Scaling Duolingo, embracing failure, and insight into Latin America’s tech scene | Gina Gotthilf (Latitud, Duolingo)

23:42So having dark colors like black, like having Trump in sort of like a black scenario kind of looking down and looking a little menacing is more powerful than having Trump looking ridiculous. For example, in the context of we need to take action. Otherwise, there will be deaths because of this, right? So it depends on the concept, but don't under play the importance of understanding how people are going to feel when they see something. And whether that's going to lead them to take action. Keeping it super super simple because also the other thing I see is like a lot of images, you know, it's like no the image can't distract from your core message.

24:18It just has to be a background thing that aids in the digestion of that message. I feel like all these startups are going to start adding Trump menacing Trump to their landing pages because they work for you guys. They're going to alienate 50 % of the American population. True. There's a few other things I wanted to dig into when it's obviously duolingo. So let's just spend some time here. So it's really interesting. I've written with my newsletter, I've written over 200 posts. The number one most popular post of all time did not expect this was about the story of duolingo and the way that the team reignited growth after it started to plateau.

24:54This was by Jorge Mazal. Mazal. Mazal. Okay, cool. Jorge Mazal. Yes. Okay, there's the right pronunciation. Clearly there's a lot of interest in the duolingo story. Before Jorge, you were there really early. I think you were there from 3 million users to 200 million. That's kind of the, what I hear you describe it. That's my claim to the team. Okay, great. That's a large growth trajectory. One thing I wanted to ask broadly is, it feels like B2C subscription apps, like never work. They never last. There's so few success stories of consumer subscription apps. There's like duolingo, like calm maybe, but it's, I don't know, feels like it's slowing down, headspace, ram or Lee sort of, like there's like always, they're like, okay, and there's a few that are okay that most die.

25:46I guess I'm mostly curious. What is it that you think duolingo did right to make it basically and continue to thrive even these days? Very few people really believe that we were going to make it not surprisingly, right? Even though we had like this amazing team, etc. Now it looks almost obvious. It's like, yeah, B2C, language learning just seems so niche. And plus education, there's no money in education. It's been stuck for so long. So, you know, and what I kept hearing you guys, did you hear about Rosetta Stone? Like, this solution already exists. So, I think that there are a couple things that really made duolingo success, which are very hard to replicate.

26:25Number one, an obsession for the mission. That sounds cliche. I think a lot of founders and started people like to talk about the mission. And I get it and I think it's real. But I really mean it because this obsession for solving a problem for hundreds of millions of people and the problem wasn't just a vitamin. It was a problem in the sense that if you don't know English in today's world, your opportunities to get out of your social economic zone are very diminished. More specifically, you can double or triple your incompetential by learning English in a developing market like Latin America.

27:03And there are lots of those around the world. That belief that education should be free and that people should have access to that opportunity, not just in developing countries, but of course, also in the US, really drove the organization in a way that drove how we built our marketing, how we spoke to our users, how we designed the experience, how we put barriers in front of taking decisions that would actually impact that mission. It helped our users rally around the business. It helped us hire the best people, even if we were based in Pittsburgh and couldn't necessarily pay the Google dollars.

27:39So, it's really hard to measure the importance of just really being obsessed about that mission. But I speak to a lot of education founders, you know, ed tech founders. And I'm very biased probably because of this experience. I will say that I had one of those, what's the called the experiment where they had, like they looked at all of the shots that some plane got when it came back from war and then started fixing the plane. There's a name for this, right? And then they realized that they should be - You have to put it in pictures. Yeah, the pictures. You shouldn't fix those spots because if they got back they survived.

28:09They're like missing the plane that like felt, right? So I got to ride in a plane that survived. So I have a - oh, it's a called survivor bias, maybe. That sounds right. Yeah, I survivor bias. But I really believe in this. Survivorship bias. So if I speak to a founder and I can tell that they're building an ed tech because they believe that they will be able to make money from it, there's nothing wrong with making money. Nothing. I want to make money. You know, I think it's a capitalist world that we live in and it's fine. But just that drive and is what brings people to you. And it's what lead you to make long -term thinking decisions that really end up mattering.

28:47And it's what allowed us in many ways to grow organically versus with paid acts ads, which I think is crucial for an early stage tech startup. It's not the only thing, but I think it's one of them that's super important. Just to follow that thread, that's something that I actually found. I wrote a post about this looking into - of the ones that made it, what did they do consistently across them all? And one is just stay very lean and scrappy for a long time because to your point, it's so hard to build a big business. And you can't afford, like you said, the best people you can pay them as much as everyone else.

29:19So essentially, it's just like a long time of just being very lean and scrapped. That was the most consistent pattern across all these B2C subscription apps. Agree. And that's number two. When I was hired by Duolingo as a consultant and as an employee, my mandate was make Duolingo grow. Here's no budget. I had no budget. And people are shocked. They're like, oh, but when you just turn on the ads, we just didn't. Because I know this is between you and me, Lenny. I actually am quite bad at paid ads. It's just not like a muscle that I ever developed. I'm only good. We won't tell anyone. Okay, please keep this a secret.

29:55I've only been good. I think I could develop that muscle. If I need it, if one day I need it. But I'm particularly good at thinking about organic growth because I've had to. Because that's what tumbler and Duolingo required of me. And the logic behind it was, listen, we with Duolingo, we started monetizing the platform very late. And it was a luxury because we had so much venture capital, money to sustain us for a while. But we had some bets that we made in early days that we thought we're going to help really sustain the company like translations that didn't end up panning out. And then we, you know, the Duolingo English test that we started developing really early with versatile, an amazing guy who basically was developing this test.

30:37We realized I was going to be super long term. We didn't start really charging for subscriptions or having ads. And I don't know exactly, but something like year three. So we didn't have an LTV, which meant that having a CAQ made no sense. So that's number one. Like having, like, you need that CAQ to LTV ratio that everyone talks about. That's an important thing. But it's more than that. First, I think there's the CAQ to LTV ratio thing. The second thing is that even if you have a low CAQ, I was just talking to an entrepreneur this morning. He was like, oh, we were able to hit a 10 cent CAQ. And I'm like, yeah, but that grows.

31:11Like as you start targeting more people, the low hanging fruit kind of dry out, and you end up having to pay more money. And then once you have those users coming in because of those paid ads, you can't cut it off because you still need that growth because you're trying to prove to your investors that you're growing or you need those users in order to continue AB testing or whatever. Like then you become completely dependent and it's really hard to turn it off. So it's almost like an addiction that as much as you're able to like limit in the beginning, the better. And the third thing is that I really believe that I don't believe.

