pull down to refresh
73 sats \ 17 replies \ @kr OP 10 Feb \ parent \ on: The Duolingo Handbook tech
Yeah I think most people still think of them as a gimmick. I think they’re going to be a $1T company one day.
I'm with you on that one. They are for sure not a gimmick.
I got my "severance" package a few years back when they moved away from the community based approach to source their courses. Now they hire linguists to make the courses. It's gotten very professional.
Still wearing the hoodie they gave me as a thank you for my efforts~~
reply
Wow, they sourced a course from you before? On physics, or korean language?
A Duolingo contributor hoodie sounds sweet, I'd definitely show that off if I had one.
reply
Korean language. I got involved after the course had already been created by other volunteers. I was an admin for the part of the platform where people would be asking Korean grammar and vocab questions when their answers got marked wrong.
reply
reply
Look up Duolingo Incubator. That's how it was called. It was a revolutionary way to grow big at small cost. His captcha experience in crowdsourcing inspired him.
reply
Whoa - 1t based on what exactly?
reply
The size of the education market being dramatically underestimated because historically it was paid for via our taxes.
Americans spend $10k+/student/year for pretty bad education outcomes.
What do Americans spend on Apple products? $1k/year?
How much revenue do Americans generate for FB/Google? Probably a combined $600-$800/year
reply
Huh. It's big, but also well-served at every price point, including zero; and especially well-served at $20/mo, racing to zero.
I will stay tuned.
reply
reply
Nothing in their current offering seems like a moat to me, not in the sense that the word is usually used. Scaling a bunch of human contributors, and enjoying some modest network effects from that, could have been a moat. But then LLMs got invented.
If they want to make "the best way to learn stuff" truly general (e.g., calculus; coding; dating), and they had a secret sauce that differentiated them from the other players in those spaces, then I'd be very mildly interested -- still seems like learning chemistry or whatever could improve by an order of magnitude, and I'd pay for that. That's a tall order, though.
reply
The 1T dollar number you put up kept popping up in my head during breakfast.
I don't believe Duolingo will ever reach that. They have too much of an altruistic mindset to belong in the same group of companies that currently have a 1T marketcap. The language certification they provide as alternative to established but expensive other certificates is an example of this altruistic modus operandi.
At the same time, what several current 1T companies represent (walled gardens, bastions of censorship, etc) is what we've come to despise in recent years, so I don't think this should be a metric in itself.
Things can change of course.
reply
I also don't think they could ever get to $1T without going back to community sourcing. They'd have to branch out into all sorts of other fields with different teaching and assessment needs, would be very hard and expensive to do in-house.
Presumably not just our long-term expectations for the dollar.
reply
Imagine if you could take over all of education....
reply
reply
How? Where will the revenue come from? People barely pay for the app. Unless they start getting more users to spend on their products I have a hard time seeing this company get to a $1T market cap.
But it is on my watch list. Flawless balance sheet and projected to grow at a decent clip.
reply