20VC: Duolingo's Luis von Ahn on How CEO's Can Scale With The Company, How VC Herd Mentality In The Valley Really Works and How Chatbots & AI Play A Role In The Future of EdTech

Welcome back to the 20 minute VC with me Harry Stebbings at H Stebbings with two bees on Snapchat and as always I'd love to see you there for all things behind the scenes from us. However, to the show today and I'm thrilled to welcome a very special individual to the hot seat. So joining us today we have Lewis von Arn, Founder and CEO at Juelingo. The leading language learning platform with over a hundred million users and they have backing from some of the best in the investing world including the likes of USV, Kleiner Perkins, NEA, Google Capital and even Ashton Kutcher.

欢迎回到《20分钟VC》，我是Harry Stebbings，在Snapchat上有两只蜜蜂的H Stebbings。如往常一样，我很乐意与您分享幕后的一切事情。今天的节目非常精彩，我非常高兴能够邀请到一位非常特别的人坐到嘉宾席上。 今天加入我们的是Juelingo的创始人兼CEO Lewis von Arn。Juelingo是领先的语言学习平台，拥有超过1亿用户，并且得到了一些最佳投资者的支持，包括USV、Kleiner Perkins、NEA、Google Capital，甚至还有阿什顿·库彻尔。

And prior to Juelingo Lewis is known for inventing capsters, being a MacArthur fellow or otherwise known as the Genius Grant and selling two companies to Google in his 20s. As a result Lewis has been named one of the 10 most brilliant scientists by popular science magazine and one of the 20 best brains under 40 by Discover.

在研发Juelingo之前，路易斯因发明Capsters、获得“天才奖学金”（MacArthur fellow）和在20岁左右将两家公司出售给Google而广为人知。因此，他被《流行科学》杂志评为10个最杰出的科学家之一，《探索》杂志评为40岁以下最聪明的20个人之一。

Quite a CV huh and the show absolutely does live up to that CV and a huge science delay list early at capital G for the intro to Lewis today without which this episode would not have been possible.

这份简历相当不错，而这个节目确实能够配得上它，而且在本集中，Lewis的介绍有一个大型的科学延迟列表，没有它这一集是不可能实现的。

But before we move into the show today, if you're a founder or operator, your most important job is people operations, whether that be hiring execs, developing managers or retaining top talent. And that's why you need lattice. lattice is the number one performance management solution for growing companies. With lattice is easy to launch 360 performance review cycles as often as you want and you also get an incredible continuous feedback system with OKR gold tracking, real time feedback and one-on-one meetings to ensure employees get feedback between reviews.

在今天的节目之前，如果你是一位创始人或经营者，你最重要的工作就是人力运营，无论是招聘高管、培养经理人还是留住顶尖人才。这就是为什么你需要使用lattice。lattice是成长型企业的头号绩效管理解决方案。通过使用lattice，你可以轻松启动360度绩效评估周期，随时随地提供OKR追踪、实时反馈和一对一会议，确保员工在评估之间得到反馈。

So find out why the likes of Coinbase, Plangrid, Birchbox and Weepay trust lattices their performance management solution by heading over to lattice.com to start investing in your people. That's lattice.com, the number one performance management solution for growing companies.

让我们前往lattice.com，看看为什么像Coinbase、Plangrid、Birchbox和Weepay这样的公司信任lattice作为他们的绩效管理方案，并开始投资于您的员工。作为成长型企业的首选绩效管理解决方案，lattice.com期待着您的到来。

And speaking of number one there, you must check out Recurly, the company powering subscription success. With Recurly's enterprise class subscription management platform providing rapid time to value without requiring massive integration effort and expense and they have the ability to not only increase revenue by 7%, but also reducing the all important churn rate. And that's why thousands of customers from Twitch to HubSpot to CBS Interactive trust are currently their subscription management platform and you can check them out now on Recurly.com that really is a must.

说到排名第一的话，你必须查看Recurly——这家支持订阅成功的公司。它们的企业级订阅管理平台可快速提供价值，而不需要大量集成努力和费用，并且它们不仅能增加收入7%，而且可以降低所有重要的流失率。这就是为什么来自Twitch、HubSpot和CBS Interactive等成千上万的客户信任他们的订阅管理平台的原因。你现在可以在Recurly.com上查看他们，这真的很重要。

But enough for me so I'm now thrilled to hand over to the wonderful Lewis Von Arn founder and CEO at Jua Lingo. You have now arrived at your destination.

但对我来说已经足够了，所以我现在非常高兴地把话筒交给了出色的 Lewis Von Arn，他是 Jua Lingo 的创始人和首席执行官。你已经到达了你的目的地。

Lewis it's such a pleasure to have you on the show today. You sized a Layla Google capsule or capsule G for the intro but thank you so much for joining me stay Lewis. Yeah I'm super happy to be here.

Lewis，今天能在节目上和你聊天真是太愉快了。你用了Layla Google胶囊或胶囊G作为自我介绍，但非常感谢你能加入我的节目。Lewis，很高兴你来了。

I'd love to kick off today with how you a man as you put it who has never been great at languages came to master language learning with Jua Lingo. So what's the founding story?

我很愿意从如何您作为一个从未擅长语言学习的男人通过 Jua Lingo 掌握语言学习来开始今天的谈话。那么，这个创始故事是什么呢？

Yeah this was a five five and a half years ago. I had just sold my second company to Google and I wanted to do something related to education. At the time I was a computer science professor at Carnegie Mell University and my PhD student and I both teamed up and we just wanted to do something related to education now. Education is very general so we kind of started looking at different verticals inside education, maybe teaching math or teaching. We wanted to teach something and we came up languages because it's inside the US or maybe the UK it's not as big of a deal to learn languages but everywhere in the world. I myself am from Guatemala. I have everywhere else in the world learning a language is a huge deal. Particularly learning English so we decided that we wanted to do something related to learning languages.

