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Duolingo CEO: What I Tell Every Employee About Surviving AI

📌 Try Granola — the AI notepad that turns meetings into action: https://www.granola.ai/marina or use code MARINA at checkout for 3 months free. Luis von Ahn, the co-founder of Duolingo, gave me the most honest take on AI I've heard from any CEO. If you're figuring out where AI is taking your career or your business, this conversation will reset your thinking. Stay till the end for the jobs blitz: gone in 5 years, gone in 10, or not going anywhere. *Timestamps:* 00:00 Duo showed up uninvited 01:07 Can you still get hired without AI skills? 04:03 Why everyone should start vibe coding 05:06 How 2 non-coders built Duolingo's newest product 08:25 The exact steps to start your AI business in 2026 10:36 Where AI actually fails — real internal data 12:30 Did AI make Duolingo 10x more productive? Honest answer 15:21 How the Duolingo founder actually uses AI 16:10 Will AI kill the need to learn languages? 19:22 Marina and Luis got the same investor rejection 20:19 Can anyone build their own app in 2026? 22:57 "We have never done a layoff" — the full story 25:21 No regrets on the 82% stock crash 28:20 Why your metrics shouldn't define your worth 31:40 Don't know where to start with AI? Watch this 33:00 The one thing Luis is actually nervous about 34:24 Blitz: which jobs survive AI and which don't 39:46 What business would Luis start in 2026? *Links:* 📩 Follow my Newsletter: https://siliconvalleygirl.beehiiv.com/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=video&utm_content=luisvonahn 🔗 My Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/siliconvalleygirl/ 📌 My Companies & Products: https://Marinamogilko.co 📹 Video brainstorming, research, and project planning - all in one place - https://partner.spotterstudio.com/ideas-with-marina 💻 Resources that helps my team and me grow the business: - Email & SMS Marketing Automation - https://your.omnisend.com/marina - AI app to work with docs and PDFs - https://www.chatpdf.com/?via=marina 📱Develop your YouTube with AI apps: - AI tool to edit videos in a minutes https://get.descript.com/fa2pjk0ylj0d - Boost your view and subscribers on YouTube - https://vidiq.com/marina - #1 AI video clipping tool - https://www.opus.pro/?via=7925d2 💰 Investment Apps: - Top credit cards for free flights, hotels, and cash-back - https://www.cardonomics.com/i/marina - Intuitive platform for stocks, options, and ETFs - https://a.webull.com/Tfjov8wp37ijU849f8 ⭐ Download my English language workbook - https://bit.ly/3hH7xFm I use affiliate links whenever possible (if you purchase items listed above using my affiliate links, I will get a bonus).

Marina MogilkohostLuis von Ahnguest
Apr 10, 202644mWatch on YouTube ↗

EVERY SPOKEN WORD

  1. 0:00 – 1:07

    Duo showed up uninvited

    1. MM

      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?

    2. LA

      Hi.

    3. MM

      Hi [laughs] .

    4. LA

      Hi.

    5. MM

      Hello.

    6. LA

      Hi. Hi.

    7. MM

      Your employees are getting a little [laughs] creative. [laughs]

    8. LA

      We pay that guy and he has his own personality. He just does what he wants.

    9. MM

      Yeah.

    10. LA

      AI is not gonna take your job. Somebody using AI is gonna take your job.

    11. MM

      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-

    12. LA

      Yeah

    13. MM

      ... and they say it's AI.

    14. LA

      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.

    15. MM

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

    16. LA

      There'll be fewer and fewer.

  2. 1:07 – 4:03

    Can you still get hired without AI skills?

    1. MM

      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?

    2. LA

      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.

    3. MM

      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?

    4. LA

      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.

    5. MM

      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?

    6. LA

      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.

    7. MM

      Mm.

    8. LA

      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-

    9. MM

      That's such a great one.

    10. LA

      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."

  3. 4:03 – 5:06

    Why everyone should start vibe coding

    1. LA

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

    2. MM

      For their KPIs or something?

    3. LA

      Yeah, for whatever it is.

    4. MM

      Yeah.

    5. LA

      Whatever it is they're tracking.

    6. MM

      Yeah.

    7. LA

      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.

    8. MM

      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.

    9. LA

      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-

    10. MM

      Then you have to-

    11. LA

      ... I'm not gonna force you to do that."

    12. MM

      Yeah.

    13. LA

      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

  4. 5:06 – 8:25

    How 2 non-coders built Duolingo's newest product

    1. LA

      fit.

    2. MM

      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?

    3. LA

      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.

    4. MM

      And whose idea was that? Was it their idea to just vibe code-

    5. LA

      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."

    6. MM

      Mm-hmm.

    7. LA

      And when she said that to me, I thought, "Oh, wow, okay, this is actually useful."

