that. And one of the difficulties with hourly is there's a pretty big difference in terms of times. I mean, for example, nine PM, around nine PM is the most popular time to learn a language. But there are times, for example, four AM, there's just not very many users. And so looking at hourly makes it a little harder.

• 47:39Tim Ferriss?

  So before we move on, I'd love to just clarify one thing that you said, and that is related to the micromanaging. And whether that point is at 10 people, 20, 30, but it was related to being pre-product market fit. Would it be safe to say that if you have product market fit, let's just say you've created a business model and a business that is generating revenue, that has found its match, that it would potentially make sense to develop people sooner than the 10 people, 20 people, or whatever the headcount might be?

• 48:12Speaker 03

  I think that makes sense. It just, you know, hopefully you're not in a period where you're doing this kind of zero to 20 employees for, for eight years or something. Hopefully that period only lasts one or two years. And in that time, you probably just need to be trying to figure out product market fit. If you're going to be in that for several years, I do think it starts making sense.

• 48:31Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 48:31Speaker 03

  Developing people.

• 48:33Tim Ferriss?

  So to, let's say, just hop back to our first conversation. There were two books that you mentioned as being particularly helpful. One, or that you would recommend, maybe both. One was Zero to One by Peter Thiel. And the other was The Hard Thing About Hard Things. If I'm getting the title right, I can never remember this title by Ben Horowitz. And I'm wondering if now, flashing forward from 2016 to present, you've gone from 60 to 600 or so people. A lot has changed. You've gone from private to public. Are there any other books or resources

• 49:13Tim Ferriss?

  or thinkers who you have found particularly helpful or helpful at all in the, the last handful of years?

• 49:20Speaker 03

  One book that I really liked, and we make all managers read it at Duolingo, is, it's an oldie, it's an oldie, but a really good one is High Output Management by Andy Grove. Yeah, it's just like a how to manual. Like he doesn't bother with like. His life story or whatever. I mean, it, it, there's a little bit of that, but it's really, it really is just very practical. It's like, look, I have found that when you're doing performance reviews, you can talk to the people before giving them the review or after, you should always just do it after. Like, it's just stuff like that. Like, it's just these little things that are just like, just, I have found that this is better than that. And there's just a lot of, you know, here, another one that I, it's just kind of off the top of my head. It's like, when somebody tells you that they want to quit, drop everything

• 50:03Speaker 03

  you're doing. If you don't want them to quit, if you want them to quit, yeah, let them quit. But otherwise, drop everything you're doing and make this your highest priority because one of the main reasons people quit is because they don't think that you think they're important. And so, there's just very, very valuable advice like that, that is just super applicable immediately to everything you're doing. So I really think that book has helped me a lot to become a better manager.

• 50:26Tim Ferriss?

  We are going to discuss a number of facets of Duolingo and new developments and so on. Before we get to that, I asked a number of questions last time that I think you may have new answers to. So I'm going to just ask those. I think there are four at least in front of me, and then we'll, we'll zig and zag back into Duolingo related things. So the first is, what is one of the best or most worthwhile investments you've ever made? That could be an investment of money, time, energy, pick your currency.

• 51:04Speaker 03

  The easy answer for that is Duolingo, though. I mean, I've been at this for so long that it's, it was not an easy investment. Obviously, it has, has been very good. Um, you know, I'll give a counterintuitive one that has really helped me. I'll say, it's a, it's a weird one. I have an aging mother, and I think a lot of people my age have aging parents. I used to worry a lot about her because she used to live in Guatemala. And, you know, Guatemala is a dangerous place. And I'm like, uh, she, she's, she's pretty old. I mean, she had me at an old age. She had, she had me at age forty-two, so she's, she's eighty-five. And she used to drive still in Guatemala, and it was like this whole thing. And I worried a lot of my mental energy was, it's not eighty percent of my mental energy, but it was a significant fraction of my mental energy was just worrying that she was okay.

• 51:49Speaker 03

  And the investment that I did is she moved in with me. And it's a weird thing. I mean, my house is large enough that this is fine. We get along well and everything, but I feel so much better about it. I mean, I'm just like now I'm not worried about her. She's there, she's thriving and she essentially keeps to herself. It's not like she bothers me all that much, but I just, I'm just not worried about it. This has made me, well, I freed up, I don't know. Call it 4% of my mental energy that I was spending on that. It's freed up. I just have more time to worry about other things.

• 52:20Tim Ferriss?

  The next question is in the last five years, what new belief, behavior, habit has most improved? Your life and at the time, the first conversation we had on the podcast. It was starting Duolingo in Pittsburgh. So kind of a slightly oblique answer to the question. But I'm wondering if you have a different answer to that or an additional answer to that now.

• 52:43Speaker 03

  I think a personal one, if we go on the personal one, a habit that has really changed my life in the last few years is strength training. I used to always kind of just do cardio to work out and that was the main thing. But one thing that happened is I was, I don't know the year, maybe 2017 in January. First of all, I don't love the winter in the northeastern United States. I am from Guatemala. I'm not used to this. This makes no sense. How could you have a place where people just die outside if they don't do anything? It's kind of ridiculous, but anyways, I don't love the winter. It was January. I was not having a great January. I also got sick. I had some sort of like a flu and I was not doing super well. And I went to the office finally after all this and I guess I looked, I didn't look so good, I guess.

• 53:25Speaker 03

  And somebody that worked at the office who's worked with us for a very long time, Dennis, looked at me and he's like, Luis, you need Gary. And I'm like, well, I know what you're talking about. He's like, all right, what are you doing tomorrow at 6:30 AM? I'm like, nothing. Gary will show up. Anyways, turns out Gary shows up. Gary is his personal trainer, Dennis' personal trainer. Gary is kind of a, quite a personality. He, he used to be the strength trainer for the Pittsburgh Steelers. And then the strength trainer for University of Pittsburgh basketball team. And it's just kind of, and, and now he just has this roster of clients of like all these rich people from Pittsburgh who are not athletes. Certainly I was not an athlete.

• 54:08Speaker 03

  And Gary shows up and he's like, all right, I'm gonna make you stronger. And you know, he gives you some weights and then he laughs at how weak you are. He like laughs. I'm like, what are you supposed to make me feel good? He's like, oh my God. You can't even do like, whatever, 40 pound dumbbells for bench press? What are you doing? And so he laughs at you and I've been with him since like 2017. It has really changed my life. I used to have all kinds of aches and pains, no longer. It turns out, you know, if you know a lot more about this than me, but I, I think if you start working out, doing strength training after age, call it 35 or so, it's pretty hard to build big muscle. So it's not like I've built humongous muscle, but I, I'm just a lot healthier and certainly a lot stronger.

• 54:52Speaker 03

  And so this has really changed my life. So Gary, Gary's awesome. Uh, big, big fan.

• 54:57Tim Ferriss?

  Wow. I guess Dennis deserves some significant thanks too, for just taking the initiative.

• 55:02Speaker 03

  Dennis is also awesome. No, he really, he, he just looked at me and I, I must've looked like hell. He just looked at me, he's like, you need Gary.

• 55:11Tim Ferriss?

  Enough said, not gonna elaborate. Yeah.

• 55:14Tim Ferriss?

  How many times per week do you do resistance training now?

• 55:17Speaker 03

  Three times a week.

• 55:18Tim Ferriss?

  Three times a week. We'll give this a shot. We'll see if this question goes anywhere and then we're gonna kind of zoom back to Duolingo and related topics. What purchase of $100 or less has most positively impacted your life in recent memory? And of course, listeners love specifics.

• 55:37Speaker 03

  Easy. An electric toothbrush.

• 55:39Tim Ferriss?

  Ah, good.

• 55:40Speaker 03

  I got the Oral-B IO. This changes your life. I mean, it just, you can't go back. You can go back and I'll tell you, when I started dating my current significant other, one of the first few things that I did was I, I saw that she was kind of slumming it with like a regular toothbrush. So on Amazon ordered her, my first gift to her was an electric toothbrush. She said, to this day, we've been together for longer. I've given her significantly more expensive gifts. To this day, best gift I've ever given her.

• 56:13Speaker 03

  It really just changes your life.

• 56:14Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 56:14Speaker 03

  See, if you're not brushing with an electric toothbrush, you're doing it wrong.

• 56:18Tim Ferriss?

