Silicon Valley Girl: AI, Tech and Career Growth - Duolingo CEO: AI Won't Take Your Job — But Someone Using It Will (And Here's What to Do Now) | Luis von Ahn

Episode Date: April 10, 2026

📌 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 built Duolingo into a company with 100M+ monthly active users and $1B in the bank — and he's never done a single layoff. While every other CEO is blaming AI for firing people, he's hiring more.In this episode, Luis breaks down exactly how his team used AI to build a chess course from scratch in 6 months — two people, no engineering background, no chess knowledge. It now has 7 million daily users. That's the real story of what AI can do for your career, if you know how to use it.We also get into: why "AI is taking your job" is mostly a lie companies tell to cover over-hiring, what happened when Duolingo's stock dropped 82% and why Luis has zero regrets, the one mindset shift that lets him not check the stock price every day, and his honest takes on which jobs are actually going away — translator, teacher, social media manager, strategist, project manager — gone in 5 years, gone in 10, or not going anywhere.If you're trying to figure out what to do with your career or business right now, this conversation will reset your thinking.Keywords: AI jobs future, career and AI, Duolingo CEO, Luis von Ahn, AI replacing jobs, future of work, AI startup, vibe coding, education AI, Silicon Valley Girl podcastMore from the Silicon Valley Girl: Follow my Newsletter: ⁠⁠⁠https://siliconvalleygirl.beehiiv.com/⁠⁠⁠Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/siliconvalleygirl/ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@SiliconValleyGirl⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠linkedin.com/in/marinamogilko⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠X: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://x.com/siliconvalleymm⁠⁠

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Tickets on sale now at Yamavat Theater.com, only at Yamava Resort and Casino, celebrating its 40th anniversary. You in? Must be 21 to enter. Hey guys, welcome to Silicon Valley Girl. We are about to interview the founder of Duolingo. Oh. No, no, no. No, duo, not you.

No, no, no. Do we have the actual founder? Hi. Hi. Hi. Hello. Your employees are getting a little creative. We pay that guy and he has his own personality.

He just does what he wants. AI is not going to take your job. Somebody using AI is going to take your job. This is Luis von On. 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. Large companies firing people. They say it's AI. 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. I'm gonna name five professions and you're gonna make some predictions. Gone in five years are not going anywhere. There will be fewer and fewer. Luis, you told your team that nobody gets hired unless team improves AI can do the work first. Can you tell me how you actually track that as a founder? Our goal here is to use AI 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 some companies may be firing people. and having AI do their job, that's not what we're doing whatsoever. Our team has gotten significantly better at using AI over the last, you know, a couple of years. And that has allowed us to do a lot more. It has allowed us to 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, try to be as efficient as possible with AI and our employees are doing that. 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? It depends on what your job role is.

I think most of our engineers 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 using AI to make prototypes of things. So the product manager may not be implementing the thing in the full 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, you know, I'm going to do 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 give approval to that type of thing. So it depends a lot in the role. You give them any guidance, like, okay, instead of doing this, do that next time? Or how do they even find out they can do these things with AI? We try to do some things in the whole company to try to, you know, we had, for example, a few months ago, we had a day where everybody in the company had to vibe code something, not just engineers,

every single person, people from, you know, HR, people from the finance team, everybody had to vibe code something. So everybody could see the power of it. We also have a lot of documentation about best practices. But generally, people here in dual language 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.

We have a lot of Slack channels. You know, one of them is called Best AI Practices. 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. That's such a great one. It is an incredible thing, very empowering for people who are like, oh, my God, I made, you know, Usually they're very small apps, but it's like I made an app. One of the things that has happened inside this company is everybody in us has made their own dashboard.

For their KPIs or something? Yeah, for whatever it is, whatever it is their tracking. I mean, I see a few product managers that have vibe coded a whole thing with like our uses in every country and what they're doing. That's super impressive. And is that how you track AI proficiency? Because now it's part of performance reviews, right, at Dolingo. 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 it. of your performance review is going to 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 backtrack 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, I'm not going to force you to do that. So I think we backtracked from that because it really felt like rather than being, you held accountable for the actual outcome. We're trying to just push something that in some cases did not fit. And do you have a specific example where somebody did something in a week without AI? And then with AI, they kind of multiplied the output. 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, neither of whom knew chess, neither of whom knew how to program. They basically vibecoded 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 entirely with AI.

