Duolingo CEO: What I Tell Every Employee About Surviving AI

Marina Mogilko 0:00 Hey, guys, welcome to Silicon Valley Girl. We are about to interview the founder of Duolingo. [blows] Oh. [blows] Oh, no, no, no. No, Duo, not you. No, no, no. Do we have the actual founder?

Luis von Ahn 0:17 Hi.

Marina Mogilko 0:17 Hi [laughs] .

Luis von Ahn 0:18 Hi.

Marina Mogilko 0:18 Hello.

Luis von Ahn 0:19 Hi. Hi.

Marina Mogilko 0:19 Your employees are getting a little [laughs] creative. [laughs]

Luis von Ahn 0:22 We pay that guy and he has his own personality. He just does what he wants.

Marina Mogilko 0:27 Yeah.

Luis von Ahn 0:27 AI is not gonna take your job. Somebody using AI is gonna take your job.

Marina Mogilko 0:30 This is Luis von Ahn, CEO of Duolingo. Recently, two of his employees built a chess course with AI in six months. No engineering background, no knowledge of the subject. It became the fastest-growing course in the company. There are a lot of rumors of large companies firing people-

Luis von Ahn 0:47 Yeah

Marina Mogilko 0:47 ... and they say it's AI.

Luis von Ahn 0:48 We have never done a layoff. Despite what the internet may think, it is important to continue hiring people because a single employee is just way more productive now than they used to be.

Marina Mogilko 0:56 I'm gonna name five professions and you're gonna make some predictions. Gone in five years or not going anywhere? [beep]

Luis von Ahn 1:04 There'll be fewer and fewer.

Marina Mogilko 1:07 Luis, you told your team that nobody gets hired unless team proves AI can do the work first. Can you tell me how you actually track that as a founder?

Luis von Ahn 1:20 Our, our goal here is to use AI, uh, to benefit our users. Internally, we have this golden rule. We're only going to use AI to benefit our learners. Some people may imagine that, uh, you know, some companies may be firing people and, and having AI do their job. That's not what we're doing whatsoever. Our team has gotten, uh, significantly better at using AI over the last, you know, couple of years, and that has allowed us to do a lot more. It has allowed us to, uh, put out a lot more content, a lot more learning content, et cetera. We as a management team are not necessarily tracking like, oh, are you doing something that AI can do or not? We're just really trying to tell everyone, uh, try to be as, as efficient as possible with AI, and, and our employees are doing that.

Marina Mogilko 2:02 And can you give me some of the best examples from the team? For someone who's watching this and they're like, "Okay, my manager tells me to start using AI, but I have no idea how to do it," do you have, like, best case examples?

Luis von Ahn 2:13 It depends on what your job role is. I think most of our engineers, um, have basically really changed their workflows. They're using AI coding tools. A lot of our product managers, what they've decided to do is m- using AI to make prototypes of things. So the product manager may not be implementing the thing in the full pro- production app, but rather than coming to us with a written document, they come with a prototype now. That's way better because it allows for much better decision-making. So if somebody comes to me with a written proposal and says, uh, you know, "I'm gonna do a, a way to teach Spanish better," it's hard for me to know what that actually means. But if they just show me the prototype and I can see that it really does seem to teach Spanish better, it's much easier to, to give approval to that type of thing. Uh, so it, it depends a lot on the role.

Marina Mogilko 3:00 Do you give them any guidance, like, okay, instead of doing this, do that next time? Or how, how do they even find out they can do these things with AI?

Luis von Ahn 3:08 We try to do some things in the whole company, um, to try to... You know, we had, for example, uh, a few months ago, we had, um, a day where everybody in the company had to vibe code something re- N- not just engineers, every single person, people from, you know, HR, people from the finance team, everybody had to vibe code something, um, so everybody could see the power of it. We also have a lot of documentation about best practices, but generally h- people here, uh, in Duolingo are pretty smart. They're always finding new things, and I think what happens is rather than management telling them what to do, they tell each other what to do. There's... We have a lot of Slack channels. You know, one of them is called Best AI Practices.

Marina Mogilko 3:48 Mm.

Luis von Ahn 3:49 And so people are just saying stuff. We also have another one that's called AI Fails, which is all the times, all the things that people try-

Marina Mogilko 3:55 That's such a great one.

Luis von Ahn 3:56 It is an incredible thing, very empowering for people who are like, "Oh my God, I made," um, you know, usually they're very small apps, but it's like, "I made an app."

Luis von Ahn 4:03 One of the things that has happened inside this company is everybody now has made their own dashboard. It's 100%-

Marina Mogilko 4:08 For their KPIs or something?

Luis von Ahn 4:09 Yeah, for whatever it is.

Marina Mogilko 4:10 Yeah.

Luis von Ahn 4:10 Whatever it is they're tracking.

Marina Mogilko 4:11 Yeah.

Luis von Ahn 4:11 I mean, I see a few product managers that have vibe coded a whole thing with like our users in every country and what they're doing.

Marina Mogilko 4:17 That's, that's super impressive. And is that how you track AI proficiency? 'Cause now it's part of performance reviews, right, at Duolingo.

Luis von Ahn 4:23 For a while it was part of performance reviews. We decided not to do that, and I'll tell you why. I sent a memo to the company that said, you know, part of your performance review is gonna be usage of AI, and we found that people were... I don't know if they were doing that, but they were kind of asking like, "Do you just want us to use AI for AI's sake?" And at the end we backtracked and we said, "No, look, the most important thing in your performance is that you are doing, you know, whatever your job is as well as possible. A lot of times AI can help you with that, but if it can't-

Marina Mogilko 4:54 Then you have to-

Luis von Ahn 4:54 ... I'm not gonna force you to do that."

Marina Mogilko 4:56 Yeah.

Luis von Ahn 4:56 So I think we backtracked from that because it really... It felt like rather than being held accountable for the actual outcome, we're trying to just push something that in some cases did not

Luis von Ahn 5:06 fit.

Marina Mogilko 5:06 And, um, d- do you have a specific example where somebody did something in a week without AI and then with AI they kind of multiplied the, uh, output?

Luis von Ahn 5:14 We now teach chess on Duolingo, so, you know, for a long time we only taught languages. Now we teach a few other things. Chess is the latest course we added. This course got started by two people, n- neither of whom knew chess, neither of whom knew how to program. They basically vibe coded the first prototype of it. Now, the final version that is actually in the app, of course, we put some engineers in there, et cetera, but they really got very far. In a span of about six months, they created the whole curriculum for chess. They created a prototype of the app all, uh, entirely with, with AI, and again, these people did not know any chess.

Marina Mogilko 5:50 And whose idea was that? Was it their idea to just vibe code-

Luis von Ahn 5:53 It was their idea to do that. They also... It was... Well, they're the ones who wanted to add chess. Uh, by the way, they came to me a year earlier to say, "We wanna add chess." I said, "I don't wanna add chess."Um, because it's just a game, and we're an education app. But what happened was that, um, a few months later, I talked to the minister of education of my country, I'm from Guatemala, and she said to me, "Our education system, our public education system in Guatemala is so broken that I'm considering sending every student a chessboard so that at least they'll learn logical thinking."

Marina Mogilko 6:23 Mm-hmm.

Luis von Ahn 6:23 And when she said that to me, I thought, "Oh, wow, okay, this is actually useful."

Marina Mogilko 6:26 Part of education.

Luis von Ahn 6:27 Yes.

Marina Mogilko 6:27 Yeah.