  You know, I didn't expect this to come up in this conversation, but I'm going to, I'm going to plus one that and mention that I recently went to a new dentist, very highly recommended by a separate doctor I work with. Apparently top of the top as far as dentists go. I was nervous to go because I had not been to a dentist since COVID. Now this is probably flashing back.

• 56:42Speaker 03

  A common thing.

• 56:43Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, common, common. So I was terrified that it was just going to be a complete, you know, warfield of, of issues. But it was mostly fine. But the point he made to me was with his recommendations, he said, number one, you need to use an electric toothbrush of some type because it will prevent you from applying too much pressure. And there are other benefits to it, but he's, I apparently brush my teeth like I'm trying to take old grout off of a tile or something and I just destroy my gums and I, it's not that I'm trying to push really strongly, but I do nonetheless and end up with bleeding gums and all of this nonsense. And since using an electric toothbrush, as far as that problem goes, problem solved.

• 57:27Speaker 03

  Is one of those where you're like, just don't realize, because people had told me this before, but you just don't realize how much it changes life. Another similar one, it's not a hundred dollars, but it is really life changing. Is it Japanese toilet?

• 57:38Tim Ferriss?

  Okay. Did you get, did you get the full Japanese toilet or the, the, the?

• 57:41Speaker 03

  I did. Okay. I, I got the full Toto Japanese toilet. This, again, more than a hundred bucks, but life changing. It is really now, it does cause a problem, which is I now really, it's not like can't, really don't like going to the bathroom anywhere but my house. Cause it's just, it's, it's just a significantly better experience.

• 58:03Tim Ferriss?

  All right. For people who are, who may be curious, I have a couple of friends who are obsessed with, with Toto toilets. Do you have a specific model? Can you recall which, which you decided on?

• 58:14Speaker 03

  Neo Rest.

• 58:15Tim Ferriss?

  Neo Rest.

• 58:16Speaker 03

  Toto Neo Rest and it is, hold on, it is a specific one. Toto Neo Rest NX1.

• 58:23Speaker 03

  It is, let me tell you, let me tell, obviously, the the main feature is that it uses kind of like the bidet feature where it cleans you with water, which after you start thinking about it, it is barbaric that people in the United States and most Western countries do not use water to clean themselves. It really is, after you think about it.

• 58:43Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I like, I like the adjective, I'm a fan.

• 58:46Speaker 03

  Well, just, just think about this. I mean, if you were to touch with your finger some cow poop.

• 58:52Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 58:53Speaker 03

  Would you not wash your hands with water? Like, would you just use a towel to likely, no, you wouldn't. That just, just because you would feel like it's still dirty. And so, think about that. So it obviously has that bidet feature, but it has all kinds of other stuff, including like white noise. So that other people can't hear you, like it just, it has features. It is good.

• 59:13Tim Ferriss?

  All right. So now let me give an alternative here because I, I'm guessing the, the Neo, this particular model is, I mean, it's probably at least a few thousand dollars. Yeah, it's probably at least a few thousand dollars. I will give people an alternative if they want somewhere between the Bugatti of toilets and the barbaric practice that, that you already outlined. You can get, and actually I was given as a gift, a washlet Toto seat. So it effectively replaces your toilet seat on your pre-existing toilet. And it's a few hundred dollars. You plug it into a wall and it has a lot of the same features.

• 59:52Tim Ferriss?

  So I'll just mention, it is pleasant to use. And, you know, I never thought I would have a Japanese toilet or, I suppose, a hybrid Japanese toilet, which I have now. But when I was in Japan, when I was 15, there's some basic features. I mean, when it is freezing and it gets cold in certain parts of Japan.

• 1:00:12Speaker 03

  A seat warmer.

• 1:00:13Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, when it's freezing and you go in and you sit down and it's warm, that has a material impact on your day-to-day experience.

• 1:00:22Speaker 03

  Well, see, this is the thing about toilet and the toothbrush. I mean, the thing is, these are things that you do every single day. It's like also spending money on a good mattress. Like it matters. Like these are things that I just, you just do it every day.

• 1:00:34Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:34Speaker 03

  You know, I understand some of these things can be pricey, but I would not skimp too much on things that you do every day.

• 1:00:40Tim Ferriss?

  You know, you mentioned the mattress. I'll just plus one that and then we can get out of the domestic objects category. But when I was, I spent a little bit of time in Panama in two thousand and five and got to stay with this lovely couple. And the, the matriarch of the family, this mother, God, I wish I could remember her name. She was really an incredible woman, very smart. And she said to me, it still stuck with me. She said, there are two things you should invest in. Make sure you invest to the extent that you can. She didn't caveat that. But she said, make sure you invest in your bed and your shoes. Cause if you're not in one, you're going to be in the other. And I was like, huh. That's good advice.

• 1:01:21Speaker 03

  Makes a lot of sense.

• 1:01:22Tim Ferriss?

  Really good advice.

• 1:01:23Speaker 03

  It makes a lot of sense.

• 1:01:24Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:24Speaker 03

  And you know, with mattresses can be expensive, but you don't have to go super nuts. Just don't buy the fifty dollar mattress. Probably you shouldn't do that.

• 1:01:32Tim Ferriss?

  It makes a difference. And if your bed is, I'll, I'll offer another hybrid option. No, I didn't realize I had so many opinions on all these domestic.

• 1:01:40Speaker 03

  Pillow top.

• 1:01:41Tim Ferriss?

  Yes. Yes. If you're, if, let's just say you can't afford to get a new mattress and the mattress is iffy.

• 1:01:46Speaker 03

  Pillow top really helps.

• 1:01:48Tim Ferriss?

  Get a good pillow top and it will make, it will make a difference. It makes a huge difference. And if you can't afford that, get a better pillow. This is another thing. And

• 1:01:59Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:01:59Tim Ferriss?

  I'll put a few pillow options in the show notes because I, I do have opinions on pillows. I don't test. There's some people who are like, I've tested ten mail order mattresses this year. I'm like, I don't have the time for that, but I will test pillows.

• 1:02:11Speaker 03

  The pillows, much easier. Yeah, that's much easier. You know, the other thing, I was recently reading about the history of beds. And this is a few hundred years ago, not that long ago. Most people didn't have a bed. People slept on like a bunch of clothes, basically. They would just kind of pile up some clothes. And that's where they slept. That's like beds were just piles of clothes.

• 1:02:31Tim Ferriss?

  Wow. How far we've come. When people read a little history, you realize a lot of improvements have been made. All right, let's go from indoor to outdoor. And I have your last answer here. If you could have a gigantic billboard anywhere with anything on it, this is metaphorically speaking, getting a message out, assuming people would understand it. Let's just take that as assumed. What would it say and why? It could be a few words, paragraph, it could be an image, could be anything. Your answer last time was it would be a billboard right across the street from Google's office here in Pittsburgh that would say, we at Duolingo are hiring and yes, we can match your salary. So do you have any new possible answers to that question?

• 1:03:13Speaker 03

  I think the word has gotten out a lot more about Duolingo hiring and we get a lot of inbound applicants. I don't think that billboard is as necessary anymore. By the way, we did have a billboard, this is not the one that we do, but we did have a billboard that was pretty successful in San Francisco that was for Duolingo that said, work in tech, own a house, move to Pittsburgh. Or something like that.

• 1:03:34Tim Ferriss?

  That's clever. That's clever.

• 1:03:36Speaker 03

  You got us a good number of employees. It really actually worked with people are like, huh? And it turns out if you move to Pittsburgh with a tech salary, which basically our salaries are the same as what you would have in, you know, Silicon Valley, you can own a pretty nice house.

• 1:03:50Tim Ferriss?

  Work in tech, own a house. What was it? What was the last?

• 1:03:54Speaker 03

  Move to Pittsburgh. Move to, move to Pittsburgh.

• 1:03:58Tim Ferriss?

  That's great. You know, you know, that reminds me of, it really covers a lot and tells a whole story in very short form. I don't know if you've ever heard the story in six words by Hemingway, for sale, baby shoes, never worn. It's kind of makes me think of

• 1:04:13Speaker 03

  Oh, wow.

• 1:04:14Tim Ferriss?

  Your billboard. Yeah. Incredible.

• 1:04:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:04:18Tim Ferriss?

  All right.

• 1:04:18Speaker 03

  I don't know what I would do now. I mean, probably something silly. I mean, I don't know if you've seen all the Duolingo memes with an owl trying to kidnap your family and stuff like that.