    8. MM

      Part of education.

    9. LA

      Yes.

    10. MM

      Yeah.

    11. LA

      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.

    12. MM

      Six months, right?

    13. LA

      About six months, yeah.

    14. MM

      And now it's your fastest-growing course?

    15. LA

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

    16. MM

      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-

    17. LA

      Mm-hmm

    18. MM

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

    19. LA

      [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.

    20. MM

      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-

    21. LA

      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.

    22. MM

      Well, so someone, a student who just

  5. 8:25 – 10:36

    The exact steps to start your AI business in 2026

    1. MM

      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?

    2. LA

      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-

    3. MM

      Mm-hmm

    4. LA

      ... 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-

    5. MM

      Basic things

    6. LA

      ... I think that's important.

    7. MM

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

    8. LA

      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.

    9. MM

      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.

    10. LA

      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-

    11. MM

      [laughs]

    12. LA

      ... and then we added chess. At this point, I also wanna add K through 12 science-

    13. MM

      Yeah

    14. LA

      ... 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.

    15. MM

      Then, yeah, they do it. Let's

  6. 10:36 – 12:30

    Where AI actually fails — real internal data

    1. MM

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

    2. LA

      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.

    3. MM

      Hmm.

    4. LA

      Uh, and I'm like, "Well, what's the disconnect?"

    5. MM

      Yeah.

    6. LA

      "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.

    7. MM

      Yeah.

    8. LA

      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.

    9. MM

      [laughs]

    10. LA

      But then when you try to come up with 100 stories, you realize that only, like, 30 are good-

    11. MM

      Mm

    12. LA

      ... and the other 70 are-

    13. MM

      So humans-

    14. LA

      ... kind of nonsense

    15. MM

      ... still needs to check and select

    16. LA

      Oh, check.

    17. MM

      Yeah.

    18. LA

      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

  7. 12:30 – 15:21

    Did AI make Duolingo 10x more productive? Honest answer

    1. LA

      quality's high.

    2. MM

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

    3. LA

      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-

    4. MM

      I don't think so. I think startups really see it-

    5. LA

      I know

    6. MM

      ... 'cause when you're a one-person team, then you can work straight.

    7. LA

      A one person can do a lot of stuff.

    8. MM

      Yeah.

    9. LA

      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.

    10. MM

      Mm.

    11. LA

      You can just maybe, I don't know, a little faster.

    12. MM

      Yeah.

    13. LA

      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-

    14. MM

      Yeah

    15. LA

      ... 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.

    16. MM

      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

  8. 15:21 – 16:10

    How the Duolingo founder actually uses AI

    1. MM

      a founder? Uh, does AI help you make decisions, or any workflows that work for you?

    2. LA

      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.

    3. MM

      Mm. Mm-hmm.

    4. LA

      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-

    5. MM

      Mm

    6. LA

      ... "What would you decide?"

    7. MM

      Okay.

    8. LA

      I, I haven't-

    9. MM

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

    10. LA

      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.

    11. MM

      Okay.

    12. LA

      Yeah.

    13. MM

      Okay. I

  9. 16:10 – 19:22

    Will AI kill the need to learn languages?

    1. MM

      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.

    2. LA

      Uh-huh.

    3. MM

      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]

    4. LA

      Okay.

    5. MM

      Thank you so much.

    6. LA

      Mm-hmm.

    7. MM

      You know, it's been my thing for 10 years. What do you think?

    8. LA

      Uh, I don't know what that means, change. So, uh-

    9. MM

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

    10. LA

      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.

    11. MM

      It's a hobby.

    12. LA

      Actually, chess is a great example.

    13. MM

      Mm.

    14. LA

      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-

    15. MM

      It's interesting how you say, like, 50% they're probably learning other languages, hobby.

    16. LA

      Yes.

    17. MM

      English, necessity.

    18. LA

      Yes.

    19. MM

      Right?

    20. LA

      But that's how it is in the world.

    21. MM

      Yeah.

    22. LA

      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.

    23. MM

      Moving.

    24. LA

      But it's a small fraction.

    25. MM

      Mm-hmm.

    26. LA

      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.

    27. MM

      It is.

    28. LA

      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-

    29. MM

      Yeah.

    30. LA

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

  10. 19:22 – 20:19

    Marina and Luis got the same investor rejection

    1. MM

      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-

    2. LA

      Mm-hmm

    3. MM

      ... language travel, language courses.

    4. LA

      Mm-hmm.

    5. MM

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

    6. LA

      Look, again, this is-

    7. MM

      "Oh, this is gonna go down. Nobody needs-"

    8. LA

      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.