And again, these people did not know any chess. And whose idea was that? Was it their idea? It was their idea to do that. They also, well, they're the ones who wanted to add chess. By the way, they came to me a year earlier to say we want to add chess. I said, I don't want to add chess because it's just a game and we're an education app. But what happened was that 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 chess board so that at least they'll learn logical thinking. And when she said that to me, I thought, oh, wow, okay, this is actually useful. education. Yes. So then 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 figured it out. Six months, right? About six months, yeah. And now is your fastest growing course? Yeah. I mean, at this point, we have 7 million daily active users that are learning chess. Wow, this is fascinating. Can you tell me step by step, what was their process?

So if somebody's watching and they're like, wow, if doolingo is able to do such a spin-off, which is kind of different from languages, if I want to start something with AI and build a fast-growing product, what are the five steps they need to take? These two guys, the first thing they did was probably learn chess, probably, because they didn't know any chess.

And that's one of the reasons they wanted to add it because 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. They're basically doing market research, 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. And so they downloaded cursor. And at first they made just chess puzzles. 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 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 really put it in the app. And then you put it in the app, and then did you give it an external push, or people just started discovering it. 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 I've not grown as much.

For example, it turns out chess is more fun than math. So someone, a student, who just heard. 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? Well, the biggest advice I can give them is to start. A lot of people talk a lot about starting. They're like, oh, I have an idea, but the biggest thing is just sit down and do it.

You will learn a lot by just trying to do it. So that's the biggest thing. Other than that, you know, try to learn how 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 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

the thing I mean I haven't I haven't quite yet seen somebody who knows nothing about programming to really make a good app but I have seen people who know a little bit about programming make you know make apps so I would tell you it's still worthwhile learning kind of the structure of programs. That seems important. Even though 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, I think that's important. Did it give you more ideas to add more courses that are non-language-related? Yeah, it's given us a lot of ideas. We are not yet working on other stuff, but we have a long list of things that we want to teach all kinds of things. K through 12 science. We want to teach. Again, we're not yet working on that. We're going to teach K through 12 science. We want to teach how to draw. There's all kinds of things. But at the moment, we're not really working on them because we want to continue working on chess, math, music, and languages. Got it. But then any employee can just go and vibe code one of these courses and show you and maybe they make it to the

company, by the way. A lot of times people come to me and they're like, what course are you going to add next? And you know, one of the things I tell them is I wanted to add K through 12 science. and then we added math. I wanted to add K through 12 science and then we added music. I wanted to add K through 12 science and then we added chess. At this point, I also want to add K to 12 science,

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. Yeah, they do it. Let's go back to the actually the AI failure chat. Can you recall any examples of AI actually failing in a task? Oh, yeah.

I mean, there's a lot of things where it's failing. 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 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. And I'm like, well, what's the disconnect? Why, you know, there's all these people saying that AI is better at coding the humans. And the reality is it's not yet the case that AI is better at coding than humans. I think you still really need engineers and you're going to need them for a long time, I think. But we've just seen a lot of cases where you tell the AI 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. That you get into the happy path is really fast. Okay, it worked. 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 things. 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 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. But then when you try to come up with 100 stories, you realize that only like 30 are good and the other 70 are. So humans still need to check and select. Oh, check. Yeah. Yeah. All our content needs to be, there's a lot of steps to try to either

check it or spot check it or something to make sure that the quality is high. So if we compare today and a year ago, how much more productive the company is with AI? I don't know. It's more in pockets. And I don't know if any larger company that has seen like a 10x speed up in like there. I don't think. I think startups really see it because when you're a one person team, then you can work this. can do a lot of stuff. 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 a thousand X.

You can just maybe, I don't know, a little faster. So overall, we're not seeing, like we're putting out 10 times as many features. We're not. We're seeing some speedups here and there in different pockets of the company. But again, it's what you said. One-person companies are a lot faster, but it's because you don't have to interface with all the other parts of the company, et cetera. Also, AI is not as good with existing code bases rather than with a brand-new codebase.

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 organized 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're committed to and then you just forgot. Team Sanks, strategy sessions, call with investors,

even a quick conversation with a contractor, it all disappears the moment the call ends. And I don't know about you, but I'm on calls every single day. Sometimes I forget to press record. Sometimes I don't think the conversation is worth recording, but then after the conversation I realized I had to actually record that. A lot 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 not a modpad 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, emerges 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 name. notes. I'm like, okay, we just had this conversation. Can you create a follow-up email that I'm going to send to Monica, my manager? We're going to proceed with this, this and that. Creates the email, and I just send it. 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.a.ai slash Marina to get three months of granola for free or enter the code Marina at checkout. I left to link in the description. And now, back to my conversation with Lewis. What about you as a founder? Does AI help you make decisions or any workflows that worked for you? 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 team of people to help me, whereas now I can get a pretty good idea by just asking Gemini or something like that. So research, I do a lot more by myself. That has helped me. But ultimately, the decisions are made by me. It's not like I asked the computer, what would you decide? Okay. So don't use it as a coach or you haven't vibecoded your own KPIs or whatever. I've done a bunch of vipcoding for things, but yeah, certainly my KPIs, but it's not decisions I still make myself.

Okay. Okay. I interview a lot of. cool people on this podcast. In the past three weeks, I had Reed Hoppin and Bill Gurley, who are legendary investors. And I asked them a question, what is the first market that's going to be completely changed

by AI and market you should be looking at and they told me language? Thank you so much. You know, it's been my thing for 10 years. What do you think? I don't know what that means, change. So... Like you don't have to learn a language

because everything is translated. Oh, no, I just don't buy that. If you look at our users, we have more than 100 million active users half of them are learning as a hobby it's a hobby whether AI can do it or not it's a hobby actually chess is a great example

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 want to learn a language has not had to learn English. It's interesting how you say like 50% they're really learning other languages, hobby, English necessity. Yes, but that's how it is in the world. 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, but it's a small fraction. 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 uses. And again, somebody who's lived their entire life in the U.S. 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. It is. You just need to learn English. And you may want to move to an English-speaking country. You may need to do an educational, like, you may need to go to a university. Nobody's going to be allowing you to go to a university with like a phone that translates everything the professor says. Like, that's just not.

Yeah. So I'm just not particularly worried about that. Is there a fraction of the market? So I'm thinking about translators, for example. Somebody spends like four years learning that. What would you say to those people? Depends 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 little bit of a language if they were going to just visit Germany for two days. That maybe now they're just not going to do that because they can just. But 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. So I'm just not pretty good. I'm not. The other thing about language translation is that simultaneous language translation has been really good for, if 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 just, you know, we've seen the demand to learn language actually go up as opposed to go down. This is not something that we internally are worried

about. But I understand people say that. Yeah, I'm also thinking, like, if you have glasses, for example, that are smart and they translate everything for you automatically. I haven't seen the case with the headphones. I don't think people really use the AirPods to translate. No. I'm thinking maybe it's glasses that translate the signs. I don't know. It's because when we came to Silicon Valley, I think 2015, we were pitching our company language trip that does like language travel, language courses. And I think 50%, but to your note, American investors are like, oh, this is not a market. Oh, this is going to go down. We've had this. We've had this.

problem and the entirety of the company of Duolingo, we are a company based in the United States. When we first pitched Duolingo to investors here, I don't know, however many years ago, the most common thing is like, nobody really wants to learn a language. Math, though, people want to learn math. And I'm sure investors think that because they're 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. What was your mindset when the smartest people in the world tell you that?

You're like, I don't care? I mean, I grew up in Guatemala. I could see what it was to have to learn English. Look, it is a huge thing to learn English. It changes people's lives. I know. My case is well. It changes people's lives.

Absolutely. 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 up for themselves. 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? A little bit, but not really. I mean, it's funny.

Inside the company, we never talk about this. This is, you know, we see, 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 is not that easy. You know, ultimately, we, for example, have data from 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. There's probably 2,000, 3,000 language learning apps in the world. They've been there. And now with vibe coding, now there will be probably 20,000 rather than 2,000, but at the moment, we're just not particularly concerned. You know, something may happen. Is there anything concerned? Because I'm asking a question about it, because I talk to people and they're like,

oh, this is going to be eliminated. This is going to be worried. And you're like, it's fine. No, I wouldn't say that it's like, all is fine. I do think a lot of things are going to change. What do you think is going to change? What are you preparing for? 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 conversation practice 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 you have to pay a lot of subscription to get the conversation process. At the moment, the cost of that has come down enough that we're going to start giving it to a much cheaper tiers. And we are probably going to eventually give it away for free.

We're doing that because I believe that customers are going to start expecting that. Like, I think there will be apps 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, again, I think we just need to stay ahead. Yeah, so users will expect more. I think users will expect more. I think users will expect the apps to be a lot more intelligent, which they should.

Yeah. We're undergoing kind of a platform 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 do that. Also talking about AI and workforce, I just talked to Gary Vaynerchuk. 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.

And they say, it's AI. Then Gary said something that struck me because 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. How do you think about that? We have never laid anybody off here. We have never done a layoff despite what the Internet may think. Yeah, I think they misunderstood you. Yeah.

We've never done a layoff here. I think that it is important to continue hiring people because now, 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 by having another employee. So that's how I see it. I mean, my sense, I, of course, cannot speak about the very specific companies. But my sense is that at least in some of the cases, AI is just an easy. PR reason. Yeah.

I mean, usually what happens is you overhired. When you over-hired, you're like, oh, okay, because of AI, we're going to do that. I don't, at least at Duolingo, the way we run the company, I am surprised that there are companies doing that because I've seen no reason. Yeah, I talked, I was just at Davos and I was talking to somebody who releases their jobs report. All the layoffs are structural, like overhired during COVID, so it's not really... A lot of companies overhired during COVID. And I understand that. And then, you know, if you over-hired, you probably don't need these people.

But, you know, blaming AI is an easy scapegoat. 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 going to automate this?

How are you going to 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 FutureProof. And every week I share what we learned with AI. Like my PR person just vibe-coded the whole website with all the transcripts from this podcast. And we share things like that in the newsletter. So first of all, subscribe to this channel.

And second, subscribe to the newsletter. Can we talk about this talk, Bryce? Because when I was preparing for this, I saw the 82% collapse of the story. talk. But what I really want to talk about, because you explain that to your shareholders, 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? Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank.

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That is no what happened. I made that decision. 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. 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've been still growing, but we're growing slower than we're 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, you know, important player in the education category. And I want to be in a situation we're going to lead some of that change through AI. So the combination of I want to 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 the 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. But we knew, you know, when we made this decision, we talked to, of course, all internally, our finance team, everybody agreed, this is going to decrease our stock price. Did you expect that number, like 80? 82%. I didn't know exactly what to expect, honestly, but I knew that it was going to be a lot. Yeah. So 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 have 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 going to be a much larger company in the long term. And the thing is, I'm operating this company. I mean, I'm hoping that this is my last job and this is the last thing that I do. And I have many more years of energy left. And you never regretted the decision.

Oh, no. That is amazing. Because as a founder, again, hearing from the market what they think about your decision is tough. They don't like it. It's tough. Wow. No, I agree. Look, it's not that it hasn't been tough. I mean, I don't regret the decision because I believe that it is the right decision. But it's, you know, yeah, it's been tough. I really still, I'm very convinced this is the right decision.

Do you feel like, because you're a founder of a publicly traded company, does you, a mood defendant used to stock fries? It used to. When we first went public, it used to. I learned to stop looking, like at least every day. I mean, it's not that I don't, it's not that I don't know the ballpark. But I don't. look every day. It used to be the case. The first year or so, it'd be like, it went up by a dollar. It went down by a dollar. Now, like you're used to it. I'm used to it. As a creator, my self-worth depends on how my last video is performing, which is not right, which is not good for my mental health. I'm learning how to not look at it. Well, I will tell you this. The same is true for me, but not with our stock price. It's with daily active users. So you still have the same person? I just

I moved to daily active users. But they've been growing. Yes, it's growing on everything. But every morning, you know, our daily active user report for the previous day comes at 5 a.m. exactly. I am, I wake up very early. Every morning at 5.01 a.m., my mood gets set. It's not good.

Do you think you should adjust it for some? Yeah, it's not good mentally. Yeah. I prefer this than the stock price, though. This makes more sense at least. This is something you can control versus stock price. 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, there used to be days that the stock price went down because, like, oil prices changed. And I'm like, okay. How is that related to me? Yeah. Any other mental hacks? Because I'm talking to you, again, you're not really worried about AI. You learned how to make stock price not control your mood. Do you have any mental life hacks that you developed as a founder during these years?

what helps you? What do you think? What do you do when something goes bad? Do you go and walks to create ideas? I mean, don't get me wrong. When something goes bad, I, you know, it gets to me. It definitely gets to me. 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, 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 that makes me feel a lot better because I think,

okay, I'm upset for no reason because this is going to fizzle out. What about other things like marketing or content? Do you think it matters for a founder? Depending on what type of company you're doing. Certainly if you're doing a consumer company, marketing is going to end up mattering. One of the most important things. It's going to end up mattering a lot. 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 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. I think good product, bad marketing is not very good, but bad product, good marketing is worse. Do you have time set for yourself every week when you play with the new AI tools?

Or you just discover it on the go? No, 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. 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 try it.

And for someone who's employed at a company and they want to hear. hear advice from a founder whose companies using AI, what would you say to them, how do they start implementing AI in their job? 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 parts of their job, not the whole thing, but parts of their job. I like that they're doing this by themselves. That actually says a lot about the way you hire. Yeah, people are doing this by themselves. And when you're doing interviews now, are you asking about, like...

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 want people who are more open. I mean, there's a good thing that somebody said that I pretty much believe AI is not going to take your job. Somebody using AI is going to take your job. And I believe that is mostly true. It's 10x more productive. This is way more productive. Yeah. Do you believe that in 10 years we'll have millions of AI agents in our companies? Probably.

I mean, what I've learned in the last, especially the last few years, is that predicting the future has gotten much harder because of AI. If you talked to me 10 years ago, I sort of could have told you what the next year was going to look like or what the next three years we're going to look like

is probably we're going to have a new version of the iPhone. It's going to have a better screen. It's like it was just not that hard to predict. It was kind of boring. It was not that hard to predict. whereas now I'm very bad at predicting what's going to happen. But you're not nervous. 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'm nervous in that I just don't know what that's going to be. I mean, if you listen to different founders, everybody's telling you things that are pretty self-serving. Like, you know, if you work in a company that makes AI for lawyers, they'll tell you lawyers are going to disappear. Like everybody's saying all these self-serving, things. I don't know what they are, but I do think something's going to change and I'm nervous because I

don't know what that is. Nobody knows. Nobody does. And I think the best thing you can do is try to adapt as fast as possible. And by the way, I am glad that I'm not having to choose a college career right now because I have no idea what I would choose. Yeah, it's even tougher now. Yeah, I have no idea what I would choose. I have a blitz for you. So I'm going to name five professions and you're going to make some predictions what you think. Oh man, predictions. I'm very bad at that. Well, like what your gut tells you, gone in five years, gone in ten years are not going anywhere. Let's try. Social media manager. You mean for like a company? Yeah, like coming up with scripts and. I don't think that's going anywhere. That's what I think. I don't. Translator? I think there will be certain. 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 going to want that. Like a premium. Premium service. It's going to turn into very premium. Yeah. But for most, you know, everyday uses, yeah, it's going to go away. Okay. Teacher. Oh, not going away. I mean. Are we going to have more language teachers, you think? Teachers serve a lot of things. And I cannot imagine they're going to go away. So I have a 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 making people want to do something. They're very inspiring. When I was growing up, I wanted to be like my teachers. And it's kind of hard to want to be like an AI. Like, I don't really want to be like an AI, but a teacher, they're very inspiring they put things into context. At the moment, I'm pretty certain that if you have a really great teacher, that is better than not having a really, 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 a point where in certain aspects, they're about as good, but I think having a teacher will always be better than not. I agree. That's what I think. So I don't believe that it's going anywhere. We're going to learn with AI, like do some stuff.

Well, we still need someone human to reply to. This is what I think. This is what I think. It's also, it's incredibly hard to keep people motivated. And teachers have ways to get people motivated to do certain things. And just, you know, they start noticing things like, oh, that student feels left out. I'm going to do something about it. Yeah.

This is pretty hard to do with AI. So I just can't imagine this is going to go away. what makes sense. Strategist. I don't know if you try to AI for strategy, but for me... It's good. So good. Sometimes it notices things I wouldn't even think about.

It was like you were not working on geo for your podcast. I'm like, oh, shoot, yes, I am not. And I'm not appearing in any searches. I recently asked the Slack has a Slack bot and sees all my conversations. And I asked it to give me what are my areas for improvement. And it was excellent. That's a very good problem. told me exactly what I like it basically told me exactly what my 360 told me but in a much more

concise way and certain things is really excellent um strategy I don't know I don't I don't know the answer to that question I would say there's probably still some you know the thing about AI is that it's really good a kind of known things I still think that there's going to 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. Okay, project manager. Oh, no, I don't think that's going to 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. I think that's going to be hard. Again, there's parts of the process. that can be automated. But in general, I can't imagine that the AI is going to be really good at, you know,

sitting two people there and being like, you too are not getting along. You need to start getting along. That seems hard. So as someone who's running a company, do you think there are any positions that are going away in the nearest future or are they just going to be transformed? I think most of it is going to 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.

So it may not be very specific professions, but it will be like, do we need a hundred people doing customer service or can we do so with only 10? I think that will happen. The entire profession going away is kind of hard. I mean, even customer service, where a lot of people say, like, oh, customer service is going to go away. You probably still need a couple of humans there being. Yeah, you probably still need some people to orchestrate it. So I do think. think that you'll find some companies that will need fewer people over time. Yeah. I totally feel that we wanted to hire someone who would do my scripting for Instagram.

But then I'm like, okay, I'll just try a quad. And then I created a cloud project. And it was so good. I'm like, okay, I don't need to hire anyone. We can, my social media manager can just do that now. So it's basically doing more with less people. Would you want to start again in 2006? If you could, like if you could go back to your,

How old you were when you started? I probably would start again, but if you asked me to choose between whether I want to start today or 15 years ago, I'm very happy we started 15 years ago. Yeah, because we now got to this point where, you know, with Duolingo, 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 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 pretty hard to start today, I think. I mean, I would do it.

What would you start? Same thing? If dualingo didn't exist, yeah. I mean, given that dualingo exists, I don't know if I would start that. Would it be languages or something else, like teaching people AI or chess? No, I would start with languages. Interestingly, I am personally not a major language learning nerd. I'm not.

Neither is my co-founder, Severin. What is interesting is that in rest of the language learning nerds, I'm not. 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 if 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? Math is a billion. One billion people. 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-12 education. There's about a billion. Nobody is learning math out. So nobody is learning math for pleasure as a hobby. I mean, I'm sure there are, but this is a tiny fraction of the population. So math has about a billion. Anything, you know, chess is like 100 million,

something like that. Any subject, K-12 science is a few hundred million. Programming is like 20 million. And when it comes to spending money is... So language is 60 billion. It depends on who's spending the money. Yeah. governments are spending a ton

teaching math, but it's governments and that's hard. The money is hard to get to because the governments are, but so there's probably more spend on math, but it's because it's the government. And what about, so consumers? Consumers, it's so. I think so. By the way, of those two billion people that are learning language, about 1.8 billion are learning English. Yeah. So English is just really big. It's crazy. I didn't realize

that. Because I thought it would be like math or now AI, maybe software engineering. You and I live in a bubble. We do. We live in a bubble. That's true. Because we got out of their cultures into this bubble and now we're here and forget. I mean, maybe programming right now with AI coding, who knows what's going to happen. But a few

years ago, whenever we would meet investors, they would be like, you know the thing everybody wants to learn is coding. Yeah. It's about 20 million people in the world that we're learning coding. That's it. Maybe they're willing to pay more. Like, if you want to take a programming course, you probably pay like a thousand, two thousand, because you know you're going to get a job.

Yes. With language, it's a long, long journey. Yes, 100%. Now, if we're an app, this is one of the reasons we never did programming. We as an app cannot charge $10,000. It's an app. Like we charge $6 a month. That is how much we charge. 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 things that require people paying. People are like service business. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Wow, that's fascinating. Thank you so much. Thank you for being positive in 2026. That's really rare. Okay. Well, I'm positive. Yeah. Thank you. I'm nervous, but it's no use to be thinking like the world's going to...

Going outside Silicon Valley, you see how, like, I was expecting you to say, oh, I use OpenClau to automate all the reports. I'm not writing my email. I was like, same Gary Vaynerchuk. I was expecting him to do like, oh, this my con is full automation. But he said, I just hired two copywriters. Yeah. I'm like, okay, New York is very different from Silicon Valley. And it's very refreshing. And for everyone who's watching, it's a great idea to start a business like helping people learn AI outside Silicon Valley. Yeah. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. I mentioned Gary Wee several times throughout this episode. I actually filmed a podcast with him. On the same trip, when I filmed Lewis, 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 is going to take over, watch that episode. It's going to give you a lot of enthusiasm about starting in 2012. Enjoy more ways to save at Ralph's, like low prices in every aisle.

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