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

Show notes

Guest: Luis von Ahn, CEO and co-founder of Duolingo When Luis von Ahn wanted to go to college in the United States, he had to take a standardized test called the TOEFL, or Test of English as a Foreign Language. But there was nowhere in his home country of Guatemala that could accommodate another test-taker, so he flew to war-torn El Salvador, just to take the TOEFL. Many years later, as the co-founder and CEO of Duolingo, Luis and his team “decided this type of thing, we could do a lot better.” Today, more than 4,500 universities accept the results of the online Duolingo English Test — a boon for the estimated 2 billion people currently learning English around the world. In this episode, Luis and Joubin discuss returning to the office, Carnegie Mellon, identifying strivers, the “Luis dashboard,” ignoring Reddit, pre-meetings, the hardest part of learning, sounding dumb, private security, the job of a professor, digitizing books,  working out every day, April Fools’ campaigns, Duo the owl, and hiring nice people. In this episode, we cover: Working in Pittsburgh, in-person (00:57) How Duolingo hires (06:48) Growing up in Guatemala (10:29) Luis’ parents, intelligence, and drive (12:09) His morning routine (16:56) Ground truth (19:39) “The smaller the team, the better” (22:29) Language education and human behavior (24:32) Learning English (28:53) Back to Guatemala (32:03) CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA (36:10) Money vs. impact (41:26) Luis’ TEDx Talk and public speaking tips (44:46) Love Language and nontraditional marketing (48:46) Doubling down on what works (53:27) Slow hiring (56:44) Would Luis ever start something new? (59:28) Who Duolingo is hiring and what “grit” means to Luis (01:01:46) Links: Connect with LuisTwitter LinkedIn Connect with JoubinTwitter LinkedIn Email: grit@kleinerperkins.com  Learn more about Kleiner Perkins This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

Guests

Luis von Ahn

Founder & CEO

Duolingo