As Duolingo goes public, CEO says aim is to be ‘100-year-old company’
For Luis von Ahn, cofounder of East Liberty based-Duolingo,the language learning app is more than a newly-public tech firm. It’s a chance to further education advocacy.
Duolingo’s stock began trading on the NASDAQ under the symbol DUOL on Wednesday, July 28, with an offering price starting at $102 per share. The price peaked at $144 per share just after noon on Wednesday and closed at $139.01, well above the starting price.
“We’ve been always building Duolingo to be a very long-term company,” the chief executive said. “We really want Duolingo to be a 100-year-old company. And usually, companies like that endup being public.”
In terms of the timing, Mr. von Ahn said they felt good about their business model, as revenue has been “more than doubling every year for the last several years.”
The company reported revenues of $70.8 million in 2019 and $161.7 million in 2020, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. It also reported a net lossof $13.6 million in 2019 and and $15.8 million in 2020. Between 2019 and 2020, average daily active users of the app jumped 58% from about 5.2million to 8.2 million.
“It’s not every day that you see a tech company based in Pittsburgh,” he said. “We thought that (going public) would be good for … the tech ecosystemof the city.”
He believes the free price point of Duolingo gives it a competitive edge to stand out. Users pay for additional features, like an ad-free experience.
“We’re always making our product better,” he said. “That’s just to always stay ahead.”
One way they’re doing this is through the Duolingo English test, which was the only online test for English proficiency. As a result, the number of universities that accepted this test for international students jumped from 800 to 3,000.
“Our test is accepted by almost every university in the world that is prestigious,” he said. “Except for Carnegie Mellon. It’s accepted by Stanford and MIT and Yale and Duke,but not CMU.”
His background in crowdsourcing and creating reCAPTCHA, the program that distinguishes between real users and robots, also helps to continually improve the app by effectively using data.
“There’s certain things that nobody knows about what’s the best way ordering of things, but with Duolingo we have so much data we can actually figure out the answer to these questions,” he said. “Imagine that people in Italy are learning Portuguese, and we don’t know whether we should teach them plurals before adjectives or adjectives before plurals … the way we figure it out is for the next 50,000 people that sign up from Italy to learn Portuguese, to half of them, we teach them plurals before adjectives. To the other half, we teach them adjectives before plurals, and thenwe measure which one’s learned better.”
About 10 years ago, he was a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University and began working on the app with his PhD student at the time, Severin Hacker, who helped co-found the company in 2011. Mr. von Ahn said his views on education were influenced by growingup in Guatemala.
“A lot of people talk about education as something that brings equality to social classes, but I always thought of it as the opposite — something that brings inequality,” he said “What happens in practice — particularly in poor countries — is that people who have money can buy themselves a good education, and therefore continue having a lot of money. Whereas, people don’t have very much money barely learn how to read and therefore never makea lot of money.”
Equal access to education is a core value to Mr. von Ahn, but he was faced with theproblem of what to teach.
“We ended up settling on teaching languages, because it’s a very large market,” he said. “There’s about 1.8 billion people in the world learninga foreign language.”
Mr. von Ahn said there are more people learning languages on Duolingo than learning languages in all U.S. highschools combined.
In addition to advocating for accessible education, Mr. von Ahn is also an advocate for immigration. Under the Trump administration, he vocally opposed the former president’s immigration policy and considered pulling out of Pittsburgh — and the U.S.— completely.
He said the tone of the Biden administration toward immigrants is significantly better and that excluding immigrants also excludes valuable talent.
“I think the U.S. just needs to be a lot more welcoming to immigrants, because that allows the United States to be able to attract the best talent from the whole world,” he said. “I still think it is ridiculous that somebody who graduates from Carnegie Mellon — the top student who graduates from Carnegie Mellon — why don’t they just get an immediatework visa?”
As for what languages he speaks, he is on his way to becoming a pentalingual — he knows Spanish, English, Portuguese and is learning Frenchand Japanese.
Mr. von Ahn also said he’s “veryhappy” about the prevalence of Duolingo memes on the internet and being part of the Saturday Night Live skit, “Duolingo for Talking to Children”with Kristen Stewart.
“We play into it, and we love the SNL skit, of course,” he said. “I think that really speaks to the power of the brand … So we’re happy that we don’t take ourselves too seriously.”