#163 What I Learned From Luis von Ahn
What I learned from reading “The Duolingo Handbook”.
Today’s Chapter is based on the book “The Duolingo Handbook”.
Luis von Ahn co-invented CAPTCHA to distinguish humans from bots online, later developed reCAPTCHA—which digitized books via user input and sold it to Google in 2009—and co-founded Duolingo, the world’s most popular free language-learning platform where he serves as CEO.
Here’s what I learned:
Long-Term Vision
“If it helps in the short-term, but hurts Duolingo in the long-term, it’s not right.”
— Luis von Ahn
Luis von Ahn founded Duolingo with one concept in mind: to stand out as a company that thinks long-term. His journey at Duolingo exemplifies how committing to the long-term can yield extraordinary results. As a matter of fact, von Ahn created Duolingo with the purpose of democratizing education, by making long-term decisions from product development to hiring. As he explains, “Our mission is to develop the best education in the world and make it universally available.” By avoiding short-term thinking, Duolingo has built a sustainable empire that serves hundreds of millions of users worldwide today.
At the heart of this approach is the recognition that languages need time to be learned. As such, it was important for von Ahn to develop Duolingo with this in mind. As von Ahn explains “Learning—particularly language learning—requires regular practice over extended periods of time. That’s why we prioritize user retention, and have spent years perfecting the Streak feature. The more we can do to keep our learners committed for the long haul, the more value they’ll get from Duolingo.”
Similarly, von Ahn understood that innovation requires time. Von Ahn and his co-founder Severin Hacker understood early on that building an effective language-learning app wasn’t a sprint but a marathon. They bet on emerging technologies, even when they were imperfect, trusting that advancements would catch up.
“From the beginning, we’ve believed that technology will advance enough to make our most ambitious ideas possible. And betting on that has been crucial to how we operate. For example, we invested in early text-to-speech systems instead of recording human voices: even though our audio sounded robotic at first, we knew the technology would improve with time.”
— Luis von Ahn
This also extended with the way Duolingo monetized itself. Rather than locking core features behind paywalls, Duolingo offers a robust free version, betting that satisfied users will upgrade. This tension between accessibility and revenue could have derailed lesser companies, but von Ahn’s patience and long-term vision paid off with Duolingo. He writes, “It became clear that introducing a freemium subscription product was the best opportunity to scale the business. The hard part was doing so while still offering an excellent product for those who couldn’t pay. We landed on a subscription package that eliminated ads and gave learners unlimited hearts. Both of these features remove friction from the app. Over the years, we’ve continued to tweak this model, but the core dynamic is the same: the paid product gives us the resources to pursue our mission at the greatest scale, and the free product is largely how that mission is achieved.”
In the same line of thought, Duolingo avoided having too many ads in their application. Von Ahn mentions, “Take advertising. We could increase revenue tomorrow by showing more ads in the app. But we know that too many ads can annoy users and stifle long-term growth, potentially compromising our goal of making the best education universally available. This is a real trade-off. But over and over, we’ve taken the long view. We have to: our goals are too big to think any other way.”
Furthermore, the hiring process at Duolingo also reflects a long-term approach. The company insists on waiting for the right people, prioritizing long-term fit over immediate needs. This has resulted in a team with unusually low turnover, fostering institutional knowledge that compounds over years. Von Ahn mentions that “Hiring decisions are some of the most important decisions we make. That’s why we take time to find the right person—even if it means waiting. Each new hire needs to meet our bar. Is this person exceptional? Are they willing to get their hands dirty? Are they a clear communicator? Will they prioritize what’s best for the company over their personal goals?”
“The temptation of short-term wins can be powerful. We had a simple mantra in the early days: “Don’t do dumb s**t.” Looking back, this was the first version of “Take the Long View.” We knew that to have any shot at meaningful success, we had to steer clear of gimmicks and tricks that might seem helpful in the short-term but hurt us down the road.”
— Luis von Ahn
This reminds me of how Jeff Bezos ran Amazon with the same mentality: that long-term vision is required for innovation. As a matter of fact Bezos once said that long-term thinking shareholders can allow the company to make constant innovations, despite having failures from time to time. As such, Bezos was not timid in making investment decisions where he had an opportunity in gaining market leadership advantages even when he knew that some of his investments would not pay off. He explains, “We like to invent and do new things, and I know for sure that long-term orientation is essential for invention because you’re going to have a lot of failures along the way.”
As a pioneer in the technology industry, it is in the Amazon’s DNA to be committed to constant improvement, experimentation and innovation. This can be done by investing into new businesses. However, Bezos mentions that it is also his responsibility to make sure that any opportunities they invest in must generate the same return on capital that investors expected when they invested in Amazon. This can only be done by taking a long-term and true ownership approach.