Luis von Ahn 6:27 So then, uh, this is when I told them, "Okay, you can add the chess course." But I said to them, "But I don't have any engineers to give you, so go ahead," and they, they figured it out.

Marina Mogilko 6:38 Six months, right?

Luis von Ahn 6:39 About six months, yeah.

Marina Mogilko 6:39 And now it's your fastest-growing course?

Luis von Ahn 6:41 Yeah. It's... I mean, at this point, we have seven million daily active users that are learning chess.

Marina Mogilko 6:46 Wow, this is fascinating. Uh, can you tell me step by step what was their process? So if somebody's watching and they're like, "Wow, if Duolingo is able to do such a spin-off," which is kind of different from languages-

Luis von Ahn 6:57 Mm-hmm

Marina Mogilko 6:57 ... if I want to start something with AI and build a fast-growing product, what are the, like, five steps they need to take?

Luis von Ahn 7:04 [laughs] These two guys, the first thing they did was probably learn chess, [laughs] probably, because they didn't know any chess, and that's one of the reasons they wanted to add it, 'cause they themselves wanted to learn chess. But after that, what they did is they really started looking at, you know, kind of the different tools that are out there for learning chess. That- they were basically doing market research to try to figure out what's out there for learning chess. They found that really what was out there was not all that great, and then they decided to start vibe coding something. To be fair, this person does have some technical knowledge. They're not an engineer, but they have some technical knowledge. Um, and so they downloaded Cursor, and at first they made just chess puzzles. Um, then they realized that the AI was not very good at making chess puzzles, so then they decided to train it with some... There's a, there's an online database of a lot of different chess puzzles, so they trained the AI with that, and it got a lot better. And then after that, what they started doing was just more and more mobile prototypes for me to play with until I told them that it was kind of good enough to, to really put it in the app.

Marina Mogilko 8:08 And then you put it in the app, and then y- did you give it an external push, or people just started discovering it and-

Luis von Ahn 8:13 By putting it in the app, very quickly a lot of people came. But chess really has a big draw. I mean, we put other courses in the app that have not grown as, as much. For example, it turns out chess is more fun than math.

Marina Mogilko 8:22 Well, so someone, a student who just

Marina Mogilko 8:25 heard about your chess course that was spun out so quickly, and they want to start building something with AI today, what advice would you give them?

Luis von Ahn 8:34 Well, the biggest advice I can give them is to start. You know, a lot of people talk a lot about starting. They, they're like, "Oh, I have an idea, but I..." Biggest thing is just sit down and do it. Y- you will learn a lot by just trying to do it, so that's, that's the biggest thing. Um, other than that, you know, try to learn how do some of the best tools work. Certainly vibe coding will help you a lot, but it's not just vibe coding. I mean, trying to make, you know, the, uh, initial designs for it. Now you can have AI tools to make the initial screens and everything. So use it all and try to make, try to make the thing. I mean, I, I haven't, haven't quite yet seen somebody who knows nothing about, uh, programming to really make a good app, but I have seen people who know a little bit about programming make-

Marina Mogilko 9:20 Mm-hmm

Luis von Ahn 9:20 ... you know, make apps. So I, I would tell you it's still worthwhile learning kind of the structure of programs. Um, that seems important. So even, even though you may, you may not actually need to program, like, word by word, just knowing how things work, for example, knowing the difference between the server and the client, like, just these very basic things-

Marina Mogilko 9:40 Basic things

Luis von Ahn 9:40 ... I think that's important.

Marina Mogilko 9:41 Did, did it give you more ideas to add more courses that are non-language related?

Luis von Ahn 9:46 Yeah, it's given us a lot of ideas. We are not, we are not yet working on other stuff, but we have a long list of things that we, you know, we wanna teach all kinds of things. K through 12 science we wanna teach. Again, we're not yet working on that. We wanna teach K through 12 science, we wanna teach how to draw. There's all kinds of things, but at the moment we're not really working on them because we wanna continue working on chess, math, music, and languages.

Marina Mogilko 10:04 Got it. But then any employee can just go and vibe code one of these courses and show you, and maybe they can make it in the app.

Luis von Ahn 10:09 Yeah, that's what I tell the company, by the way. A lot of times people come to me and they're like, "What course are you gonna add next?" And I, you know, what, one of the things I tell them is, uh, I wanted to add K through 12 science, and then we added math. I, I wanted to add K through 12 science, and then we added music. I wanted to add K through 12 science-

Marina Mogilko 10:25 [laughs]

Luis von Ahn 10:25 ... and then we added chess. At this point, I also wanna add K through 12 science-

Marina Mogilko 10:29 Yeah

Luis von Ahn 10:29 ... but it turns out that what people do here is somebody comes up with a really good idea, and if it's good and they're passionate about it, we let them do it.

Marina Mogilko 10:34 Then, yeah, they do it. Let's

Marina Mogilko 10:36 go back to the, actually the AI failure, Chad. Can you recall any examples of AI actually failing in a task?

Luis von Ahn 10:43 Oh, yeah. I mean, there's a lot of things where it's, where it's failing. I'll, I'll tell you the biggest one, which I think we're starting to see a difference here, but it wasn't the case a year ago. If you were to look at Twitter, um, and just read what people are saying on Twitter, two years ago I should have fired all our engineers. Because on Twitter they're like, "AI is better at coding than engineers." This is kind of, for the last two years, this is what they've been saying on Twitter. And it was an interesting thing, because I would come here and I would not really see a speed up on engineering.

Marina Mogilko 11:11 Hmm.

Luis von Ahn 11:11 Uh, and I'm like, "Well, what's the disconnect?"

Marina Mogilko 11:13 Yeah.

Luis von Ahn 11:13 "Why, you know, there's all these people saying that AI is better at coding than humans?" [laughs] And the reality is it's not yet the case that AI is better at coding than humans. I, I think you still really need engineers, and you're gonna need them for a long time, I think. But we've just seen a lot of cases where, uh, you know, you tell the AI to, to program something, and sometimes it works, but the other, I don't know what fraction of the time it doesn't work, but when it doesn't work, there's a real problem in that because you don't really know what it did, it's really hard to debug it, and that's kind of what has happened.

Marina Mogilko 11:42 Yeah.

Luis von Ahn 11:42 That you get into... The, the happy path is really fast. Okay, it worked. But the unhappy path makes it so that it takes so long that you end up spending more effort on that than the time you saved on the other thing, so we've seen that quite a bit. We've also seen AI not be able to generate things like narrative, like stories. Sometimes it does a good job, sometimes it doesn't do a great job, and it's just-... comes up with things that don't make any sense. You know, it's interesting because when you see a demo and you ask it to come up with a story, somehow those demos always look amazing.

Marina Mogilko 12:13 [laughs]

Luis von Ahn 12:13 But then when you try to come up with 100 stories, you realize that only, like, 30 are good-

Marina Mogilko 12:17 Mm

Luis von Ahn 12:17 ... and the other 70 are-

Marina Mogilko 12:18 So humans-

Luis von Ahn 12:19 ... kind of nonsense

Marina Mogilko 12:19 ... still needs to check and select

Luis von Ahn 12:20 Oh, check.

Marina Mogilko 12:21 Yeah.

Luis von Ahn 12:21 Yeah, uh, yeah. All our content needs to be... There, there's a lot of steps to try to either check it, or spot check it, or, or something to make sure that the

Luis von Ahn 12:30 quality's high.

Marina Mogilko 12:31 So if we compare today and a year ago, how much more productive the company is with AI?

