Why Duolingo Worked (with Luis von Ahn, CEO)
About this episode
Luis von Ahn discusses the success of Duolingo and its impact on self-guided education.
Duolingo has fundamentally changed the landscape of self-guided education, starting with language learning. It is now a $9B publicly traded company in a space where everyone thought you could never build a large and exciting company. We’re joined by Duolingo founder and CEO, Luis von Ahn. Luis dives into how learning English was transformative in his personal trajectory and opportunities in his life, inspiring him to create the most successful EdTech product of all time. A few topics in this episode: How Duolingo became a leader in the gamification and mobile-first movements in the early 2010s How the company balances rigorous experimentation with gut instinct to build an app with customer experience at its core The backstory of Duolingo’s “unhinged, yet wholesome” green owl mascot trending on your TikTok feed Sponsors: Sierra: https://bit.ly/acquiredsierra
People in this episode
Hosts: Ben Gilbert, David Rosenthal
Guest: Luis von Ahn
Topics covered
- self-guided education
- language learning
- gamification
- mobile-first movements
- customer experience
- EdTech
Keywords
- Duolingo
- Luis von Ahn
- EdTech
- language learning
- gamification
- mobile-first
- customer experience
Sponsors
Sierra
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Duolingo
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