• 1:04:26Tim Ferriss?

  I have not.

• 1:04:29Speaker 03

  They're pretty popular. They're pretty popular on TikTok, basically saying, you know, the idea is that our, our owl, you know, notifications can be pretty passive aggressive. So, for example, we have a notification on the app. We send you a notification every day to remind you to practice. But if you don't practice for five days, we stop sending you notifications. At some point, it occurred to us that we could have a notification that said, when we stop, we actually should tell you to stop, that we're stopping. As in, we should be nice and tell you, hey, we're stopping. So we, the last notification we send before we stop is, hey, these notifications don't seem to be working. We're gonna stop sending them for now. And comes from the owl. And a lot of people consider this a very passive aggressive. By the way, this notification gets people to come back a lot because they feel bad. They're like, oh, my God, I'm not giving up on, on my Spanish, or my French,

• 1:05:13Speaker 03

  or whatever. So it gets people to come back quite a bit. But that notification has really gotten all kinds of people to talk more and more about our notifications. And there's a whole persona that has evolved, not by us. It's like the, the internet has evolved, that whole persona for our owl, that it kidnaps your family if you're not learning Spanish. And there's a number of taglines that they have that the owl would say. So for example, one is Spanish or vanish. Or French or the trench, Japanese or your niece. Like, they just come up with a lot of these. So I, I would just have a fun billboard that just said Spanish or vanish.

• 1:05:48Tim Ferriss?

  Spanish.

• 1:05:49Speaker 03

  Uh, somewhere.

• 1:05:50Tim Ferriss?

  Spanish or vanish. You know, sometimes it's the little things that get people talking. I'll, I'll just, we won't get into it right now, but people should Google Derek Sivers, S I V E R S, CD Baby, that was his company at the time, email. It's a confirmation email that they would send out when orders came in. It was an automated email. So people can just search Derek Sivers, CD Baby email. We'll put it in the show notes as well. All right. Coming back to present day. I have notes in front of me, one of which is related to mission and mission steering business decisions.

• 1:06:26Tim Ferriss?

  When I think many people, including myself, sometimes hear mission, we're like, oh, boy, here we go. This is gonna be like some type of thing on a wall in office space or some type of kind of lead with integrity type thing from a GE type of company where you're like, all right, well, what does that mean? And does that really have an impact on people on a day to day basis? What do you mean when you talk about mission?

• 1:06:47Speaker 03

  I feel similarly to you. I'm distrustful when people say that. It is interesting that at Duolingo, I think it really has to do with this first group of employees that we talked about before that were like pretty big zealots on our mission, that we really, most every decision that we make at Duolingo is very mission oriented. And our mission, you know, there's a statement of the mission. That sounds good, but I'll say the statement, but I'll kind of explain it more. So the statement is to develop the best education in the world and make it universally available. The real driving forces, we want to make sure that anybody who wants to learn can do so. Now, we're not out there giving people phones or anything like that. We do assume that you have some sort of smart device. And the reason for that assumption is the world's going that way. These days, you can get an

• 1:07:30Speaker 03

  Android device for 30 bucks. It is kind of going that way. We make sure that our app works on very low end Android devices, for example, but we just, we really want to make sure that anybody who wants to learn a language, languages, but we're expanding to teaching other things too, but anybody who wants to learn a language can do so without having to pay us. And this matters to us. And most of the decisions we make are related to this. But one of the things that I think has really affected my thinking, and certainly the company behavior, is we are all really big believers that, yeah, the mission, we like the mission and it's great. We're all really big believers that that mission is actually well aligned

• 1:08:11Speaker 03

  with the long term success of our company. As a business entity, as an actual money making, publicly traded company, it is aligned with a long term success. And let me kind of explain. For example, we could say tomorrow, you know what, screw it, you have to pay to use Duolingo. I'm pretty sure we would make a lot more money if we did that. Our number of users would go down, but good number of them would also pay us. And we would make a lot more money and next quarter would be an amazing quarter for us. Like, it would be an amazing quarter for us. I don't know the off the top of my head, but our revenue probably would, I don't know, 10x or some crazy number in like one quarter would just go nuts. However,

• 1:08:50Speaker 03

  What that would do is it would completely stifle our growth. Because the way Duolingo has grown is through word of mouth. We have all these people who use us for free, they don't pay us. We make some money off them from the ads, but you know, most of our money comes from our subscription. But what's really useful about all these people that use us is they use us, they have a good experience and they tell their friends. And the vast majority of our users, I mean, really the overwhelming majority of our users, when you ask them, how'd you find out about Duolingo? It's like, ah, a friend told me or like my, my significant other told me or whatever. It's basically word of mouth. And I really do believe that having a really great free user experience, it's what's best for the business in the long run. Again, not next quarter, but if you take the long view, which we are at Duolingo, I mean, we've been at this for 10 years.

• 1:09:34Speaker 03

  I'm going to stick around Duolingo probably forever. I mean, I really love working here, et cetera. So my view now is a long-term view. I mean, I'm, I'm here thinking about the next 10 years, the next 20 years, et cetera. And I really think that if we do the right thing for our users in terms of like actually being able to learn a language really well. And without having to pay us, that is actually what's going to optimize our revenue in the long term. So I believe that, I think most everybody in the company believes that. And I think that alignment has made it so that a lot of decisions are a lot easier because we do hire a bunch of people who are like, what the hell are you talking about mission? Like, you know, this is people who went to like whatever business school and everything is like, well, I'm just here to make money.

• 1:10:14Speaker 03

  So we do hire some such people, but I think once they understand that we really, it's not like we don't want to make money. We really are big believers that, that there's real long-term alignment here that aligns everybody.

• 1:10:25Tim Ferriss?

  What other ways does the long view impact decision-making? So maybe you could give another example or two as to how that informs not just the culture, but how you make decisions. You already mentioned one, which would be the decision to keep it free for the majority of users versus force a subscription upon everyone. And then have a short-term game for all of these long-term sacrifices. Can you think of any other ways in which taking the longer view? Affects decision making?

• 1:11:06Speaker 03

  I'll tell you another one that has worked out really well for us. You know, one of the things about taking advice from certain companies that I've learned is taking individual pieces of advice sometimes doesn't work because it only works for that company in the context of that company.

• 1:11:18Tim Ferriss?

  Right, totally.

• 1:11:19Speaker 03

  We have a very specific context, which is because, again, because our culture is good, because Pittsburgh is not quite Silicon Valley, et cetera. We have low employee churn. If you see a Silicon Valley company, a lot of times, I mean, by the way, Silicon Valley is amazing. These companies operate really well. But one of the things that is common in Silicon Valley is people don't stay at jobs for very long. And companies have become optimized for that. They're optimized for it. They're very good at operating excellent companies when the assumption is that people are going to stay there for two, three years. And they get really good at that. At Duolingo, people stay for much longer than that. People stay for a pretty long time. And we take the long view in doing things in hiring. We are really picky with hiring.

• 1:12:05Speaker 03

  And it's because people stick around for a long time that it really matters. If they're going to be here for eight years, it's okay to wait a couple of months to find somebody that is probably going to be 20% better for this job.

• 1:12:17Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, totally.

• 1:12:17Speaker 03

  And not because overall. However, if you are a company where, you know, you have pretty high churn, probably this is not as worthwhile. For us, this has been a pretty good thing for, you know, taking the longer for us.

• 1:12:30Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I'd like to ask more about that specifically. I am trying to get better at hiring myself. And had some maybe beginner's luck where I did really well in the beginning, had people stick around for a long time, but have had a couple of misses in the last few years. And it's been hard for

• 1:12:48Speaker 03

  This happens.

• 1:12:49Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it does happen. And it's been, it's been hard for me to really deconstruct the reasons for that in a post-game analysis, although I do think that there were probably, there were some Unnecessary rushing to the hiring process. So we've talked in our last conversation about hiring and you mentioned that you've learned how expensive hiring mistakes can be. No doubt you've learned that more than once. So you guys are very strict in your interviews and you described the process. I'd love to see if this has changed and if it is different for non-technical roles. But in 2016, it was number one, resume screen, good GPA, internships and so on.

• 1:13:33Tim Ferriss?

