Duo the owl can’t teach everything.
Duolingo’s CEO, Luis von Ahn, said the company has three criteria to decide what subjects to add. The app started with languages and has expanded to math, music, and chess.
“We debate a lot about what subjects to teach,” von Ahn said in a talk at Stanford Graduate School of Business published last week. “There’s a few things that we need them to do.”
The company’s first requirement is that there needs to be a “very large demand” — at least hundreds of millions of people who are interested in learning that topic, Von Ahn said.
“For example, even coding, there’s only about 20 million people in the world that either want to learn coding or are learning coding. That’s just not a very large number,” von Ahn said. The subjects should also be teachable on a mobile app, he added.
The company had 46.6 million daily active users in the first quarter, a 49% jump from last year.
The company offers courses in about 40 languages, including some that have a declining number of speakers.
Duolingo’s second criterion is that it will only teach subjects that benefit the world.
“Turns out a lot of people want to learn like Pokémon cards,” the CEO said. “We’re not going to do that. So we want it to be good for the world.”
Von Ahn, who cofounded the company in 2011, has said that making education free and accessible has always been Duolingo’s mission. During the Stanford talk, von Ahn said that one of his regrets when growing the company was monetizing it three years too late because he thought “making money was evil.”
The CEO said his third requirement for what subjects are added has to do with the team’s motivation.
“We need somebody or a small group of people inside the company to be excited about this, to actually go work on it,” von Ahn said.
He said that employees began developing chess — which launches this week — eight months ago.
“It got started by two people, neither of whom knew how to code and neither of whom knew how to play chess,” he said.
Late last month, von Ahn made headlines for outlining all the ways he plans to integrate AI at the company, including for hiring and evaluation decisions.
Duolingo is on a tear. The company’s stock has risen 198% in the past year because of AI and continued growth in both free and premium users.
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