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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“Should deserve all of our support. The sad part is also, I think, in Silicon Valley is like being a tech found risk is really, you're mostly a good person. Of course, there's also aspiring, right? So people want to be that. I think a lot of people in Europe, you're just like, why are you doing this? Or they look at it as like, oh, yeah, they're just doing it for the money or this suspicion you can't be too successful or you can't be you shouldn't be too ambitious”
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 think it has changed to a degree, but it's still you need to look at what is the most impatient people and the founders, where do they go? It's a little bit sad because in New York, I see a lot of European founders and I often think like, how successful would they be if they had stayed in Europe? And I think for most of them, I would say best movie have a successful or maybe sometimes 0%. And I would like to change that. I would like to change that. I mean, that's why I invest in Project Europe. We need to change that 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
“The environment is so much stronger. And I can say this because we built Duolingo in Pittsburgh. We're not a Silicon Valley company. We don't have an office in Silicon Valley. We succeeded despite not being in Silicon Valley. And by the way, there's also pros of not being in Silicon Valley. But I can guarantee you Duolinga would not have been able to raise any money in Europe. You know, we had zero dollar revenue for the first five years. Zero. There's no European investor who would have invested. Not into Switzerland, not anywhere 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
“I'm very conflicted internally. I want Europe not to fade into irrelevance, of course. However, if you ask me, young founder, European founder, came to me. It's like, hey, I have this brilliant idea of how to use AI or like a new model or something like that. What should I do? 100%. Go to Silicon Valley. 100%. Absolutely maximize your chances. And by the way, you know, this is 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
“The millions and millions of people that use the link, how many come back tomorrow? All of these correlate with each other. So if your current user retention is very high, you also have very high T7 retention. You also have very high D30 retention. But you get a data point every single day.”
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
“Consumer, it's much more winner take all mechanics. So we've been now running this for 12 years every single year. There was one or two companies that grow really fast in language learning. One or two. Inevitably they go down again. What happened is they use venture money to grow through paid acquisition. So they spend it on Facebook ads, Google ads, and they go really fast. But the only thing that matters is retention. You can spend as much money as you want. If you don't have retention, it's a leaky bucket. All these people are going to leave. Now when you see one of those, we're not scared because we've seen this play out a million times. So the one company I'm scared of is one that has higher retention than 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
“Very interesting. So, one insight, and in hindsight, it's kind of obvious, you know, they say, like, what is the best predictor of two founders working out? Like, you know, they're actually, they're not going to get into a fight and found a conflict. And the number one thing to look for is have the two founders work before they started this company? Have they worked together? For example, Louise and I, we had been working together on research for two years prior to starting Duolingo. By the way, it's not the same as friendship. You can know someone for a very long time, but they might be very different networks. So prior work experience of working together. That is number one. If M&A, it's the same thing, I actually think. It's do you have prior experience working with this company? Yes or no? So I would say that's the number one advice is like, have you worked with them before? It can also be an investment relationship.”
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, like what's going to happen? What does the future look like in our space? What is the implications for Duolingo? What actions do we need to take? That's number one. I probably spent 80% of my day thinking and acting on this, this AI question. And number two is more M&A. And it relates to the first questions, M&A, like, you know, what companies should we buy? Where do we invest externally? That's basically all I do right now.”
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 like once a month, once a quarter. So really think about does this need to be done at all? What happens if you don't do it? If you just don't do it, is it the end of the world or is it, is there actual negative effect? So that's number one. And in particular, what happens if I don't do this? And then number two is what you cannot reduce, what you cannot remove. Let's say you decide, okay, this action needs to be done. Then the second question is like, can I automate it? Now, again, with AI, it's a lot easier. Can I automate this part of my job? Can I use ChatGPT to do this report or answer this question? Or that's softening, that's very natural. It's like, okay, can we build a tool that does this for me or the company or whatever? And then what you can't automate, you delegate. Okay, so that I try to delegate to other people in org. You know, I've handed off most of the day-to-day engineering to our head of engineering. She's really good with this. I'm now a little bit out of the weeds. I'm thinking more right now, actually, I'm only focused on two things. One is like with.”
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, I'm actually quite good at delegating things and kind of like self awareness of what I'm good at, what I'm bad at, what I like, what I don't like, what is beneficial to the company, and what is not beneficial. So that's also why my role has always changed. And one of my principles is reduce, automate, delegate. Can you go me through that? Yeah, so the main idea 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
“Go to sorry for my other Well, first of all, I would say you should not always, but every now and then, especially when there's a big technology shift like now, you should question all of these assumptions, you know, how you build companies. I think we're in the middle of this massive transformation. You can build companies with probably 10 times fewer employees. So that convention is completely overthrown, that you need to hire a lot of people. That's one thing. I would say, you know, early on, there was like this belief that you can run a completely flat organization, right? No managers, no hierarchies, no levels. And that's not really possible. At a certain scale, you need to have managers or layers or you need to have some sort of hierarchy career progression and stuff like that. I think that the oldest organization in the world, the Catholic Church that is still around, it's very hierarchical. And I think there's probably some reason.”