31:43I think we all know by this point that the most important thing for the growth of anything tech, or maybe in general, is retention. Of course, you need acquisition, but retention is important. And I simplify it a little bit because I don't think retention is like, I don't think it's in terms of like, wow, I must retain this user. It's like, is this thing valuable or not? Like that's what retention is to me. Like either it's actually providing real value or it's not. If it's providing real value, people stick around. It's as simple as that. And if you don't force yourself to pay attention to retention and finding the users to whom this is the most useful, really early on, you risk convincing yourself of metrics and kind of like glossing over some of this other important stuff, which means that even if you succeed at acquisition, you're just not going to succeed long -term because those users fall through.

32:30And you won't really understand why. Because you were building retention based on acquired users that weren't the ones who weren't necessarily going to, you know, and I don't mean to say that I don't believe and paid at all. I think paid has this value. I think especially when it comes to testing, sometimes you don't have as many users as you need to run such a significantly significant test, but with paid users, you could or you could just use paid ads to understand like messaging and images and even value prop on a landing page. Like that's super valuable. Or you find an amazing niche and you know exactly who your target users are and you figure out a way that makes sense.

33:06But then again, I would argue that if you found your perfect user and where they are, you should go figure out a way to get them organically because if you can really provide them value, they would come and they would stay. So far, I've heard be really focused around a mission. Be very clear about what you're trying to achieve. Two is just very low spend. Try not to essentially don't expect to grow this into a venture -scale business. Focus on a sustainable profitable business for as long as you can and like constrain your spend basically. And then third is this focus on retention, which I think is a really important point.

33:38And this is true for any happier building, but I think especially true for consumer business, where people just like, man, this is cool. Okay, what's next? Okay, let's check out snapchat. Totally. And I was going to have a different three, but I think it's related. So maybe we can add it as three B or four. Three B, let's do it. An obsession for the product. Again, sounds obvious, but isn't. When we look back to products that exist, you know, before the internet, before I did that, the app store, you built this thing, you made it, and then you tried to convince people to buy it. That was kind of it, right?

34:11So like, look, I made a chair. It's a beautiful chair. And then you spent all this money trying to like get it out into the world and people buy the chair. And you like, it's primarily sales people and you hire an amazing marketing agency. They try to sell the chair. It's no longer at all that because products are constantly in motion and evolving. And like, unless you're able to own that data and understand what it can tell you, you're never going to win. So I hear a lot of people come to me and say, Gina, Gina, we built Duolingo for this. And I'm like, okay, cool. And then they show it to me and it looks exactly like Duolingo.

34:41And I'm like, okay, cool. And then I'm like, how did you get to this design? They're like, oh, yeah, we use Duolingo. So I'm like, great. But then as I started talking to them, I understand they didn't actually, they don't have the engineers and PMs there looking at mixed panel or whatever it is that they're using every day, understanding how every single change is leading to other changes that enables them to ask the questions and come up with the hypotheses that allow them to get to the next step. So it's almost like they just like copy -basit some, it's, you know how I think it is of that? It's like those students who are able to copy their, like the best students answer on the math test and then they get frustrated that they didn't get an A because the work wasn't there, but they copied the answer.

35:21But if you don't know how to do the work, you get another math question and you're not going to get it right. And so that I think still misses and I would venture to say most early stage tech startups out there. It's certainly the case in Latin America where people think they can outsource like the code or outsource the growth and they're not just like looking like Cox at like the quality of the data and statistical significance and like running hypotheses and like questioning them and that rigor is a culture at Duolingo that was there from day one before me and continues to be there today. Amazing.

35:58So I think if listeners trying to build a subscription consumer app, I would suggest just rewind and listen to that again. I think there's so much gold there and in my experience I get a lot of decks because I do a bunch of angel investing. I just kind of just discount consumer subscription apps because they never work, except when I do once in a while. And so my advice is if you're building something in the space, just like listen to exactly what you just said, there's a lot of importance to it and like actually internalize it. Like stay really lean, stay really focused, obsessed with retention, obsessed with making sure the product is solving the problem you're going after.

36:32So I'm so glad that you agree Lenny. I really admire you. So it makes me very happy. Well, we're both happy then. I wanted to switch to the B side and I'm curious, what's like a mess up or a big mistake? Maybe that you made or your teammate that was like, oh wow, that was a big waste of time. Yeah, look, a lot of things didn't work out. More than 50 % of our AB tests didn't work out. We made bets that didn't make sense. I will say though that like in the spirit of A and B sides, I, and I think in general, we are really good at forgetting the B stuff. Like I talk so much about all the stuff that worked that it's hard to remember like all of those moments that didn't actually work.

37:12And the moment and the thing that I tend to talk about, which is like this mistake that we made as the growth team is almost like one of those like when you get asked in an interview, like what's your, what's like your biggest weakness and you're like I'm a perfectionist, you know, it's like one of those things that actually makes you sound good because it's the story about how my team really wanted to implement badges. We spend a lot of time playing all the games that were popular at the time, trying to understand how those gamification growth hacks that we could find in those apps would potentially overlay onto dualingo and how, you know, we would do that.

37:48And badges was just pervasive in all of the top games. And so it seemed like a no -brainer. But since we ranked all of our experiments in terms of ROI and return being like how many users we think we're going to get from this, the AUs and in fact time investments, it was never, it never made sense to focus on this because we thought that the time sync would be too high. So I actually ended up not letting the team run this experiment for like six months so that we focus on lower hanging fruit. So that's like a mistake on my end. Then we decided to, we decided to run this experiment in the most lean way possible.

38:21We're like, you know what, like there's MVP, there's like minimum viable experiments. We don't have to run a whole badges thing. We can just like do something more simple and actually see if that like leads to growth in an interesting way. And then we'll know. And we ran this very simple experiment that was like, you sign up and then you get a badge. And it was like this girl with a balloon, I don't know, she was like happy or whatever. And of course, of course, in retrospect, it led to no results because no one is proud of signing up. It's not an exciting moment. And you don't even have badges to collect.

38:47You can't show it to other people like none of the things that make badges compelling were there. But we were like, okay, well, we tested it didn't work and then we moved on. So we moved on for like another, I don't know eight months. And we didn't look back. And then when we did look back, first of all, at that point, we discovered that we hadn't been dog fooding, okay, which also was embarrassing looking back. We hadn't been dog fooding in the growth scene. We just come up with hypotheses. We were super careful about prioritizing them and making sure that we were doing the best possible like write -ups and all these things.

39:16But like the dog fooding piece, it just, I didn't come from a product background. I was a marketer. And I hadn't even, I didn't really understand the term dog fooding. But when we thought, we had a conversation, we were like, you know what, if we had just tested that, we would have all known that this was a super lame badge. And I was like, why are we not testing our experiments? And so like that became part of our of our practice. It's still relevant. I just had a conversation yesterday with engineers at latitude. I haven't explained what we built yet where we're building it. Maybe we'll get there.

