[Applause] [Music] hi oh I heard you've talked to like build gaze for 45 minutes oh multip yeah multiple times for for what you sold it to Y No I gave it to them for free I didn't afford for me to charge if you do it again right now would you charge them yes yeah okay I didn't even have employees or anything that was in 2004 I sold up to Google yes oh my God how how old were you then like 2004 I must have been 25 [Music] 25 recap recap because I had sold a company to Google I had more money than I ever needed I was like Curious when you sold a company to Google did you sign anything for example you have to stay at Google for several years and then you get the vested shares things like that's exactly right um so I signed something that said I had to stay for 2 years uhhuh um and every month that I stayed I got yeah more more more part of the acquisition I ended up staying not exactly for 2 years almost 2 years for about a year and 10 months most excited about this is something that we've been sort semi- quietly working on for the last year and a half or so it hasn't yet been launched it's called du lingo since it hasn't been launched sh so you were doing computer science now how did you decide to go into the field of education then I'm not from the United States I am from Guatemala it's a very small and very poor country in poor countries and I assume this happens in China too people that have a lot of money can buy themselves a really good education and therefore continue being very rich whereas people who don't have very much money don't get a very good education and this is what happens in gu so I wanted to do something that would give equal access to everyone and this is why um we started dualingo how did you construct initial team like do you have a team at the beginning yeah it was a this a very small team the entirety of the team was students of mine at Carnegie melon so I was a professor at Carnegie melon and I picked my best students and I asked them if they wanted to be part of the team and they said yes that's like a perk being a professor that was yeah so and most of them are still working uh at dualingo oh nice 12 years later most of them are still there wow wow that's nice do you have any funding at the beginning um at the very beginning we didn't we were just working at Carnegie melon um did you pay them or like no everybody was doing it kind of for free but I would say a few months in maybe 6 months in uh we got funding from a venture capital firm uh we got $3 million which at the time felt like a lot of money and that's when we started paying people so when you talked to the VC like the app was free so how what's your business model how did you we had none we had no no at the beginning we just went and we told the VC's look I just sold the company to Google I made a lot of money I have this thing it's free I don't know how it's going to make money but trust me it worked it worked when you had the idea of Dingle what kind of research did you do very little very little very little instead of doing research we decided to start making it I am a native Spanish speaker so I made the first Spanish course and my co-founder Severin is a native German speaker and he made the first German course what we told each other is I will make the Spanish course and he has to learn Spanish and he made the German course and I had to learn German and so we started learning each other's language through through the ver the yes the first version of dualingo and we ran into this problem that um we would come into the office every day at like 9:00 a.m. and I would say hey did you do your your Spanish lesson and he would say no it was so boring oh really and I this the same thing was happening to me I I couldn't it was too boring this is when we learned that the hardest thing about learning a language by yourself is staying motivated cuz we couldn't even do it ourselves so that's why we very quickly decided to turn dualingo into something that feels a lot like a game um so that we ourselves could do it and that worked really well so by the time we launched dualingo was uh it felt a lot like a game so it was fun it was fun and free so how do you make sure it's like the a systematic enough for you to learn a language because it's all games we do two things we hire people um with phds in second language acquisition we spent a lot of effort on actually structuring the courses so that they teach the easy grammar first then the harder grammar Etc so we we that's one thing we do the other thing we do is we look at the data as people are learning and if we find that too many people are are making too many mistakes or something we we go and make changes the way it works is in English-speaking countries people want to learn a lot of languages in non-english speaking countries people want to learn English I think for those two types the the goal might be different like yeah for people who are learning English they might want to get a better career or education but for those who are native English speaker maybe just for fun or for travel yeah so how did you like accommodate to fit those needs it's it's very interesting we do we don't do anything to accommodate those needs like it's the same app it's the same app the same M the idea is that you can learn for free and it's fun and it works that's the idea and that that works really well for both types of users but you're completely right can you tell us more about how dingo teach Chinese or Cantonese you know we spent a lot of effort on teaching Chinese and cantones I don't know this for a fact but I assume we're probably the largest place where people learn Chinese in the world um it's for most every language we're the largest yeah of provider for anything and we're happy to have cantones for for mandering speakers so Mandarin speakers can learn cantones so here if you're you know in in mainland China I did that yeah I learned cantones with the first like sh uh shrimp dumpling shrimp dumpling ex all the food we try to do that for most courses we try to make it so that we do uh things that are culturally relevant so if you're learning German we probably are not teaching you about shrimp pumpings we're probably teaching you about beer beer