Luis von Ahn 12:36 I don't know. It's more in pockets, and I don't know of any larger company that has seen, like, a 10X speed up in, like, the-

Marina Mogilko 12:42 I don't think so. I think startups really see it-

Luis von Ahn 12:44 I know

Marina Mogilko 12:44 ... 'cause when you're a one-person team, then you can work straight.

Luis von Ahn 12:46 A one person can do a lot of stuff.

Marina Mogilko 12:47 Yeah.

Luis von Ahn 12:47 With a larger company, it's harder. It just turns out, for example, most engineers don't spend eight hours a day coding. They have to go to meetings, they have to... So there's a part of it that you just cannot speed up. Then there's the part that they spend coding. Okay, maybe you can speed that up, but you cannot speed it up, at least at the moment, you cannot speed it up by 1000X.

Marina Mogilko 13:05 Mm.

Luis von Ahn 13:05 You can just maybe, I don't know, a little faster.

Marina Mogilko 13:07 Yeah.

Luis von Ahn 13:08 So overall, we're not seeing, like, we're putting out 10 times as many features. We're not. We're seeing some speed ups here and there in different pockets of the company, but again, it's what you said, one person companies are a lot faster-

Marina Mogilko 13:20 Yeah

Luis von Ahn 13:20 ... but it's because you don't have to interface with all the other parts of the company, et cetera. Uh, also, AI is not as good with existing code bases rather than with a brand-new code base.

Marina Mogilko 13:29 We've been talking a lot about how AI is changing the way people learn and retain information, and that got me thinking about something I changed in how I organize my own daily life and work. Someone told me once, "If you're not capturing everything that happens in your calls with your team, you're actually losing to other companies. You're losing decisions that were made, you're losing context that gets dropped, things you committed to and then you just forgot." Team syncs, strategy sessions, call with investors, even a quick conversation with a contractor, it all disappears the moment the call ends. And, uh, I don't know about you, but I'm on calls every single day, and sometimes I forget to press record. Sometimes I don't think the conversation is worth recording, but then after the conversation I realize, "I had to actually record that." One of my friends told me, "Marina, you should start using Granola. You'll be blown away," and now I use it on every single call. Now, it is an AI notepad for meetings, but it's not a bot that joins your Zoom and makes everyone uncomfortable. It transcribes your computer's audio in the background while you stay completely present in the conversation. It listens to every call automatically, and if it's a recurring call, it merges them by folders, so by the time the meeting ends, you have clean, structured notes ready to go. And after the call, I chat with my notes. I'm like, "Okay, uh, we just had this conversation. Can you, uh, create a follow-up email that I'm gonna send to Monica, my manager? Uh, we're gonna proceed with this, this, and that." Creates the email and I just send. It takes 15 seconds. It works across Zoom, Google Meet, and Teams. It's one of those tools I genuinely can't work without anymore, and I don't think you'll be able to either once you try it. Try it on your very first meeting after this episode. Head to granola.ai/marina to get three months of Granola for free, or enter the code marina at checkout. I left a link in the description. And now back to my conversation with Luis. What about you as

Marina Mogilko 15:21 a founder? Uh, does AI help you make decisions, or any workflows that work for you?

Luis von Ahn 15:26 Research, sure. It used to be the case that whenever I had something that needed to be researched, like, I don't know, what is the chess landscape in India, for example, you know, it used to be the case that I needed to either spend a lot of time myself or get a team of people to help me, whereas now I can, I can get a pretty good idea by just asking Gemini or something like that.

Marina Mogilko 15:47 Mm. Mm-hmm.

Luis von Ahn 15:47 Um, so research I do a lot more by myself. That has helped me, but ultimately the decisions are made m- ma- made by me. It's not like I ask the computer-

Marina Mogilko 15:56 Mm

Luis von Ahn 15:56 ... "What would you decide?"

Marina Mogilko 15:57 Okay.

Luis von Ahn 15:57 I, I haven't-

Marina Mogilko 15:58 So you don't use it as a coach, or you haven't vibe coded your own KPIs or whatever.

Luis von Ahn 16:01 I've done a bunch of vibe coding for things, but yeah, certainly my KPIs, but it's not... Decisions I still make [laughs] myself.

Marina Mogilko 16:08 Okay.

Luis von Ahn 16:09 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 16:09 Okay. I

Marina Mogilko 16:10 interview a lot of cool people on this podcast. In the past three weeks I had Reid Hoffman and Bill Gurley, who are legendary investors.

Luis von Ahn 16:16 Uh-huh.

Marina Mogilko 16:16 And I asked them a question, "What is the first market that's gonna be completely changed by AI and market you should be looking at?" And they told me language. [laughs]

Luis von Ahn 16:25 Okay.

Marina Mogilko 16:25 Thank you so much.

Luis von Ahn 16:26 Mm-hmm.

Marina Mogilko 16:26 You know, it's been my thing for 10 years. What do you think?

Luis von Ahn 16:29 Uh, I don't know what that means, change. So, uh-

Marina Mogilko 16:32 Like, you don't have to learn a language because everything is translated.

Luis von Ahn 16:35 Oh, no, I just don't buy that. Um, if you look at our users, uh, we have more than 100 million active users. Um, half of them are learning as a hobby. It's a hobby. Whether AI can do it or not, it's a hobby.

Marina Mogilko 16:51 It's a hobby.

Luis von Ahn 16:51 Actually, chess is a great example.

Marina Mogilko 16:52 Mm.

Luis von Ahn 16:52 You know, computers have been better at chess than humans since 1997. A lot more people are learning chess today than they were in 1997. It's a hobby. So for half of our learners, it's a hobby, and I don't think whether computers can do it or not, I don't think it'll matter. The other half are learning English, and I think anybody who tells you that people don't wanna learn a language has not had to learn English. I-

Marina Mogilko 17:15 It's interesting how you say, like, 50% they're probably learning other languages, hobby.

Luis von Ahn 17:18 Yes.

Marina Mogilko 17:19 English, necessity.

Luis von Ahn 17:20 Yes.

Marina Mogilko 17:20 Right?

Luis von Ahn 17:20 But that's how it is in the world.

Marina Mogilko 17:21 Yeah.

Luis von Ahn 17:21 Like, if you're learning... I'm sure there are... I'm generalizing here, but generally, if you're learning French, it's a hobby. It's not always true. I'm sure there are people who actually need to move to France.

Marina Mogilko 17:30 Moving.

Luis von Ahn 17:30 But it's a small fraction.

Marina Mogilko 17:31 Mm-hmm.

Luis von Ahn 17:31 The majority of people in the world that are learning French will, you know, want to feel cool when they go to Paris so they can order a croissant, and that's our users. And again, somebody who's lived their entire life in the US has, you know, has never had to learn English because that's their native language, et cetera, will say something like, "Well, languages are unnecessary," et cetera. But somebody who's had to learn English, it's a different thing.

Marina Mogilko 17:53 It is.

Luis von Ahn 17:53 It's just you just need to learn English and, and you may wanna move to an English-speaking country. You may need to do an educational... Like, you may need to go to a university. Nobody's gonna be allowing you to go to a university with, like, a, a phone that translates everything the professor says. Like, that's just not-

Marina Mogilko 18:08 Yeah.

Luis von Ahn 18:08 So I, I'm just not particularly worried about that.

Marina Mogilko 18:11 Is there a fraction of the market? So I'm thinking about translators, for example.

Luis von Ahn 18:13 Okay.

Marina Mogilko 18:14 Somebody spends, like, four years learning that.

Luis von Ahn 18:16 Y-

Marina Mogilko 18:16 What would you say to those people?