39:46But I was talking to engineers at latitude. And they're awesome. Like in terms of product team, we have like the number eight employee at New Bank. You might have heard of New Bank, but it's this like massive banking like FinTech in Latin America. And we have people from like other FinTechs. And then we have this guy who was a lead PM at Twilio. And I was explaining to them why we should be dog fooding. And they were all like, oh yeah, we should dog food. It's just like easy to forget stuff like that. So, so that was a mistake that, you know, we could have probably gotten to the growth that we got to with badges much earlier on.

40:16And not only did we get to growth with badges, but it became like this amazing treasure trove of opportunity because once you have badges and people want them, you can now ask people to do anything. Like go find friends, go buy things like, you know, whatever it is. And so like we had we impacted almost all metrics across the company positively, but including some we hadn't expected. But it's like easy to talk about a mistake that ended up being a win. So that's why I compared it to the interviews thing in the beginning. But, you know, we we tried making a duolingo with social app really early on and failed.

40:50It was called dual duels, dual duels. Like you could duel, you know, very clever. Yeah, I know. We were clever, but people didn't use it and we didn't figure out why we we tried making a duolingo for schools platform. Like we couldn't get it to pick up. I went and launched duolingo in China. I got downloaded by a million people in the first day and then the app got blocked. And I, you know, because of the government. And then we couldn't figure out what to do. And then everyone rated the app like one star because it didn't work. And so then we had a really like a lot of trouble actually recovering from that.

41:23We launched duolingo in India and didn't realize because we couldn't have unless we went there, which we finally did. That most people set their phones phone UI in India to English because typing in Hindi is hard. And of course, there's a lot of languages throughout India. And we were making it so that when you download a duolingo, whatever UI you open your app, your your phone was set to, we offered not that language for you to learn. That was your base language. So we were telling people learn French, Spanish, German from English. And they were all trying to learn English. So they didn't find what they were looking for.

41:56They left. There were so many mistakes, you know, and luckily, I think we were able to bounce back from most of them in terms of how duolingo is doing today. Man, there's so much there. That was awesome. I like you're like, oh, I don't remember any of my failures. And then like, oh, here's all these awesome stories. That was great. Just one thread there that comes up again. And again, in this podcast is the doc fooding piece, especially. I think people don't trust their gut and personal instinct enough. I think a lot of times, pms are just like, I need to do these research to understand what we should be doing versus just use the things.

42:29See what feels wrong and keeps you from being excited. And really trust that. I find that more and more like, I don't know when I read a thing, when I'm writing, I'm just like, oh, I don't like that. I should change that. I don't need to like run this by three people. So I think that's a really good lesson. They're just don't underestimate the power of you just using it and relying on instincts and feelings you have when you're trying to use it. Totally. And that's so hard to do, especially when you're young. And I think it, you know, I will add that especially when you're female as well, or maybe, you know, maybe other minorities, it's just really hard to trust your instinct because you constantly telling yourself like, what, do I really, do I really know anything?

43:04Or like, am I just being lucky? But you have to. And I think that forcing yourself to pretend that you know answers and just finding out what this like pretend person who would know all the answers would think, like, is really helpful because it helps you develop your point of view, your voice and to trust yourself. Even when you're working on something that you don't fully understand, you know, as an, you know, we're building a banking platform at a latitude. I was looking at it and I was like, they were having trouble understanding why people were having problems with wires. And I told them all about how I'm an idiot when it comes to wires and I make these mistakes, ABC because like, I don't match like the line, it's like, whatever, there's like all this information you're supposed to input.

43:40And sometimes the information you get is not in the same order. And they're like, wow, you know, and I'm like, this is just me as like a user making them mistakes. But that is our forte when you're able to understand that when you don't get something, probably other people don't get it to at scale. Absolutely. It's like the, if you're, if you're thinking about asking a question in class, many people are thinking of that same question and they will appreciate you asking it. The other thing I stood out there, so the Hindi mistake you made, I actually made the same mistake with my podcast recently.

44:10I was noticing that the second biggest market of listeners is in India. So I'm like, how do I lean into that and help people in India find this podcast even better? So I added subtitles in Hindi to a number of the episodes and tweeted it being, oh, look at me go, I'm going to make this so great for people in India. And everyone's like, we don't need this. We prefer English people in tech in India. We know English. This is even harder. They're like, I can read a lot faster in English. So please don't do this. So that was a really good way to learn. And there's so many languages in India. Like that's who?

44:41Really? It's crazy how many, like, but help people don't speak the same languages across the whole country. But also it means that people in India are very are fluent are fluent in so many different languages. We live, we learn. I want to go back to the A side and just a couple more questions about doing go, you said that most of the growth was organic and you basically had to grow it organically. Is there anything that you can share that worked really well? Because everybody wants to grow organically through a mouth. Is there anything tactical you did that really helped doing go that other startups can can do and try?

45:12Absolutely. So first of all, I would actually say that AB testing and product -led growth is organic growth because you're not spending money on it. And so first thing that you can do, no matter what stage your startup is, is make sure that you are not overlooking the importance of people in your product team who really know how to evaluate data and how to use that and learn. And if you're too early stage, you're not looking at 5 % growth. You're looking at 20%, 30 % growth opportunities. But I think that's number one. Number two, actually this is something I might have said is like something that duelingo did really well.

45:49But I think it goes hand in hand with mission. But throwing the mission thing aside, brand and PR. So the importance of building a lovable brand that really resonates with people and makes people feel something and want to stand behind an idea that's bigger than themselves is not easy to do, but possible and core to being able to increase word of mouth. So at the bottom of this is the mission, which is we, you know, duelingo, mission was always doing for originally to bring free language education to the world, then, you know, to build the best education to make it accessible to everyone. I don't know how they're wording it today.

46:33But that's something mostly looking behind. Does it matter if you think Bloomberg or Trump should be president? Do you think everyone should have access to great education? Like most people would say yes. And so that's much more powerful than do you want to download an app and learn a new language, you know? So if you're able to have that and things that you really believe in about what you're building that's changing lives or impacting the world, even if it is just helping business people do their jobs better in a way that's going to prove their lives and their ability to make a like a like a living or a company, it's going to improve companies ability, whatever it is, like the bigger, the bigger idea behind it and focusing on creating something that people like, or whichever your audience is, it might be a more serious audience than something like duelingo, but for duelingo it meant like we have this owl, the colors, and then the way that the owl talks and the notifications and the emails that you get and the product experience, all of that ties back into how people feel about your brand, which makes it so that people are elected to talk about it, which makes it so that you are much more likely to get a reporter to write a story about you.

47:37If you have something that's meaningful outside of like, hey, like tech crunch did you know that my app grew by 20 % last month, they're like, I don't care, you know? But if you're able to tell a story about people whose lives are completely transformed or something like that's much more interesting and has played an important role in honestly my work at Tumblr, at duelingo, not that my Bloomberg presidential campaign, but definitely latitude as well. Okay, that's amazing. I was going to ask what does that actually mean and how do you build a level brand? And so what I've heard so far is there's this like personality and voice that was really fun that you all lead into to make it like not just a generic translation app, it's like, oh, this is really fun and interesting.

