Duolingo CEO: How to Brainwash Yourself to Success and Get Addicted to Learning. Follow these habits

The hardest thing about learning something by yourself is staying motivated.

What we want is that whenever you're using Duolingo, what you're doing there is positive for you. It just takes some time to form a habit, but once you form it, it's pretty hard to get rid of it. So all these people that have like a 2,000 day streak on Duolingo or thousand day streak on Duolingo, they'll go through whatever to continue their streak. Hi, I'm Luis Von Ahn. I am the CEO and co-founder of Duolingo. Welcome to the Burnouts.

The owl has been amazing for us. It started at first very early when we launched Duolingo, which is now I don't know close to 15 years ago. We knew we wanted to have a mascot. That's what we wanted to do. We came up with an owl because it's in Western cultures at least it is a symbol of knowledge. Then it was green. The reason it's green is to troll our co-founder Sever. So, Severin Hacker, who's our CTO and co-founder, doesn't really care about design all that much. And when we were deciding about the owl, the design team asked him, 'What do you want out of this?' And he said, 'I don't care.' And then he said, 'But there's just one thing. I hate the color green.' And so they turned around and they thought it would be really funny to just make it green. So that's why it's a green owl to troll Severin. And then we've had this owl and then at some point somebody had the idea that the owl was going to be the app icon. So the app icon to Duolingo is just the face of the owl. Okay. The next thing is we send notifications but always notifications on a phone put the app icon right next to it. So because it's the face of the owl, it looks like what is being said comes from the owl.

So then people started ascribing the owl all kinds of things, you know, all our notifications essentially it's as if it came from the owl and then our notifications started getting more and more pushy. So the way our notifications work is that after if you don't use the app after 5 days we stop sending you notifications. But the last notification we send you somebody had the idea that we should tell you that we're stopping to send notifications. So the last notification we send you says something like 'these reminders don't seem to be working. I'm going to stop for now.' What it turned out is that this was a very effective way to get people to come back because people felt guilty like the owl was giving up on them. So everybody started being like, 'Oh, the owl's passive aggressive. It's like an extremely passive aggressive. It feels like it's my parent telling me this.' And so the internet just started talking about the owl and they started making memes about how the owl would go through great lengths to get you to do your lesson. So you know it would kidnap your family to get you to do your lesson, etc. So that's kind of how it all started and then we started leaning into it. I mean, we as a company decided, well, why not get in on the joke and so we started posting things like we in fact, we had a whole TV commercial where it was one of these kind of shitty lawyer commercials that are like, you know, in local TV where they're like, 'Call blah blah blah if you've, you know, had an accident or whatever.' We made exactly that commercial, but it was supposed to be about if you've been kidnapped by an owl. And it was like a whole lawyer commercial. And we aired it and it was I mean it was pretty funny. By the way, that commercial, the way we created that commercial was, we first went to one of these companies that makes the shitty lawyer commercials and we're like, 'Hey, we want one of these commercials like, you know, like shitty lawyer commercials.' And they were like, 'What do you mean shitty?' Like they did not... This is when we realized we actually had to go to a very fancy development company and we told them about a shitty lawyer commercial and they were like, 'We got it.'

It happened over time. It wasn't like one day we went from zero to 100. We just I think we just have tried to be a little more experimental with it. And every time that we pushed it was successful. So we just kept on pushing and pushing. Of course we have guidelines about things. But generally I would say between the years of 2019 and 2022 or so you could see the just getting more and more unhinged and it's because every time it worked.

Yeah. So, we had just hired Zarya who had just graduated from college. And you know, she was at the time our head of marketing, our CMO was a woman that I loved, Cammy. And she said, I in my career, Cammy had a very long and prestigious career. And she said, 'I always learned that you should hire 21 year olds to do your marketing because they just know what the kids like.' She basically said, 'I'm too old to know what the kids like.' And so she hired a few people that were basically straight out of college. And Zarya came up with this idea that we would start a TikTok channel. And then I was shown the first few videos that we were going to post. And truthfully, I didn't even understand them. And then after that, of course, we had more Gen Z people in the team and then it just became a team and they're all very good at it.

It's just doing stuff. You know that one at the time I now know what it means but at the time there was a saying that was like 'no cap' at the time I had never heard this and I'm like what the hell does that even mean?

I know I had no idea what it meant. But it had something it was something about no cap. And I guess a lot of people started looking at that and then at some point they did another one where...

Oh no, that was from the beginning. It was from the beginning it was the costume. And...

We had a costume already. And the reason we had a costume was because we thought it would be useful for job fairs where we would send during a job fair like we would go to, you know, all these schools to try to hire engineers. We thought it would be cool to have somebody in the costume. So that was the reason for the costume. So we had it...

