YouSaid · the spoken record

Severin Hacker

lines on the record: 119
first: 2025-05-19
most recent: 2025-05-19
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Yep, I think that's one thing. And I think then also mutual support, do they support you and what do you do? Or is there competition? I think competition, you don't want to have competition in any of these relationships.”
2025-05-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Duolingo Co-Founder on Why $3M is Harder than $100M to Raise | Why You Should Always Take Tier 1 VCs Even at Worse Terms | Why Europe Can't Win Unless the US Screws Up | How AI Impacts the Future of Work and Education with Severin Hacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably what to build the product itself. There were conflicts there, and then also on hiring, not hiring, firing, et cetera. There were a bunch of conflicts as well. And then I think we had it all worked out. And it's amazing. I only meet with Louis every other week. And sometimes the meeting lasts 10 minutes. We go into a meeting, like the execTeam meeting. And I have a pretty good language model of like what he's going to say or how he's going to react to a certain idea. Because we had been working together for the first six, seven, eight years in the same room every day for 50, 60 hours a week. I know him better than probably any other person than my wife and vice versa.”
2025-05-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Duolingo Co-Founder on Why $3M is Harder than $100M to Raise | Why You Should Always Take Tier 1 VCs Even at Worse Terms | Why Europe Can't Win Unless the US Screws Up | How AI Impacts the Future of Work and Education with Severin Hacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we both signed it. And I think that avoid a lot of conflict. And the other thing that's interesting, I think a lot of the conflicts happen in the first two years. What was the biggest?”
2025-05-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Duolingo Co-Founder on Why $3M is Harder than $100M to Raise | Why You Should Always Take Tier 1 VCs Even at Worse Terms | Why Europe Can't Win Unless the US Screws Up | How AI Impacts the Future of Work and Education with Severin Hacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So for founders, I think it's a little easier. One thing is, have you worked previously with this person? The keys worked, not hung out at the bar. I was like, have you worked with this person prior to starting this company? And Lucy and I, we had work together for two years prior. So we kind of already knew how we work and what we were good at, what we bad at, priorities. And we actually had this very early on, we had this because I went, I went from, you know, he was my superior. He was my PhD advisor. And I was his student into an equal relationship, equal co-founders. And I was like, can I trust this guy? What if he just fires me after a year? So I wrote down a little contract between the two of us. I still have a copy at home where we outline exactly like, you know, this is how we're going to make decisions. It's like this short. This is how we're going to make decisions. This is, you know, Lucy's responsibility. This is Sever's responsibility.”
2025-05-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Duolingo Co-Founder on Why $3M is Harder than $100M to Raise | Why You Should Always Take Tier 1 VCs Even at Worse Terms | Why Europe Can't Win Unless the US Screws Up | How AI Impacts the Future of Work and Education with Severin Hacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the next question, if they're a user, it's like, oh, I love your streak is this long. And then that's actually, if they're actual users, it's much more interesting to me.”
2025-05-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Duolingo Co-Founder on Why $3M is Harder than $100M to Raise | Why You Should Always Take Tier 1 VCs Even at Worse Terms | Why Europe Can't Win Unless the US Screws Up | How AI Impacts the Future of Work and Education with Severin Hacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wish you could go into like you could switch, you know, like you could go into incognita mode in the browser. It's like, you know what? I'm just going to put on glasses. And it's like, I don't want to, in fact, you know, people sometimes ask you, like, what do you do? And when I'm in a room where I know they don't know who I am, I sometimes give a wrong answer. I used to say like an Uber driver. Of course, nobody really believes that. Or I say, like, I'm a software engineer at the tech company. Or I say I'm a patron of the arts, which is not entirely untrue because I know how the conversations go when I tell the truth. There's a next question is, how many languages do you speak? Next question is how did you start Duolinka? Why”
2025-05-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Duolingo Co-Founder on Why $3M is Harder than $100M to Raise | Why You Should Always Take Tier 1 VCs Even at Worse Terms | Why Europe Can't Win Unless the US Screws Up | How AI Impacts the Future of Work and Education with Severin Hacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bit so we met before I was successful. In fact, my now wife at the time girlfriend, she for the first couple years, she made more than me. So we kind of reversed that. And she knows me from when I wasn't very successful, when I was just a dude with some crazy ideas. I think it's different than if I had to date someone now because again, everybody, like everything starts with this, oh co-founder of Duolingo. And then super successful, everybody, well, everybody knows Duolingo, my CEO, like my co-founder is obviously way more famous. But it's hard to remove that. So in fact,”
2025-05-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Duolingo Co-Founder on Why $3M is Harder than $100M to Raise | Why You Should Always Take Tier 1 VCs Even at Worse Terms | Why Europe Can't Win Unless the US Screws Up | How AI Impacts the Future of Work and Education with Severin Hacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wow, I thought it was going to be the quick run. It is, I think the answer depends on your answer of the question does money change people? Because if it changes people, it'll probably change marriage. So I assume the answer is yes, but it depends on the people.”