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
“40 or so 40 people or so. The reason for it is for a very long time we had no marketing budget. We didn't advertise nothing, like zero dollar marketing budget because we were also not profitable. We also didn't have any revenue. So it was like, no, we can't spend money that we don't have. So there was like the constraint. But then the constraint was really good at enforcing us to come up with good ideas. We always say the dual link marketing, it's not powered by money. It's powered by ideas. What do you see on our TikTok channel? So it's having the green owl, our mascot, having the costume, and also kind of doing unhinged things. And kind of like also making fun of ourselves in a way. That is why it is so effective.”
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
“Think at some point we were bigger on TikTok than Nike, a brand that has existed for a very long time. We all obviously know Nike. And the other thing that is like, I always say it's like we run the world's most efficient marketing organization. People think, oh, yeah, you know, they're big because they spend a lot of money on advertising and social media influencers and stuff. By impact, we must be the most efficient marketing org. It's a small team.”
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, I was the one who pushed for hiring our first product manager. It was actually interesting because Louise, at the time, he's like, oh, we don't need product managers. He had seen some of them at Google and he had worked with some of them and he's like, hey, no, I don't think they provide that much value. And we don't need this. I cannot do this myself. And we just need a bunch of designers. No, no, we really should, you know, like if every single company has a product manager at our size, maybe we're wrong. Let's hire one and if it doesn't work out, then we can still go with that. But obviously that was the right decision. Obviously that was the right decision.”
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, yeah. So early on, I was implementing the thing. I was building Duolingo. And then it morphed more into code review architecture, how to build the backend system and all that system design. And then it morphed more into management hiring. I think I'm actually quite good at hiring. But then there's also other stuff that people wouldn't expect from a CTO. Cool.”
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
“Still does. So that's a founder mode for him. It's like he's still in most of the product reviews. And I think that's rare for a company CEO of our size where the CEO sits in most of the product reviews.”
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
“He mostly mostly works with the PM org, the product org. And they would probably say something like that when we still have this product review process where every change goes through review and loses, it sits in most 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
“It would be problematic if it was just me and everybody was like me. You need to have complementary skills within the founders, but then also within the whole exec team, within the whole company, right? So if everybody was really bad at finishing, by the way, the last 20% are basically details. You need to have someone who's obsessed with details. In Duolingo, that is Luis from day one. He was just obsessed with details and he really cares. And I also care about details. But he is an order of magnitude better at that. I think he has ever”
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, no, no, it depends. By the way, also, when there's, you know, there was a power outage in Portugal and Spain, we proactively extended their streak.”
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
“Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's great. And we also sometimes get emails. I was on this trip to Climb Mount Everest and I couldn't extend my streak. Can you please restore it or something? And I had no internet access.”
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. I mean, the streak is exactly this loss aversion mechanic, right? So it's like it's motivating to build up your streak, but it's like, I absolutely do not want to lose my streak. I will do a lot of crazy stories.”
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 think that there's still going to be this human element of what do I need to learn kind of guidance and coaching and motivation. And also why should I learn this? And AI will never tell you like why you should learn this. It's like help you learn it. But it's not going to tell you why you should learn this. Why is this important?”
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, yeah, 100%. It's huge. It's massive. Going back to the higher ed three things. For K-12, people also, okay, my kids, they go to school to learn things. But again, it's not just the learning. In fact, a lot of K-12 is childcare. So even if you solve one aspect of it, like let's say you have an AI tutor that is really, really good, you still need to solve the childcare problem. It's unlikely that people will just go to a school without any humans, without any teachers, and just use apps and then go home, or that we would have some sort of Optimus in the school. I think there's a lot of it needs to be done by humans still. And by the way, the other thing is like, I do believe that the AI tutors will become really, really, really good. It's going to be the way most people learn most things in the future.”
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
“Still makes a huge difference. And we know because whenever the service goes down that sends a push notification, you can see the dip.”
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. But one thing on the second thing, so we have not solved the social thing, right? Okay, this is what higher ed does. But on the number two, the credentials, one thing we're also very passionate about is the Duolingo score. I'm not sure if you've noticed it within Duolingo, but we now give you a score, like how good you are at this language. And we want this to become the way people talk about language proficiency. So it's like, hey, my Duolingo score is 61 in French. And then people know, okay, I guess you can have this kind of conversation, et cetera, et cet So we're getting into the credentials or the degree aspect of it with this score.”