“Outsized returns often come from betting against conventional wisdom, and conventional wisdom is usually right. Given a ten percent chance of a one hundred times payoff, you should take that bet every time. But you’re still going to be wrong nine times out of ten. We all know that if you swing for the fences, you’re going to strike out a lot, but you’re also going to hit some home runs. The difference between baseball and business, however, is that baseball has a truncated outcome distribution. When you swing, no matter how well you connect with the ball, the most runs you can get is four. In business, every once in a while, when you step up to the plate, you can score one thousand runs. This long-tailed distribution of returns is why it’s important to be bold. Big winners pay for so many experiments.”
— Jeff Bezos
Expect Excellence
“If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have the time to do it over?”
— John Wooden
Luis von Ahn’s leadership at Duolingo can be simplified as a relentless pursuit of excellence, not as an aspiration but as a non-negotiable foundation. He once said, “Excellence isn’t some lofty goal—it’s our baseline.” As a person with a detail-oriented mindset, von Ahn wanted to build a culture at Duolingo that rejects mediocrity to ensure that Duolingo wasn’t just a functional app but the world’s leading language-learning platform. As von Ahn mentions, “To change how the world leans, we must do work-class work.”
As per usual, this culture of excellence must be rooted into the people working at Duolingo. As such, when hiring, Duolingo ensures to hire individuals who are great both in their skills but also in their characters. As von Ahn explains, “Our people set the bar for everything else we do. So, we insist on bringing in exceptional talent—individuals who stand out not just in their skills but in their character. That might mean someone who was at the top of their class, or the first from their family to graduate from college—but also is genuinely kind. To maintain this standard, Luis and Severin still approve every new hire.”
It is also important for employees at Duolingo to love their work and to have high standards. This can be achieved by assigning them clear mandates that ensure accountability. Von Ahn writes, “One key to maintaining high standards is assigning ownership. That means putting a person or team on a task, providing a clear mandate and saying, “You are responsible.” We’ve seen it again and again: only things that are owned become excellent.”
“Another key way we maintain excellence is by using the app daily. This ensures that we ourselves love the product and that bugs are spotted and resolved quickly. To make this process even more effective, we built Shake to Report, a simple tool that lets anyone in the company snapshot and report an issue instantly by shaking their device. Over the years, Shake to Report has become a vital part of our development process, making excellence in the app a shared responsibility.”
— Luis von Ahn
But more importantly, von Ahn explains that employees need to be able to take on constructive criticism in order to maintain a high standard of excellency. He believes in the motto of “Hard on the work, easy on the people.” He writes, “That means giving constructive, clear feedback that sharpens ideas without undermining relationships. (We stick to the “what,” not the “who.”) It also means being open to receiving feedback and not taking it personally. This candid, constructive approach allows us to hold each other to high standards while fostering trust and collaboration.”
Finally, excellence is also codified in terms of product design. There are four guiding elements that influences the way Duolingo is built: Useful, Intuitive, Delightful and Polished. Here’s how von Ahn explains them:
Useful: Learners need to get utility out of whatever we’ve built. Otherwise, we’ve made something that adds more complexity to the app and distracts learners from what they’re here to do.
Intuitive: Learners should be learning, not figuring out how to use the app. Every feature must be easy to use for everyone—it doesn’t matter whether they’re a 75-year-old in India using an Android or a 16-year-old in New York City on an iPhone. If a feature or screen requires explanation or additional context, it’s not right.
Delightful: Every new feature needs to have some amount of fun and delight. We might not need the most elaborate animations in the first iteration of a feature, but there should always be a hint of the magic that learners love.
Polished: This is what makes a feature feel complete. Tight visual design, perfect copy, and seamless interactions are the baseline. Nothing should feel clunky or inconsistent. For instance, we shouldn’t have both a Back button and an X button that do the same thing.
This focus on excellence and in the details reminds me of what we have learned from John Wooden who believed that excellence comes from one’s character. In fact, he believes in building one’s character over one’s reputation. He encourages us to focus on who we are rather than how others perceive us. He writes, “Be more concerned with your character than your reputation. Character is what you really are. Reputation is what people say you are. Reputation is often based on character—but not always.”
For Wooden, character is revealed not in grand gestures but in small, consistent actions. He once said, “I believe in the basics: attention to, and perfection of, tiny details that might commonly be overlooked. They may seem trivial, perhaps even laughable to those who don’t understand, but they aren’t. They are fundamental to your progress in basketball, business, and life. They are the difference between champions and near champions.” This focus on the little things—whether it’s keeping your word, showing up on time, or treating others with respect—demonstrates the depth of Wooden’s commitment to integrity.