2025-05-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Duolingo Co-Founder on Why $3M is Harder than $100M to Raise | Why You Should Always Take Tier 1 VCs Even at Worse Terms | Why Europe Can't Win Unless the US Screws Up | How AI Impacts the Future of Work and Education with Severin Hacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do believe I'm happier now than not by a lot. I was pretty happy in my 20s too, but a little bit. I think this sense of achievement and will never go away, even if a tooling collapses tomorrow. It's still a good thing. It's like, you know, I tried, you know, and it worked out for a while and maybe and then maybe goes away. But I would still have this sense of achievement. And another thing is like, you know, when people just share their dual lingo stories or when I, you know, I was in Venice a year ago or two years ago and they have the bus is a boat, right? So I took the bus on the canal. And next to me was this woman, like literally like sitting next to me was this woman doing the lingo. And I was just looking at and I was like, you know, if she knew, you know, I was sitting next. Did you say anything? No, nothing. I was just for a 10 minute ride. She was doing her dueling.”
2025-05-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Duolingo Co-Founder on Why $3M is Harder than $100M to Raise | Why You Should Always Take Tier 1 VCs Even at Worse Terms | Why Europe Can't Win Unless the US Screws Up | How AI Impacts the Future of Work and Education with Severin Hacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I want this is a mission company, and I tweeted this recently. It's like, I think the counterintuitively, the founders that start with a purpose and a mission and are not focused too much on money end up usually doing better. Maybe people don't give them credit, but I do because I'm in the same situation. I think Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg, you know, Bill Gates wanted to put a computer on every desk. And then he realized, okay, well, how do I do this? And one way of doing it, or maybe the only way of doing it is starting a company. They're not like, I'm going to start a company to become rich. That's like kind of the reversing. It's like you have to think like, okay, what changed you want to see in the world? What do people want? How can it help other people? That's ultimately in an ideal capitalist environment that should drive value. And I do believe that that's why these companies got started and Mark Zuckerberg maybe, you know, connecting people.”
2025-05-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Duolingo Co-Founder on Why $3M is Harder than $100M to Raise | Why You Should Always Take Tier 1 VCs Even at Worse Terms | Why Europe Can't Win Unless the US Screws Up | How AI Impacts the Future of Work and Education with Severin Hacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was the answer of those people. It's kind of like when you stop, I guess, worrying about it because it's so much. I mean, so much. Did you have a question?”
2025-05-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Duolingo Co-Founder on Why $3M is Harder than $100M to Raise | Why You Should Always Take Tier 1 VCs Even at Worse Terms | Why Europe Can't Win Unless the US Screws Up | How AI Impacts the Future of Work and Education with Severin Hacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and I've also spent a lot of time thinking about this question. The weird thing is, I wish I hadn't. You know, like I feel like it's not a productive, you know, am I happier now than I was when I was a grad student? And is it because of because of the money or is it because of the success? Or is it because I know myself better? And it's very hard to disentangle all the different factors that go into happiness. I would say though that there's different levels of wealth. And they actually did this study, I think, with post-exit founders. They asked them, how much is it enough? How much is enough? When do people switch their opinions? Like, okay, now this is enough. The answer they got was, you know what the answer was?”