大约五五年前，我刚刚将我的第二个公司卖给了Google，我想做些与教育相关的事情。当时，我是卡内基梅隆大学的计算机科学教授，我的博士生和我一起组队，我们只想做些与教育相关的事情。教育很普遍，所以我们开始研究教育内部的不同领域，也许是教数学或教学。我们想教授一些东西，所以我们选择了语言，因为在美国或英国学习语言不是太大的问题，但在全世界任何地方学习语言都是一个巨大的挑战。我自己来自危地马拉，我们决定要做一些与语言学习相关的工作，特别是学习英语。

It's a huge audience 1.2 billion people in the world learning a foreign language about 80 billion dollars a year 8080 billion dollars a year are spent on language learning and at the time of founding of founding Dueling we one of the things that was always crazy for us is most of the people that are learning a foreign language about two thirds of them satisfy three properties first they're learning English second the reason they're learning English is in order to get a job and third they are of low socioeconomic conditions so most people trying to learn a foreign language are basically trying to learn English in order to get out of poverty but most of the ways they were to learn a language particularly with software we're very expensive in the US there's this thing called Mercedes Stone which was between 500 and a thousand dollars and there are similar programs everywhere in the world so it seemed ironic to us that it required about a thousand dollars to get out of poverty by learning English so we decided to make Dueling Go which was going to be a free way to learn language that was that was what we launched.

这是一个庞大的观众，全球有12亿人学习外语，每年约花费800亿美元。在Dueling成立的时候，我们发现一个非常疯狂的事实，大多数学习外语的人有三个共同点：首先，他们正在学习英语；其次，他们学习英语的原因是为了找工作；第三，他们处于低社会经济状况。因此，大多数想学习外语的人基本上是在学英语以摆脱贫困。但大多数学习语言的方式，特别是软件，非常昂贵。在美国，有一种叫做Mercedes Stone的东西，价格在500到1000美元之间，在世界其他地方也有类似的程序。所以我们觉得很讽刺的是，需要花费大约1000美元通过学习英语摆脱贫困。因此，我们决定制作Dueling Go，这是一种免费的学习语言的方式，这也是我们所推出的。

Now I want to ask a very very broad and matter question just to start with then why is it that ed techs are always deemed such a hard space if you're at a dinner party with a load of VCs and you say ed tech a lot of them will go it's a hard space why do you think it's got the perception of such kind of hardship around it oh we have spent years discussing this within you know inside the company I think there's a number of reasons

现在我想问一个非常广泛的问题，作为开头，为什么教育科技总是被认为是一个很难的领域？如果你在一个餐会上和一群风险投资家说起教育科技，很多人会说这是一个难的领域，你为什么认为这个领域有这样的困难感？我们在公司内部讨论了多年，我认为有多种原因。

I think one is first you have to decide are you gonna do an ed tech thing where you actually teach something or you're gonna do an ed tech thing where you're just kind of this supporting a supporting tool and by supporting tools I mean very successful but supporting tools that are just like blackboard as a supporting tool where it's just kind of classroom management system or remind is another supporting tool where it's it's a system it's not actually for teaching anything it's just a way to for teachers to communicate with students in some way so first you have to decide you're gonna teach something or you're gonna do some sort of supporting tool if you're gonna do a supporting tool you know one of the things is you're always gonna be on the side and you're never going to be the main course I mean the main course is actually the teaching if you're gonna decide to teach something there is a big problem which is I don't believe there's an easy way to do a really simple app where in some way kind of you crowdsource the teaching from one side to the other like for example think of instagram instagram is an amazing app but it is not a massively difficult app to build you build this app and you get basically people publishing pictures for others to consume so you're not actually creating any real content yourself if you're building an app like instagram whereas if you're gonna teach something I strongly feel like you have to really solve the content creation side and it's not as simple as just making a little app that can just hook up people who know versus people who want to learn and they'll learn I don't think it's as simple as that I think that's one big difficulty

我认为首先你必须决定是要做一个教育科技项目来教授某些内容，还是要做一个教育科技支持工具，类似于黑板这样的支持工具，它仅仅是一个教室管理系统，或者像Remind这样的支持工具，它是一种系统，不是为教学而设计的，而是为老师与学生之间的沟通而设计的。因此，首先你必须决定自己是要教授某些内容，还是要做某种支持工具。如果你要做支持工具，你就永远只能是辅助工具，而不是主课程；如果你要决定教授某些内容，那么会有一个很大的挑战，那就是我不认为有一个简单的方法可以轻松地创建一个应用程序，从一方面向另一方面进行教学，就像Instagram一样。Instagram是一个很棒的应用程序，但它并不是一个难以构建的应用程序。你建立这个应用程序，基本上就是让人们发布照片，供其他人消费，所以你并没有真正创造任何内容。如果你要构建一个像Instagram这样的应用程序，那么你必须真正解决内容创作方面的问题，这并不像简单地制作一个小应用程序那么简单，这个应用程序只需要将知道和想要学习的人联系在一起，他们就会学到东西。我不认为这是那么简单的事情，这是一个很大的困难。

I think another big difficulty is that education is regulated and and it's tough a lot of the money that is in education is two governments and that's pretty tough because it's pretty decentralized even you know even inside the United States education is usually at the at the district level at the school district level where where things are spent so it's not like you can have a contract with the whole US school system or anything like that and different district levels teach differently different districts teach differently different countries teach differently it's very hard to make a single tool that will scale to everybody and then with the fact that it's regulated and also in many countries think about usually the wealthier countries education is free and pretty good so if you make something and you want to compete with the school system you know it's kind of hard you have to do something that is there's 10 times better than the school system and you know the school system for example in Switzerland it's pretty good doing something that's 10 times better than that is hard so I think all of those things combined make it so that at tech is hard yeah no I completely agree