  Number two, two phone screens, which includes problem solving. Number three, bringing remaining candidates on site where they have four different interviews, some of which involve more problem solving as well as paired programming during which they fix a bug. So this seems to be specific for technical candidates. I'm wondering if you have anything to add to this? If you could maybe elaborate on what taking your time and looking for that extra 20% looks like? And I suppose I'm most interested in non-technical roles since I am not hiring for real technical capabilities, but anything you have to say on any of those?

• 1:14:12Speaker 03

  That interview is pretty similar to what we do now. I think the actual questions may have changed a little bit. What we look for in resumes may have changed a little bit, but it is, the overall is pretty similar and that is for technical hires. Non-technical hires, it really depends, you know, that's, that's another thing about hiring. I mean, it really depends on what function you're hiring for. So for example, designers, what matters a lot is their portfolio. And the portfolio is this magical thing. Portfolios are amazing because within 30 seconds, by looking at a portfolio, you can tell a lot. You don't even have to do all that much interview or anything. They just look at a portfolio, yeah, it's good. And the other beautiful thing about portfolios, by the way, is that they're so nice because they're really good for diversity in that you don't have to know this person's name.

• 1:14:56Speaker 03

  You don't have to know what they look like. You don't have to know anything. It's just the work speaks for itself. So this is the beautiful thing about the sign, but that's very rare. Usually you don't, most fields don't have a thing like the portfolio where you just look at it and you're like, this is it. So I think outside of these, you have to get really good at interviewing. And there's a few things that really work out. One is work product. So whatever it is that they're supposed to do, you have them do some of that. It could be that they do it offline, as in like they don't have to do it in front of you. It could be like, look, in order to apply, you have to write this thing or whatever it is. You can take your time, just send it to us as part of the application. Work product is really good and it has to be pretty close to what they're supposed to do when you hire them.

• 1:15:41Speaker 03

  So that's really good. I think there's another one, which is just kind of general intelligence stuff, which you may or may not want to do. But there's this like three question IQ test that you can Google for. And with just three questions, you're not going to be able to get an exact IQ. But basically, you know, if people can solve this, all three of these questions, you know, they're pretty good with cognitive abilities. And I think you wanna, you may wanna do that. And then the other one is just more of these behavioral interviews that you ask these questions that it does make a difference for non-technical stuff. I mean, things like talk about a failure. Tell me about about a time you failed and the types of things you're looking for is A, do they recognize that they have failed? The wrong answer, the horrible ones, is this like failure, not failure.

• 1:16:21Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I just care too much.

• 1:16:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, or like it starts looking like a failure, but actually it was a home run. You're like, no, no, no, no, no.

• 1:16:30Speaker 03

  Like a real failure. You wanna understand that they understand when they failed. The other thing you wanna hear there is did they blame others or themselves? It's very telling when they tell you about a failure. It's a real failure, but they're like, but you know what? I knew what to do the whole time. It's just my manager was dumb. That's a very bad sign that because look, everybody's failed and there's at least one instance, and usually many, where it really was your fault. I want to hear about that, not about how you always knew all along and you're always right. And it's just your manager sucked or the somebody else. Because when you do end up hiring them, these are the type of people that would probably blame everybody else for their failures and you don't want that. So there are these kind of behavioral interviews that I think really work out pretty well.

• 1:17:13Speaker 03

  So we do apply all of those, but you know, one of the things that I have learned a lot. And we employ at a Duolingo, when you are the hiring manager, so the person that's actually going to work with them. And usually it's because you you're hiring somebody because you'd have a need. You're like, well, I need a designer on my team or I need whatever it is. I need this on my team and I have the need. You're extremely biased towards hiring. Because you're like, look, I just need to get this done. I just want to get it. So one of the things we do is ultimately at Duolingo, the decisions are not by the hiring manager. Hiring manager can have a lot of input, but there's somebody else. A lot of times that's me who's like, mm, I understand you're in deep pain right now and

• 1:17:55Speaker 03

  you need, you know, another person, but this person's does not pass our bar. It's not that I'm that good at the bar. It's just that I'm a different person. So I make the same mistake when I'm hiring for an executive or something. I have a bias towards hiring because I'm like, man, I don't, I don't want to spend more time looking for, you know, this whatever our head of whatever. We did this for our CFO, our chief financial officer. We took a long time and at some point I almost gave up. I'm like, man, I'll just take whoever like it doesn't matter. We didn't do that. I was lucky. I was lucky that we ended up.

• 1:18:26Speaker 03

  I mean, I had spent about a year looking for our CFO.

• 1:18:28Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's a long time.

• 1:18:29Speaker 03

  And thank God we waited. I mean, we our CFO, Mats Karup is amazing. Thank God we waited, but in the middle there after I don't know, nine months or so, I started faltering. I started being like, ah, just take whoever. So it's not that I'm that good at holding our bar, but I'm very good at holding our bar when it's not me.

• 1:18:45Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 1:18:47Speaker 03

  To me, that's a big piece of advice. Have somebody else hold the bar.

• 1:18:50Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, so this is actually a very opportune time to segue. So the two things I'm going to cover, well, I'm going to cover. That's not true. The royal I that you are going to cover that I'd love to explore are number one. How did you decide to go public? When did you decide it was the right time to pursue that? And the CFO may somehow be involved with that. But the question after that is going to be, what's next? New products? You alluded to something beyond.

• 1:19:23Speaker 03

  Language learning.

• 1:19:23Tim Ferriss?

  Language learning. So certainly, I would love to hear more about that. But let's begin with the going public question and just how you thought about that and made decisions around it. And then from there into new products, new revenue streams, things like that.

• 1:19:39Speaker 03

  The idea of going public, for example, last time we talked, you know, I don't know exactly what was going on six years ago in my head. But the idea of going public, I think around then just seems so foreign. So like, that's never going to happen. Or like, I just kind of just, I wasn't just not thinking about that. Once we figured out our revenue and we figured out that we could make a lot of revenue. The first time this really was discussed was we were having a meeting with one of our board members. His name is Bing Gordon and his Bing is like a legendary guy in Silicon Valley. He's.

• 1:20:08Tim Ferriss?

  Very famous.

• 1:20:09Speaker 03

  Very famous, says a lot of crazy stuff, a lot of really good crazy stuff. But also sometimes it's like just really crazy stuff. And, you know, he was just sitting there and we were talking about our revenue. And he said, look, you're going to make this much revenue next year. You're going to make that much revenue the year after that, and then you're going to go public. And we were like, what? It just completely like, really? You can do that? You could just go public? That's like a thing? And he's like, yeah, why not? And that's kind of where it clicked. And that's, you know, we're like, okay, maybe. And we started thinking about it. And then when we got to the point, we were basically breaking even. Bing talked about that, maybe the year after that, we were already breaking or we were roughly breaking even. I mean, it wasn't like, it was not exactly breaking. We were pretty close to breaking even.

• 1:20:54Speaker 03

  We're like, ah, maybe we should consider going public. And the first step, if you're going to go public, the first step you need is you need a CFO. Maybe you can go public without a CFO, but it seems like a really bad idea. Don't do that. So step one is you need a.

• 1:21:07Tim Ferriss?

  Generally ill advised.

• 1:21:08Speaker 03

  Yes. So step one is you need a CFO, and a CFO that actually knows how to take you public. A lot of people give you advice that you should hire a CFO that has taken a company public. That is hard for many reasons. For one, there's just not very many such people. Secondly, CFOs turn out to be very highly paid individuals. And when you go public, you get paid a lot as a CFO. So what ends up happening is a lot of these people who are CFOs who've taken a company public are just very rich. And they don't want to work for you anymore. They're just like, whatever. I live in my house in the Hamptons and that's this is where I am and I'm just not going to go work with you. So it's just a very limited pool of people who have taken a company public once.

• 1:21:48Speaker 03

  And so there's that. And then we did interview some people, you know, they had good experience. What we ended up doing for CFOs, not take somebody who are taking a company public, but you obviously knew finance, etc. He came from Goldman Sachs. But we maximize for kind of intelligence and grit. And that was a really good move for us. And so that that worked out for us.

• 1:22:07Tim Ferriss?

  Quick question. So intelligence, I can see how you test for intelligence. How do you assess grit?