2025-05-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Duolingo Co-Founder on Why $3M is Harder than $100M to Raise | Why You Should Always Take Tier 1 VCs Even at Worse Terms | Why Europe Can't Win Unless the US Screws Up | How AI Impacts the Future of Work and Education with Severin Hacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, thanks for assuming that there's ahead of us. As I said, going back to the very beginning of the conversation, it's like the mission is this to provide the best education, make it universally successful. But now I think we can really do it. We can really build an AI tutor that is as good as the best human AI tutors. And we can do it for everyone, not just the rich. And that will change the world. I really think this is the moment. You know, we had to wait for 10 years to get to this stage. But I think this AI wave is going to really enable us to do this.”
2025-05-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Duolingo Co-Founder on Why $3M is Harder than $100M to Raise | Why You Should Always Take Tier 1 VCs Even at Worse Terms | Why Europe Can't Win Unless the US Screws Up | How AI Impacts the Future of Work and Education with Severin Hacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's like a punch in the gut. Depends which employees. Sure, sure, sure, sure, sure. But it's like, why did I leave? What did I do wrong? Do they not believe in this company anymore? think about this for weeks.”
2025-05-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Duolingo Co-Founder on Why $3M is Harder than $100M to Raise | Why You Should Always Take Tier 1 VCs Even at Worse Terms | Why Europe Can't Win Unless the US Screws Up | How AI Impacts the Future of Work and Education with Severin Hacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The thing is, I just still enjoy it so much. And sometimes I wish I hated my job and it would make it easier to leave and do something else. But I still really enjoyed. Another point was early on and it's still somewhat true when employee leaves quits.”
2025-05-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Duolingo Co-Founder on Why $3M is Harder than $100M to Raise | Why You Should Always Take Tier 1 VCs Even at Worse Terms | Why Europe Can't Win Unless the US Screws Up | How AI Impacts the Future of Work and Education with Severin Hacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So true. And I have talked to many founders who left their company, and there's like, I would say half of them fall into depression because their identity is the company. And I don't know if you notices, but.”
2025-05-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Duolingo Co-Founder on Why $3M is Harder than $100M to Raise | Why You Should Always Take Tier 1 VCs Even at Worse Terms | Why Europe Can't Win Unless the US Screws Up | How AI Impacts the Future of Work and Education with Severin Hacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know one thing I would say is one of the reasons why I said yes to this podcast or why I wanted to be on this podcast is I feel like I'm reduced to just Duolingo. My identity is Duolingo said I'm founder of Duolingo. Every introduction starts with oh founder and CTO of Duolingo. And I feel there's much more to me, to my personal, my identity than just Duolingo. That's the other 20% that I have not really explored or haven't been able to share.”
2025-05-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Duolingo Co-Founder on Why $3M is Harder than $100M to Raise | Why You Should Always Take Tier 1 VCs Even at Worse Terms | Why Europe Can't Win Unless the US Screws Up | How AI Impacts the Future of Work and Education with Severin Hacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I have an investor friend. I'm not going to share who it is. But I feel that guy has kind of figured it out for himself.”
2025-05-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Duolingo Co-Founder on Why $3M is Harder than $100M to Raise | Why You Should Always Take Tier 1 VCs Even at Worse Terms | Why Europe Can't Win Unless the US Screws Up | How AI Impacts the Future of Work and Education with Severin Hacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is Naval Ravikant quote the true measure of intelligence is if you get out of life, what do you want to get out of life? By that definition, I'm maybe 80% successful or intelligence.”
2025-05-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Duolingo Co-Founder on Why $3M is Harder than $100M to Raise | Why You Should Always Take Tier 1 VCs Even at Worse Terms | Why Europe Can't Win Unless the US Screws Up | How AI Impacts the Future of Work and Education with Severin Hacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I don't believe. No, I think the human to human interaction, the value of that will go up significantly. Going to be value on verified human, even if it's not as good. So, for example, in the art world, I believe that art that was made before 2022 is going to increase in value because it's verified human. Because we know it was Picasso.”