Luis von Ahn 18:18 Depends on, on what it is, but there are fractions of the market that are probably going to change quite a bit. Also-In terms of the demand, I agree that some people may have wanted to learn a, a little bit of a language if they were gonna, you know, just visit Germany for two days, that maybe now they're just not gonna do that because they can just... But I, a- at least when you look at Duolingo's users, that's a very small minority of our users. The majority really are hobby or English. Um, so I'm just not particularly-

Marina Mogilko 18:43 So you're not worried?

Luis von Ahn 18:43 I'm not. The other thing about language translation is that simultaneous language translation has been really good for... This is not an LLM thing. Like, LLMs are good at it, too, but Google Translate did not use LLMs, and it was really good 10 years ago. So I, I just... You know, we've seen the demand to learn a language actually go up as opposed to go down.

Marina Mogilko 19:04 Mm-hmm.

Luis von Ahn 19:04 Um, so, uh, this is not something that we internally are worried about.

Marina Mogilko 19:07 Okay.

Luis von Ahn 19:07 But I understand people say that [laughs] .

Marina Mogilko 19:09 Yeah, I'm also thinking, like, if you have glasses, for example, that are smart and they translate everything for you automatically.

Luis von Ahn 19:14 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 19:14 I haven't seen the case with, uh, headphones. I don't think people really use the, the AirPods to translate.

Luis von Ahn 19:19 No.

Marina Mogilko 19:19 And I'm thinking maybe it's glasses that translate the

Marina Mogilko 19:22 signs. I don't know, it's... 'Cause when we came to Silicon Valley, I think 2015, we were pitching our company Linguatrip that does, like-

Luis von Ahn 19:27 Mm-hmm

Marina Mogilko 19:27 ... language travel, language courses.

Luis von Ahn 19:29 Mm-hmm.

Marina Mogilko 19:30 And I think 50%, but to your note, American investors were like, "Oh, this is not a market."

Luis von Ahn 19:34 Look, again, this is-

Marina Mogilko 19:35 "Oh, this is gonna go down. Nobody needs-"

Luis von Ahn 19:36 We've had this problem at, at the entirety of the company of Duolingo. We're a company based in the United States. Uh, you know, I... When we first pitched Duolingo to investors here, you know, I don't know, however many years ago, the most common thing is like, "Nobody really wants to learn a language. Math, though, people wanna learn math." And that's, you know, I'm, I'm sure investors think that because they are good at math and they wanted to learn math, but the reality is there are more people learning languages in the world than there are people learning math.

Marina Mogilko 20:01 What was your mindset when the smartest people in the world tell you that? You're like, "I don't care. I just-"

Luis von Ahn 20:06 Well, I mean, I, you know, I grew up in Guatemala. I could see what it was [laughs] to have to learn English.

Marina Mogilko 20:10 Yeah.

Luis von Ahn 20:10 Look, it is a huge thing to learn English.

Marina Mogilko 20:12 Yeah.

Luis von Ahn 20:12 It changes people's lives.

Marina Mogilko 20:14 I know.

Luis von Ahn 20:14 Right?

Marina Mogilko 20:14 That's, that's my, my case as well.

Luis von Ahn 20:16 [laughs] It changes people's lives.

Marina Mogilko 20:17 Absolutely.

Luis von Ahn 20:17 So, uh, yeah.

Marina Mogilko 20:19 Do you have another worry that... So you have an app, right? But now we're in the era when anyone can vibe code an app for themselves.

Luis von Ahn 20:25 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 20:25 What if I go to, like I'm learning English, I go to Claude and ask, "Can you gamify my experience, create me an app that's personalized to me, you know my interests, you know my hobbies?" Do you worry about that?

Luis von Ahn 20:37 A little bit, but not, not really. I mean, this... It's funny, inside the company, we never talk about this. This is, you know, we see... A- again, we see Twitter talking about that or investors talking about that, but we internally don't talk about that. Look, ultimately, I think you can ask AI to make you an app, but making a really good app, um, is not that easy. Uh, you know, u- ultimately, we, for example, have data from, uh, hundreds of millions of people about how they learn a language. Every single day, more than a billion exercises are answered on Duolingo, and we use that data to teach you better. And so we just have a lot of data on how to keep you motivated. You know, there's probably two, 3,000 language learning apps in the world. They've been there, and now with vibe coding, there are now, there will be probably 20,000 rather than two, 3,000. But at the moment-

Marina Mogilko 21:25 Wow

Luis von Ahn 21:25 ... we're just not particularly concerned.

Marina Mogilko 21:26 Mm-hmm.

Luis von Ahn 21:27 You know, something may happen.

Marina Mogilko 21:28 Is there anything you're sort of... 'Cause I'm asking a question about it 'cause I talk to people and they're like, "Oh, this is gonna be eliminated. This is gonna be... We're done." And you're like, "It's fine."

Luis von Ahn 21:36 No, I don't, I wouldn't say that it's like all is fine. I do think a lot of things are gonna change.

Marina Mogilko 21:40 What do you think is gonna change? What are you preparing for?

Luis von Ahn 21:43 I think that user expectations are going to change, and I think we have to stay ahead of it. So a good example is, you know, one of the things we have in the app is, uh, conversation practice, uh, with AI. When we first put that out there, the cost of it was high for us, so we put it behind the most expensive tier, so, so you have to pay a lot of subscription to get the conversation practice. At the moment, the cost of that has come down enough that we're gonna start giving it to much cheaper tiers, and we are probably gonna eventually give it away for free.

Marina Mogilko 22:19 Mm-hmm.

Luis von Ahn 22:20 We're doing that because I believe that customers are gonna start expecting that. Like, I think there will be apps-

Marina Mogilko 22:26 Yeah

Luis von Ahn 22:26 ... that start doing this for free, and if we don't do it now, we'll be forced to do it in a few years. So that's the type of stuff we're doing to prepare for this because I, I, again, I think we just need to stay ahead. Uh-

Marina Mogilko 22:36 Yeah, so users will expect more for free.

Luis von Ahn 22:38 I, I think users will expect more. I think, I think users will expect the apps to be a lot more intelligent, which they should.

Marina Mogilko 22:44 Yeah.

Luis von Ahn 22:44 We're undergoing kind of a platform ch- shift here, and what ends up happening in platform shifts is that the companies who were the winner before the platform shift may or may not remain the winner after that. So I hope that we can

Luis von Ahn 22:57 do that.

Marina Mogilko 22:57 Also talking about, uh, AI and workforce, I just talked to Gary Vaynerchuk-

Luis von Ahn 23:02 Mm-hmm

Marina Mogilko 23:02 ... and I really like what he said. Like, there are a lot of rumors of people and news people firing, like large companies firing people.

Luis von Ahn 23:08 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 23:08 And they say it's AI. Then Gary said something [laughs] that struck me, 'cause he said, like, "If I fire 100 people, my competitor hires them, and they still 10X their output. Like, I'm dumb for firing them."

Luis von Ahn 23:20 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 23:20 How do you think about that?

Luis von Ahn 23:21 We have never, uh, laid anybody off here. We have never done a layoff. Despite what the internet may think, the internet may think we've done-

Marina Mogilko 23:28 Yeah, I think they misunderstood you or-

Luis von Ahn 23:29 Yeah

Marina Mogilko 23:30 ... no.

Luis von Ahn 23:30 We've never done a layoff here. Um, I think that it is, um, important to continue hiring people because now, y- you know, the way I see it is a single employee is just way more productive now than they used to be. So, you know, I get better return on investment [laughs] by having-

Marina Mogilko 23:46 Yeah

Luis von Ahn 23:46 ... another employee.