    9. MM

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

    10. LA

      Well, I mean, I, you know, I grew up in Guatemala. I could see what it was [laughs] to have to learn English.

    11. MM

      Yeah.

    12. LA

      Look, it is a huge thing to learn English.

    13. MM

      Yeah.

    14. LA

      It changes people's lives.

    15. MM

      I know.

    16. LA

      Right?

    17. MM

      That's, that's my, my case as well.

    18. LA

      [laughs] It changes people's lives.

    19. MM

      Absolutely.

    20. LA

      So, uh, yeah.

  11. 20:19 – 22:57

    Can anyone build their own app in 2026?

    1. MM

      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.

    2. LA

      Yeah.

    3. MM

      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?

    4. LA

      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-

    5. MM

      Wow

    6. LA

      ... we're just not particularly concerned.

    7. MM

      Mm-hmm.

    8. LA

      You know, something may happen.

    9. MM

      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."

    10. LA

      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.

    11. MM

      What do you think is gonna change? What are you preparing for?

    12. LA

      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.

    13. MM

      Mm-hmm.

    14. LA

      We're doing that because I believe that customers are gonna start expecting that. Like, I think there will be apps-

    15. MM

      Yeah

    16. LA

      ... 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-

    17. MM

      Yeah, so users will expect more for free.

    18. LA

      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.

    19. MM

      Yeah.

    20. LA

      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

  12. 22:57 – 25:21

    "We have never done a layoff" — the full story

    1. LA

      do that.

    2. MM

      Also talking about, uh, AI and workforce, I just talked to Gary Vaynerchuk-

    3. LA

      Mm-hmm

    4. MM

      ... 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.

    5. LA

      Yeah.

    6. MM

      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."

    7. LA

      Yeah.

    8. MM

      How do you think about that?

    9. LA

      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-

    10. MM

      Yeah, I think they misunderstood you or-

    11. LA

      Yeah

    12. MM

      ... no.

    13. LA

      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-

    14. MM

      Yeah

    15. LA

      ... another employee.

    16. MM

      It is.

    17. LA

      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-

    18. MM

      PR reason [laughs] .

    19. LA

      Yeah.

    20. MM

      Yeah.

    21. LA

      I mean, usually what happened is you overhired.

    22. MM

      Yeah, during COVID.

    23. LA

      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.

    24. MM

      Yeah. I talked... I was just at Davos, and I was talking to somebody who releases their jobs report.

    25. LA

      Mm-hmm.

    26. MM

      All the layoffs are structural, like overhired during COVID, so it's not really-

    27. LA

      A lot of companies overhired during COVID.

    28. MM

      Yeah.

    29. LA

      And I understand that.

    30. MM

      Mm-hmm.

  13. 25:21 – 28:20

    No regrets on the 82% stock crash

    1. MM

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

    2. LA

      Yeah.

    3. MM

      But what I really wanna talk about, 'cause you explained that to your-

    4. LA

      Mm

    5. MM

      ... shareholders.

    6. LA

      Mm.

    7. MM

      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]

    8. LA

      Well, the decision was made by AI, so I'm kidding.

    9. MM

      [laughs]

    10. LA

      [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.

    11. MM

      Yeah.

    12. LA

      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.

    13. MM

      Yeah.

    14. LA

      Uh-

    15. MM

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

    16. LA

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

    17. MM

      Yeah.

    18. LA

      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.

    19. MM

      Mm.

    20. LA

      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.

    21. MM

      And you never regretted the decision?

    22. LA

      Oh, no. No.

    23. MM

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

    24. LA

      They don't like it. [laughs]

    25. MM

      It's tough. Wow.

    26. LA

      I know. I agree.

    27. MM

      [laughs]

    28. LA

      I, I agree. Look, it's not that it hasn't been tough.

    29. MM

      Mm-hmm.

    30. LA

      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.

  14. 28:20 – 31:40

    Why your metrics shouldn't define your worth

    1. MM

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

    2. LA

      It used to.

    3. MM

      Yeah.

    4. LA

      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-

    5. MM

      Like, you're used to it?

    6. LA

      I'm used to it.

    7. MM

      '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.

    8. LA

      Uh, well, I will tell you this.

    9. MM

      No, no, no. [laughs]

    10. LA

      Uh, the same is true for me, but not with our stock price. It's with daily active users.

    11. MM

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

    12. LA

      I just moved it to daily active users, so every-

    13. MM

      But they've been growing though

    14. LA

      ... 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]

    15. MM

      But do-

    16. LA

      It's not good

    17. MM

      ... do you think you should adjust it for some-

    18. LA

      Yeah, it's not good mentally, but-

    19. MM

      Yeah

    20. LA

      ... hey, uh, I-

    21. MM

      [laughs]

    22. LA

      ... I prefer this than the stock price, though.