and sausages and [Music] cheese within a year we were the top language learning thing in the United States I think the the first time that I thought we really were going to succeed was in the year 2004 when Apple made dualingo iPhone app of the year that was the first time I thought okay we'll probably succeed so when you launch it did you do a lot of marketing or you just like launch it and people no marketing it just people it was all word of mouth that's how we grew for the first several years it was all word of mouth and even today we we do some marketing today but the majority of our growth today is still word of mouth oh that that's it's because people like the product and they tell their friends then did you get another round of founding or did you hire employees we got a lot of rounds of fundings in the funding in the US we started in 2012 we got $3 million then in 2013 we got $115 million then in 2014 again I think we had another $40 million in total the funding that we got was $180 million uh and it keeps then just like you became a unicorn yes I don't remember which year we became a unicorn maybe 2016 or something you remember that okay I don't remember the exact date no so was money was it a big thing for you or no it never was um it's not like I don't like money but this was not my major motivator um and by the time I started dualingo um because I had sold a company to Google I had more money than I ever needed um so the idea with dualingo was more of a passion project it has turned out to be very profitable for everybody but it was more of a passion project it was still like a free app right then how did you monetize did you figure out the business model we figured out the business model in 2017 we knew we needed to start making some money but we didn't know how and and we were very concerned because we wanted it to continue being free fortunately we found this model that works really well this premium model the idea is that you can use dualingo entirely for free you don't never have to pay us but if you don't pay us you have to see an ad at the end of a lesson so you see ads at the end of the lesson yeah at the end of a lesson you see an ad so we make money from ads we don't make a lot of money from ads we make a little bit of money from ads then if you want to turn off the ads and get a few extra features you can pay us to subscribe you can sign up for the premium for the premium version yes um how much was that it depends on the country in in the United States it's about $8 per month so that's the idea and that has worked out really well about 7 to 8% of our monthly active users pay us to subscribe have the premium version the other 92 93% use it for free but the people who pay us to subscribe premium version give us about 80% of our Revenue so the majority of our Revenue comes from a small number of people that pay to subscribe gotcha and the other 20 comes from uh the ads ads mostly well ads and this other project which we should talk about which is the Dual lingual English test 10% comes from the Dual English test 10% comes from ads and about 80% comes from subscription just like the tofl or the ielt it's $60 which is much cheaper 60 it's much cheaper than the TOEFL or anything and it's entirely online and you can take it from home and you get the results you know within a day pretty quickly is toos do you like do they have online test or they they do but the majority of the test is still offline because they prefer people going to the testing center because they make more money from that fore when you launch an English test you have to solve a few problems the first one is you have to make a test we made a test it was a good test the second one is you have to stop cheating um yeah exactly the way we stop cheating is we turn on the front-facing camera of the device and we have a human watch you take the test it turns out this prevents cheating you can like people watching you taking the test or a it's afterwards uh we record a video while you're taking the test and afterwards they watch it while you're they they they watch the whole video of you taking the test and then the third thing that you have to do if you start your own test is you have to get institutions to accept your results yeah exactly and that has taken many years but at this point uh we have about 5,000 University programs accept the results of the Dual English yeah almost any University that you've ever heard of accepts the results of the Dual langual English test so Stanford and Yale and Duke and whatever they all accept the Dual Eng English test did you approach universities first yeah or you approach some other organizations no universities we approach universities because I used to be a professor and I knew a lot of people um that's that's what happened here at first no University wanted to accept the results because because they're like well this is not reliable Etc the first thing we did is we did a a scientific study that proved that people who take the Dual lingual English test versus the tofu the scores are very highly correlated with that we started approaching universities with the results of the scientific study and the write up of all the security things and we were very fortunate that one of the first universities that started accepting us was very well-known University Yale oh they said yes I think the reason Yale said yes was because for them the English test was just like a cherry on top the people that they accept are so good that most of them anyways already they knew that they already speak spoke English so it's just like a little extra thing but the fact that y accepted it made it so that every other university thought oh Yale accepts it then and so they started you know other universities started accept I guess the first one must be the most difficult one right the first one was the most difficult one but we were very fortunate that it was such a highly ranked University that started accepting it and then by the time we had about 800 universities accepting it um coid came ah and when coid came all the testing centers for the other tests closed and that's a good news for you guys I guess and then all these other universities that didn't accept our test thought