我认为另一个巨大的困难是教育是有规定的，而且很多教育经费是归政府管辖的，这相当困难，因为它是相对分散的，即使在美国，教育通常是在地区层面，学区层面进行的，所以你不能与整个美国的学校系统签订合同，不同的学区教育方式不同，不同的国家教育方式也不同，很难制作一个适用于每个人的单一工具，而且考虑到它是有规定的，在许多国家中，尤其是在贫富差异较大的国家中，教育是免费且非常好的。因此，如果你想与学校系统竞争并开发出一款更好的产品，这相当困难，你需要做出比学校系统更好10倍的产品，例如在瑞士，学校系统已经相当不错，要做出比这更好10倍的产品是很难的。因此，我认为这些因素的结合使得技术的发展变得困难，我非常同意这一点。

But I do want to start say with two elements so that potentially radically changing the world of ad tech and how we consume educational content so let's start with with one being AI what role do you think that AI and machine learning play in really teaching languages I think it's huge and we're betting a lot of the company on that at duolingo the way we see it so with duolingo you know we're trying to teach you a language that's what we're trying to do what I would like to do a linga to be so I would like to a linga to be as effective as a one-on-one. human tutor this is something that I think can can be transformational

但是我确实想从两个元素开始，这两个元素有可能彻底改变广告技术和我们消费教育内容的方式。让我们先从AI开始谈起，你认为人工智能和机器学习在语言教学中扮演什么角色？我认为这是非常重要的，我们在Duolingo公司也将公司的未来赌在了AI上。对于Duolingo来说，我们试图教授一门语言，这是我们的使命。我的愿望是让Duolingo像一个一对一的人类导师一样有效，我认为这可以极大地改变语言教学的方式。

I mean there's a lot of studies in educational psychology that show you know the most famous one it's something called the blooms to sigma study it shows the following compares a student in a standard classroom let's say with 30 other students or 20 other students a standard classroom student it compares their academic achievement with a student that is not in the classroom but has a one-on-one human tutor turns out that those who have a one-on-one human tutor perform better than 98 percent of the people in a classroom which is a huge deal that's to sigma it means to standard deviations above the median in terms of performance so we know that one-on-one human tutors do better than classroom this is known this has been known for a while and so the best thing we could do for education is to have everybody you know to give everybody a one-on-one human tutor the problem of course is that's really hard you know that requires one teacher per student then we kind of don't have that so for a really scalable model of self-subs you could have yes this is not great but I think artificial intelligence could do something

我指的是教育心理学中有很多研究表明，最著名的是一项叫做布卢姆斯到西格马研究的研究。它展示了以下情况：对比一个有30个或20个其他学生的标准教室中的学生，与那些没有在教室里但拥有一对一人类导师的学生的学术成就。结论是，那些有一对一人类导师的学生表现比教室里98％的人要好，这是一个巨大的成果，它是在表现方面超出了中间值的两个标准偏差。因此，我们知道一对一的人类导师比教室更好，这是已知的而且已知已久。因此，我们对于教育所能做的最好的事情就是给每个人一个一对一的人类导师。当然，问题在于这非常难实现，需要一个老师给一个学生。那么，对于一种真正可扩展的自助模式，我们可以尝试使用人工智能来进行辅助教育。虽然这并不完美，但我认为人工智能可以发挥一些作用。

so our goal is for duolingo to be as good as a one-on-one human tutor so really that would be significantly better than a classroom significantly better than anything else and that's what we want to do we're we're spending a lot of our effort creating artificial intelligence that can teach you as well as a human teacher now is that going to happen super soon i'm not going to happen this year but I think that's where we want to go and so we're spending a lot of our effort on that and this is why we launched two months ago we launched a chatbot that you can try to practice your conversation with and it's been very successful I love the chatbot personally

我们的目标是让Duolingo成为一个和一对一的人类导师一样出色的学习工具。这意味着在课堂上或其他任何地方使用Duolingo都会显著提升学习效果。我们正在努力建立能够像人类教师一样教授知识的人工智能，虽然这不会在今年内就实现，但这是我们想要达到的目标。因此，我们花费了大量的时间和精力来开发它。两个月前我们推出了一个聊天机器人，你可以用它进行对话练习，它已经非常成功了。我个人很喜欢聊天机器人。

but the big question then for me surrounding the chatbot element is the transition to bots and kind of that conversational interface that it is does that represent a major point of disruption or more do you think it's just an evolution in the interface paradigm within edtech and how we consume content it depends I think for language learning in particular I think it is a paradigm shift in the case of language learning the thing is the conversation chatbots were a fad a few months ago I don't think it's all that useful to have something like teaching math where you have a chatbot because the conversation's not the real element you know you're somehow trying to teach math whereas in languages you're trying to teach the conversation so I think you know that's the main course here and I think that's why you know chatbots and language learning are really a natural for that to happen I don't think it's the chatbots became kind of popular for even you know Domino's pizza had a chatbot to order pizza I don't think you need a chatbot to order pizza but in the case of language learning you're practicing conversation so I think it's a huge deal for that

对我来说，关于聊天机器人的问题是，转向机器人和那种对话式界面，它代表着一种重大的颠覆点，或者你认为它只是教育技术界面范式上的一种演变，以及我们如何消费内容这取决于具体情况。我认为特别是对于语言学习来说，这是一种范式转变。聊天机器人几个月前很流行，但我认为在教数学等不需要真正对话的领域，它并不是非常有用。对话并不是真正的元素，而在语言学习中你正在试图教会对话。所以我认为这是主要的课程，并且我认为这就是为什么聊天机器人和语言学习真正自然地结合在一起的原因。我认为聊天机器人在订购披萨等领域变得流行是不必要的，但在语言学习中，你正在练习对话，所以我认为这是非常重要的。