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
“Credentials number two, very important because otherwise you would always have to prove again that you know something, right? But that's the purpose of the degree. And number three is the social aspect. So a lot of people meet their partner at the university and their friendship network. So most companies that look inside edtech, they just focus on number one. But I think if you really want to, let's say, if you really want to disrupt the harvards of the world, you have to solve all three.”
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
“A good question, so I'm not sure about that directly. But one thing that is interesting about education is, okay, so there's K-12 and then there is higher ed universities college, et cetera. One thing that's interesting when people talk about education, we always assume it's the instruction. Here's skill I learned the skill and now I go from A to B. That's kind of like how we think of education. But higher ed, for example, is actually more than that. Going to college, it's three things. It is the actual instruction, it's the actual teaching. It's actually the learning of new skills. Okay, that's number one. But then there is also the degree, the credentials, right? So the universe says, Harry, you got a degree. You successfully finished this course and you can put this on your LinkedIn or resume and then an employer can say, oh, I guess, you know, Harry did take this computer science class. And therefore, we can hire them as a engineer.”
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 not well, yeah. I don't know, it could be something like that. It could be, you know, learning together, but it could also be a lot of untapped potential that there's not that many apps 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
“What I'm most passionate about is the social aspect of the app. I think we have these leaderboard mechanics. We now have these massive user base and we have all these brand law. People love Duolingo. And I feel like there's an untapped potential of connecting the people that are on Duolingo. I don't know how to do it. But I'm very”
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
“In times You could play it, and it just felt like this belongs inside the app. You know, it's like when you just see a screen, it's like, yeah, maybe you have to kind of imagine it versus if you have the prototype, it's like, well, this looks and feels like Duolingo. The other thing is because of AI, again, we were able to build this within nine months. fastest way ever created a new course”
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 prototype is what convinces us that we should do this. If it had just been a Figma design, we probably was like, you know, maybe, maybe not. But the prototype was so good that it convinced everyone. It's like, yeah, let's build 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 don't want to build just a game. There needs to be some educational aspect. That's always a trade-off between, okay, are you just a game or are you an educational game or are you just a textbook boring experience? So you have to find the balance between the two. We don't want just a game. So if chess is different, like chess is not like a racing game or something. Chess is like, you know, it helps you think. So that's why we're good with it. But then how does this fit into the path? How does this look inside Duolingo? Can we make it fit into Duolingo design language and all that? So that's another concern. But then this is again super interesting. And so the two of them, they built this prototype with AI, PM and designer and the PM. He has some engineering background. So he knows how to think logically. But he hadn't written much code before Duolingo or at Duolingo. But he was able to build this first version just using cursor and a bunch of AI tools.”
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
“Chess is an interesting one because is it really education? You know, it helps you think. I mean, we had this discussion before should you still study computer science. I think chess is similar in a way that it helps you think, helps you think logically. And so we believe.”
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 this is looking more like the main Duolingo app, and it's like we're about to add a leaderboard and a league system and streak. And it was like, why are we doing this? Like, why are we replicating this whole functionality? That was inside number one. And then inside number two is for the user, it was also not a great experience because first you had to know that Dueling had a math app. Then you had to find in an app store. Then you had to download it. Then you had to install it. Then you had to grant it permissions again to send you push notifications. It was like, wait, is this trick different from my Duolingo streak? It feels very much like Duolingo, but it's not quite Duolingo. And then we said, no more new apps. If it's education and goes into the main app. It's kind of like a super app strategy, right? So now the good thing is like all the content and all that, we can just transfer in. So we didn't, you know, throw it out, but merge it with the main app.”
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 we started with languages, but the mission must always be all of education, right? So at some point it's like, okay, let's build new subjects. We want to add new subjects and then someone said, let's add math. Math is another one of these like fundamental skills that we'll probably need to learn for the next hundred years or so. And then the first idea was to build a new app. In fact, we built a new app. We built a new math app.”
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
“Think ultimately product quality is details. Louis, he's obsessed with details. He can spot something like being not properly aligned within half a second. The details really, really matter. If you look at retention, which is the main metric we care about, it's like the details really matter. It really matters. It also matters in terms of how likely are you to recommend it to a friend. And you're not going to say, oh, you know, it's like, oh, it's super details are really good. But it's like, it's a great app. That's all details. Difference between a good app and a great app is details.”
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 one thing, maybe. So we have these stories inside Duolingo. So every now and then you get a story. I think they're actually becoming really good again with AI. And there's kind of an entertainment aspect with this. Like maybe you could actually make them more prominent, go into more reading, including your first language, L1, or maybe something for kids, like learning how to read, but you haven't done that yet. It's not at the level of Harry Potter.”
