At the heart of Duolingo is its mission: to scale free education and increase income potential through language learning. However, the same mission that has helped it grow to a business valued at $2.4 billion with over 500 million registered learners, has led to tensions that continue to define the business. How do you survive as a startup if you don’t want to charge users? How do you design a startup that isn’t too hard to lose people, but isn’t too easy to compromise education? How do you balance monetization goals while also keeping education as a product free? For my first EC-1, I spent months with Duolingo executives, investors, and of course, competitors, to answer some of these questions. How a bot-fighting test turned into edtech’s most iconic brand, Duolingo (3,300 words/13 minutes) The product-led growth behind edtech’s most downloaded app (3,000 words/12 minutes) How Duolingo became fluent in monetization (2,800 words/11 minutes) Duolingo can’t teach you how to speak a language, but now it wants to try (3,100 words/12 minutes) One of my favorite details in the story that got left on the cutting room floor was Duolingo co-founder and CEO Luis von Ahn comparing his company to the elliptical. I was pressing him on the efficacy of Duolingo, and the long-standing critique that it still… Click below to read the full story from TechCrunch
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How Duolingo became a $2.4B language unicorn