I'm also intrigued by another element though that's largely driven a lot of edtech companies in the way they teach his gamification how do you view the integration of education in games for us it's been huge and it's probably been the thing that has made us stand out in the case of language learning from the beginning when we launched a lingo we realized one thing when you're trying to learn something the hardest part is keeping yourself motivated if you're trying to learn something by yourself this is very different than going to school see what going to school basically society is motivating you to go to school your parents are kind of forcing you to do it there's a teacher there your friends are there to go there you stop going you become kind of an outcast to society there's a whole social structure in motivating you to go to school if you're just learning something from an app there's nothing really motivating you and it's very easy for people to kind of give up this is why you see a lot of education companies when they launch something the user retention numbers are very very bad

我对另一个元素也非常感兴趣，即在教学方面驱动了许多教育科技公司的游戏化。您如何看待将教育与游戏结合起来呢？在我们的语言学习应用Lingo推出之初，我们意识到了一件事：当您试图学习某种东西时，最困难的部分是保持自己的动力。与在学校上课不同，自学的情况下，社会无法激励您，父母也无法强迫您。当然学校里有老师、朋友等社交结构可以激励您去学校，但如果您仅仅是通过手机应用学习某些知识，实际上没有什么可以激励您，很容易就会放弃。这也是为什么很多教育公司推出某些东西之后，用户保留率非常低的原因。对我们来说，游戏元素在语言学习中的应用是极其重要的，也是我们从一开始就与众不同的地方。

When you compare user retention numbers i mean you see a lot of these you know for example a lot of the the MOOC companies they're the massively online course companies like Coursera and Udacity etc the retention numbers for their courses are abysmal i mean the number of people that sign up something like 1.5% or 2% of the people actually bother to complete the whole thing because it's super easy to give up and hey on the other side there's Facebook's right there i can just check my Instagram or Snapchat or go play a you know Candy Crush so it's really easy to give up so for us we realize this early on so we spent a lot of effort trying to make duolingo as addictive as possible and this is what we spend most of our effort on historically we spent most of our effort on making it as addictive as possible so today one of the things that i'm happiest about is with duolingo our user retention numbers are pretty similar to kind of you know we compare ourselves to games so if you look at for example of the people who sign up on duolingo about 55% come back the next day that's the number that is comparable to pretty good games and if you look at usually education companies the numbers that you get there are you know 10% come back the next day or 15% come back the next day and most of that we've done through gamification.

当您比较用户留存数时，您会看到许多这些数字，例如许多MOOC公司，如Coursera和Udacity等大规模在线课程公司，它们的课程留存数字令人惊讶，因为报名参加的人数仅有1.5％至2％，真正完成整个课程的人很少。因为这很容易就会放弃去使用Facebook或查看Instagram或Snapchat，或者玩Candy Crush之类的游戏，因此很容易放弃。因此，我们意识到这一点很早，花费了很多精力尝试使Duolingo变得尽可能上瘾。这是我们历史上努力的主要方向。因此，今天，我最高兴的事情之一就是，对于Duolingo，我们的用户留存数字与游戏公司相当相似。例如，如果您查看在Duolingo注册的人中，约55％的人会在第二天返回，这是与非常好的游戏相当的数字。如果你看看大多数教育公司，你通常会看到留存数字只有10％或15％，而我们通过游戏化带来了大部分的留存数字。

Can I suppose the seven day return? Ah for us on returning on D7 so on the seventh day probably you know it's north of 30% that's correct yeah so we do compare ourselves i mean this is the thing we compare ourselves to a game and you know a lot of people ask us who are competitors are etc and usually that what we consider competitors are our games we look at a lot of companies like Supercell who i admire a lot they're making they're making these amazing games where they're D365 retention like one year later you know they're they're looking at things like 20% on the the 365 day people are there this is amazing and i think i think you know their idea for us is to make education as addictive as one of these games so we do spend effort but we have a team whose job it is to make duolingo addictive and we look at things that we look at how casino games work and we look at you know we're using randomness to make things addictive and that's our goal is to make it as addictive as a as a game no i read an article from your in VP of growth i think it was you said but just putting the little red icon in the top hand corner at increased return the next day by 6.5% which is pretty astonishing yeah and and you know something else that we're really embracing a lot in the company this is an interesting thing we survey our users regularly and we have found that to our surprise at first we thought when we survey our users we asked them you know why are you learning learning on duolingo and i what i thought it was you know half the people were going to tell us something like i've always wanted to learn spanish or or my my grandma doesn't speak my language and that's why i need to learn Swedish or the people who are learning english so i need to get a job with that i yikes or travel was another one this is what i expected we found that a pretty large fraction of our users it's it's not quite 50% but if you look at wealthy countries it is close to 50% large fraction of our users but their answer was was none of these it was basically i just don't want to completely waste my time what they say is you know normally i would i'd be playing candy crush so i consider duolingo kind of a game it's not quite as fun as candy crush but at least i don't feel bad because i'm not spending my time on a complete you know waste of time that a lot of people are using this where it's just like so we're we're really embracing this where it's just kind of guilt free entertainment where you know you're you're entertained at the end of the day you're kind of entertaining you're you're probably procrastinating on what you actually need to do which is probably your you know your homework or whatever but you don't feel totally bad because hey at the end you learned part of a language or something as opposed to if you spent the last three hours playing candy crush sure so that's something that we're really embracing that makes that makes sense.

