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Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn wants you addicted to learning


The cofounder of language app Duolingo on gamification and the power of freemium.

We’ve tried to build our technology stacks so that you can interchange them, but the reality is that you start getting wonky stuff because you probably spent a lot of time testing your way into the right queries. Do you think there’s an evolution in Duolingo — that the first thing that you worked on was the engagement and bringing users back to the app and having the character, and then the underlying content was language lessons? It’s just that this bird won’t leave me alone and that’s why I’m back again.” And now you’re talking about this whole other spectrum of things: we’re going to use AI; we’re going to have these natural language conversations; we’re going to expand to mathematics.

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Luis von Ahn