Luis von Ahn, CEO and co-founder of Duolingo

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

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

In this episode, we cover:

Working in Pittsburgh, in-person (00:57)
How Duolingo hires (06:48)
Growing up in Guatemala (10:29)
Luis’ parents, intelligence, and drive (12:09)
His morning routine (16:56)
Ground truth (19:39)
“The smaller the team, the better” (22:29)
Language education and human behavior (24:32)
Learning English (28:53)
Back to Guatemala (32:03)
CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA (36:10)
Money vs. impact (41:26)
Luis’ TEDx Talk and public speaking tips (44:46)

Love Language and nontraditional marketing (48:46)
Doubling down on what works (53:27)
Slow hiring (56:44)
Would Luis ever start something new? (59:28)
Who Duolingo is hiring and what “grit” means to Luis (01:01:46)

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