2025-05-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Duolingo Co-Founder on Why $3M is Harder than $100M to Raise | Why You Should Always Take Tier 1 VCs Even at Worse Terms | Why Europe Can't Win Unless the US Screws Up | How AI Impacts the Future of Work and Education with Severin Hacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“AI and the impact of it. I've gone back and forth from basically any of the fundamental questions. Like, is it going to change the world? Are we going to have more engineers, fewer engineers? One thing I think that gets lost in the conversation is that, okay, let's assume AI really drives productivity gains. We all become more productive. You become more productive. I become more productive. Everybody we work with becomes more productive, let's say 20, 30 percent. Is that good or bad? That's great. You know, one of the big problems we have is demographics. We all need to become more productive. We don't have enough kids. And then how are we going to finance our?”
2025-05-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Duolingo Co-Founder on Why $3M is Harder than $100M to Raise | Why You Should Always Take Tier 1 VCs Even at Worse Terms | Why Europe Can't Win Unless the US Screws Up | How AI Impacts the Future of Work and Education with Severin Hacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would agree with that. I think there's like the trap you can run into you only run tiny experiments on your purchase page or you run these tiny experiments on copy or something. And I think it's very important that you have your portfolio of changes. So you have lots of low risk, small changes, but you also have some big changes. And a big change could be adding chess or adding math. And that's how you stay innovative and relevant. Otherwise, you end up in a local maxima where you can't get out because you optimize yourself into that.”
2025-05-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Duolingo Co-Founder on Why $3M is Harder than $100M to Raise | Why You Should Always Take Tier 1 VCs Even at Worse Terms | Why Europe Can't Win Unless the US Screws Up | How AI Impacts the Future of Work and Education with Severin Hacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then Lewis keeps telling them the true answer, which is it's running thousands and thousands of AP experiments. The streak mechanic, for example, we added it. That was one experiment. But then we've probably run 300 experiments fine-tuning the streak mechanic. And that's where you get the gains in retention. And that's what ultimately drives the growth of Duolingo, which is still super fast. We're still growing so fast that the green machine is what I mentioned before. It's like we run a lot of experiments. This is also true for marketing. It's not AB experiments, but it's more like, let's try this on TikTok. Let's try this on Instagram and then double down on the stuff that works. And that's it. That's the secret sauce. It's the process. It's not a single feature.”
2025-05-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Duolingo Co-Founder on Why $3M is Harder than $100M to Raise | Why You Should Always Take Tier 1 VCs Even at Worse Terms | Why Europe Can't Win Unless the US Screws Up | How AI Impacts the Future of Work and Education with Severin Hacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One thing they ask this question like, what is the secret sauce? Why stooling so successful? And they look for an answer that is like a one word explanation. And you can tell when you give them the actual answer, they're disappointed. The wish the answer was, it's a streak. That's a secret sauce. You know, it's this one mechanic. That's why we're so successful. And we invented it or whatever. We maximized it or whatever. Or it's the leaderboards. Or it's like, oh, we're so good at this particular market. It's like Brazil. That's a secret sauce. We figured out how to crack Brazil.”
2025-05-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Duolingo Co-Founder on Why $3M is Harder than $100M to Raise | Why You Should Always Take Tier 1 VCs Even at Worse Terms | Why Europe Can't Win Unless the US Screws Up | How AI Impacts the Future of Work and Education with Severin Hacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's an overlap between being a good founder and a good investor. Ultimately, they're different things. First of all, the investment cycle is 10 years, right? Versus as a founder, at least RSDH, you get data points every day. You can learn the feedback loops are so much faster. I think I'm better with the fast feedback loops than the 10-year investment horizons. I've had a few successes, like 10x or something, but.”
2025-05-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Duolingo Co-Founder on Why $3M is Harder than $100M to Raise | Why You Should Always Take Tier 1 VCs Even at Worse Terms | Why Europe Can't Win Unless the US Screws Up | How AI Impacts the Future of Work and Education with Severin Hacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, there's so much uncertainty in the market right now. I think right now, if you're a private company, there's a stronger argument for staying private. But for the very, you know, the much more mature businesses like Stripe. I think you want to go public because you create this liquidity for your employees. And yes, there's like other ways to do it and you can do secondaries and all that. One thing I am also proud of is that we hired all these people. We made lots of millionaires. That money flows back into the ecosystem. Now it flows back into the Pittsburgh ecosystem and maybe some of it, the New York ecosystem. But if we had more European companies, Spotify, GoPublic and then make lots of employees make some money and then maybe start own companies. That is like what we need. That's what we need in Europe.”