我能假定七天内退货吗？啊，我们在D7返回，因此在第七天，可能您知道，这是超过30％，是正确的。是的，所以我们将自己与游戏进行比较，许多人问我们谁是竞争对手，通常我们认为竞争对手是我们的游戏。我们看很多像Supercell这样的公司，我非常敬佩他们，他们正在制作这些惊人的游戏，他们的D365保有量可以保持一年，你知道，他们正在研究像365天内有20％的人等等的东西，这是惊人的，我认为我们的想法是使教育如此上瘾，就像这些游戏之一。因此，我们付出了努力，但我们有一个专门制作Duolingo成瘾的团队，我们看着赌场游戏如何运作，并且我们正在使用随机性使事物上瘾，我们的目标是使它像游戏一样成瘾。我读了一篇关于您的增长副总裁的文章，我认为您说的只是把小红色图标放在右上角，可以使第二天的回报增加6.5％，这相当惊人。我们在公司中还有另一件事，这是一个有趣的事情。我们经常对我们的用户进行调查，并且我们发现，最初令我们惊讶的是，当我们调查我们的用户时，我们问他们为什么在Duolingo上学习，我认为一半的人会告诉我们一些像我一直想学习西班牙语之类的东西，或者我的祖母不会讲我的语言，所以我需要学习瑞典语，或者学英语的人，所以我需要获得一份工作，或旅行是另一个。然而，我们发现，我们的一大部分用户的答案都不是这些，虽然不到50％，但如果您看看富裕国家，它接近50％，他们的答案基本上是没有这些。他们说的是，“我只是不想完全浪费我的时间。”他们说的是，通常情况下，我会玩糖果传奇，所以我认为Duolingo有点像游戏，不像糖果传奇那么有趣，但至少我不会因为在一个完全浪费时间的地方浪费时间而感到糟糕，很多人正在使用这个地方，因此我们非常接受这个地方，这是一种毫无罪恶感的娱乐形式，您知道，您在一天结束时会感到娱乐，您可能是在拖延你实际需要做的事情，也许是你的功课或其他什么，但你不会感到完全糟糕，因为嘿，在结束时，你学到了一个语言的一部分，或者其他什么，而不是如果你花了最后三个小时玩糖果传奇。所以我们非常接受这一点，这很有意义。

I do want to slightly move away from the edtech landscape itself though and move more towards you and particularly you as a as a leader and as a CEO. We recently had Sean Rad at Tinder on the show and he said the best CEO's scale with their companies. Now Duolingo's clearly scaling incredible recent round of funding 200 million users. I'd love to hear how you've seen yourself scale so to speak and develop with the changes to the firm. Yeah, it's been it's been a pretty big change.

我想要稍微偏离教育科技行业本身，而更多地关注你，特别是你作为领导者和CEO的角色。我们最近请到了Tinder的Sean Rad担任嘉宾，并他表示最好的CEO会随着公司的发展而成长。目前，Duolingo拥有超过2亿用户，显然在快速扩张。我很想听听你是如何看待自己的成长和随着公司变化而发展的。是的，这是一个相当大的变化。

I had started companies before but the largest company outside before had sold to Google when it hadn't you know, I don't know under 15 people so I had never really managed a company that had this many people and it's been a growing opportunity for me. The first thing I had to do was stop micromanaging that that's the first thing I had to do and then I had to really learn that my job is not actually doing the things that need to get done but really motivating people to do the things that need to get done. So I spend most of my time nowadays motivating and communicating just basically making sure that everybody's pointing in the same direction. That's what I spend most of my time on and that's been a pretty big shift.

我之前曾经创立过公司，但是在那之前卖给Google的公司从未超过15人，因此我从未真正管理过这么多人的公司，这对我来说是一个成长的机会。我需要做的第一件事是停止过度管理，这是我必须做的第一件事，然后我必须真正学会我的工作不是做需要完成的事情，而是激励人们去完成需要完成的事情。因此，现在我大部分的时间都在激励和沟通上，基本上就是确保每个人都无偏差。这是我现在花费大部分时间的事情，这是一个相当大的转变。

Can you tell me about it, and this is a new question, but what I'd love to hear about maybe a specific situation where a CEO you really struggled to come to gross with it with the scaling of the firm and how did you overcome that for me personally? A few things I've had to learn how to be much better at. One was firing people. I had huge trouble firing people. You know, this is funny story inside Duolingo. The first person I fired inside Duolingo, it's not like we fire a lot of people, by the way, it's very rare, but you have to do it sometimes. The first person I fired inside Duolingo, I had to fire them four times because they didn't actually understand that they were being fired. I think that's your fault, Lewis. I think you should, you know, I understand that was that was my fault and there's this, it's a funny story. I mean, I did it and then they came the next day and I was like, I thought I had fired them so I, you know, I've gotten, I've gotten a lot better doing this.

能告诉我有关新问题的情况吗？我很想听听您遇到的具体情况，比如您作为CEO在公司扩展方面遇到的困境以及您是如何克服的？个人认为，需要学会很多技能，其中包括解雇员工。在这方面，我曾经遇到过很大的麻烦。在Duolingo内部，我第一次解雇员工的经历很有趣。当然，我们不经常解雇员工，但有时是必要的。我第一次解雇的那个人，我必须解雇他四次，因为他并没有真正明白被解雇的情况。我认为这是你的错，路易斯。我认为你应该负责，我理解这是我的错，这是一个有趣的故事。现在我已经变得更加擅长了。

It's not like again, it's not like we do it often, but I've gotten a lot better. Do you agree with higher force fire fast? No, I do not agree with that. We're actually doing quite the opposite. We're very picky at hiring. I mean, we have raised quite a bit of money. We have raised about a hundred and eight million dollars. So we only have about a hundred employees now. We would be able to have way more employees than we do now, but we're very careful with hiring. So because for us we just think that hiring mistakes are just a huge time sink, so our interview process is really tough. So we hire slow, but we also once we hire somebody we kind of give people a chance here. So we're the opposite of higher fast fire fast. What were the other elements that you learned you said there are a couple.