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 other thing is Louise always says there's a difference between being a first class citizen and a second class citizen as a feature, right? So Duling of works because we have these gamification mechanics, we have the streak, we have the XP, we have the leaks and all that. And you can build this all inside a different app. But if it's just kind of a second class citizen buried somewhere, again, it's like, it's hard to make that experience as sticky as it if you build an app just for 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 the actual motivation. And, you know, by the way, this is one of the key insights of Duolingo. We've been sharing this with the entire world for the last 10 years, and still nobody seems to believe us. So the hardest part is motivation. And Duolingo is because it's so gamified. It's really good at this. It's a motivation engine. I call it a motivation engine. It really gets you to come back every day and do Duolingo. And if you stick to it and you do the hard material, you will actually learn a language. That is the power of Duolingo. In general, people underestimate how important that is. So if you want to build something that is as good as Duolingo, you have to solve this somehow. If you ask our users, what do you do if Duolingo went away? They never mentioned any of our language learning competitors. They say, oh, I would spend more time on social media. And then the second thing is, if I was Sam Altman, you know, I would go after the big trillion dollar companies. Why go into language learning when you can go into search or social media? Those are the, well, if you're”
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's definitely somewhat of a concern. I think there's a bunch of things to be said about that. So, first of all, what is the hardest part about learning a language?”
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 other thing that I think you see happening in the public markets, and my only comment about this is like this bifurcation of the market into is this an AI winner or is this an AI loser? I think by mistake we were first put into the AI loser category and now it changed to like, oh no, Dueling is going to be an AI winner and there's lots of tailwind from AI. And, you know, I outlined some of 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
“I think there's going to be a lot of competition in more specialized use cases, the divisional model. There's less competition, and you can see that there could be companies that keep a lead for our voices. We also work with 11 labs, and they're just amazing models, amazing voices. I can see that might be harder to replace with one or the other model.”
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 it's also like it's a one off thing. Generate the content, then it's done. And then number two is these AI features like Video Cultivate Lily, where you actually have a unit cost. You directly interact with a LLM on the back end and you have to pay for that API call, right? So there's an actual unit cost there. And then you have to make that viable. So we have three tiers, the free tier, there's super, and there's max. And it's mostly now our max, the higher tier subscription because of that reason, right? So we would like to give this to everyone. But the reality is today there's a unit cost to AI and therefore it's in our higher tier subscription. We believe all of these costs will come down. So the one, the batch processing cost has already come down. There's a lot of competition there. And then in the kind of the real-time model, multi-model, there's always going to be, we hope there's going to be a lot of competition. Costs will come down. Eventually, I think we'll be able to give this to.”
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
“Terms of margins, as I explained before, there's these three use cases at Duolingo. Number one is the content generation. So content generation is just, it's good for margins, right? So you...”
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 we started using an AI tool for customer support. I think it's another one of these early applications of AI where AI can really do a great job and transform an industry. We have found for a lot of the AI can do 70 to 80% of the tickets that we get. And then people always say, oh, well, okay, you don't need human customer support agents anymore. That's not true because you still have the other 30% or so. But then not only that, now that you have these kind of like an unlimited AI customer support agent, you can actually give customer support to a much broader base. So far, we only give it to our subscribers, the ones that pay for Duolingo. But if we can reduce the cost of customer support by 10x or 100x, then we can actually give it to everyone. Classic, classic example of Turbin's paradox, right? So as cost goes down, demand goes up.”
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
“He could never understand it. In fact, when I open TikTok and look at our own Duolingo, I don't get it. It's like, why is this funny? Why do people watch this? But it's super, super popular.”
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 think it's just like I bet the person who spent a thousand hours using ChatGPT is a lot better at using it than I am. And I think that's the case for the Newgrads. You know, DuLink wouldn't be where it is today in terms of our social media presence if we never hired from Gen Z. It's like you need to know your target demographic. And, you know, Zaria, who was on your show before, she's Gen Z and without.”
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'm not sure. So here's another thing the general consensus is that these AI tools are really good for senior software engineers or staff level software engineers, right? You know, they have been trained and now they can use AI and they become much more productive. They're now 10x engineer. The channel consensus is that AI can do the job of an entry-level engineer. Therefore, let's stop hiring entry-level engineers and only hire senior engineers. But I think that's a mistake. And we're actually not doing that at Duolingo. We still hire from universities. One of the reasons is we believe that people that grow up with these tools and start using these tools early will become much better at using them. So in a way, yes, they're...”
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 get paid to hang out with amazing. So for us, it's not just income, right? It's purpose. We derive purpose from our job. But for a lot of people, the job is just they do it for the income. They don't derive purpose from it. The people that derive purpose from their job who work the most, et cetera, attack people and the investors and all of these people close to the AI revolution. I think we are most afraid of it because we feel we might lose our purpose. That's why we are sometimes not optimistic about this future world.”
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 other thing that is interesting about this is this is more on a philosophical note if you just ask people, do you like your job? You can ask anyone here. They all love their job. You love your job. I'm sure you love your job. You would do it for less money.”
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