48:17And then this other piece is these stories of transformation. Yeah, there's more, there's more. So I think a brand that stands for something, but truly stands for something, that's where the mission piece comes in. How do you communicate that? Like, how do you believe in no that the brand stands for that? So that has to be into a part of your communication. Like in the early days, like we tested a lot of stuff on social media, we made all of the mistakes. Like at one point we were posting photos of our team on Facebook being like, check out the behind the scenes. Guess what? No one cares. But like, but making the mission, we had like a calendar.

48:50It's very tactical, but like a social media calendar where like one post a week is about effectiveness because we knew that like proving that dual English was an effective way to learn the language and actually having data behind that moved the needle. So making sure that was part of our communication in terms of our social media calendar, in terms of like the PR pitches that we were making in terms of, you know, whatever we were able to like communicate out into the world. And then make sure that one post a week was something about the mission and what we were actually trying to accomplish. But it also got embedded into a lot of things.

49:19Like for example, when we were testing screens to get people to convert into paid users on dualingo, we found that including something like by paying for dualingo, you're making language learning accessible to millions of people that actually improved the metric people cared enough to make the payment. You know, so it really can be anywhere. In addition to that, I love copywriting and I believe that communication is constantly underrated and communication isn't about being able to convey a message, it's about being able to convey a message in a way that the listener receives it and understands it and remembers it.

49:55And that's really hard to do. And one of the things I've helped employ at dualingo that I think is still there today, it's definitely not just me, it was an amazing team, but I've helped employ that I've used at latitude and other places is a unique voice. And what that means is exactly what you said, Lenny, like not just another language learning app where we give you instructions and you follow directions. There is always a quirk, like it's unexpected. The way we talk to you is a little bit funny, it doesn't take ourselves too seriously. And it makes the person receiving this message feel something.

50:28It's about how you make people feel and you feel like either you giggle or you're like, wait, what? They just did what? And using that to your benefit. We use that a lot at latitude today as well in terms of especially our newsletter, just self -deprecating humor and that's what's helped us grow so quickly in Latin Americans at a short amount of time. People identify with it, they see themselves as part of that again, much like the mission versus like, you're a company and I'm a consumer. This episode is brought to you by Mercury, who I also happen to use for my business checking account. I've tried a lot of business banks and there is nothing even close to the experience you get with Mercury.

51:10I moved cash over from another bank and it literally took less than half an hour to set up the account and wire money over at no cost. They kind of make you want to use this site more often which I've never felt with another banking site. Mercury is banking engineered for the start of journey, a modern solution to help your company become the best version of itself. And Mercury isn't just a place to hold and send money. It's soft we're built to help you scale with safety and stability, whether you're a team of two or a team of a thousand. Mercury also goes beyond banking to provide you with access to the foremost investors, operators and tools.

51:44Visit mercury .com to join over 100 ,000 startups on Mercury, the powerful and intuitive way for ambitious companies to bank. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group and Evolve Bank and Trust, members FDIC. Is there an example of that kind of message you remember from Deolingo or from even latitude of something that worked that was really fun here? Different. Look, I think for Deolingo, we constantly looked at every copy we wrote and asked, could this have been written by other companies? Like, what could this have been, any other company or is it Deolingo?

52:20Like, what makes this Deolingo? And it was tough because the more people you hire who come from other backgrounds, they don't, they're not used that style and they might even think it's unprofessional or whatever. You're like, nope, this is a Deolingo way. So it helps figuring out like, okay, exactly what is that voice? What does it sound like? What are some voices? What are some words that it tends to use? Why, yes, why not? What's too much? What's too little? In terms of specific examples, this is something that I didn't write myself, but I wrote a lot of notifications for Deolingo for the passive -aggressive message that I'm sure people have received, which started and then became a meme, and then, and then Deolingo used as well.

52:53But like, the whole, like, this doesn't seem to be working, we'll stop sending them for now message, which like, you got after five days of inactivity. In addition to that message, just around the same time, we decided to send an email to people in New Year's because that's when people make a resolution to do things. And we wanted them to make learning a language or resolution for the year. So we created an email and it had like sad duo, you know, because there was, I don't know if the screen is still there, I haven't used a link in a while, but there was always a screen of, do a really sad when you fail something.

53:23And like, and that, that's kind of the owl. The owl, the owl, sorry, the green owl will cry, and we maybe tested the size of the puzzle, the size of the puddle and the number of tears that came out his eyes in terms of the effectiveness. So we used that duo and like, you know, in one of those emails. And then it started, you know, someone picked it up on Twitter and the message, like, the passive aggressive message and this, this sad duo, they started making their own versions, which was like, study now or duo will eat a poison loaf of bread or like the next email will be a funeral e -vite, things like that, right?

53:58And so that's an example, I think to me, which can now be seen very much throughout the duelingo's brand, where we could have just said, oh no, this is a PR disaster. We need to go back to being this friendly, like, nice little fluffy thing that everyone loves instead of being like, no, like, we're, we get that people think this is funny, and we're just going to run with it, you know, because being, using the duo voice, it gives us the permission to do that because we're not just like, we're not square, we're not going to do that thing that you read in the textbook in school, we're just, we're kind of going to play along with it.

54:28That's an incredible lesson. It reminds me of this famous duo lingo meme that I'm sure you've seen where someone shared these, they got these two notifications in a row. I just pulled it up here where first they got this duo lingo push notification. Looks like you forgot your Spanish lessons again. You know what happens now. And then the next push was from their security system, intruder alert, back door, perceived with caution. And I imagine the duo lingo even like, like leaned into that, I think when this started spreading. 100 % and it wasn't an easy decision, you know, because of course a lot of people in the company were like really concerned about the brand image and like, what are people doing?

55:00And what do, how do we revert this? That kind of thing, right? So it was like a, it was a, it was a bet that we made where we're just going to like, no, we're going to lean into it because that's what having this unique voice means it's about getting it. It's about being part of something bigger. It's about, you know, connecting with people outside of just teaching them a word a day or whatever it is. And with latitude, I think we do that, we do that all the time in our newsletter. And it's a lot of like self deprecating humor for Latinos and using expressions that like could be almost offensive, but they're not not in terms of Latinos only, but also the tech world, making fun of like being a tech founder and like the things that we do that we think are okay.

55:39And like, it's just a lot of that where I think I would call it irreverent. It's a, it's a tough line. It's a lot easier to be, I think a copywriter in a place that doesn't want to do that because the lines are a lot clearer and you don't have to take as many risks, but it's so less fun, which I think makes it so less fun for the user because people are used to getting emails from their banks with corporate lingo that you don't understand. But if they get an email from their bank, that's funny, ironic, but also very informative. Like that's that's a bank email I'm going to read, you know. I think that's a really good lesson.