• 1:22:12Speaker 03

  Ah, it's just, I think a lot of it has to do from references. I mean, this one Matt that we hired, we knew a few people that knew him. There's a reference, we're just, and and they were true. The thing is, they were truly, they'll tell you like, oh, Matt Skarupa is like, the hardest working and also most honest guy I've ever met. And I'm like, to me, the words honest and CFO just kind of don't go together that much. I don't, I don't know if I just had, I was biased against that. But then we hired a guy that is like the most honest guy. We call him, sometimes some of us call him the boy scout. Because it's just like, this guy is just kind of a good guy. We hired Matt, you know, by the way, the other thing with Matt is Matt was going to be based in New York right before COVID. We hired Matt, I don't know, his first day was maybe a month before COVID.

• 1:22:55Speaker 03

  It's probably like February of 2020 or something like that. He was going to be based in New York, but we're headquartered in Pittsburgh. We have an office in New York with about a hundred people. He was going to be in that office. But he knew he had to travel out to Pittsburgh. On his first day, he shows up with a, I don't know, it had like 10 slides, a deck with his travel plans for the next two years. He had pie charts of fraction of time he was going to spend in Pittsburgh, in New York, on the plane. All this stuff that he had done, like a massive analysis, like what a consultant would do for some sort of analysis. He's like, this is my travel schedule for the next two years. And I'm like, wow, I, I would have never done anything like this, but I see we hired the right person.

• 1:23:36Speaker 03

  He must have spent hours and hours on this. And then poor guy, COVID came and then that travel plan went down the drain and um, he just didn't have to travel.

• 1:23:45Speaker 03

  But anyways, you hire CFO, that's kind of the first thing. And then for me, I think what really mattered was, and this seems to be like what matters the most, is our revenue predictable? Is our finances predictable? If your finances are not predictable, you should not go public. You're gonna have a real bad time. So you want to know that your finances are predictable. And by predictable, I mean, I've learned you need to be able to predict your finances with a year out and be like 3% away. So pretty good forecasting. So you have to do that. And you have to have a path to real profitability. That's the other thing. If you don't have either of those, I would say I would not go public. You're just having a really bad time. The other thing to say about having gone public, I'm very happy we did.

• 1:24:30Speaker 03

  The company operates better. I think of it as like when nobody visits you in your house, you kind of don't have to clean all that much. Like, it's not a very clean house. If nobody ever visits you, you're like, you kind of live like a slob. It's like, but if there's gonna be a visit coming, you're like, oh shit, I gotta clean up.

• 1:24:46Tim Ferriss?

  Once a quarter.

• 1:24:48Speaker 03

  Well, it's not once a quarter because now we're like under scrutiny. But basically, I think what happened is once the process of going public forced us to do all these things much better. There were all these processes that were like,

• 1:25:01Tim Ferriss?

  Totally.

• 1:25:01Speaker 03

  They were just not well set up as a process. They were, or like, we may not even have had a process. And it's like, no, we're gonna go public now. Now we have to have a process now. So at this point, our house is pretty clean because we get visits all the time. And I think that the thing about living in a clean house is you feel good about it. You know, it's just kind of better. And so I'm very happy that we went public.

• 1:25:21Tim Ferriss?

  I just want to say also to folks who may be listening and have a small business and they're like, I'm never going public. This isn't relevant to me. What I would say is, and there are books that you can read that I think are interesting for as a thought exercise at the very least. There's a book called Built to Sell. I think the author's name is John Morlow. And if someone wants to improve their own business, let's just say it's a smaller business with five employees.

• 1:25:48Tim Ferriss?

  Pretend like you're gonna sell it. Right? Pretend like you are gonna sell it in 12 months and

• 1:25:53Speaker 03

  You renovate the bathroom is what you're saying.

• 1:25:55Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, you're good. Yeah, you're gonna renovate the bathroom. You're gonna realize like, oh yeah, the duct tape on that part of the plumbing. No, no one's gonna buy that. That's not gonna pass the inspection. So we're gonna have to fix that. And you can go through a very similar house cleaning process where you build systems, you remove yourself as a bottleneck for certain decisions and so on, that can be hugely, hugely beneficial. So I'll just mention the parallels there. What have been the biggest challenges?

• 1:26:24Speaker 03

  Of being public?

• 1:26:26Tim Ferriss?

  Or being a publicly, I don't want to make it too abstract. I mean, there are the challenges of being a publicly traded company. I'm just wondering, being the CEO of a publicly traded company.

• 1:26:35Speaker 03

  A lot of people assumed that my job was going to change a lot. It hasn't. And the other thing is, we worked really hard to make sure that our culture didn't change a lot. If you ask a random, which I have, if you ask a random Duolingo employee, how does it feel before and after? They'll tell you very little changed. There's a couple of things, you know, you can't really give forward looking statements as much. You can't say like, well, next year, we're gonna make this much revenue or whatever. Just don't do that. Stuff like that. But it's minor, I would say. And I think my job in particular, the only real change is now I have to spend, I have a deal with our head of investment relations, I have to spend 12 hours a quarter on talking to investors or analysts. And so that's that. The reason I have this deal is you can spend 100% of your time doing

• 1:27:20Speaker 03

  that. And I love talking to investors and analysts, love talking to them, but it just, you can't run a company and you spend 100% of your time talking to them. You just actually just can't do that. So I give her 12 hours a quarter.

• 1:27:31Tim Ferriss?

  How did you settle on 12 hours? I'm just so curious. Is that one hour a week?

• 1:27:35Speaker 03

  No, we negotiated. We negotiated. I started with five. She's like, you can't do that. And she's like, how about 20? I'm like, in the end, we just settled on 12.

• 1:27:47Speaker 03

  That's about the biggest change. I don't think there's, there's much else. I guess I have to write a, you don't have to do this. By the way, I just learned, I was very clueless before going public about what it really meant to be a publicly traded company. I thought, one of the things I recently learned is you don't have to have earnings calls or shareholder letters. You don't have to do this. I thought you did and we do them, we do them every quarter. Turns out you don't. This is not a legal requirement of any kind. But it's probably a good idea to do it. So anyways, the other thing I, I have to write a shareholder letter. We do shareholder letters and I have to do that every quarter. But other than that, it's been good. I mean, we're fortunate that, you know, the stock market has been pretty choppy. We're fortunate that our stock has held up pretty well.

• 1:28:29Speaker 03

  And so there are some companies for whom, you know, they're like down 90% from when they went public or something like that. That must be very tough. We're fortunate that that's just not the case.

• 1:28:38Tim Ferriss?

  That's when the activists start circling in the waters.

• 1:28:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's, that's fortunately, I mean, but I think, I, you know, it's fortunate, but I also think the thing we made sure of is we both had a highly forecastable business and a good path to good profitability. I think if you have those two, you're gonna do okay. Last year in particular, you saw a number of companies that were either not very forecastable or just kind of did not care at all about profitability. And I think in today's climate, that's just not so great.

• 1:29:11Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah, that's sort of tying our behind your back when you get into the boxing ring. You might win, you might, but it does make it a little more challenging.

• 1:29:21Speaker 03

  Well, you know, and you know what else does not help? I don't know if you've watched this show, We Crashed, which by the way is an excellent show. It's the, the story of WeWork.

• 1:29:29Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I saw episode one, actually, at South by Southwest.

• 1:29:33Speaker 03

  I love that show, but you know, one of the things that does not help is investment bankers will tell you what you want to hear. They're supposed to be, you know, there to coach you, but they make money if you go public. And they make a ton of money if you go public. So it is common that they'll tell you, yeah, of course you're ready to go public. Of course. And I just don't think they are as brutally honest as they should be in that respect.

• 1:29:59Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, well, you know, it's like the old Buffettism, don't ask a barber if you need a haircut.

• 1:30:05Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:30:06Tim Ferriss?

  It's being aware of the incentives involved is important.

• 1:30:09Speaker 03

  Yep, yep.

• 1:30:10Tim Ferriss?

  Which is also, you know, it could be true for reward, it could be true for punishment or pain, as you're mentioning earlier with hiring, right? If you are in the hot seat and you are facing the consequences of a lack of a hire, you are going to be strongly incentivized and you might use motivated reasoning to push for a faster hire than you should.

• 1:30:32Speaker 03

  Yes, and the crazy thing about that is that you may not even be malicious. Like, I'm not saying that it's just these incentives work that way. Like, I'm not saying the investment bankers are even malicious or anything. They're just like in their way of viewing the world. They're like, yeah, it's good for you to go public, just this.

• 1:30:46Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's just human nature.

• 1:30:48Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:30:50Tim Ferriss?