Yeah. It was like somewhere in the closet and they're like, 'Whoa, we have this costume. Let's just do weird stuff with it.' And that's kind of what happened. They started getting progressively weirder. At some point they did one where it was man Scrub Daddy and the owl had kids or like I mean like I don't know babies what like a million little Scrub Daddy sponges came out and that was like the video and I was very confused but it got that thing got I don't know how many 20 million views or something. So...

I mean it varies. It's anybody who starts their job at Duolingo thinks that this is a pretty amazing opportunity to be inside this owl. So all the new employees are like, 'Can I be the owl? Can I be the owl?' Once you've been the owl once or twice, you realize it's actually just a pretty sweaty job. It's not something you want to do. So yeah, that's so it varies. Now, for very high stakes filmings, like if we have something like a large marketing campaign or something and we actually want the owl to do some very specific stuff, we hire people that are not employees that usually are professional dancers. They know how to move much better for the owl and especially if they all I mean we have some where the owl's like dancing. They're professional dancers. They're not Duolingo employees I can't imagine are great dancers.

It's worked out pretty well for us. I mean, it's really worked out really well.

I mean, there's a lot of companies that I think do marketing very well. I mean, you know, there's the ones that do marketing really well on social media. Like, I mean, historically, there's just been like some like Burger King and Taco Bell and Wendy's. They just like historically have done that. But it doesn't have to be just social media. I mean, I'm always a huge fan of Apple marketing. They just... But that's a very different vein of doing it. So, I think you just have to find your niche and you know, it's true what you... I mean, in my case, I am not I don't particularly love attention and I am generally shy. So, I am not going to be the person who's going to be out there on a social media account or something. So, I'm very happy that we have the owl doing the job.

He's way busier than I am.

Sorry.

They had free reign. I mean, we just there's very little oversight. There's some amount of oversight and there's somebody that manages them that is more of an adult. But they have pretty free reign to do almost whatever they want and that has worked out pretty well.

I don't. I reviewed the first two or three and it was pretty clear that it was useless for me to review them because I didn't even understand them. I'm like I don't know what this is. No cap. But I don't review them but we have our head of marketing Manu. The rule right now is if the social media manager believes that it's going to be somewhat controversial they should ask their manager and so that we have this person who is our head of brand who is awesome, Kat Chan, and then if she thinks it's going to be controversial she should ask our CMO Manu and if he thinks it's going to be controversial he asks me but it has not gotten to the point where he asked me. No, I don't think so. Really, half of the stuff that gets posted, I'm like, I don't even know why this is funny or why anybody would not like it. So, I'm not a good reviewer for this.

Yeah, I mean, so we're the whole time that we've been at Duolingo, we've hired people straight out of college, a lot of them. At first, I think it started because we started the company in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, it was easier to hire new grads. New grads were willing to move to Pittsburgh, whereas I think more established people, a lot of times they had families, so it's kind of harder to move. So that's why we started hiring new grads. Also, it used to be the case that I used to be a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and that's why we were in Pittsburgh. So I knew a lot of college students I guess. So that's why we started. But over time, we just have this new grad program. About half of our employees have come to Duolingo as a new grad.

Well, it depends on what it is for. I mean if it's students I mean to learning the most important thing about learning is just making a habit. You know there's some stuff that you can learn in an hour or two like fixing a faucet but things you know like these subjects like math or whatever it takes years to learn. Same with learning a language it just takes years to learn a language. So the most important thing is just do what you can to build a habit. So that's for students. Now, for people who have recently graduated and that work at Duolingo, for example, I mean, my biggest advice is to find a way to be useful. That takes you pretty far. I have a story that I tell inside Duolingo to all the new employees, which happens to be a true story. Early on at Duolingo, there were two engineers. One of them kept on coming to me and saying, 'We don't have a blog. We should have a blog. Why don't we have a blog?' And they kept on complaining, like months of complaining. We didn't have a blog. And then the second engineer one day just came to me and said, 'I noticed we didn't have a blog, so I started one.' That's way better than complaining about not having a blog. So this is a kind of a story that I use inside Duolingo for people just make yourself useful as opposed to trying to complain. Complainers, not useful.

Certainly good at their craft. So whatever it is your craft is, I mean if you're a designer, we really look at your portfolio. If you're an engineer, you know, we want to make sure that you're great at your craft. So certainly we look at that. But then on top of that, we look at whether people really believe in our mission. Most of the people that work at Duolingo really believe in the mission. So we look at that. And then the other thing we have this rule. It's kind of an informal rule, but you know, whenever you're trying to hire somebody, it's because you have a hole in the organization that you're trying to fill. The informal rule is better to have a hole than an asshole. So we try very hard not to hire assholes. You can't always tell from an interview, but sometimes you can. And we're like, 'Yeah, we're not going to hire that person.'