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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“I believe that's going to happen. The big question is when. I don't think it's going to be next five years. Maybe it's going to be next 10 years if you really see a broad adoption of these technologies. More likely maybe 20 years or so. Today in the US, if you run into a stranger at the conference, something, the first question is usually, what do you do? But in this future world, the first question might be like, what are your hobbies? You know, like because we don't have jobs anymore. So everything is going to be like about not work.”
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 would say for the next five years, probably still a good investment. Yeah. You know, like there's like, okay, so if you extrapolate, okay, so once we have full AGI, we no longer have jobs. Nobody has to work anymore. We have UBI, et cetera. It's like the paradise.”
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, I did my CS degree. It's now quite a while ago. They don't actually teach you coding. People think, oh, CS means coding. What they teach is kind of the fundamentals of not even software engineering, but like how computers work. And then computer science is kind of applied mathematics. Okay, so I do believe there's still a lot of value in thinking logically, which is something that the best CS courses teach you. They don't teach you Java.”
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 we see is inside Duolingo, we have the three biggest functions within Duolingo are product engineering and design. Those compose probably about 80%, 78 to 80% of our workforce. But with AI, you can see that there's maybe like a new role, kind of a product engineer designer, like one person who can do all of these roles to a certain degree. They can build a prototype and then maybe at some point they need to hand it off to an actual software engineer or an actual designer. That's going to be part of the future. So I think it's going to be more software, a lot more software, a lot more people creating software. Whether we're going to call them software engineers or not, I'm not sure. And then I think there's going to be this convergence of roles of product engineer and design.”
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
“If you had asked me a year ago, I would have said 100% more. Now I'm a little bit less certain, but I think two things will change. So in a way, what these AI tools do is they lower the entry level to get into software engineering, right? So, you know, your mom can maybe build an app with Lovable or something like that. So there you go. The other thing it does, it just lowers the cost of lines of code producing software. And then there's the Chervin's paradox, which says the cost of a good goes down. You will actually have more demand for it. I also believe some of this will be true. So I think there will be a lot more people writing apps, whether they will actually touch the code or not. I'm not sure. And then I think the second thing is, are we going to call them software engineers or what are we going to call them?”
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 software engineering side, I think what they're really good at is going from zero to 80% for a simple app, the replit, the lovable. And then the larger code base gets, the worst I get. Adding the next 10% takes as long as the first 80%. And they kind of create their own tech debt, which they also cannot really solve. And then the other thing they're really good at is just isolated transformations. So in a single file, add all the comments or change a function to use different input parameters or something like that. Really good at that. What they're not good at is large code bases and adding a feature, even a simple one to a large code base.”
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 go that far into it. But when you have so many users, you're like, there's always one. No, so the hello stations are not a problem. I think there's a lot of Silicon Valley hyperboline getting replaced very quickly. I'm less sure about that. I try all of these tools and I think there's still a lot they can't do well.”
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 early on, there were a lot of these hallucinations, the AI making stuff up. I think they have gone down, number one, but then also number two for us, it's not a problem if they hallucinate because we teach languages. As long as the language is grammatically correct, it is okay if it makes up a historical fact. We don't teach history. It's like hallucinations are not a problem for our use case.”
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
“Don't mandate Du Linga is surprisingly egalitarian, and we just say use AI tool or use whatever makes you more productive. And we pay for it. You can use cursor, you can use ChatGPT, you can use copilot. And then we see what people actually use.”
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 use AI in three ways at Duolingo. Number one is content generation, and that's where we've seen the biggest success. Number two is AI features that you previously couldn't build. So this is, again, this video copy. It's an interactive conversation with an AI bot. Two years ago or three years ago, you couldn't build. Now you can do it. And it's actually the thing that was lacking in the product. If you ask our user, what's missing in Dueling, it's like this conversational piece, like speaking. I want to get better at speaking. And now we can do this. And it's a really, really, really powerful feature. Great adoption with this video call with Lily feature. And I think there's more to be done there, both making this feature better, but then also maybe this new AI features that we can now build. And the third is overall productivity improvements across the company. Software engineers using cursor, using AI for customer support.”
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 think it's going to be multimodal. We have this feature inside the app called video call with Lily. So you can call Lily's one of our characters. She's the one with the purple hair. She's not a one-on-one tutor. She's more like a friend. But she remembers stuff. So she remembers, for example, that, you know, that I like cooking. She knows where I live, etc., etc. She personalizes in that way. But it's full conversation. So you learn by conversing with an AI friend. And I think that's going to be super 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
“I think that's part of the reason why these one-on-one tutors are so good because they know where you are. They're really good at assessment. Think of the tennis coach again. They know where you are. They know where you need to go. And they're very good at giving you the feedback. And they also know how you differ from other players.”
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 industry is definitely moving that way. One of the most amazing things about Duolingo is we have this massive user base. We're by far the largest learning platform out there, by far. Orders of magnitude. We see how people learn. It's like the largest school. We see usually in education, the studies were done with, you know, 20 to 30 students. We have hundreds of millions. That allows us to look at, okay, does this curriculum design work versus this versus that? And we can use that data to improve the curriculum design itself. But not only that. So, you know, right now we still have these courses and, you know, your curriculum is the same as mine. But really, I think the future is going to be quite different where you say like you might be interested in rugby and you have a trip plan to, I know, France, I think France also is big into rugby. And you could then custom design a course just for you. They use exactly the vocabulary you want to use when you go to friends. You know, it could be completely different from mine. Why do we even create this batch on the back end? Like, why don't you create it on the fly?”
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
“By the way, there's still a lot of human in the loop. So, for example, the curriculum design that's all human made. Anyhow, inside Duelinger, there's a lot of these short sentences, the ones you see in the lessons. And those are now producer of AI. There's also this concept of viability. You want to introduce new words one at a time and you can give these constraints to the AI. Create a sentence that uses these words, doesn't use any of the other words, and only uses these grammar concepts. And it can do that. And that's how we've been able to generate the sentence content within these courses.”
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
“When you first had access to it, it was impressive. It was like an iPhone moment. You just realized this is the future. We're going to use this everywhere. And then it's like the second question is like, how do you use this at Duolinka? And the first thing we realized is this can really help us accelerate content production. In the past, it would always take us a long time to produce new courses. But then we have AI. There's a potential that you can pump out a lot of these courses all at once. In fact, we just did that. It took us 12 years to build the first hundred courses or so. And now within one year, we built another 148 courses. It would have taken us decades to 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
“This has been going on for the last two and a half years. So we were one of the launch partners of OpenAI when they first launched GPD4. And we immediately saw the potential of this technology to help our mission.”
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, exactly. So, you know, they got the one on one Twitter. When we started dueling, we saw the potential of technology to do this but for everyone. We can't all afford these one-on-one tutors. That's too expensive. But with technology, there's a way that anyone can have access to a one-on-one tutor with the same efficacy. And that's why we started Dueling. From day one was technology first. Back then it was software. Now we call it AI. So in a way, not much has changed, except AI has become a lot better.”
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 maybe taking a step back. Why did we start Duolingo? What is our mission? Duolingo's mission is to provide the best education and make it universally available. That's why Lucy and I started this company. In the past, the best education was only available to the richest people, the king is the head, you know, the private tutors for their kids. That was the way to learn. And by the way, this is still true today. If you want to become the best tennis player, you hire a one-on-one tennis coach.”
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 should always try to raise money from the best tier one VCs, even if the terms are slightly worse, because so much signaling. It's harder to raise 3 million than it is to raise 100 million. But I can guarantee you, Dueling would not have been able to raise any money in Europe. You know, we had zero dollar revenue for the first five years.”
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