CEOInterviews.AI
Start App
Try: AI strategy tariffs earnings guidance layoffs interest rates growth

Luis von Ahn Arellano

Co-Founder, Chairman of the Board, President & Chief Executive Officer, Duolingo

Search every verified Luis von Ahn Arellano interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Luis von Ahn, co-founder and CEO of Duolingo, gave an interview in New York in September 2026, during which he discussed the company's origins, his personal background, and Duolingo's business model. He stated that he started Duolingo about 15 years ago with the goal of providing equal access to education, noting that he grew up in Guatemala and observed disparities in educational quality based on wealth. He also said that Duolingo's approach to monetization is to ask users who can afford to pay to do so, while allowing those who cannot to use the app for free, citing the company's annual operating costs of hundreds of millions of dollars. During the interview, von Ahn confirmed that he created CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA and sold the latter to Google. When asked about the "secret sauce" behind his successful products, he said he did not believe there was one, attributing outcomes to hard work and persistence, and noted that Duolingo has launched several products that did not succeed. He also expressed interest in visiting Indonesia beyond Bali, and said Duolingo is focused on teaching languages such as English, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean to users in the Indonesian market.

Recent appearances

Verified interview transcripts

Notable quotes

“At the highest level, what we want is that if you use Duolingo and you get value out of it, and you can afford to pay, we want you to pay. So if you can afford to pay and you get value out of it, it is only fair that you pay us because running Duolingo costs hundreds of millions of dollars per year. But if you cannot afford to pay or for some reason have a difficulty in paying then we actually want you to use it for ”

“We could say tomorrow, you know what, screw it, you have to pay to use Duolingo. I'm pretty sure we would make a lot more money if we did that. Our number of users would go down, but a good number of them would also pay us and we would make a lot more money and next quarter would be an amazing quarter for us. However, what that would do is it would completely stifle our growth because the way Duolingo has grown is th”

“The easiest way to make money when you're teaching somebody is just to charge them to learn. That's kind of how education monetizes. It was very important for us that we didn't do that because the mission of our company was really related to giving access to education to everybody for free.”

“I've tried to start companies, there are two that have done better. The one I'm working on today, which is Duolingo, is a public company on the stock exchange here in the United States, and it's doing quite well, valued at around 7 billion dollars depending on the day. What the company does is we mostly teach languages, it's an app for learning languages. Now we're getting into teaching math and music, but mostly wha”

“In the short term, you know, the it really it really matters which one you're prioritizing, but I think in the long term, what's going to matter the most and what's going to also make the most money is a company that really is putting the education of the users first. I think that will be the larger company in the long term.”

“In 2026, we decided that this year we would really spend it trying to work much more on user growth rather than revenue growth. The reason for that is I really think that over the next few years, the way most people learn is going to change. AI is just going to allow us to teach significantly better than we have in the past. And we're already seeing it. Our product today in terms of teaching is way better than it was”

Other executives at Duolingo

The summary and quote tags on this profile are produced with AI assistance from verified, first-person interview transcripts, then checked by our team to confirm the speaker's identity and the accuracy of every quote. See how we verify →