这不是像以前那样频繁地重复，但我变得更好了。你同意高效力量快速执行吗？不，我不同意。实际上，我们正在做相反的事情。我们非常挑剔地雇用人才。我的意思是，我们已经筹集了相当多的资金。我们筹集了大约1.08亿美元。所以我们现在只有大约100名员工。我们可以拥有比现在更多的员工，但我们在雇用方面非常谨慎。因为对我们来说，雇用错误只会浪费大量时间，所以我们的面试过程非常严格。我们雇用缓慢，但一旦我们雇用了某人，我们就给予他们机会。所以我们是高效力量快速执行相反的。你说还有其他学到的元素是什么？

I think another thing that I've had to learn a lot is how much what I say really matters. When we were a smaller company, we were all friends and, but I really was at the same plane almost everybody else even though I had the title of CEO. I kind of if we were all roughly the same plane as each other, these days I realized that I, and I find it, I mean, I realized that sometimes I have some comments off the cuff that I just say like uh, which probably just to this, and then then I look a couple weeks later, and they're actually doing the thing that I, that I, you know, I just, I kind of pull it out of nowhere and so now I have to be really careful when whatever I say a lot of times I have to say hey, I'm just gonna say this, if this does not mean that you guys need to start doing it or anything, it's just an idea and it's probably a stupid idea, but here it is because I, you know, took me a while to realize that absolutely a lot of times people are of your words.

我认为我还需要学习的另一件事情就是说话的重要性。当我们公司规模较小时，大家都是朋友，而且我觉得我和其他人在同一水平线上，尽管我拥有CEO的头衔。我认为我们都处于同一水平线上，但是现在我意识到，有时候我会随意说一些评论，并没有特别的意思，但几周后，他们实际上正在做我刚刚提的事情，我像凭空说出那个想法一样，所以现在我必须非常小心地说话，每次我说话时，都必须小心，很多时候我要说：“嘿，我只是随便说说，这并不意味着你们开始做它或任何事情，这只是一个想法，也可能是一个愚蠢的想法，但我要告诉你们。”因为我意识到，很多时候人们会根据你说的话去做事。

Yes, and because I just consider myself just another normal employee where whenever there's a there's a brainstorm or anything, I just, I'm just throwing ideas just like everybody else and sometimes I don't even think that my ideas are any better than the other ones that are being thrown in there, but I see that sometimes they just get executed, and I myself thought they were a bad idea, but it's just what I said. I love it well very modest of you, but I do want to finish today and before we dive into the quick fire round or make an exciting series e-round at 25 million from drive, so talk to me about this round of funding how was it and how did it differ from the prior rounds? Yeah, it was a pretty different round and it's the first time where a few things happened.

是的，因为我认为自己只是另一个普通员工，在讨论会议或其他时，我会像其他人一样提出想法，有时我甚至不认为自己的想法比别人的更好，但有时它们会被执行，而我自己认为它们是一个坏主意，但那只是我的说法。我很谦虚，但我想在今天结束之前，我们可以快速进入下一个轮次或从驱动器25百万的激动人心的系列 e-round中完成。所以谈谈这轮资金，它是怎么来的，与之前的轮次有何不同？是的，这是一次非常不同的轮次，第一次发生了几件事情。

We did not want to raise a lot of money so in a you know weird situation we actually were negotiating down on how much money we needed to raise as opposed to up. So why was it so why wasn't it a 700 valuation? I was kind of surprised.

我们并不想筹集太多资金，所以在一种奇怪的情况下，我们实际上在谈判中降低了我们需要筹集的资金数额，而不是增加。那么，为什么估值不是700呢？我有点惊讶。 意思是：本文讲述了一个团队在筹资时，希望筹集的资金数额不要太多。他们在一次谈判中甚至降低了筹集金额。作者感到惊讶的是，公司未能达到预期的700万美元估值。

At the 25 raise yeah we negotiated that down it's because we didn't think we needed more money i mean the truth of the matter is we're not quite yet breaking even but we're very close we're going to break even very soon and this round of funding was mainly it's a bit of insurance in case we take a little it takes a little longer to break even and it also allows us to hire a little faster that that's all it was.

在这25次增资中，我们已经将金额谈了下来，因为我们认为自己不需要更多的资金。事实上，我们还没有完全实现盈亏平衡，但已经非常接近了。这轮融资主要是为了保险起见，以防我们需要更长时间才能实现盈亏平衡，同时也允许我们更快地聘请人才。这就是全部意思。

I don't know if this happens to other companies but in our case there's this cyclical thing that i don't know why this happens but every few months i don't know how many months but every and let's say every four or five months we get contacted by so we spend about four or five months we don't i personally don't hear from any venture firm they just don't hear anything from them and then in a span of about two weeks i hear from like 12 of them and they're all like hey i'd like to invest you know really you know we as a firm are really excited by your progress etc etc and it's very strange.

我不知道其他公司是否也有这种情况，但在我们公司，每隔几个月会出现这种循环现象，我不知道为什么会这样，但大约每四五个月我们就会接到联系，然后在接下来的四五个月里，我们就没有听到任何风险投资公司的消息了，我个人就再也没有听到任何关于他们的消息了。然后在大约两周的时间里，我会从12个风险投资公司那里收到消息，他们都会说：“嘿，我想投资，我们公司非常看好你们的进展等等，真的非常奇怪”。

I don't know if they're all on the same calendar or if they talk to each other or what the deal is i can give you a hint they all have kind of data sourcing tools and so when you have inflections in in growth charts in retention rates in employee count they all get notified at the same time that's probably what's happening but it's a very funny thing and so what happened is we had one of these couple of week periods where we got contacted by a bunch of firms then it was it was near one of our board meetings and i went into the board meeting and i said look i do we just got contacted by a bunch of firms many of which are are kind of very well known firms and so fancy firms you know what should we do and then we looked at our you know we looked at our finances and we thought eh big gourd is one of the people in our board he's from planter perkins and and he said he said something you know something like i wouldn't mind the next to 25 million bucks in the bank account.