Marina Mogilko 23:46 It is.

Luis von Ahn 23:46 So that, that's how I see it. Um, I, I mean, my sense, I, of course, cannot speak about the very specific companies, but I, my sense is that at least in some of the cases, AI is just, um, an easy-

Marina Mogilko 23:58 PR reason [laughs] .

Luis von Ahn 23:59 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 24:00 Yeah.

Luis von Ahn 24:00 I mean, usually what happened is you overhired.

Marina Mogilko 24:02 Yeah, during COVID.

Luis von Ahn 24:02 And when you overhired, you're like, "Oh, okay, because of AI, we're gonna do that." I don't... At least at Duolingo, the way we run the company, I, I am surprised that there are companies doing that 'cause I see no reason.

Marina Mogilko 24:16 Yeah. I talked... I was just at Davos, and I was talking to somebody who releases their jobs report.

Luis von Ahn 24:20 Mm-hmm.

Marina Mogilko 24:21 All the layoffs are structural, like overhired during COVID, so it's not really-

Luis von Ahn 24:25 A lot of companies overhired during COVID.

Marina Mogilko 24:27 Yeah.

Luis von Ahn 24:27 And I understand that.

Marina Mogilko 24:28 Mm-hmm.

Luis von Ahn 24:28 And then, you know, if you overhired, you probably don't need these people.

Marina Mogilko 24:31 Yeah.

Luis von Ahn 24:31 But, you know, blaming AI is an, is an easy scapegoat.

Marina Mogilko 24:34 It is. It is. What he just said actually worries me the most. Everyone's talking about, like, AI replacing jobs and big companies firing people.This is not what's happening here, right? He's actually hiring people, but he's hiring those who know AI. Same for me, where we're just hiring a social media manager, and the questions I was asking them during the interview, "How are you gonna automate this? How are you gonna use AI in this process?" Founders are looking for people who utilize AI in their work. And this is actually what my newsletter is about. It's called Future Proof, and every week I share what we learned with AI. Like, my, uh, PR person just vibe coded the whole website with all the transcripts from this podcast. And, uh, we share things like that in the newsletter. So first of all, subscribe to this channel, and second, subscribe to the newsletter.

Marina Mogilko 25:21 Can we talk about the stock price? 'Cause I... When I was preparing for this, I saw the 82% collapse of the stock.

Luis von Ahn 25:28 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 25:28 But what I really wanna talk about, 'cause you explained that to your-

Luis von Ahn 25:32 Mm

Marina Mogilko 25:32 ... shareholders.

Luis von Ahn 25:33 Mm.

Marina Mogilko 25:33 Can you walk me through your mindset as a founder when you make such decisions who make your users happy but they don't make your investors happy? [chuckles]

Luis von Ahn 25:42 Well, the decision was made by AI, so I'm kidding.

Marina Mogilko 25:44 [laughs]

Luis von Ahn 25:45 [laughs] That is a joke. That is not what happened. Uh, I made that decision. Uh, well, look, we made a conscious shift in how we run the company. I made a conscious shift, and certainly the executive team was behind me. But we got to a point where, you know, if you look at over the last five years, we've grown a lot. We became a public company in 2021. Uh, we have grown our user base by more, like, our active users by more than 5X since then, so we've grown a lot. We've also grown our revenue by a similar amount, et cetera. We've grown a lot. But two things happened. One is that throughout 2025, we, we've been still growing, but we were growing slower than we were growing in previous years. So that's one thing that happened, like, our user base was growing slower than in previous years. The second thing that happened is because of AI, I really do believe that education is going to change quite a bit, and we are a really, uh, you know, important player in the education category, and I wanna be i- in, in a situation where we can lead some of that change through AI. So the combination of I wanna lead through that change in AI and our user growth slowing down told me we need to do something important, change how we operate so that we continue grabbing as many users as possible. Now, that comes with a cost, which is we are not going to be monetizing our user base as much as we were before, and investors don't love that.

Marina Mogilko 27:13 Yeah.

Luis von Ahn 27:13 But we knew... You know, when we made this decision, uh, we talked to, of course, all internally, our finance team. Everybody agreed this is going to decrease our stock price.

Marina Mogilko 27:21 Yeah.

Luis von Ahn 27:21 Uh-

Marina Mogilko 27:21 Did you expect that number, like 80, 82%?

Luis von Ahn 27:24 I didn't know exactly what to expect, honestly, but I knew that it was going to be a lot.

Marina Mogilko 27:28 Yeah.

Luis von Ahn 27:28 Um, so we, we kn- we knew that. But we made the decision consciously because we think that if we continued operating the way we were operating, you know, we probably could've continued growing a little bit, et cetera. But at some point it was going to be capped, whereas I think if we really try to get a much larger user base, we're gonna be a much larger company in the long term.

Marina Mogilko 27:46 Mm.

Luis von Ahn 27:46 And the thing is I'm operating this company... Uh, I mean, I'm hoping that this is my last job and this is the last thing that I do. Uh, and I have many more years of energy left.

Marina Mogilko 27:55 And you never regretted the decision?

Luis von Ahn 27:57 Oh, no. No.

Marina Mogilko 27:58 That is amazing, 'cause as a founder, like, again, hearing from the market what they think about your decision is tough.

Luis von Ahn 28:05 They don't like it. [laughs]

Marina Mogilko 28:06 It's tough. Wow.

Luis von Ahn 28:07 I know. I agree.

Marina Mogilko 28:08 [laughs]

Luis von Ahn 28:08 I, I agree. Look, it's not that it hasn't been tough.

Marina Mogilko 28:10 Mm-hmm.

Luis von Ahn 28:11 I mean, I, I don't regret the decision because I believe that it is the right decision, but it, it's, you know, it, uh... Yeah, it's been tough. I, I really still am very convinced this is the right decision.

Marina Mogilko 28:19 Do

Marina Mogilko 28:20 you feel like, 'cause you're founder of a publicly traded company, does your mood depend on your stock [chuckles] price?

Luis von Ahn 28:25 It used to.

Marina Mogilko 28:26 Yeah.

Luis von Ahn 28:26 At the... When we first went public, it used to. I learned to stop looking, uh, like, at least every day. I mean, uh, it's not that I, uh, I don't... It's not that I don't know the m- the ballpark, but I don't look every day. It used to be the case. The first, the first year or so, it'd be like, "It went up by a dollar. It went down by a dollar." Now, ah-

Marina Mogilko 28:45 Like, you're used to it?

Luis von Ahn 28:46 I'm used to it.

Marina Mogilko 28:46 'Cause I'm, as a creator, my self-worth depends on how my last video's performing, which is not right, which is not good for my mental health. I'm learning how to not look at it.

Luis von Ahn 28:58 Uh, well, I will tell you this.

Marina Mogilko 28:59 No, no, no. [laughs]

Luis von Ahn 29:00 Uh, the same is true for me, but not with our stock price. It's with daily active users.

Marina Mogilko 29:04 Oh, [laughs] so you still have the same, but it's just a different metric.

Luis von Ahn 29:06 I just moved it to daily active users, so every-

Marina Mogilko 29:08 But they've been growing though

Luis von Ahn 29:09 ... every morning... Yes, it's growing and everything, but every morning, I... You know, our daily active user report for the previous day comes at 5:00 AM exactly. I am, I wake up very early. Every morning at 5:01 AM, my mood gets set. [laughs]

Marina Mogilko 29:22 But do-

Luis von Ahn 29:22 It's not good

Marina Mogilko 29:23 ... do you think you should adjust it for some-

Luis von Ahn 29:25 Yeah, it's not good mentally, but-

Marina Mogilko 29:26 Yeah

Luis von Ahn 29:26 ... hey, uh, I-

Marina Mogilko 29:27 [laughs]

Luis von Ahn 29:27 ... I prefer this than the stock price, though.