  All right, looking towards the future, new products, revenue streams, what's coming?

• 1:30:56Speaker 03

  We're very excited by this. Historically, Duolingo has been language learning. We've taught, that's the thing, we teach languages. By now, we're the largest way to learn languages in the world. We're most popular than any other way to learn languages, including public school systems. So, that's awesome. But our mission has always been more general. We really like all of education. We started with language learning. So we're starting to expand to other things. We've launched already a literacy app. That's different from language learning in that it's your native language, you just need to learn how to read. So this is an app for kids. Right now, it's only in English. It's Duolingo ABC that teaches kids. Well, when we were working on it, we thought kids three to six.

• 1:31:37Speaker 03

  Turns out, kids get, there's like a downward pressure for learning how to read earlier and earlier. So some of our top users for the app are actually two. So there's these kids that are age two that are learning how to read on our app, which I'm like, when I was two, I don't even think I knew how to walk when I was two. I don't know. But somehow, these kids. Are learning how to read at age two with with the app. So we started with that. We're working on a math app that is going to come out this year where the idea is you're going to be able to learn some math. We're starting with elementary school math and not first grade, so not counting. But we're starting with kind of basic arithmetic and fractions and stuff like that.

• 1:32:17Speaker 03

  One of the interesting things about that is that, well, the reason we're starting with elementary school math is because that's kind of where you start seeing a divergence in people who are quote unquote, good at math versus not. Right around when you have to learn kind of multiplication and division and stuff like that. So we want to get to kids then. That's one thing, but there's another thing, and I think it's going to be for the growth of the app. It's actually pretty fun for adults in that it feels a lot like a game, like dueling. I mean, I have the app on my phone. It feels a lot like a game. And this, you know, third to fifth grade math is right at the level where adults find it challenging, but doable. So if we were to give adults, like most adults, like ninth grade math, they like can't do it. Most of it like, oh, it's like too hard.

• 1:32:59Speaker 03

  But if you're giving adults some fraction problems or multiplication or stuff like that, it's kind of like brain training. So we actually think this app is going to grow both for students who are kind of elementary school students, but also kind of people who just want to get a little better at math and do some brain training, kind of more adults. And so the app is going to kind of cater to both. And we're very excited by that. And again, I have a PhD in computer science. You would think that I am good at math, but I'm in, I'm loving basic multiplication here. I'm not learning it. I'm just, it's just kind of everyday kind of brain training. So we're very, very excited by that project.

• 1:33:35Tim Ferriss?

  Okay. So the math is going to launch in 2022. I am very much looking forward to that. And it's timely for me. It's been on my brain. And if you can just allow me to be a little self indulgent and talk for a second. It's a bit later in my life trajectory, but in ninth grade, I was very good at math. And I had a math teacher who just brutalized the male students in the class. I don't know why she did this, but she, she just really had an axe to grind. And basically all of. The male cohort in that class stopped taking math.

• 1:34:08Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:34:08Tim Ferriss?

  Myself included. And my brother had the opposite experience and ended up with PhD in statistics.

• 1:34:15Tim Ferriss?

  About as heavy as you can imagine. He had a very, very good teacher. And I've always had, on some level, I consider myself numerate, but in a very basic way. And I've wanted to rekindle some of those capabilities, or at least the interest in math. And concurrent with that, one of my close friends, closest friends, is about to go to grad school and will need to take an intro to stats class. But this friend also stopped math quite early, didn't have the support structure that I did. So for her, it was probably in the earlier elementary school years.

• 1:34:55Tim Ferriss?

  So I've been thinking a lot about this. How do you make it not just learnable, but hopefully on some level, interesting and enjoyable and rewarding? So I've been looking at, I can't remember his name, there's a professor or who was it? Harvey Mudd, who developed a book called Matha Magics.

• 1:35:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, I've heard of that one, yeah.

• 1:35:15Tim Ferriss?

  And I feel like some of those techniques might be considered like cheap tricks, but I do find that it is very rewarding if you teach someone how to, say, multiply double-digit numbers by 11. It's a trick, sure. It doesn't apply to 12, but, but it shows people that they can do something they thought they couldn't do. So I'm very excited to see the math.

• 1:35:36Speaker 03

  The other thing that, you know, we've learned at Duolingo is what we did with the original Duolingo app, the language learning app, is we got really good at getting you to repeat stuff over and over again. And, you know, the way you learn a language is by a lot of repetition. And I really believe this to be true also of kind of the type of elementary school math. And so one of the things that's awesome about this product is that it really is fun. And we've made it so that repeating these multiplications or whatever is actually fun. Because, you know, you get all these kind of this progress bars and points and stuff like that. And it just kind of feels fun. You're doing exactly what you're supposed to be doing. The way you get much better at this math is by repeating it 10,000 times. This just, that's just how you get better at it.

• 1:36:17Tim Ferriss?

  So is there anything else that you have coming that you'd like to talk about? Or anything else that you're working on that you're particularly excited about?

• 1:36:25Speaker 03

  The thing that I'm really excited about, in addition to all these things, is a project that we're not... People in the US don't know us so much for this project, but it's a pretty successful and amazing project. It's called the Duolingo English Test. So what it is, is a standardized English proficiency exam. So basically, you go there, you take a test for, call it 30 minutes, 30 to 45 minutes, and at the end you get a score from 0 to 160 about how good your English is. That's it. That's the product. It turns out that doing this is necessary in most countries in the world, again, not that necessary in the US, because everybody speaks English, but if you want to get a work visa in the UK, you have to take a standardized English exam. If you want to come to college in the US from an English-speaking country, you have to take a standardized English exam.

• 1:37:07Speaker 03

  If you want to get promoted in Japan, in most jobs, you have to take a standardized English exam. So there's all these reasons for taking these, and we made our own test. The reason we made our own test is because before our test, you had to... All these standardized English tests, you had to go to a physical testing center to take them, to like, you know, like actually go somewhere and take a paper test, etc. We thought that was ridiculous, so we made our own, that you can take it online, and it's been really, really successful and a really rewarding project, because what this has done... So by now, our test is now accepted, for example, by 4,200 academic programs in the world. So if you want to apply to most universities in the US, like if you want to apply to MIT or Stanford, they accept our test as proof of English proficiency. So this is great, but the reason this has been so rewarding is that

• 1:37:51Speaker 03

  we're getting all these people to take this test that simply could not take a standardized English proficiency exam before. People who live far away from cities, they just couldn't. Or it turned out that in the Democratic Republic of Congo, there was just no way to take a standardized English test, you just couldn't. So if you were there and you wanted to apply to a place like, you know, a US university, you had to fly somewhere to actually take the test, which is kind of ridiculous. So it's been very rewarding to do this, and I'm very excited by this project, because, first of all, we keep getting more and more acceptance on it, and so the hope is that this will become the standard for English proficiency. What we're hoping to do, and not just for English, we're hoping to do it for every, every language out there,

• 1:38:32Speaker 03

  at least the big languages, is we're hoping to change so that when somebody asks you, "How much French do you know? Or how much English do you know?", we want the answer to be, "Oh, I am a Duolingo 65." Or I'm a Duolingo ninety. That's what we want the answer to be. That's not true today, but that's what we want. And it would be a lot better because, for example, the most common answers for how much French you know are, one, I took four years of high school French, which doesn't answer anything. The other one is I'm intermediate, which is like also like, what the hell does that even mean? So we really want people to say I'm a Duolingo sixty-five in French. And our approach for this is going to be the test is one side, which gives our score legitimacy. Look, that score is good enough for you to get into MIT

• 1:39:16Speaker 03

  or Duke or wherever. That's good. And then we don't have that yet, but we're going to start putting that score in the app. We're going to start putting an estimated score of the Duolingo English test or the Duolingo Spanish test. Once we have a Spanish test, we don't yet have a Spanish test. We're going to start putting in the app. That gives it scale. So pretty soon, literally hundreds of millions of people are going to have an estimated score. And the hope is that people start putting in their resume, et cetera, et cetera. And I think if we're able to do that, this will be not only good for the world, but also for the company, they will be a very defensible position because we kind of own the scale. So I'm very excited by that.

• 1:39:51Tim Ferriss?