56:13Part of this is just taking a risk. I think that's one of the big takeaways here. Just take some risks. We had Lulu Chang on the podcast who was a huge advocate of that. She's a PR calms person that's worked at Substack and Blizzard now. And that was her advice to the people. Take risks. Do things that are a little controversial because that'll get attention. I definitely want to talk about latitude. Just a couple more questions on dueling go. One is, today feels like one of the most interesting things about dueling go is their TikTok presence and feels like they're doing so well. Kind of leaning into exactly what you're talking about just being really silly and different with the owl, especially.

56:49I guess the question there is just, what is it that you think allows for that? Is it just this like very special social media person they hired? That was just like incredibly good at this thing and being irreverent, as you said, or there's something else that contributes and allows a company to win in social media the way that the way that dueling go has. Look, I haven't met the person who does a TikTok and they're fantastic. Definitely to one of the merit their work. It's awesome. I don't think it's easy to do, especially on a consistent basis. I think yes, finding someone who gets humor, who gets the platform, who's able to produce content like quickly, but it also reacts to learnings.

57:24All of that is not easy to do. However, I do think that everything we just talked about is at the bottom of that. Because if dueling go didn't have this unique voice and leaned into the humor and wanted to be irreverent as a brand and was so focused on connecting with people where they were and ready to take risks that might seem, you know, maybe an orthodox in terms of, especially in terms of education, then an opportunity to build a TikTok like that wouldn't exist. So it's both. And I think it goes back to the brand DNA. It goes back to the culture of the company and to the attention, as I said, to every single text that was published and whether or not it wasn't the right voice or not.

58:06It has to do with having those conversations with the executive team where you talk about who is duo and what are they like and how do they talk and, you know, what do they sound like? And is this a duo thing to say? Is this not a duo thing to say? And committing to this idea that you're going to be remembered that you're going to do things that are sometimes are going to rub people the wrong way and you're not just going to sit squarely in one place. I think that opens the possibility for a TikTok like the one that Dueling Go has today to exist. But again, whoever's running the TikTok, you're amazing.

58:42That's such a good lesson. A lot of people are looking at Dueling Go. We need to find that person at our company. And what you're saying is it takes a lot more than that. Like that person is not going to have a good time. If the culture of the company isn't set up to be that sort of to have that approach to try to just take risks and be irreferent. So that's a really good point. One final question around internationalization. You said that you help drive internationalization of Dueling Go. And I read somewhere that when a learnings you had there was essentially treat everyone the same almost across countries, which I think people think is the counter like they should often like no, we should be super personalized for every country.

59:20And what did you learn there? I think that this is very controversial because not only is it the case that when you're working in regulated industries, maybe like more B2B, situations like looking at specific countries is important. They're looking at specific countries and elements of these countries are important, especially when you're looking at like, I don't know, laws. And if you need like legal differences and there's a lot of things that make countries different is where I'm trying to get. However, humans are very similar. And we think we're very different. I don't think we're that different.

1:00:01I think that maybe we were brought up differently. And so for example, in Brazil, we like to dance. Fauho. In Mexico, we like to dance salsa. In some places, it's okay to hug. In other places, not okay to hug. Yes, there are cultural differences. And it's important to love everyone and to adapt, etc. But a lot of these differences when it comes to like core human behavior are like that. Like final like 5 % of getting people, of understanding people. And if as a startup, whether it be early stage, but as a startup, you focus too much on those marginal differences between groups of people. You can run the risk of making big mistakes, which is making too many changes too soon and learning very little and adding crazy amounts of code complexity and overall organizational complexity to what you're building.

1:00:50And with Duolingo, because it was a consumer app, because we weren't dealing with a lot of regulatory issues, except for like China, where we had to like watch out for certain words and phrases. In general, people want to learn a language and people learn a certain way and people use apps a certain way. So there's a lot of commonality. We just found that by treating the world as one, and whenever we deployed, you know, eb -test or tried something new in terms of marketing, we would just look at it as like, okay, well, if this worked here, it will work there. And we time I went and launched Duolingo new market, I got the same feedback.

1:01:27Whatever country it was, here it's different. People are different. You don't understand. And what you're doing is not going to work. And here's why you need to change. And if we had actually listened to that, it would cause all kinds of problems. Like in our country, we think that green is a negative color. Like, owls are like poorly seen as an animal or here, people think that free things are actually of low value. They like things that are expensive. Oh, people here really like free things. I'm like, everyone likes free things. And they're like, oh, in this country, we, whatever. So yes, I think that countries are different, but it's more important to realize that people like to think they're different and people like to think their countries are different and like highlight those because it makes them feel special.

1:02:08You unique. We're all special and unique in all of our amazing ways, but this is not necessarily it. And when you're trying to be super cautious of your resources, you have to ignore some of that because then you're able to roll out things once, which is important. But that in addition to that, every new AB test you want to run or every new hypothesis you have, if you now have a version of your apps is different in Mexico, in China, in India, whatever, you're going to have to run that test and whatever change you have in all of those versions. And then you just start having all of these different versions of the app everywhere.

1:02:44And good luck managing that in terms of code, in terms of processes, in terms of personnel, in terms of costs, and most importantly, in terms of time. Because now every single experiment or or hypothesis is going to take you way longer to be able to deploy. And time is almost more important than money when you're a startup. So it's important to keep things super simple. And this was something that we did that actually ended up paying off with few exceptions like India and China. Not as such cool advice. It reminds me of a quote that I think of that a friend of mine shared once life is maintenance.

1:03:19Anything you add to your life is just something you're going to have to maintain from that point forward. And similar in products at any time you add new code, you can maintain that code forever. And the more you can not add anything new and not make things really different, the easier everything gets. Like people forget that. It's like, oh, we're just going to spend a bunch of time to make it awesome in China or Brazil. And then, oh, they have to maintain that forever and every feature has to. And it's an 80 20. So, you know, like just focus on what will get you the 80 and not the 20. And then when you have the luxury of focusing on the 20, then you can.

1:03:51Okay. So speaking of different cultures and people being different, but not that different, you pivoted your career basically to focus on Latin America. First of all, why did you decide to do that? That's a pretty unique path. And what pulled you there? So Lenny, I don't see it as a pivot because as we were joking in the beginning, I, you know, I've been an employee. I was an operator at early stage startups. And now I'm a founder and I'm a VC. So I'm still kind of like in this little stack of like roles that we have in our little tech ecosystem. And in my time working with Tumblr and my agency in Duolingo, I had the pleasure of speaking with entrepreneurs all over the world in part because I started getting some media because of the work that I've been doing at starting at Tumblr.

1:04:43So a lot of entrepreneurs reached out to me, but also because they became a mentor for an organization called Endeavour, which is global. So I started working with entrepreneurs in Japan and like in Brazil, on my free time, just mentoring. And I know that the opportunity for growth in terms of tech in Latin America is huge because first of all, the opportunity for growth in tech is huge all over the world, meaning there's just more, just more and more to do. There's more pieces of our lives that can become more efficient or better or cheaper by making them digital in some way, shape, or form because digital products scale.