well I can't get foreign students you know the to or I are not working so they started accepting us so we went within a period of 3 months we went from 800 universities accepting us to 3,000 universities accepting us because they all just within three months it was a combination of coid and the fact that we already had 800 universities in so people thought okay this is good enough uhhuh that that that's that that's what it was how many employees do you have right now across the world uh between 7 and 800 oh wow right now you have the uh du lingual English app learning like all different languages you have English test and any other projects you're working on not only do we want to continue growing uh the impact that we have in the world but we're also starting to teach other things um so we starting to teach yeah we're starting to teach math for example um so there's a math app I don't think it's available in China yet uh but it will be soon yeah when you talk about like pronunciation one of things I noticed that maybe in China or like other countries people pay a lot of attention to like the accent yeah but uh when I work in the US I feel like like the I mean the goal of languages to communicate so people don't care that much about your accent to what extent do you think accent is um actually matters I different people have different views I have very strong views I for me as long as people can understand understand what you're saying that's all that matters especially if you're in the US the US is very open to Foreign Accents if people can understand you that's great the problem is when people can't understand you ex then then you really need to figure but but if people can understand you I don't think there's a big you know I don't I don't think there's a need to do um you know accent reduction or anything like that as long as people so for me the most important thing is can people understand you when you talk about like uh recruitment I think a lot of our audience are maybe still at school or at some point in their career at someone you have interviewed and managed probably hundreds of employees when you hire someone what are the trades you're looking for um well the biggest one for us is that they are excellent at their craft whatever their craft is if you're an engineer you have to be excellent at engineering gotta if you are uh you know a marketing person you have to be excellent at marketing Etc and we we test for that but then we also test for other things at dueling in particular we try really hard to hire um people who are kind kind oh how did you tell like from an interview or you know we can you can tell it's it's like it's not perfect but you can tell so I have a really good story for this when we hired our Chief Financial Officer our CFO which is a very important uh role it's it's kind of the the second most important role in the company after the CEO we were interviewing a lot of people there was another person that we were about to hire they had a really excellent resume they passed all the interview we really liked them but what they didn't know is that part of the interview was the driver that drove them from the airport to the office was part of the interview and they didn't know that and they were not nice to the driver oh and we did not hire them everything because just because of that that person was very nice to me of course they very nice to me nice to me but we don't want to hire people who are not nice to somebody who may report to them or something like that and we we we actually turned them down and it was a hard decision because we had been looking for a long time uh this person had a very good resume um and but turned them down and I'm very happy with that so I think we tried really hard to to hire people who are who are kind did you plan plan it like I mean the driver was part of the interviewer or yeah we don't do that for you know if you're a first year engineering grad or something we may not do that but for very important roles like that everything is part of the interview even you know the person that that greets them at the office we want to know were they nice to you [Music] so if you're looking back to maybe 20 years ago like what advice would you give to 20y Old Louise really the majority of my job is is dealing with people I see and I should have gotten better at dealing with people earlier I didn't know the very basic things about how to manage people um the first time I had to fire somebody they didn't understand that they were being fired and they came back the next day what did you say to them like I don't remember what I said to them but I thought I had fired them and then the next day they showed up at 9:00 a.m. and I thought what are you doing here how many uh people do you manage like directly um 10 10 okay that's a good number fortunately I like them all and at least they tell me that they like me at least probably do yeah I don't know but they tell me so I like that nice any book recommendations for entrepreneurship or just like in general for career growth or personal growth um I really like a book about management called high output management high output management yes it's by the guy who was for many many years the CEO of Intel uhhuh um and it's very very good because it just tells you very actionable advice it's not philosophical it just tells you for example it says when doing a performance review you should meet with a person within 24 hours it's like basically instructions what you should do yes and with things which you just don't know they just like for example another one that it says is if somebody quits drop everything you're doing and concentrate solely on that because one of the main reasons people quit is because they don't feel appreciated and it's just like that is very very good advice and it's just very actionable stuff and so to me that's one of the best books ever written about management mainly because it's just this just an instruction man got as opposed to many of the other books are about like big stuff feelings and philosophy and whatever this one's just just do this just do this yeah figer you're this type of guy like just do this I just want to know and uh works really [Music] well