Marina Mogilko 29:29 Yeah. [laughs]

Luis von Ahn 29:30 This, this makes more sense at least. This is a-

Marina Mogilko 29:31 This is something you can control versus the stock price

Luis von Ahn 29:32 ... this is something I can control, and it's an actual measure of the health of this company. The stock price, some of it is... You know, over the long term, it is a good measure of the health of this company. But on a day-to-day basis, you know, we used to... There used to be days that the stock price went down because, like, oil prices changed.

Marina Mogilko 29:48 Yeah.

Luis von Ahn 29:48 And I'm like, "Okay." [laughs]

Marina Mogilko 29:49 Yeah, I can't control that.

Luis von Ahn 29:50 "How is that related to me?"

Marina Mogilko 29:51 Yeah.

Luis von Ahn 29:52 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 29:52 Any other mental hacks? 'Cause I'm, I'm talking to you. Again, you're not really worried about AI. You learned how to make stock price not control your mood. Uh, do you have any mental life hacks that you developed as a founder during these years? What helps you? What do you think or what, what do you do when something goes bad? Do you go on walks to create ideas?

Luis von Ahn 30:13 I mean, don't get me wrong. When something goes bad, I... You know, it gets to me. I, it, it definitely gets to me. Um, I try to really think about the long term. One of the things that has helped me the most is really thinking about this. This is not just about the company. This is in general. And of course, I didn't invent this. This is... A lot of people say this. Thinking about anything, will this matter in six months? The vast majority of things will not matter in six months.

Marina Mogilko 30:37 Mm.

Luis von Ahn 30:37 The vast majority of things. So sometimes I get really upset, and I think about it, will this matter in six months? Some things will, but the vast majority of things will not matter in six months, and I... That, that makes me feel a lot better because I think, "Okay, I'm, I'm upset for no reason," because-This is gonna fizzle out

Marina Mogilko 30:52 What about, um, other things like marketing or content, do you think it matters for a founder?

Luis von Ahn 30:59 Depending on what type of company you're doing. Uh, certainly if you're doing a consumer company, marketing is gonna end up mattering.

Marina Mogilko 31:06 One of the most important things. [laughs]

Luis von Ahn 31:08 It's gonna end up mattering a lot.

Marina Mogilko 31:09 Yeah.

Luis von Ahn 31:09 I mean, I love our marketing team. They are excellent. They've done some really creative things over the years and have helped us grow a lot. I don't know of any hacks. I mean, ultimately you need to figure out how to get the word out for your product. I will say I have seen, um, many people try to cover a bad product with good marketing, and that can only get you so far. The reality is, if you want to really succeed, your product has to be good.

Marina Mogilko 31:33 Yeah.

Luis von Ahn 31:34 Um, I think good product, bad marketing is not very good, but bad product, good marketing is

Luis von Ahn 31:40 worse.

Marina Mogilko 31:40 Do you have time set for yourself every week when you play with the new AI tools, or you just discover on the go?

Luis von Ahn 31:46 I... No, I, I don't know if I have time that I've set for myself like that, but I mean, basically what happens is I talk to some of the employees. I know who in the company is at the forefront-

Marina Mogilko 31:55 Mm

Luis von Ahn 31:55 ... and I talk to them, and then they tell me, "Oh, you should try that. You should try that." And then I go... You know, I, I try it and...

Marina Mogilko 32:00 And for someone who's employed at a company and they want to hear advice from a founder whose company's using AI, what would you say to them? How do they start, uh, implementing AI in their job?

Luis von Ahn 32:10 Again, it depends a lot on their job. A lot of different tools for a lot of different things. It's not that hard to find the right tool for your job, and then try to use it and see if you can automate parts of your job with it. I mean, a lot of our employees have automated part of, parts of their job. Not the whole thing, but parts of their job.

Marina Mogilko 32:24 I like that they're doing this by themselves. That actually says a lot about the way you hire.

Luis von Ahn 32:29 Yeah. People are doing this by themselves.

Marina Mogilko 32:30 And when you're doing interviews now, are you asking about, like-

Luis von Ahn 32:33 We do ask. We want people here is to be open to it. I mean, we really are... You know, you do see the people who are just a lot more open to using AI versus the people who are like, "Nah." We, we want people who are more open. I mean, you know, there's a good thing that somebody said that I pretty much believe: AI is not gonna t- take your job, somebody using AI is gonna take your job. And I believe that is-

Marina Mogilko 32:55 Yeah

Luis von Ahn 32:55 ... mostly true.

Marina Mogilko 32:56 It's 10X more productive-

Luis von Ahn 32:57 This is way more productive

Marina Mogilko 32:59 ... with, with AI tools.

Luis von Ahn 32:59 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 32:59 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 33:00 Uh, do you believe that in 10 years we'll have millions of AI agents in our companies?

Luis von Ahn 33:05 Probably. I mean, it's... What I've learned in the last, especially the last few years, is that predicting the future is m- has gotten much harder because of AI. If you talked to me 10 years ago, I, I sort of coulda told you what the next year was gonna look like or what the next three years were gonna look like. It's probably we're gonna have a new version of the iPhone. It's gonna have a better screen. It's like it, it was just not that hard to predict.

Marina Mogilko 33:25 Boring. [laughs]

Luis von Ahn 33:26 It was kind of boring-

Marina Mogilko 33:27 Yeah

Luis von Ahn 33:27 ... and it was not that hard to predict. Whereas now, I'm very bad at predicting what's gonna happen.

Marina Mogilko 33:32 But you're not nervous?

Luis von Ahn 33:35 I am nervous, not for the immediate term and not necessarily for this company, but I am nervous about... I do believe that some shift is going to happen, and I, I'm nervous in that I just don't know what that's gonna be.

Marina Mogilko 33:47 Mm.

Luis von Ahn 33:47 I mean, there's... If you listen to different founders, everybody's telling you things that are pretty self-serving, like, you know, if, if you work in a company that makes AI for lawyers, they'll tell you lawyers are gonna disappear. Like, everybody's saying all these self-serving things. I don't know what they are, but I do think something's gonna change, and I'm nervous 'cause I don't know what that is.

Marina Mogilko 34:04 Nobody knows.

Luis von Ahn 34:05 Nobody does.

Marina Mogilko 34:06 Just go, go with the flow.

Luis von Ahn 34:07 Nobody does. [laughs] And I think the best thing you can do is try to adapt as pos- as fast as possible. And by the way, I, I am glad that I'm not having to choose a college career right now because I have no idea what I would choose.

Marina Mogilko 34:19 Mm.

Luis von Ahn 34:19 Uh-

Marina Mogilko 34:19 Yeah. It's even tougher now.

Luis von Ahn 34:21 Yeah, I-

Marina Mogilko 34:21 Yeah

Luis von Ahn 34:21 ... I have no idea what I would choose.

Marina Mogilko 34:23 I have a blitz for you.

Marina Mogilko 34:24 So I'm gonna name five professions and you're gonna make some predictions what you think.

Luis von Ahn 34:29 [laughs] Oh, man. Predictions, I'm very bad at that.

Marina Mogilko 34:30 [laughs] But, like, what your gut tells you. Gone in five years, gone in 10 years, or not going anywhere.