2025-05-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Duolingo Co-Founder on Why $3M is Harder than $100M to Raise | Why You Should Always Take Tier 1 VCs Even at Worse Terms | Why Europe Can't Win Unless the US Screws Up | How AI Impacts the Future of Work and Education with Severin Hacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think that's also really important that you don't think it's done, right? I'm still with the company. Most founders that are not CEOs, they leave after four or five years once they're fully vested or at least when they get acquired or IPO. I'm still with the company. The one thing I think is, yes, these private markets are now much, much, much bigger. And there's lots of pros of staying private, right? For us, before we went public, our finance team, for example, was two people. Now it's, I think, 25 or so. So there's a lot of overhead and the financial markets, they really care about predictability. So in fact, I feel like they care even more about that than they care about the actual profit margins or growth or whatever. They really care that you can predict. And I think the way they see this is like, if you can't predict the future of your business, you're not a good operator. You probably don't understand what drives your business or the kind of like lose trust in them in the management team. So someone like that.”
2025-05-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Duolingo Co-Founder on Why $3M is Harder than $100M to Raise | Why You Should Always Take Tier 1 VCs Even at Worse Terms | Why Europe Can't Win Unless the US Screws Up | How AI Impacts the Future of Work and Education with Severin Hacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It doesn't matter. Doesn't matter. As long as it kind of flows back to the European ecosystem. But for Duolingo, it's been a great journey, actually. Going public, bringing the NASA, the Bell career highlight by far. It's incredible. You know, I felt like I grew up in this small town in Switzerland, made it to the US, got a PhD, started this company. It was my first job. I've never worked anywhere else. And then this became this huge hit, massive audience, millions and millions of people loving the product, great purpose, unicorn, deca corn, public company. You feel like it gives you this achievement. It feels like you won a big tournament. You're not done, right? It's not done. And it's not.”
2025-05-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Duolingo Co-Founder on Why $3M is Harder than $100M to Raise | Why You Should Always Take Tier 1 VCs Even at Worse Terms | Why Europe Can't Win Unless the US Screws Up | How AI Impacts the Future of Work and Education with Severin Hacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, so I'm in the camp of yes, you should go public. It's actually the better thing for the ecosystem. In fact, I believe there should be more European companies going public because...”
2025-05-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Duolingo Co-Founder on Why $3M is Harder than $100M to Raise | Why You Should Always Take Tier 1 VCs Even at Worse Terms | Why Europe Can't Win Unless the US Screws Up | How AI Impacts the Future of Work and Education with Severin Hacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“UNESCO was great thing is actually great. Bing is a rare type of investment because he is very product minded. He uses the product and he gives us a lot of feedback on the product. He's obsessed with product. Most investors are more like business types and like, okay, investment and return and EBITDA and all that. And Bing is a very different type of investor.”
2025-05-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Duolingo Co-Founder on Why $3M is Harder than $100M to Raise | Why You Should Always Take Tier 1 VCs Even at Worse Terms | Why Europe Can't Win Unless the US Screws Up | How AI Impacts the Future of Work and Education with Severin Hacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We never did the third time. We always got pretty much a standard deal. I think the last couple were more competitive. And, you know, by the way, we could have raised a lot more at higher valuations, but we didn't do it.”
2025-05-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Duolingo Co-Founder on Why $3M is Harder than $100M to Raise | Why You Should Always Take Tier 1 VCs Even at Worse Terms | Why Europe Can't Win Unless the US Screws Up | How AI Impacts the Future of Work and Education with Severin Hacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was basic hour deal at the time, right? So you got a standard deal. And then there's the extreme outlier deal. That's like one or two companies of a generation get that one. Facebook got that one or Uber, Airbnb that probably got some of those.”