1:05:20We are behind when it comes to that in terms of Latin America and our economy is also not like doing super great right now. There's a number of things that make it tougher to succeed in Latin America but make the outcome of potential success much higher. And it simply put, there's a lot of low hanging fruit because a lot of what has already been digitized and been productized in the US and where developed markets just hasn't in Latin America. And every time I took these calls, I would think like, well, you know, this is not very efficient for me to be doing this one to one call. It's, I feel very good about myself.

1:05:51Like I feel great and this entrepreneur learned a lot, but I wish I could do this more at scale. And also it doesn't seem like this is what's going to help this entrepreneur succeed. Like maybe it's a little bit of advice, but it's like, and not only that, but I had a lot of experiences where I would mention something about growth that I had learned and that would blow the entrepreneur's mind. And I would think, why do I know this, but not this entrepreneur who honestly is smarter and more ambitious than me? Oh, it's because I've had a career into looking value because I've gotten to work with some of the best people in the world and I have access to this information just free flowing in my way all the time.

1:06:23And that's, you know, we take it for granted. So how can we make this more accessible to Latin America's entrepreneurs so that they can have access to that? What else is hard to get access to that could really get in the way? Oh, like access to capital. Okay, so what's the VC in the angel ecosystem looking like? And what can we do that can actually impact that at scale? And then there's other pieces of the ecosystem that are missing. Like if you're going to start a company, you have to incorporate it. It sounds super boring, but like in Brazil is one of the countries that takes the longest times to incorporate a company in the world.

1:06:53But then if you're going to get investment, you probably can't get investment in your Brazil entity because investors are like, I don't know anything about Brazil. And sounds like a lot of people, employers get sued by their employees and lose, which is totally true. And there's all this liability, I feel much more comfortable investing in a Delaware company. So then entrepreneurs are like, oh man, like now I have to create this entity in Delaware. I'm never, I don't even know where that is. And like what's a C -core, you know, what's this other thing? Like so there's just stuff that needs to happen for Latin Americans that we don't think about here until like Quincol Silicon Valley talking about it as in the cloud in the US in developed markets.

1:07:29But also like, okay, then you're able to raise money. How do you get money down to your country? That's not simple at all. Like how do you think about like the effects transactions and not get screwed in the process? And who's going to do it? And so anyway, there's like a number of these things that make it super hard. And so that's some of the problems that we wanted to solve. Why it matters to me? I'm Brazilian, I'm Latin American, and I know that I had all of the opportunities in the world. I went to an American school. I got to go to school in the US. I got to work with some of the best tech companies in the world.

1:08:00And 99 .9 % of people in Latin America will not have these opportunities. And so for me, if I don't use this privilege to somehow make a huge impact where I came from, that will last, then I kind of wasted my life. So that's why this matters so much to me. And I met my co -founder Brian Records at On Deck. If you've heard of On Deck before, I'm a big fan of. I'm wearing on deck socks right now. Yeah, I am. I love their socks. And I just had a conversation. I just had a conversation with them yesterday. I really love, like, I'm a big fan of what they built. I met Brian doing on deck. I actually was thinking of starting a completely different company, but also focused on community as we were talking about like people want to find connection.

1:08:43And I think that there's a lot of business opportunity there. But I met my co -founder and he was working with our third co -founder, Yuri, who was actually the guy, we joke he's the guy who builds things. He's the CTO. He actually knows how to build. And started talking about what it is that we can do to make an impact in the speed at which tech startups succeed in Latin America because we think we can have a huge impact on the GDP of the whole region, development, job opportunities, and so on and so forth. So to me, that's what motivates me. It's like figuring out how I can use my time to as leverage to make the biggest impact possible in terms of social economic, social, economical mobility for people in the world.

1:09:22And focusing on the part of the world that I came from made the most sense. So you referenced this company, they started latitude, maybe just described briefly what it just brought the heavy pitch, what latitude does to folks that you might find it useful. I will and I still do a pretty bad job with pitching it, but the pitch is basically like we're we're building the operating system for Latin American early sage tech startups. And what that means is that building a startup is hard anywhere, but it's extra hard in Latin America for some of the reasons that I outlined. Some of the things that we decided so far are one, it's super lonely to be a founder.

1:09:56And if you're able to meet great founders who are just a step ahead of you in anything, be it in product or growth or marketing or incorporation or finances, you can save yourself so much time from trying to like read books and Google. If they can just tell you what to do or connect you with the right person, that if we were able to connect these people, meaningfully, we could make a huge impact. So that's number one, it's lonely. And number two, you build a startup in Brazil and you're like, wow, this is working. I'm going to go to Silicon Valley. I've seen this happen a lot in the past decade.

1:10:25And Silicon Valley is a completely different place. The US is a different place. The competition is different. 3 % of people in Brazil only, you know, in that varies in Latin America, speak English. So the likelihood of you being taken seriously is low. But your chances of success are low. But at the same time, Latin America has so much in common as a region, but we don't actually see that if we're Latin Americans. We just think we're countries. Like, especially Brazilians don't think that they're part of the arrest. And Mexicans don't think about Brazil. Like, it's so far. Look at it on the map.

1:10:56In the US, you're like, oh, yeah, Latin America. But if you're there, it's just like not at all connected, but the opportunities of growth are huge. And dependent on whether you meet the right people are able to open doors and understand that our problems are so similar, that a solution for one part of this region could potentially be great for another part of the region. I'm not doing a great job of pitching. But in addition to it being lonely and it being difficult to find the right resources and really just where the knowledge is really hard to raise capital. And it's really hard to do things I can incorporate and and bring your money down, et cetera.

1:11:30So that's what we do. First, we have a like a fellowship program. We have a 1 ,500 entrepreneurs who got in. We run four cohorts a year, about 600 applicants per. And so you get in and you get access to all of these resources we put together. You get to find out what everyone thinks about other investors in the region, because I think it's important to disseminate that information. You get access to introductions to investors to each other and advice and event. In addition, we have a fund. So we've invested in 100 startups and we're raising our second fund. Now it's going to be around $25 million with a $30 million cap.

1:12:04So that's another thing. So we invest you figure out your investment game. But you might you might become one of our investments as well. And in addition, we have products that make it a lot easier to navigate the super in my opinion, boring and frustrating stuff behind starting a company that you don't want to think about it as an entrepreneur because you're trying to solve a problem and build a team and build a product. You're not trying to figure out what's the best incorporation method and what how to open a bank account in the US and how to figure out like the foreign exchange prices and bring the money down and how to manage that money or how to stay compliant in your country and then in two other jurisdictions, if you have a Delaware and a Cayman.