  I want to share a little bit of backstory. And then I want to ask a question about how you actually do this testing. So the backstory that I wanted to share briefly is that you're very good at catching cheaters. You have a history of catching cheaters. So I don't want to spend too much time on this, but I'll just give a quick recap. So you have taught at Carnegie Mellon, and my recollection, this is shorthand here, based on notes I have, but you would tell students they were not to Google certain answers for specific homework assignments. Then you would create honeypot websites with the answers to homework questions. The websites would record IP addresses. Then you would call out the cheaters and tell the class if they confessed, they would simply get a zero. But if he had, if he, meaning

• 1:40:36Tim Ferriss?

  you, had to do the work of figuring out who it was, you would report them. And they got so scared of your tricks that they eventually all stopped cheating. So you have a history of catching people who are trying to game the system. In the case of remote

• 1:40:52Tim Ferriss?

  Aptitude testing for English. Are you still using the front facing camera and microphone on a phone? Or how do you set it up such that it is hard to game the system?

• 1:41:03Speaker 03

  That is one of the hardest problems you have to solve if you are testing an English proficiency for high stakes test. By the way, that's the reason why they force people to go to testing centers. Because they wanted to make sure they weren't cheating. It turns out we are able to solve this and we just use a number of tricks. I mean, obviously, we turn on the front facing camera of the device. Right now, the test only works on computers. We did not do it for phones. So you have to take it on a computer, front facing camera of the device. We have a real human watch you do the test. We also have artificial intelligence that looks at where you're looking. And that turns out to be really powerful when you are taking a test. It is very predictable where you're going to be looking. On the screen, there is the area that has the question. We need to see that you actually went and read that.

• 1:41:47Speaker 03

  Your eyes scan that, then you're probably going to be looking where you're typing, etc. So you can pretty well tell that that is actually the person taking the test as opposed to being taken by somebody else. We also do all kinds of other things. I mean, we record all the ambient noise. We also lock down your computer as in like you have to download an app that kind of turns off everything in your computer and also tells us whether your computer is connected to external devices, whether you have all kinds of, you know, like, for example, some, some headphones that are telling you the answer or whatever. So we do a lot of that. And the way we know we catch cheaters is that we actually have a program where we pay people to try to cheat. And we see whether they're successful or not.

• 1:42:24Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, that's, that's great. Yeah, you red team your own system.

• 1:42:27Speaker 03

  We do, and that's been really good. And you know, every now and then they're able to find something that kind of passes through, and then we patch it. And I'll tell you, even though this is kind of the new technology and everything, and people would say like, ah, but it's still computers. Maybe they're doing something weird. It's a hell of a lot easier to cheat in offline kind of testing centers. Because the way people cheat in these offline testing centers is so easy. And it's as follows. Most of these testing centers are in developing countries. The person who works at the testing center is not a highly paid employee in a developing country. Turns out, non-highly paid employees in developing countries will take a hundred bucks bribe for, well, almost anything. So, this is how you cheat there. And it's actually very,

• 1:43:12Speaker 03

  this is low, low fidelity, old school cheating, which is like, here's a hundred bucks, just say that I took the test, but actually here's my friend who actually speaks English, let them take the test. Thanks, bye. So that is how people cheat. People actually cheat that way. You cannot cheat that way with our tests because you cannot see who's proctoring you. You just, you can't communicate with them, etc. So, we feel pretty good about the anti-testing mechanics here.

• 1:43:39Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I'm glad I asked. That covered a lot more than I expected we would cover. Do you still eat Greek yogurt for breakfast? At least last time we spoke, you did the same breakfast for two to three years, as an example of one decision that removes a thousand decisions. Or have you, have you decided to swap in a new breakfast for yourself?

• 1:43:56Speaker 03

  Very similar, but I just do, now it's just a little jug of muscle milk. Because my trainer, Gary, on his first day, Gary's a funny guy, he only cares about strength. He said, let's have the nutrition conversation. I'm like, okay. And he said, drink muscle milk. And then I'm like, anything else? He's like, nope. Just drink muscle milk. Thanks. That was his nutrition conversation.

• 1:44:17Tim Ferriss?

  Good talk.

• 1:44:18Speaker 03

  Good talk, good talk.

• 1:44:23Speaker 03

  I was hoping he'd be like, well, you know, eat this type of whatever vegetable and this after that. Nothing. He's just like, just drink some muscle milk. So, it's what I do for breakfast.

• 1:44:32Tim Ferriss?

  Hey, keeps it simple. Daily, daily habit. Yep. It's like brushing your teeth.

• 1:44:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:44:38Tim Ferriss?

  All right, two more questions, maybe three, and then we can bring this to a close and land the plane. All right. So, next question is more generalized. What advice would you give to a smart-driven, say, college student, you could pick a different age, about to enter the real world? And secondarily, if you want to take a stab at this, you know, what advice should they ignore?

• 1:45:00Speaker 03

  Depends on what you want. You wanna get a job, you wanna work, you wanna work? Or do you wanna just play video games? If you wanna play video games, go play video games, whatever, that's fine. But if you actually wanna get a job, I would say the most important thing is find a way to become useful. And I don't know if it's just always, you know, I am getting older and I don't know if it's just always people talking about the younger generations this way, but it's just a lot of times, a lot of, you know, the Gen Z's, it used to be even millennials, but the Gen Z's, you know, they show up and they're like, what are you gonna do for me? And it's like, well, can you do this? No, no, no, I don't, I don't like that. That's not a good learning opportunity for me. Or like, you hired me to be a software engineer. I'm not gonna do, that's not my job. I'm not gonna do that. That's not my job.

• 1:45:42Speaker 03

  The attitude of just finding a way to become useful gets you a lot farther. Certainly at Duolingo, but I think in most places in life where it's just like, you need me to do this? This is what's actually needed? Yeah, I'll do it. I'm pretty smart. I'll figure it out. I'll do it. Obviously, you know, if you're hired to be a software engineer, you should not go and like build a building, because you don't even know how to do that. But just kind of just find ways to become useful and crucial for the company will get you a lot more perks and promotions than having this attitude of what are you gonna do for me? That's just my sense and I see that a lot of the what are you gonna do for me attitude.

• 1:46:19Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, just to add to that, the opposite would be something like, and I think I'm getting this right. So a friend of mine, Kelly Starrett, very well-known performance coach, PT, has written many books, works with tons of professional athletes, the top tier of elite military, and he also happened to be, I would say, he might disagree, but Olympic level whitewater kayaker for a period of time. And I went on a river trip with him and he mentioned to everybody as this priming talk, as part of this orientation, he said, you know, there are really four words that will make the biggest difference in this trip and it's how can I help?

• 1:47:03Tim Ferriss?

  And he's just like, everybody should ask that. It seems so rudimentary, but I would agree with you and man, if you just take that attitude, like you're on a river trip, how can I help? If you've got some extra time or slack. It really will distinguish you.

• 1:47:19Speaker 03

  It really does. It is amazing. I mean, and I see it. We do, you know, of course, we hire a lot of people and everybody we hire is pretty awesome. But the ones that have more of this attitude just get farther in life just because they're just there. They're like, how can I help? I just need to help. I have a story of it's kind of two separate employees. This is kind of early Duolingo where we didn't have a blog. We of course now have a blog for stuff. One just kept complaining. We didn't have a blog. He's like, I can't believe we don't have a blog. Why don't we have a blog? It's ridiculous. We don't have a blog, but never did anything. Another one started and they just said, I noticed we don't have a blog, so I started one. And here it's linked to the website. That is the attitude that helps a lot more than just being like, I can't believe we don't have a blog. How about you do something about it?

• 1:48:07Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, last question for me. And then there's just a closing question of if there's anything else you'd like to add, say, or direct the listeners to in any way. In the last handful of years, what have you become better at saying no to? Could be distractions, invitations, anything. Are there any new realizations or approaches that have have helped you to say no to more? Maybe that's not even a problem you have, but I figured I would ask.

• 1:48:33Speaker 03

  No, I have a problem saying no. I definitely have become better at saying no. You know, in some cases I just don't have the time, but it is a problem. I mean, the problem is I'm a people pleaser. Like I want to please the people in front of me, whoever they are. Sometimes even if they are a random stranger emailing me some stuff, I still I'm a people pleaser. So this is not that new, but it is a big trick that I learned a little while ago, specifically for invitations and stuff like that, which is, I used to say yes to an invitation to like, give a talk next year, just go give a talk next year. And I used to say yes, because I thought, nah, next year I won't be that busy or whatever. And if you change your framing, whenever somebody asks you to do something a long time from now, change the framing and say, what if it was tomorrow?