2025-05-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Duolingo Co-Founder on Why $3M is Harder than $100M to Raise | Why You Should Always Take Tier 1 VCs Even at Worse Terms | Why Europe Can't Win Unless the US Screws Up | How AI Impacts the Future of Work and Education with Severin Hacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nobody is it. And that's the default, right? It's like nobody wants to invest. Number two is you get a standard deal. And the standard deal is what most companies get at your stage is the standard series A deal. I don't know what it is today. About 15.”
2025-05-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Duolingo Co-Founder on Why $3M is Harder than $100M to Raise | Why You Should Always Take Tier 1 VCs Even at Worse Terms | Why Europe Can't Win Unless the US Screws Up | How AI Impacts the Future of Work and Education with Severin Hacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I thought every deal is custom. Every deal is custom. Like, you know, your Series A is different from my Series A and your Series B is completely different from my Series B. And what I realized there's only three possible deals. One is no deal.”
2025-05-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Duolingo Co-Founder on Why $3M is Harder than $100M to Raise | Why You Should Always Take Tier 1 VCs Even at Worse Terms | Why Europe Can't Win Unless the US Screws Up | How AI Impacts the Future of Work and Education with Severin Hacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We were thinking, like, we don't want to have a downrand, no down rent. Okay, by the way, we also never had a layoff, you know, growing fast, but we never went on a hiring spree, and we never wanted to have a down rant. And the problem also with raising a lot of capital at super high valuation is like the expectations become very, very obviously you're not worth that much at a time, but they all want you to grow into that valuation, right? So that's why they invest, oh yeah, you know, today, you know, if you take your ARR multiple whatever, which, by the way, was infinite. The joys of raising were no revenue. It's great. So you're obviously not worth that much, but we believe that you're going to be worth that much a couple years down the road. So that's one thing we wanted to avoid. We wanted to avoid a down round and we wanted to avoid having an investor that just has extreme expectations that we cannot live up to. That was kind of our philosophy. The other thing I learned on the fundraising is”
2025-05-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Duolingo Co-Founder on Why $3M is Harder than $100M to Raise | Why You Should Always Take Tier 1 VCs Even at Worse Terms | Why Europe Can't Win Unless the US Screws Up | How AI Impacts the Future of Work and Education with Severin Hacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I would say the best faners do not need investor value. However, I would say investors need to have your back. Absolutely. That is important. You should always try to hire raise money from the best tier one VCs, even if the terms are slightly worse. I mean, there's, again, because so much signaling. Series A was the hardest, but because Unisquare invested. It's like every other investor. Like, okay, what is Unix square? Because they had this amazing track record and amazing performance. And if Units square invests in your company, they will look at it really, really, really powerful. Every other round, it was a lot easier. That's the weird thing. It's harder to raise 3 million than it is to raise 100 million.”
2025-05-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Duolingo Co-Founder on Why $3M is Harder than $100M to Raise | Why You Should Always Take Tier 1 VCs Even at Worse Terms | Why Europe Can't Win Unless the US Screws Up | How AI Impacts the Future of Work and Education with Severin Hacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so one thing that was true back then is we did the Silicon Valley Roach show. We actually did get a lot of interest from Silicon Valley VCs at the time, but they all made it a requirement to move to Silicon Valley. That was always the question. We're super interested, we want to make a deal here. When are we moving to SF or Bay Area? And we're like, we're not moving. And then the immediately lost interest. By the way, some of them later invested in later rounds. But they didn't want to be the first one in a non-Silicon Valley company. And so Unisquare, they didn't care. In fact, they said, we're the only investor that doesn't care that you're in Pittsburgh. That's true.”