1:12:42So we do all of that for you and make it easy to like a dashboard. We build a bank that we built and so on and so forth. So it's not an easy to describe business because it's kind of an ecosystem play where we're trying to elevate the tech ecosystem in Latin America. And it's a lot of moving parts. You basically help them do everything, which is what I'm hearing. And it sounds like you'd be a fool not to take advantage of this. The customers essentially are founders in any Latin American country. Is that right? Is that who founders in Latin America? But we also have a lot of US based founders who are building for Latin America because they understand that the opportunity there is huge.

1:13:21Awesome. And then how is what is the arrangement? Do you take equity if they join the program? Is it free? What's the point? Joining the program is free. You just have to be able to get in. We don't for a number of reasons. We just don't want to like deter anyone who's amazing from being part of this community. And so that's why we made that decision. If we invest, we take equity. If you choose to use our products, that's a paid thing. So you can choose what makes sense for you. Something I want to ask about is what is it that you think is that Latin American founders and companies are uniquely good at?

1:13:56Is there a kind of a thread across Latin American startups that are like, oh, this is they're so good at this area. Pay attention here. In general terms, startup founders have to be really scrappy and resourceful and resilient. Latin Americans tend to be very scrappy, resourceful and resilient because of just their realities in which we were brought up in. We have words for that that we don't have an English in Portuguese and Spanish, which is like dancing around things and figuring out things when like you don't have other solutions. So I think that's something that we see a lot. In terms of what we're what we are really good at, I would say, first of all, there's opportunity in every single vertical in Latin America because it's such a wide open field.

1:14:38So there's opportunity everywhere. It's not that we're particularly good at FinTech, for example. But if you look at the FinTech opportunity in Latin America right now, it's so hot and there's like so much money and there's so much happening because of the huge problem of people not having access to bank accounts or access to credit or just like all of the bureaucracy that exists in trying to get those things or to make payments and so on and so forth. So there's just huge opportunity there trying to think what else I would like highlight. Ah, Blani, you talked about like B2C, I think again because there's so much open field, there's so much opportunity when it comes to B2B, especially when you're talking about SMBs.

1:15:14There's a lot of like small and medium businesses doing things on paper. So figure out what they are and how you can make them not on paper and deploy them effectively. So I think that's an advantage we have. Other than that, I wouldn't highlight anything in particular. I think that there's amazing people all over the world. It's just a what are the opportunities that exist and because there's so many opportunities that are Latin America specific or that are emerging market specific, which means that if they work in an emerging market in Latin America, they could work in other emerging markets and you know what, most of the world is not developed markets and understanding what it's like to not have access to amazing Wi -Fi and like iPhones and and all the things that we have access to, that's that can be a huge advantage because that's the reality that most of the population lives in and that's a huge term.

1:16:08Yeah, that makes me think about WhatsApp and one of the reasons they made it is they were just obsessed with making the app incredibly small and fast and they started I think with international markets and then they just ended up being an amazing app because it's so fast and so easy to use and and still and now there's things being built on top of WhatsApp. Like we just invested in a company called LeadSales and they basically turn your WhatsApp into a CRM which is amazing because so much business is being done on WhatsApp and that's not the case here in the US so you wouldn't understand that you can build something for that and there are other markets that are using WhatsApp for which that's also meant to be useful and the other thing is I think that emerging or developing markets tend to sometimes skip over things because we're so quote unquote behind.

1:16:48So for example, there's examples of these like in India and in some countries in Africa where like I don't know the desktop was skipped you know people just went straight to mobile. I think we can see these catapult opportunities because then when you start building something and you already and you didn't even build for the previous version of whatever it is that was being used because you know in the US or more developed market you had access to them then you are in a way at an advantage so I'm excited to see how that plays out in in the next few years and I'm particularly curious to see how that plays out when it comes to AI.

1:17:20One last question around Latin America. It's going to be kind of a whether it's specific companies you want to call out big companies that have done that are doing great or just trans or patterns. What do you think people should be paying attention to anything you want to shout out? Lenny the truth is I would love to call out all of our portfolio companies because I believe in all of them and there are some of them that are going incredibly impressively. One of them is Pomello which is like a FinTech platform for FinTechs that you know is just grown incredibly. To me it's more about paying attention to Latin America I think for for the West that's already a lot.

1:18:02I don't think people know what's going on below the border, have no idea what Brazil is like but paying attention because it's not just a place that's behind and trying to catch up. It's a place where the opportunity to make a lot of money exists. It's a higher risk like region because of all the political and economic instability but given the scenario that we're in right now which is that we're still quote unquote behind in terms of like all the solutions that we know will be built to give people access to health, to education, to financial services etc. But we actually have a lot of money flowing into the region in terms of like venture capital.

1:18:40We have the best talent we've ever had because now we've had I forget how many but like a lot of IPOs that came from Latin America like and and and and unicorn companies. People who have worked at those companies or who have worked the places like Duolingo and are coming back to build. Now know what they're doing and so there's a number of things that have come together that make now a really exciting time to build a startup in Latin America and to scale it. So from an investment perspective I just think that there's a lot of hot opportunities. Now in terms of like you know knowing what's a good opportunity versus not I think the same rules probably apply to those anywhere else which is you know like most importantly the entrepreneur.

1:19:21Does this person know what they're talking about? Do they have an unfair advantage in terms of knowing what a problem that exists and knowing how to solve it in the way that others couldn't? Do they have access to the best talent in the world not just in the region that will actually join them and build the best thing possible and yeah like what's the tam and not just what they put on the slide but like what you actually believe with the tam to be. So that's what I would say. I think everyone's looking at FinTech in Latin America right now. It's hot. It's profitable. Money is where the money is but I'm super excited about what happens with with health and education in particular because I think that that has the power of to truly transform the region in a massive way.

1:20:05At latitude like I think I mentioned in addition to FinTech we tend to invest a lot in in B2B SMB platforms that are helping businesses scale and work more effectively because there is a huge need for that and there's an opportunity to build and I think that that can have an impact on the region. So I think that would be my advice. It's a little broad but other than that if not I would just now sit here and tell you like 15 companies that we love at latitude and I won't. Well we can point people to your portfolio page on your website. I would love to highlight our portfolio companies maybe I'll just send you a list or something.

1:20:41I don't know. Perfect. We will figure out a way to share that. With that we reached our very exciting lightning round. Gina are you ready? I'm ready Lenny. What are two or three books that you recommended most to other people? The one book I recommend because I truly it really changed the way I think about things. It taught me a lot about a discipline I had never really thought much about but also because I think it makes me sound smart and it's a really short book so it's easy to get through is the design of everyday things. For me that was the first time that I realized that design wasn't just a sort of like cool thing that some people were in too and the had to get and it made things beautiful.