• 1:49:18Speaker 03

  Would you want to do this or not? Almost invariably, the answer is no, I definitely don't want to do this tomorrow. And then you should answer based on that. I think that has helped me say no to a lot of things where you just say like, okay, because it's not necessarily a trick that people use, although sometimes maybe it is a trick, but I just get asked to do certain things months from now. And I never think about, man, I'm actually gonna have to do it and it's gonna suck. I just never think about that. So I'm just like, ah, months from now, it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter. You really should get a lot better at that and just think about what if it was tomorrow?

• 1:49:51Tim Ferriss?

  Whether you do if it were tomorrow. Good advice, good advice. Luis, is there anything else that you would like to add? Any requests of the audience? Of course, people can find you on Twitter at Luis Von Un. They can find Duolingo, duolingo.com or anywhere they find their apps, most certainly they could find it. Anything else that you would like to add or mention, draw attention to or closing comments?

• 1:50:18Speaker 03

  I do have one thing, although, you know, you're welcome to cut it if you don't think it's gonna be all that interesting, but I would be remiss if I didn't say this. It is about my country, Guatemala. I would like to call attention, particularly here in the United States, about the level of corruption there. And you're like, okay, who cares? Guatemala's corrupt. First of all, it's extremely corrupt. And there are real consequences for the United States, and in particular, one of them is probably illegal immigration. There's, you know, Guatemala is, I believe, the second country with largest illegal immigration into the United States. There's a lot of, there's literally millions of illegal immigrants from Guatemala here in the United States. And you can be very concerned about that. And not only can you be very concerned about the treatment of them in the border, which I think is horrendous, but, you know, once they're here, like, you can be very concerned about that.

• 1:51:03Speaker 03

  And the sole reason why they're leaving so much is because the country is extremely corrupt and just cannot handle itself, basically.

• 1:51:12Speaker 03

  And the reason I like to call attention to that is because I do believe the United States and their foreign policy can actually help with this in many ways. And unfortunately, that is just not something that's happening too much. But I do believe that as long as Guatemala continues to be this corrupt, there will continue being a lot of illegal immigration. And I also think there's all kinds of stuff. I mean, the thing is, it's so close to the US that it has become a hub for basically international crime. And, you know, when they're close to the US, that means some of that crime spills over to here. So far, it hasn't happened, but we haven't seen a terrorist attack where the terrorists came through Guatemala. But I wouldn't be surprised if that happens, where, you know, it's just an extremely corrupt place and they just kind of funnel stuff from there. So given that it's so close to this country, I think this is of importance.

• 1:51:56Speaker 03

  And of course, I have a self-serving reason for saying this. I mean, I would like my country to do better. But at this point, the level of corruption there is unbelievable. So that's the one thing that I would like to call attention to.

• 1:52:09Tim Ferriss?

  That's why I asked. I think this is a perfectly fine place to talk about this. And let me ask you a follow-up. For those policymakers, people listening who may actually be able to look at this more closely and have an impact, do you have any specific recommendations or requests of them?

• 1:52:32Speaker 03

  I do. A number of them. Probably one of the biggest ones is there's a free trade agreement with Guatemala, the same one as NAFTA. I mean, there's a free trade agreement with kind of, you know, Mexico and Guatemala, et cetera. There are clauses there that are against, like anti-corruption clauses. They are being overlooked. It is known that there is a lot of corruption in a lot of these countries. And I think that the US can say, you know what? It's clear you're that corrupt. We're going to clamp down on NAFTA unless you fix your problem. And this would get these countries to fix their problems because they care about something like NAFTA because they make a lot of money off of it. I mean, money moves things. That's one thing. Another one is considering, I mean, there are sanctions that they put to individuals.

• 1:53:14Speaker 03

  The US has done these things where certain individuals, they just consider them so corrupt that they're like, sorry, you cannot enter this country anymore. We don't even want you to come visit, the shopping trip to Miami or whatever. No, no, we don't want that. Crazy story. Some of the highest government officials in Guatemala, including our Attorney General, is banned from entering the United States because they're considered so corrupt. Applying more of that, that actually has real teeth and in particular applying that to corrupt business people because they all love their nice mansion in Miami. I bring up Miami because Latin Americans love Miami, they love having mansions there. They all have their nice mansion in Miami, etc. If suddenly they cannot come to the US, that's bad and it looks bad for their kids because their kids, they love to come to Miami and their kids' friends love to.

• 1:53:58Speaker 03

  So this is the type of stuff that I think has teeth that the US can do.

• 1:54:02Tim Ferriss?

  Well, thank you, Luis. I did not see that coming and I'm glad you brought it up.

• 1:54:07Speaker 03

  I've thought about this problem a lot. I've thought about this. I poured millions of dollars to try to improve. I own a good fraction of the oldest running newspaper in Guatemala and we do a lot of stuff against corruption. So I've poured a lot of money onto this, but unfortunately, I think the corruption problem in Guatemala could be solved with some money, but I think it's like billions of dollars. Unfortunately, I have not dropped that amount, but I've poured in millions of dollars to try to fix this.

• 1:54:33Tim Ferriss?

  What I might do is ask you, after we stop this recording, we'll get maybe a few links for policymakers who may be interested in in learning more about this and the different resources they might want to educate themselves on, whether it's trade agreements or otherwise. So we'll get some links and put those in the show notes as well. And Luis, thank you for making the time. It's nice to see you, man. It's been, it's been a little while and for those who can't see the video, I appreciate the matrix-like background that you have as well. It's very compelling.

• 1:55:09Speaker 03

  Thank you, Tim. I'm in a studio, I'm in a great studio here near the Duolingo offices.

• 1:55:13Tim Ferriss?

  And hope to see you in person not too long from now. So maybe, maybe we can, next time you're in New York City, we can figure out a way to break some bread or have a drink together.

• 1:55:24Speaker 03

  I would love that. If you're in New York City, I'm there very often. I would love that.

• 1:55:27Tim Ferriss?

  All right. Wonderful. Well, Luis, thank you so much and I always enjoy our conversations. As I mentioned before, people can find you at Luis Von On on Twitter, duolingo.com and we'll link to everything in the show notes at tim.blog/podcast. And to everyone listening, be just a little kinder than necessary today and thank you so much for tuning in and until next time, take care.

• 1:55:54Tim Ferriss?

  Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between 1.5 and 2 million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half-page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered, or have started exploring over that week. It's kinda like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests.

• 1:56:37Tim Ferriss?

  And these strange esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So, if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog/friday. Type that into your browser, tim.blog/friday. Drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time what I would take if I could only take one supplement. The answer is invariably Athletic Greens. I view it as all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it, in fact, in The Four Hour Body. This is more than 10 years ago, and I did not get paid to do so.

• 1:57:22Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:58:06Tim Ferriss?

  which is a free vitamin D supplement and five free travel packs with your first subscription purchase. Many of us are deficient in vitamin D. I've found that true for myself, which is usually produced in our bodies from sun exposure. So adding a vitamin D supplement to your daily routine is a great option for additional immune support. Support your immunity, gut health, and energy by visiting athleticgreens.com/tim. You'll receive up to a year's supply of vitamin D and five free travel packs with your subscription. Again, that's athleticgreens.com/tim. This podcast episode is brought to you by Helix Sleep. Sleep is super important to me. In the last few years, I've come to conclude it is the end all be all, that all good things,

• 1:58:51Tim Ferriss?

  good mood, good performance, good everything seem to stem from good sleep. So I've tried a lot to optimize it. I've tried pills and potions, all sorts of different mattresses, you name it. And for the last few years, I've been sleeping on a Helix Midnight Luxe mattress. I also have one in the guest bedroom and feedback from friends has always been fantastic. It's something that they comment on. Helix Sleep has a quiz, takes about two minutes to complete, that matches your body type and sleep preferences to the perfect mattress for you. With Helix, there's a specific mattress for each and every body. That is your body, also your taste. So let's say you sleep on your side in like a super soft bed. No problem.

• 1:59:32Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:00:15Tim Ferriss?

  So that's up to $200 off and two free pillows at helixsleep.com/tim. That's helix, H E L I X, sleep.com/tim for up to $200 off. So, check it out one more time. Helix, H E L I X, sleep.com/tim.