Luis von Ahn 34:36 [exhales] Okay.

Marina Mogilko 34:36 Let's try. Social media manager.

Luis von Ahn 34:39 You mean for, like, a company?

Marina Mogilko 34:40 Yeah. Like, coming up with scripts and...

Luis von Ahn 34:44 I, I don't think that's going anywhere.

Marina Mogilko 34:45 Mm-hmm.

Luis von Ahn 34:46 That's what I think. I don't.

Marina Mogilko 34:47 Translator?

Luis von Ahn 34:49 I think there will be cer- See, gone is a hard term because I think there will still be cases where we're going to want real human translation, but there'll be fewer and fewer. But I do think that for certain situations we're gonna want that.

Marina Mogilko 35:02 Like a premium-

Luis von Ahn 35:03 Yes

Marina Mogilko 35:04 ... premium service.

Luis von Ahn 35:04 It's, it's a very-

Marina Mogilko 35:04 Yeah

Luis von Ahn 35:04 ... it's gonna turn into very premium.

Marina Mogilko 35:06 Yeah.

Luis von Ahn 35:07 Um, uh, but for most, you know, everyday uses, yeah, it's gonna go away.

Marina Mogilko 35:13 Okay. Um, teacher.

Luis von Ahn 35:15 Oh, not going away. Uh, I mean, look-

Marina Mogilko 35:18 Are we gonna have more language teachers, you think?

Luis von Ahn 35:20 Teachers serve a lot of things, and I cannot imagine they're gonna go away. So I have a lot of thoughts about this. I mean, I'm a former teacher. I used to be a professor. I think AI is going to be great at teaching certain parts, certainly giving you a lot of repetition, maybe even adapting to what you learn, but ultimately, teachers are great at putting things into context. They're also really great at, um, making people wanna do something. They're very inspiring. When I was growing up, I wanted to be like my teachers, and it's kinda hard to wanna be like an AI. Like, I don't, I don't really wanna be-

Marina Mogilko 35:56 Yeah

Luis von Ahn 35:56 ... like an AI. But a teacher, they're very inspiring. They're, um, they put into, things into context. I mean, at the moment I'm pretty certain that if you have a really great teacher, um, that is better than not having a really [laughs] ... than not having a teacher. Again, not all teachers are equally good, et cetera, et cetera, but by the way, today computers are not as good at teaching as a really great teacher. That has not yet happened. I think it may start getting to the point where in certain aspects they're about as good, but I think having a teacher will always be better than not.

Marina Mogilko 36:26 I agree. I agree.

Luis von Ahn 36:26 I- that's what I think. So I, I don't-

Marina Mogilko 36:28 I think we're gonna-

Luis von Ahn 36:28 ... believe that it's going anywhere.

Marina Mogilko 36:29 We're gonna learn with AI, like, do some stuff, but we still need someone human to reply to.

Luis von Ahn 36:35 This is what I think. This is what I think.

Marina Mogilko 36:37 Yeah.

Luis von Ahn 36:37 I, I... It's also, it's incredibly hard to keep people motivated, and teachers are, have ways to get people motivated to do certain things. Uh, and, and just... You know, they start noticing things like, oh, that student feels left out. I'm gonna do something about it.

Marina Mogilko 36:51 Yeah.

Luis von Ahn 36:52 This is pretty hard to do with AI.

Marina Mogilko 36:53 Mm-hmm.

Luis von Ahn 36:53 So I, I just can't imagine this is gonna go away, but-

Marina Mogilko 36:56 Makes sense

Luis von Ahn 36:56 ... could be wrong.

Marina Mogilko 36:57 Strategist.I don't know if you tried AI for strategy, but for me-

Luis von Ahn 37:01 [laughs] It's good?

Marina Mogilko 37:02 So good. Sometimes it notices things I wouldn't even think about. Like, it was like, "You're not working on geo for your podcast."

Luis von Ahn 37:09 Mm.

Marina Mogilko 37:09 I'm like, "Oh, shoot. Yes, I am not."

Luis von Ahn 37:12 Uh, I recently-

Marina Mogilko 37:12 "And I'm not appearing in any searches."

Luis von Ahn 37:14 I recently asked, uh, the Slack has a Slack bot, and it sees all my conversations.

Marina Mogilko 37:19 Mm-hmm.

Luis von Ahn 37:19 And I asked it, uh, to give me, uh, what are my areas for improvement, and it was excellent.

Marina Mogilko 37:24 That's a very good prompt, by the way. Yeah.

Luis von Ahn 37:25 It told me exactly what... Like, it basically told me exactly what my 360 told me, but in a much more concise way. And certain things, it's really excellent. Um, strategy, um, I don't know. I don't, I don't know the answer to that question. I, I, I would say there's probably still some... You know, the thing about AI is that it's really good at kind of known things. I still think that there's gonna be some amount of human ingenuity necessary for certain types of strategy. So again, it may be that it just becomes a very premium thing.

Marina Mogilko 37:56 Okay, project manager.

Luis von Ahn 37:58 Oh, no, I don't think that's gonna go away. In my experience, project managers, if you need multiple people working on something, really good project managers have really good EQ and end up figuring out why a project is not working. And a lot of times, the project is not working because that person doesn't get along with that person. Like, stuff like that-

Marina Mogilko 38:20 Yeah

Luis von Ahn 38:21 ... um, I think that's gonna be hard. Again, there's parts of the, the, of the process that are, that can be automated. But in general, I, I, I can't imagine that the AI is gonna be really good at, you know, sitting two people there and being like, "You two are not getting along. You need to start getting along." I... That seems hard.

Marina Mogilko 38:38 So as someone who's running a company, do you think there, there are any positions that are going away in the nearest future, or are they just gonna be transformed?

Luis von Ahn 38:45 I think most of it is gonna be transformed, and I think, what I think will happen is that some companies, particularly companies that are not growing a lot, are going to find that they can do the same with fewer people.

Marina Mogilko 38:58 Right.

Luis von Ahn 38:58 So it may not be very specific professions, but it will be like, do we need 100 people do- doing customer service, or can we do so with only 10? I think that will hap- happen.

Marina Mogilko 39:09 Yeah.

Luis von Ahn 39:09 Um, the entire profession going away is kind of hard. I mean, even customer service, where a lot of people say like, "Ah, customer service is gonna go away," you probably still need a couple of humans there being-

Marina Mogilko 39:19 You still need to orchestrate the-

Luis von Ahn 39:19 Yeah, you probably-

Marina Mogilko 39:20 Yeah

Luis von Ahn 39:20 ... still need some people to orchestrate it. So I, I do think that, uh, you'll find some companies that will need fewer people over time.

Marina Mogilko 39:27 Yeah. I totally, uh, totally feel that. We wanted to hire someone who would do my scripting for-

Luis von Ahn 39:32 Mm-hmm

Marina Mogilko 39:32 ... Instagram, but then I'm like, "Okay, I'll, I'll just try Claude." And then I created a Claude project-

Luis von Ahn 39:36 Mm-hmm

Marina Mogilko 39:36 ... and it was so good, I'm like, "Okay, I don't need to hire [laughs] anyone. We can... My, uh, social media manager can just do that now."

Luis von Ahn 39:42 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 39:42 So it's basically doing more with less people. Would you wanna start

Marina Mogilko 39:46 again in 2026, if you could? Like, if you could go back to your... How old you were when you started.

Luis von Ahn 39:53 Um, I probably would start again, but if you ask me to choose between whether I wanna start today or 15 years ago, I'm very happy we started 15 years ago.

Marina Mogilko 40:03 [laughs] Good.