2025-05-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Duolingo Co-Founder on Why $3M is Harder than $100M to Raise | Why You Should Always Take Tier 1 VCs Even at Worse Terms | Why Europe Can't Win Unless the US Screws Up | How AI Impacts the Future of Work and Education with Severin Hacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We never raised seed or precede. This was because we had these NSF grants, so we built this project inside the university. So Series A was our first”
2025-05-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Duolingo Co-Founder on Why $3M is Harder than $100M to Raise | Why You Should Always Take Tier 1 VCs Even at Worse Terms | Why Europe Can't Win Unless the US Screws Up | How AI Impacts the Future of Work and Education with Severin Hacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. My co-founder had two prior exits, so he had a track record. That was actually the other belief was like, okay, these two researchers are going to sell to Google. And number one two is like, even if this one doesn't work out, it allows us to invest in Louis's next company. So they were basically buying a ticket for the next company companies, including the first one, they didn't believe that this was going to become this”
2025-05-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Duolingo Co-Founder on Why $3M is Harder than $100M to Raise | Why You Should Always Take Tier 1 VCs Even at Worse Terms | Why Europe Can't Win Unless the US Screws Up | How AI Impacts the Future of Work and Education with Severin Hacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We started as a research project at Carnegie Mellon University. The belief was oh, it's these two academics. Louise was a professor and I was a PhD student. It's these two academics. And they're going to build something that's not going to make any money and going to sell to Google. Okay. And then that was kind of the belief. And by the way, that belief lasted until we actually made money for like five years. The first five years, oh yeah, these two researchers and they're going to build this thing and they're eventually going to sell. They're not going to become a public company or anything. That was one reason. And then this was 2011. We raced on a prototype and it was a website.”
2025-05-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Duolingo Co-Founder on Why $3M is Harder than $100M to Raise | Why You Should Always Take Tier 1 VCs Even at Worse Terms | Why Europe Can't Win Unless the US Screws Up | How AI Impacts the Future of Work and Education with Severin Hacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You need a little bit of both. By the way, today it's still doing as a very young organization. We still hire a lot of people directly from university.”
2025-05-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Duolingo Co-Founder on Why $3M is Harder than $100M to Raise | Why You Should Always Take Tier 1 VCs Even at Worse Terms | Why Europe Can't Win Unless the US Screws Up | How AI Impacts the Future of Work and Education with Severin Hacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Two years earlier. Number two is we also waited for too long hiring more senior managers up until 30 employees or so it was completely flat a lot of people from Newgrad. It was pretty chaotic.”
2025-05-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Duolingo Co-Founder on Why $3M is Harder than $100M to Raise | Why You Should Always Take Tier 1 VCs Even at Worse Terms | Why Europe Can't Win Unless the US Screws Up | How AI Impacts the Future of Work and Education with Severin Hacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and you know, our investor sales invested in Twitter and some of these, and for those platforms, it was always the right decision just grow users first, grow users first. So that's what we did. So number one is we knew we could always grow users first. Number two is we knew we could always raise more money. And I think the other one was our mission, right? So our mission is to provide the best education and make it universally available. For a long time, we didn't know how to build a business model that is compatible with this mission, right? So for a long time, it's like everything has to be free. But then we realized, no, no, what really matters is that we don't exclude people. You should be able to learn everything that is on Duolingo without a bank account. And it's still true today. You know, most of our users do not pay Duolingo. They use the free tier. That's actually another thing I'm very proud of. It's like it's not just great business, but it's a great business with a great purpose. That's also why we probably waited for a little bit too long. You know, we should have started.”
2025-05-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Duolingo Co-Founder on Why $3M is Harder than $100M to Raise | Why You Should Always Take Tier 1 VCs Even at Worse Terms | Why Europe Can't Win Unless the US Screws Up | How AI Impacts the Future of Work and Education with Severin Hacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Combination, so it was also like the investors that didn't push us to monetize early, which is it was always counterintuitive to me. It's like, why don't they ask for monetization?”
2025-05-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Duolingo Co-Founder on Why $3M is Harder than $100M to Raise | Why You Should Always Take Tier 1 VCs Even at Worse Terms | Why Europe Can't Win Unless the US Screws Up | How AI Impacts the Future of Work and Education with Severin Hacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The two big ones were one, we waited too long with monetization. So we just didn't take it seriously enough early on. And we were operating under this business model of let's raise more money. Like our business, people ask, what's your business model? Oh, it's a venture capital. And eventually we did take it seriously. And we're very good at this now. We have this internal concept of the green machine. It's like run a lot of experiments, see what works, and then double down. And that's what we did with monetization. It's super good now. But we just waited for too long.”