我不知道他们是否都在同一日历上，或者他们是否互相交流，而且这个交易是什么，我可以给你一个提示，它们都有一种数据来源工具，当你在增长曲线中看到波动，或者在保留率、员工数量方面，它们都会同时收到通知，这可能就是发生的事情，但这非常有趣。在这样一个几周的时间里，我们被一批公司联系了，接着就是我们的董事会会议，我进入董事会会议时说：“看，我们被一堆公司联系了，其中很多是非常知名的公司，所以华丽的公司，你们认为我们应该做些什么？”然后我们查看了我们的财务状况，认为嘿，我们的董事会成员之一Gourd来自Planter Perkins，他说了一些像“我不介意下一个2500万美元在银行账户中”。

So we engaged with some of the companies that had talked to us and we decided well we didn't particularly need the money but it wouldn't be it wouldn't be bad to put the money in the bank account and we talked to a few of them and we really love the drive capital guys they're they're not a Silicon Valley firm which was rare i mean most of the other firms we were talking to were Silicon Valley firms kind of well known Silicon Valley firms and a growth equity for private equity firms we really like them you know they're investment thesis there's two things first of all they invest in category leaders and that you know they consider dueling with a category leader in language learning and the second thing we really like this for them this was the only company for which Pittsburgh we're located in Pittsburgh we're not in Silicon Valley for them that was not a downside.

所以，我们和一些曾与我们联系过的公司联系，我们决定我们并不特别需要这笔钱，但把这笔钱放进我们的银行账户也不错。我们与其中几家公司进行了交流，我们特别喜欢Drive Capital。他们并不是硅谷公司，这非常罕见，因为我们和其他大多数谈过的公司都是硅谷公司，成长股权和私募股权公司。我们真的很喜欢Drive Capital。他们的投资理论有两个方面，首先是投资于领先的类别，他们认为我们在语言学习领域是这样的领导者。其次，我们非常欣赏的是，对他们来说，这是唯一一个位于匹兹堡的公司。我们不在硅谷对他们来说并不是不利因素。

Drive capitalist is started by a couple of people who used to be at Sequoia who decided that they were gonna invest in you know the Midwest so it's a couple of Sequoia folks who came to start a firm in Ohio and their investment thesis is category leaders that are located in the Midwest and so so it was a perfect fit yeah it was and they said they could really help us with hiring here in the Midwest etc and it was a breath of fresh air whenever we talk to people it made mainly from Silicon Valley there you know the first thing is a lot of them don't even know we're not in Silicon Valley a lot of the investors that we talk is they're like okay so you know can we meet this afternoon and you know you're you're talking to them and you're like uh we would take me eight hours to get there cannot meet this afternoon so sorry the time is for offering yeah exactly we're we're not there so you know for most kind of Silicon Valley investors you know it's a downside that we're in Pittsburgh and I understand that I mean it makes sense from there and but for the drive folks it was not and you know we met their team and they seemed really smart you know a plus team and so we we decided to take money from them love it what a good answer.

Drive Capitalist是由一对曾在Sequoia工作的人创立的，他们决定投资于中西部地区。他们是Sequoia的几位员工，来到俄亥俄州成立公司，他们的投资论点是中西部地区的领军企业。这非常适合我们，他们表示能够真正帮助我们在中西部地区招聘人才，给我们带来了一股新鲜空气。我们跟来自硅谷的人聊天时，主要问题是他们往往不知道我们不在硅谷。很多投资者会说：好的，那么我们今天下午见面吧，而我们却要解释需要八个小时的路程才能到达。对于大多数硅谷投资者来说，我们在匹兹堡是一个缺点，我很理解这一点，但对Drive团队来说却不是。我们遇到了他们，他们看起来真的很聪明，是A级团队，所以我们决定从他们那里拿钱。太好了，这是一个好答案。

But I want to move into the final quick fire and so it's five questions five minutes how does that sound sounds good so your favorite book and why you know my first knee-jerk reaction for that is it's a book that I read as a teenager which was called girl Acer Bach which was by Douglas Hofstadter it basically explains a lot of the basics of computing that were developed in the 20th century I really liked that but that was a long time ago.

但是我想进入最后的快速提问环节了，所以有五个问题，五分钟的时间，这听起来如何？这听起来不错。那么，你最喜欢的书是什么，为什么？我第一时间想到的是我十几岁时读过的一本叫《哥德尔·艾舍尔·巴赫——集异璧之大成者》的书，作者是道格拉斯·霍夫斯塔德。这本书基本上解释了20世纪发展起来的计算机基础知识。我非常喜欢这本书，但那已经是很久以前的事情了。

I mean off the late I really liked high output management by Andy Grove who was the CEO of Intel you know that has helped me in terms of becoming a better CEO I did not find it as enjoyable as the girl Acer Bach but. I did learn a lot from it taught me about the very precise day you work out routine

我的意思是最近我非常喜欢英特尔的前CEO安迪·格鲁夫所著的《高产出管理》这本书，它帮助了我成为更好的CEO。虽然我没有像阿克尔·巴赫的女孩那样对这本书有很大的兴趣，但是我从中学到了很多知识，它教给了我非常精确的日常工作规律。

I've been warned on this one so tell me what is it yes I work out every day I mean a lot of people think I'm kind of crazy about it so I work out for precisely 16 minutes and I basically you know I started with 10 and I kept on increasing until about 16 and then at that point I you know I work out for 16 but the actual thing takes about 25 minutes because what happens is for 16 minutes I just either run or do an elliptical as freaking hard as I can and so it takes me another 10 minutes to catch my breath after so the whole thing takes about 25 minutes but you know that's basically I just do it for I just don't have much more time to spend on that and so I go nuts doing that people who watch me do I think that I'm about to have a heart attack hopefully hopefully that doesn't happen anytime soon but that's my that's what I do I love it