Furthermore, Wooden recognized that character is about actively cultivating one’s positive qualities. He encouraged individuals to focus on developing their inner strengths emphasizing that these are within everyone’s reach. He once said, “Take a moment and draw a circle around the following personal characteristics that you possess: confidence, poise, imagination, initiative, tolerance, humility, love, cheerfulness, faith, enthusiasm, courage, honesty, serenity. I hope you circled them all because all are within each of us. It is simply up to us to bring them out.”
“There’s nothing wrong with having faults so long as you work conscientiously to correct them. How hard you work at correcting your faults reveals your character.”
— John Wooden
Ship it Fast!
“Sometimes, making the wrong choice is better than making no choice. You have the courage to go forward, that is rare. A person who stands at the fork, unable to pick, will never get anywhere.”
— Terry Goodkind
Duolingo’s success under Luis von Ahn also hinges on a culture of speed and experimentation, where ideas are tested swiftly and only the winners are scaled. Von Ahn created a framework to encourage innovation through constant evolution and where experimentation was encouraged. He writes, “We were also fast as hell. And the pace of our experimentation allowed us to quickly figure out what was working, and ditch what wasn’t. This applied across everything: product, hiring, engineering, and our business as a whole. We were testing and learning at warp speed.”
As a matter of fact, even today, Duolingo releases new versions of the application on iOS and Android every week while running hundreds of experiments simultaneously. Von Ahn truly believed that the principle of ““Ship It” keeps us ahead of our competitors; “Ship It” makes Duolingo a fun place to work; “Ship It” ensures that our product never sits still.”
“Duolingo is the sum of thousands of experiments. The faster we can run experiments—successful or not—the faster we can improve the app and advance our mission. Over time, each of these changes builds on one another, creating a cycle of compounding growth.”
— Luis von Ahn
And while speed was important, Duolingo was also ruthless in terms of focusing their experimentations effort into things that would improve the company’s offering to the customers. Any features that do not deliver value are quickly removed as unnecessary complexity. As von Ahn writes, “As much as we want to move fast and increase clock speed, we always need to make sure we’re working on the right thing. At Duolingo, prioritization is sometimes described as “ruthless:” we are decisive about what we focus on as a company, based on what will have the largest impact on our learners.”
He also mentions that “Deciding what to prioritize starts with clearly defined goals. For every initiative, we ask: How does this contribute to our mission? What measurable outcomes will it drive? And if something doesn’t move the needle in a meaningful way, it’s cut—no matter how much effort has already gone into it. One high-impact win always outweighs a handful of small scattered efforts.”
This led to Von Ahn to create what he calls the Green Machine which outlines the six steps for Duolingo’s success which can be summarized by gathering excellent people, giving them space to experiment and to double down on what works.
Staff It with Great People
Define Success
Set Guardrails and Think Long-Term
Build the Thing and Set Up Feedback Loops
Execute with Urgency and Excellence
Double Down on What Works, Stop What Doesn’t
“For a good idea to become reality, we need to move with a sense of urgency. So Go, Go, Go!”
— Luis von Ahn
This reminds me of how Michael Bloomberg first created his own company. He noticed that in life, it is the “doers”, the lean and hungry ones that usually go the furthest and that achieve the most. As a matter of fact, Bloomberg mentions that while it is important to have a vision, it is dangerous to start second-guessing yourself by worrying too much about the details.
At Bloomberg, the strategy has always been to build the product first and the rest would take care of themselves. Of course, Bloomberg made mistakes along the way and the product would have to be improved on with the feedbacks received from their customers. However, while their competition were still planning on perfecting their product, they were already through rounds of testing and were about to release their tenth version.
“ It gets back to planning versus acting. We act from day one; others plan how to plan—for months.”
— Michael Bloomberg
This is exactly how Bloomberg obtained their first customer. While Merrill Lynch were in the planning to develop a similar product, Bloomberg was able to obtain the contract by guaranteeing that they would deliver a workable product before the estimated time of delivery provided by Merrill Lynch’s internal tech team. Furthermore, he promised that Bloomberg would only be paid until they were truly satisfied with their product.
While it does not seem like it on the surface, this agreement was extremely beneficial for Bloomberg as it would allow them to receive direct feedbacks from Merrill Lynch on how to improve their product. As Bloomberg would say, “At Bloomberg, a problem spurs a solution. That’s what makes us successful.”
“Every day, our system got better as we fixed each problem they pointed out. I’d always rather have a smart, fair, honest, demanding client than a nasty dummy or an “I don’t care” user.”
— Michael Bloomberg
Beyond the Book
Read "Jeff Bezos: Big Things Start Small" by Farnam Street
Read "How to Do Great Things" by Farnam Street
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