2025-05-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Duolingo Co-Founder on Why $3M is Harder than $100M to Raise | Why You Should Always Take Tier 1 VCs Even at Worse Terms | Why Europe Can't Win Unless the US Screws Up | How AI Impacts the Future of Work and Education with Severin Hacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, I think it depends if there's an alternative or not. Again, as a founder, I can like, okay, I can work with the EU regulation on AI, which is some of the dumbest regulation ever, you know, the Ottoman Empire, they had, when they invented the printing press, it's like, oh, this is not good. It's not good for our community. Let's not do the printing press. I feel like the EU AI Act is that. Let's not do AI because there could be negative repercussions or negative side effects or something. It's that dumb. If there was no alternative, then I would agree. By the way, for example, in Uber's case and Airbnb, there's a lot of local regulations. There's actually lots of alternatives. So even if, say, one city doesn't work, say New York is the regulation, you have 200 other cities in the US.”
2025-05-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Duolingo Co-Founder on Why $3M is Harder than $100M to Raise | Why You Should Always Take Tier 1 VCs Even at Worse Terms | Why Europe Can't Win Unless the US Screws Up | How AI Impacts the Future of Work and Education with Severin Hacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The best thing that could happen to Europe is if the US made it really hard to immigrate for founders. If they made it really hard, if they restricted immigration such that people like me couldn't move there anymore, then I would build it here. And what I would do first, it would let's first change the environment here to make it easier for startups to succeed. Right now, there's also no pressure from the industry to change the regulation to make it easier to start companies. Because I can just go, I can vote with my feet.”
2025-05-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Duolingo Co-Founder on Why $3M is Harder than $100M to Raise | Why You Should Always Take Tier 1 VCs Even at Worse Terms | Why Europe Can't Win Unless the US Screws Up | How AI Impacts the Future of Work and Education with Severin Hacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, by the way, so I started angel investing with a very similar thesis in Pittsburgh because there's no one other than me and Louise. But then, you know, a lot of those companies eventually moved to Silicon Valley. But yeah, that was exactly my investment thesis in Pittsburgh. But I think as an investor, it's not clear. As an investor and doing the show, I think it's not clear because this is much less crowded. You can really become the top investor that founders want to work with in Europe. I agree. But I was explaining this as a founder. If you want to start a business, an AI business, you have this crazy idea. Would you stay or not? I would move. But that's exactly the problem. How can we change that? You know, part of the problem, this is a little non-obvious, is part of the problem is it's so easy to move to Silicon Valley. A good degree and you can raise money, et cetera. The US is actually really good at getting these brains to come to Silicon Valley. In a way,”
2025-05-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Duolingo Co-Founder on Why $3M is Harder than $100M to Raise | Why You Should Always Take Tier 1 VCs Even at Worse Terms | Why Europe Can't Win Unless the US Screws Up | How AI Impacts the Future of Work and Education with Severin Hacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe now it's OpenAI or Anthropic, and you basically create a hiring of funnel for Silicon Valley and you lose your talent. That was also new to me. And then it's like, no, no, let's not do that”
2025-05-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Duolingo Co-Founder on Why $3M is Harder than $100M to Raise | Why You Should Always Take Tier 1 VCs Even at Worse Terms | Why Europe Can't Win Unless the US Screws Up | How AI Impacts the Future of Work and Education with Severin Hacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so Dulango does not happen office in Silicon Valley or anywhere in California. The reason is when we thought about opening one, and of course all of our investors, they said you got to open an SF office. And we, in fact, did go to SF and we looked at office space. We were disclosed to opening an office in SF. But before we pulled the trigger, we asked a bunch of founders who had companies that were headquartered outside of Silicon Valley and then opened an office in Silicon Valley. And you asked them, what do you think? It was a good decision, bad decision. And all of them said, worst single decision ever. And why? And they said, well, you know what happens is it creates this internal funnel of your best employees moving from your HQ to Silicon Valley, which by itself is not a problem. The problem is then they get recruited away by the whatever the hot Silicon Valley companies at the time, you know, like Airbnb or Uber at the time.”
2025-05-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Duolingo Co-Founder on Why $3M is Harder than $100M to Raise | Why You Should Always Take Tier 1 VCs Even at Worse Terms | Why Europe Can't Win Unless the US Screws Up | How AI Impacts the Future of Work and Education with Severin Hacker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source