#164 CEO & Co-Founder Duolingo, Luis von Ahn: "The Pitch Was Never Pittsburgh"

Grit

Guest: Luis von Ahn, CEO and co-founder of Duolingo

When Luis von Ahn wanted to go to college in the United States, he had to take a standardized test called the TOEFL, or Test of English as a Foreign Language. But there was nowhere in his home country of Guatemala that could accommodate another test-taker, so he flew to war-torn El Salvador, just to take the TOEFL. Many years later, as the co-founder and CEO of Duolingo, Luis and his team “decided this type of thing, we could do a lot better.” Today, more than 4,500 universities accept the results of the online Duolingo English Test — a boon for the estimated 2 billion people currently learning English around the world.

In this episode, Luis and Joubin discuss returning to the office, Carnegie Mellon, identifying strivers, the “Luis dashboard,” ignoring Reddit, pre-meetings, the hardest part of learning, sounding dumb, private security, the job of a professor, digitizing books,
working out every day, April Fools’ campaigns, Duo the owl, and hiring nice people.

In this episode, we cover:

• Working in Pittsburgh, in-person (00:57)
• How Duolingo hires (06:48)
• Growing up in Guatemala (10:29)
• Luis’ parents, intelligence, and drive (12:09)
• His morning routine (16:56)
• Ground truth (19:39)
• “The smaller the team, the better” (22:29)
• Language education and human behavior (24:32)
• Learning English (28:53)
• Back to Guatemala (32:03)
• CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA (36:10)
• Money vs. impact (41:26)
• Luis’ TEDx Talk and public speaking tips (44:46)
• Love Language and nontraditional marketing (48:46)
• Doubling down on what works (53:27)
• Slow hiring (56:44)
• Would Luis ever start something new? (59:28)
• Who Duolingo is hiring and what “grit” means to Luis (01:01:46)

Links:

• Connect with Luis
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
• Connect with Joubin
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Email: [e-mail]
• Learn more about Kleiner Perkins
• This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm