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

Grit

Το περιεχόμενο παρέχεται από το Joubin Mirzadegan. Όλο το περιεχόμενο podcast, συμπεριλαμβανομένων των επεισοδίων, των γραφικών και των περιγραφών podcast, μεταφορτώνεται και παρέχεται απευθείας από τον Joubin Mirzadegan ή τον συνεργάτη της πλατφόρμας podcast. Εάν πιστεύετε ότι κάποιος χρησιμοποιεί το έργο σας που προστατεύεται από πνευματικά δικαιώματα χωρίς την άδειά σας, μπορείτε να ακολουθήσετε τη διαδικασία που περιγράφεται εδώ https://el.player.fm/legal.

12M ago 1:03:49

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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 Luis
- Twitter
- LinkedIn
Connect with Joubin
- Twitter
- LinkedIn
- Email: grit@kleinerperkins.com
Learn more about Kleiner Perkins
This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

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