Luis von Ahn 40:04 If you ask me. Uh, yeah, because we-

Marina Mogilko 40:06 Mm-hmm

Luis von Ahn 40:06 ... we now got to this point where, you know, w- with Duolingo, we have, we have a lot of money because we're profitable. We have, like, I don't know, more than a billion dollars in the bank. We have a large user base. We have a large install base. So I, I feel pretty good about the situation that we're in, whereas if we were to start today, boy, I don't know. I mean, it's, it's pretty hard to start today, I think. I mean, I would do it, but I, I-

Marina Mogilko 40:28 What would you start? Same thing?

Luis von Ahn 40:31 If Duolingo didn't exist, yeah. I mean, given that Duolingo exists, I don't know if I would start that. I would probably start something-

Marina Mogilko 40:36 Would it be languages or something else, or like teaching people AI or chess?

Luis von Ahn 40:39 No, I would start with languages.

Marina Mogilko 40:41 Languages?

Luis von Ahn 40:41 Um, uh, i- interestingly, I am personally not a major language learning nerd. Uh, I'm not. Uh, neither is my co-founder, Severin. Um, w- what is interesting is that in retrospect, I'm very happy we started with languages. I don't know of another subject, even though we've done a lot of research, I don't know of another subject that gets learned as much. If you look, there's about two billion people in the world learning languages. That's the number. There's... Any other subject is less. I mean, math-

Marina Mogilko 41:06 Not even math?

Luis von Ahn 41:07 ... math is a billion.

Marina Mogilko 41:08 Oh, really?

Luis von Ahn 41:08 One billion people. It's... Math is basically, you know, the number of people learning math in the world is highly, highly correlated, like identical almost, as the number of people in the world that are in K through 12 education. There's about a billion. Nobody is le- learning math out there.

Marina Mogilko 41:22 So nobody's learning math for pleasure-

Luis von Ahn 41:24 No

Marina Mogilko 41:24 ... as a hobby. [laughs]

Luis von Ahn 41:25 It's, I, I mean, I'm sure there are, but this is-

Marina Mogilko 41:26 But not-

Luis von Ahn 41:26 ... a tiny fraction of the population. Um, so math has about a billion. Uh, anything, you know, chess is, like, 100 million, something like that. Um, any subject, uh, K through 12 science is a few hundred million.

Marina Mogilko 41:38 Jesus.

Luis von Ahn 41:38 Programming is, like, 20 million.

Marina Mogilko 41:40 And when it comes to spending money, is-

Luis von Ahn 41:43 So language is 60 billion. It depends on who's spending the money.

Marina Mogilko 41:46 Yeah.

Luis von Ahn 41:47 Governments are spending a ton teaching math, but it's governments.

Marina Mogilko 41:51 Mm-hmm.

Luis von Ahn 41:51 And that's hard... That money is hard to get to-

Marina Mogilko 41:54 Yeah

Luis von Ahn 41:54 ... because governments are... But, so there's probably more spend on math, but it's because it's the governments.

Marina Mogilko 42:00 And what about cons- so consumers-

Luis von Ahn 42:01 Consumers-

Marina Mogilko 42:01 ... it's still language?

Luis von Ahn 42:02 I, it's, I think so. By the way, of those two billion people that are learning language, about 1.8 billion are learning English.

Marina Mogilko 42:07 Yeah.

Luis von Ahn 42:08 So English is just really big.

Marina Mogilko 42:10 It's crazy. I didn't realize that.

Luis von Ahn 42:11 It's a, it's a big market.

Marina Mogilko 42:11 'Cause I thought it would be, like, math or now AI, maybe com- software engineering.

Luis von Ahn 42:16 You and I live in a bubble.

Marina Mogilko 42:18 We do. We do. [laughs]

Luis von Ahn 42:19 We live in a bubble.

Marina Mogilko 42:19 That's true.

Luis von Ahn 42:20 Yes, I-

Marina Mogilko 42:20 'Cause we got out of their cultures into this bubble, [laughs] and now we're here-

Luis von Ahn 42:24 Yeah

Marina Mogilko 42:24 ... and forget what-

Luis von Ahn 42:24 I mean, pro- uh, maybe programming right now with AI coding, who knows what's gonna happen, but a few years ago, uh, uh, whenever we would meet investors, they would be like, "You know, the thing everybody wants to learn is coding."

Marina Mogilko 42:34 Yeah.

Luis von Ahn 42:34 There's about 20 million people in the world that were learning coding. That's it. That, that's it.

Marina Mogilko 42:38 Maybe we- they're willing to pay more. Like, if you want to take a programming course, you-

Luis von Ahn 42:41 Yeah, they pay more

Marina Mogilko 42:41 ... you probably pay, like, 1,000, 2,000, 'cause you know you're gonna get a job.

Luis von Ahn 42:44 Yes.

Marina Mogilko 42:45 With language, it's a long, long journey.

Luis von Ahn 42:47 Yes, 100%. Now, if we're an app, this is one of the things we, one of the reasons we never did pro- programming. We as an app cannot charge $10,000. It's an app.

Marina Mogilko 42:57 Yeah.

Luis von Ahn 42:57 Like, we charge $6 a month. That is how much we charged.

Marina Mogilko 43:00 Mm-hmm.

Luis von Ahn 43:00 Maybe we could charge $20 a month. We can't charge 10,000. So this is why we go for things that have hundreds of millions of people learning them, because we need to be a larger business, and so these, these things that r- require people paying-

Marina Mogilko 43:13 Something like service business.

Luis von Ahn 43:14 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 43:15 Right.

Luis von Ahn 43:15 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 43:16 Yeah.

Luis von Ahn 43:16 Mm.

Marina Mogilko 43:16 Wow, that's fascinating. Thank you so much. Thank you for being positive in 2026.

Luis von Ahn 43:21 Okay. [laughs]

Marina Mogilko 43:21 That's really rare. [laughs]

Luis von Ahn 43:23 Okay. Well, I'm positive, yeah.

Marina Mogilko 43:25 Thank you so much.

Luis von Ahn 43:25 Yeah, thank you. I'm nervous, but it's no use to be thinking like the world's gonna-

Marina Mogilko 43:29 Going outside Silicon Valley, you see how... You, like, I, I was expecting you to say, "Oh, I use OpenClaw to automate all the reports. I'm not writing my emails." Like, you're not saying that.

Luis von Ahn 43:38 No.

Marina Mogilko 43:39 Same, same Gary Vaynerchuk. I was expecting him to do, like, "Oh, this, my client is full automation," but he said, "I just hired two copywriters."

Luis von Ahn 43:46 [laughs] Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 43:47 I'm like, okay, New York is very different [laughs] from Silicon Valley.

Luis von Ahn 43:50 Yeah, it is.

Marina Mogilko 43:50 And it's very refreshing. And for everyone who's watching, it's a great idea to start a, a business, like, helping people learn AI outside Silicon Valley.

Luis von Ahn 43:58 I think so, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Marina Mogilko 44:00 Yeah.

Luis von Ahn 44:00 Mm.

Marina Mogilko 44:00 Thank you so much.

Luis von Ahn 44:01 No, thank you, thank you.

Marina Mogilko 44:02 Thank you. I mentioned Gary Vee, uh, several times throughout this episode. I actually filmed a podcast with him on the same trip when I filmed Luis. He's thinking positively about everything that's happening right now. So if you're someone who wants to start a business now, but if you're afraid that a bigger company's gonna take over, watch that episode. It's gonna give you a lot of enthusiasm about starting in 2026.