“I didn’t really need to worry about money after that,” he says. He sold it to Google in 2004 for an undisclosed sum. While he was still a grad student, Von Ahn built a tool that used crowdsourcing to identify image files. Together they created CAPTCHA, an academic project they gave away for free. in computer science at Carnegie Mellon (CMU), where he studied under Manuel Blum, 1995 winner of the Turing Award, known within the field as the Nobel Prize of computing. He went to America for college and graduate school, earning a bachelor’s in math at Duke and a Ph.D. He excelled in math, and by the time he was 12 he wanted to be a professor. His mother, a physician who had him when she was 42 and unmarried, raised him on her own (his surname comes from his father’s German family). Von Ahn learned English the old-fashioned way at the American School in Guatemala City. In response to the question, “ ¿Hablas español?” he freezes, then says, “Could you repeat that?” I am drink beer in a bar.)īob Meese, Duolingo’s 42-year-old chief revenue officer, has been studying Duolingo Spanish for more than six months. (Rough translation: I play sports, I am eat with my friends. Je suis boire du biere en un bar,” mangling his tenses. He’s been logging 15 to 20 minutes of French every day since November, and when asked to describe what he did the previous weekend he says, “ Je fais du sport. “A significant portion of our users use it because it’s fun and it’s not a complete waste of time,” he says. But Von Ahn promises only to get users to a level between advanced beginner and early intermediate. Fans tweet about funny sentences generated by the software, like “I am selling my mother-in-law for a euro.”ĭuolingo has gotten bad press from writers who try the app and don’t learn much. Drag the words onto a line, hit “check” and “You are correct” appears at the bottom of the screen with a satisfying chime. In a typical exercise, the sentence “I eat bread” appears above seven bubbled words.
The app’s three-minute lessons are designed with a simple interface. Duolingo grabs users with gamification tricks like points, treasure chests and “streaks” for continuous use. “Our retention is comparable to games,” he says. He also boasts that users are less likely to quit Duolingo than they are to bail out of competing language apps. He likes to say that the money he forfeits giving away the app is equivalent to the cost of his rivals’ bloated marketing budgets. The company isn’t profitable, but Von Ahn says it will be cash-flow positive this year. Employee head count will rise from 170 to 200 by year’s end.ĭuolingo’s headquarters, in a converted furniture store in East Liberty, a gentrifying neighborhood not far from Google’s Pittsburgh office, is set to expand to a second floor. Von Ahn says that will climb to $86 million in 2019 and $160 million in 2020 as more users sign on and pay for the premium app, which will attract them with new features. Only 1.75% of Duolingo’s users pay for its ad-free version ($84 a year), but because its base is so huge, revenue hit $36 million last year.
Another competitor, Berlin-based Babbel, says its revenue of more than $115 million comes from the $85-a-year subscription fee it charges its million-plus subscribers.
Venture capitalists have pumped in $108 million, ballooning Duolingo’s valuation to $700 million in 2017, $150 million more than the market capitalization of Rosetta Stone, its 27-year-old publicly traded rival.Īlong with teaching more languages (Rosetta Stone offers 25), Duolingo attracts users because its basic ad-supported version is free, compared with the $120 a year Rosetta Stone charges its 500,000 subscribers. Seven years after its launch, it has nearly 30 million active monthly users, according to its own figures. À la Wikipedia, Duolingo enlists volunteers to help create its more obscure courses. They include little-spoken tongues like Hawaiian, Navajo and Gaelic and the fictional language High Valyrian from the HBO blockbuster Game of Thrones (1.2 million users are studying it). But at the time that this was released - due to Covid - it was very difficult or even impossible for many people to get out to buy a freakin’ whiteboard.Duolingo already offers more languages than its competitors do, 36 at last count. This is not a large expense compared to the other things you may have to buy in order to do this version of the TOEFL. A Small White-Board - Which is actually feasable, but that means that you probably have to go buy one, because almost no one besides teachers actually have one.
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