    23. MM

      Yeah. [laughs]

    24. LA

      This, this makes more sense at least. This is a-

    25. MM

      This is something you can control versus the stock price

    26. LA

      ... 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.

    27. MM

      Yeah.

    28. LA

      And I'm like, "Okay." [laughs]

    29. MM

      Yeah, I can't control that.

    30. LA

      "How is that related to me?"

  15. 31:40 – 33:00

    Don't know where to start with AI? Watch this

    1. LA

      worse.

    2. MM

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

    3. LA

      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-

    4. MM

      Mm

    5. LA

      ... 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...

    6. MM

      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?

    7. LA

      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.

    8. MM

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

    9. LA

      Yeah. People are doing this by themselves.

    10. MM

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

    11. LA

      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-

    12. MM

      Yeah

    13. LA

      ... mostly true.

    14. MM

      It's 10X more productive-

    15. LA

      This is way more productive

    16. MM

      ... with, with AI tools.

    17. LA

      Yeah.

    18. MM

      Yeah.

  16. 33:00 – 34:24

    The one thing Luis is actually nervous about

    1. MM

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

    2. LA

      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.

    3. MM

      Boring. [laughs]

    4. LA

      It was kind of boring-

    5. MM

      Yeah

    6. LA

      ... and it was not that hard to predict. Whereas now, I'm very bad at predicting what's gonna happen.

    7. MM

      But you're not nervous?

    8. LA

      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.

    9. MM

      Mm.

    10. LA

      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.

    11. MM

      Nobody knows.

    12. LA

      Nobody does.

    13. MM

      Just go, go with the flow.

    14. LA

      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.

    15. MM

      Mm.

    16. LA

      Uh-

    17. MM

      Yeah. It's even tougher now.

    18. LA

      Yeah, I-

    19. MM

      Yeah

    20. LA

      ... I have no idea what I would choose.

    21. MM

      I have a blitz for you.

  17. 34:24 – 39:46

    Blitz: which jobs survive AI and which don't

    1. MM

      So I'm gonna name five professions and you're gonna make some predictions what you think.

    2. LA

      [laughs] Oh, man. Predictions, I'm very bad at that.

    3. MM

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

    4. LA

      [exhales] Okay.

    5. MM

      Let's try. Social media manager.

    6. LA

      You mean for, like, a company?

    7. MM

      Yeah. Like, coming up with scripts and...

    8. LA

      I, I don't think that's going anywhere.

    9. MM

      Mm-hmm.

    10. LA

      That's what I think. I don't.

    11. MM

      Translator?

    12. LA

      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.

    13. MM

      Like a premium-

    14. LA

      Yes

    15. MM

      ... premium service.

    16. LA

      It's, it's a very-

    17. MM

      Yeah

    18. LA

      ... it's gonna turn into very premium.

    19. MM

      Yeah.

    20. LA

      Um, uh, but for most, you know, everyday uses, yeah, it's gonna go away.

    21. MM

      Okay. Um, teacher.

    22. LA

      Oh, not going away. Uh, I mean, look-

    23. MM

      Are we gonna have more language teachers, you think?

    24. LA

      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-

    25. MM

      Yeah

    26. LA

      ... 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.

    27. MM

      I agree. I agree.

    28. LA

      I- that's what I think. So I, I don't-

    29. MM

      I think we're gonna-

    30. LA

      ... believe that it's going anywhere.

  18. 39:46 – 44:24

    What business would Luis start in 2026?

    1. MM

      again in 2026, if you could? Like, if you could go back to your... How old you were when you started.

    2. LA

      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.

    3. MM

      [laughs] Good.

    4. LA

      If you ask me. Uh, yeah, because we-

    5. MM

      Mm-hmm

    6. LA

      ... 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-

    7. MM

      What would you start? Same thing?

    8. LA

      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-

    9. MM

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

    10. LA

      No, I would start with languages.

    11. MM

      Languages?

    12. LA

      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-

    13. MM

      Not even math?

    14. LA

      ... math is a billion.

    15. MM

      Oh, really?

    16. LA

      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.

    17. MM

      So nobody's learning math for pleasure-

    18. LA

      No

    19. MM

      ... as a hobby. [laughs]

    20. LA

      It's, I, I mean, I'm sure there are, but this is-

    21. MM

      But not-

    22. LA

      ... 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.

    23. MM

      Jesus.

    24. LA

      Programming is, like, 20 million.

    25. MM

      And when it comes to spending money, is-

    26. LA

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

    27. MM

      Yeah.

    28. LA

      Governments are spending a ton teaching math, but it's governments.

    29. MM

      Mm-hmm.

    30. LA

      And that's hard... That money is hard to get to-

Episode duration: 44:25

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