我已经受到警告，所以告诉我，这是什么？是的，我每天锻炼，很多人认为我有点疯狂，锻炼时间正好是16分钟，我一开始是10分钟，逐渐增加到16分钟，然后我会用足我所有的力气紧跟着跑步或椭圆机，所以实际时间要花25分钟，因为锻炼16分钟后，我还需要花10分钟来恢复呼吸。那是我能花的最多时间，我之前已经疯狂地锻炼了。观看我的人认为我即将心脏病发作，但愿这种情况不会很快发生。但这就是我喜欢的。

what about the favorite blog on newsletter are there any must reads when they come in you know I really like Fred Wilson's blog it's the one that I've been reading through the years and I mean many of them kind of come and go I like that one that that's been one that I read through the years I really universe squares one of our investors and I really love those guys most of their opinions are things that I agree with

在通讯中，你喜欢的博客有哪些必读的文章？你知道的，我真的很喜欢Fred Wilson的博客，这是我多年来一直阅读的博客之一，而且许多博客会随时兴起又瞬间消失，但我喜欢它一直坚持下来。我最喜欢的宇宙广场是我们的投资者之一，我真的很喜欢这些家伙，因为他们的大多数观点都是我认同的。

what would you most like to change in the world of VC in startups diversity I would like startups and VCs to be more diverse and it would help everybody that that were the case we as tech companies struggle with diversity just like everybody else in particular I find that the VC world is not very diverse I mean many many firms that you see have no female partners be great if we could change that not an easy and of course you know it's hard to blame anybody it's not an easy thing to change it's kind of societal and cultural changes are they just take a long time

在初创企业垂直领域中，你最希望改变什么？我希望初创企业和风险投资公司更加多样化。如果能实现这一点，对所有人都有益。就像其他科技公司一样，我们也面临着多样性方面的挑战。特别是在风险投资界，我发现这个领域的多样性很差。我是指很多公司中都没有女性合伙人。如果我们能改变这一点将会是很好的。当然这并不容易，因为这是社会和文化变革所带来的，需要很长时间来实现。我们无法责怪任何人。

and then let's finish today on the next five years for you and for Jurelingo what for your own store well we want to be a publicly traded company I don't know when that'll happen kind of very early to tell we're gearing up towards that I think our revenues are going to justify it in maybe I'm hoping that in 2019 our revenues would justify a publicly traded company that's what we're hoping to do I think that's what will happen well I look very forward seeing you ring the bell but it's been such a pleasure to have you on the show as I said I've heard so many great things from Layla and Jean so thank you so much for joining me today thank you for having me

然后让我们讨论未来五年对于你和Jurelingo来说将会如何，对于你自己的店铺而言，我们希望成为一家上市公司，目前很难确定具体时间，但我们正在为此做准备。我认为我们的营收会证明这一点，希望在2019年能够成为一家上市公司。我期待着看到你敲响上市钟声，非常感谢你来参加我们的节目，正如我之前跟Layla和Jean所说，我听说了很多好消息。谢谢你今天加入我们的节目。

such a fantastic episode with Lewis there and if you'd like to buy Lewis's workout video then please do send me your snaps I would love to see them on at age stepings with two bees I am of course joking I don't think there is quite a workout video yet but if you do try it do send me the photos at age stepings with two bees on snapchat it'd be fantastic to see those and again a huge thanks to Jean and Layla at capital G for the intro to Lewis today without which today's episode would not have been possible

有了路易斯的精彩表现，如果您想购买路易斯的锻炼视频，请发送您的快照给我，我很想在 Snapchat 的 @agestepings 上看到它们。 当然，我是在开玩笑，我不认为还有什么锻炼视频，但如果您尝试了，请将照片发送给我。 再次感谢Capital G的Jean和Layla为今天面向路易斯做介绍，没有他们今天的节目是不可能的。

but before you leave you today if you're a founder or operator you're most important job is people operations whether that be hiring execs developing managers or retaining top talent and that's why you need lattice lattice is the number one performance management solution for growing companies with lattice is easy to launch 360 performance review cycles as often as you want and you also get an incredible continuous feedback system with okay or goal tracking real-time feedback and one-on-one meetings to ensure employees get feedback between reviews so find out why the lights of coin-based plan grid birch box and we pay trust lattice is their performance management solution by heading over to lattice.com to start investing in your people that's lattice.com the number one performance management solution for growing companies

在你今天离开之前，如果你是创始人或运营者，那么你最重要的工作就是人才运营，不论是招聘高管、培养经理人还是留住顶尖人才，这就是为什么你需要使用lattice。lattice是适用于不断发展的公司的头号绩效管理解决方案。借助lattice，你可以轻松启动360绩效审查周期，频率随意，同时你也可以享受到令人难以置信的持续反馈系统，包括目标跟踪、实时反馈和一对一会议，以确保员工在审查之间得到反馈。尽快前往lattice.com，了解为什么coin-based、plan grid、birch box和we pay信任lattice作为他们的绩效管理解决方案，并开始投资于你的人才。lattice.com是适用于不断发展的公司的头号绩效管理解决方案。

And speaking number one there, you must check out Ricurly. The company is powering subscription success with Ricurly's enterprise class subscription management platform. The platform provides rapid time to value without requiring massive integration effort and expense. They have the ability to not only increase revenue by 7%, but also reducing the all-important churn rate. That's why thousands of customers from Twitch to Hub Spot to CBS Interactive trust Ricurly as their subscription management platform. You can check them out now on Ricurly.com - that really is a must.

在谈到第一话题时，您必须了解Ricurly。该公司通过Ricurly的企业级订阅管理平台推动订阅业务成功。该平台不需要大量的集成工作和费用即可快速实现良好的价值。他们不仅能够增加7%的收入，还能降低至关重要的客户流失率。这就是为什么成千上万的客户，从Twitch到Hub Spot再到CBS Interactive，都信任Ricurly作为他们的订阅管理平台。您现在可以在Ricurly.com上了解他们——这真的是必须的。

Over and out from team 20 VC and have a fantastic weekend.

来自20号投资团队的结束报告，愿你们周末愉快。