1:21:20It was about understanding how everything is designed and how to think about design and usability. So for someone like me who didn't have any experience in product before I think it could be transformative. And then the second book it has nothing to do with what we do. I recommend Victor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning because at heart I'm a philosopher and I tend to think a lot about life, the meaning of life and you know what differentiates when life from from the next and how to how to live a good one and no matter what profession we choose that continues to be important. So those are my recommendations.

1:22:00What is a favorite recent movie or TV show that you really enjoy? So first of all I love succession but I don't think we have to go into that. One that was recommended to me by a friend who I very much admire was Mike Krieger at Co -founder of Instagram is how to with John Wilson. It's a really weird TV show that I would have never found if it wasn't for him but it's the premise is basically this guy is I think he's just a he's a filmmaker and he's awkward and he's it's cool that he's awkward as just his style and he decides to make a TV show about like about creating to help people who are really worried or scared of doing something and helping them prepare for that moment in their lives.

1:22:42So for example like you know someone is really scared of telling their friends that they lied about how many college degrees they had or whatever like that they said they had a master's degree but they didn't and it's now been five years and it was like it's like their it's not a debate club but I forget what it is but something that like requires some sort of intellect and like he doesn't want to confront the the group so like he recreates everything that could possibly happen that day in order to make this easier or another one of like about like having kids and was really scared about making the decision about whether or not they want to have kids so that's it's kind of a documentary but it's not it's awkward it's weird but it's so good and then I would say white Lotus just like you know so good.

1:23:24I do that I do that song to my new child often because it's so funny my husband and I do that. I'm not gonna do it but it's a recurring favorite on this podcast so we had a short drinking game where every time someone said wait Lotus we drink so I'm gonna have some tea here real quick. Okay I'm sorry to be predictable but you know like I said my humans are a lot more similar than we'd like to think you know what's amazing Lenny it's just my realization more and more of how much this is true because I like to think of myself as unique much like everybody else and then I start seeing that like all of these really creative decisions I made are what all of the other millennial white girls did you know it's just fascinating like oh I like you know whatever mid -century modern furniture and if you oh you know what actually I'll tell you a movie is my favorite one.

1:24:16Bo Burnham's inside I love oh my god I don't know if that's a movie but I just I'm in love with Bo Burnham my husband knows about this I know all of the songs and white white what is it white girls Instagram white woman's white woman's Instagram's such a good song that's what I'm talking about. Yeah also I've been re -listening to how is the best case scenario Joe Biden they're gonna make me vote for Joe Biden I was thinking this is my parents they didn't get it. It's amazing. Going to that video that movie it's even after COVID it's incredible. Anyway I was actually gonna say that first show you mentioned I think it's called the rehearsal maybe there's like a different title.

1:24:57Oh my god you're right so he has two shows and one of them is called how to and the other one is called the rehearsal and you're right I am recommending the rehearsal I have also seen how to which are shorter episodes where he films in New York and he just goes like how to find a parking spot and then it takes him and is down a rabbit hole of like how cars are made or like parking in the city but it's also very good but I prefer the rehearsal and Nathan Filder's the guy behind all this is incredibly incredibly hilarious. He has a new show actually I think it's on HBO with John Wilson or something that he's producing where it's this other guy just going around talking about stuff in New York and I think he's a producer.

1:25:36That's the one I'm talking about that's how to with John Wilson. Oh there we go so I think he's pretty behind that okay look at us we're figuring we are figuring things out so I think he has maybe a new season. Fix season two I haven't started that one yet anyway here we go we're gonna keep going what is a favorite interview question that you like to ask candidates that you're interviewing. Why do you want to work here is when I really like to ask because it tells me a lot you know of course everyone wants a job like it feel good just be like because I want a job and it seems like you guys pay well and you know whatever I think this is a good next step in my career but I want to I want to know if this person like knows what it is that we do if they did a minimum level of research and if they actually and if they connect with our mission because we're going to talk about mission a lot and I I don't want them to gloss over it and to make decisions that are short term thinking that go against our mission because of the reasons I mentioned with Duolingo so I think that's one it's not very unique but I think gives you a lot of information and then I would say what are you world class at and how do you know that your world world class at that and the second part is almost more important though what are you world class at like it's okay if someone says like look I'm more I'm working on becoming world class at whatever and this is like why I think I'm better you know like I'm great at it or whatever but the second part is important because it tells me if people actually care about metrics and I don't care what the metrics are but just how do you know this to be true it has to be more than like oh because my boss loves me or because my mom told me because you know I give a talk and or whatnot or whatever it I want to hear because you know I'm proud of having accomplished this and maybe if you have some numbers to show that's that's also really important what is a favorite product they recently discovered they really like I have not been trying any products I would say so nothing to recommend I would say though that I am very curious to try these like gut health tests that are out there now you know or like microbiome ones like I'm really interested in how little we know about our body and how tech can actually help democratize this information and going on a tiny rant I'm also feeling very resentful of doctors right now because we've always lived in a world in which doctors are sort of like these authorities and we must just believe whatever it is that they tell us and we rely on them for information that is crucial to our survival for now in a world where we can google things and that's even more scary because you know you have to know how to filter that information really well and you don't find you know explanations to things but doctors don't like you googling because they say it's scary but also because they don't like being questioned I think we're finally coming to a place where a lot of these devices that can give you great information about your body so that you understand your nutrition and you know very core things about ourselves that we don't today are becoming accessible to a lot of people just to the population it's still expensive what we're getting there and I think that will that will be magical so I will call out the company levels by my friend Sam Corcos because I think that what they're doing is awesome.

1:28:39Next question what is a favorite life motto that you like to think about come back to share with other people? One is this too shall pass and I will tell you this one right now is particularly meaningful to me right now because I'm going through a really tough moment because I have long COVID and lost my taste and smell and it might be long -term and so but I think it applies to AB thing that I was talking about you know when like everything in life is moments except for you know a couple a couple of diagnoses and so this too shall pass is something I'd say to myself a lot. The second one is also not particularly motivational but I really believe in it which is fake it till you make it that's something I I've held on to for a long time and even today I don't mean I don't mean lie I don't mean pretend to be something that you're not but I mean it's almost like a way to overcome imposter syndrome and by opening rooms for yourself to be who you want to become so that you enable opportunities to become that and I'm not saying lying but early in my career I did fake until I make it from the point of view of like not saying no to things when companies were saying to me being like hey can you help us grow without a budget like Tumblr right I was 25 26 I was like yeah and then go figure it out you know and when do a lingua turn to me and said hey can you be head of growth and I didn't know what growth was and I had to google and find Andrew Jen's blog I read it and I found out and and I just had yes and then you know kept going with that so fake it till you make it is kind of that for me but even today I have a lot of imposter syndrome which I actually think is not imposter syndrome is just acknowledging that I don't know a lot my team says I have too much self deprecating humor that actually puts you know that's puts the company down it puts me down so fake it till you make it to me means like standing knowing how to stand in front of your team or or or reporter or or Lenny in a podcast and almost like being that person that you would like to be or being your best self you could call it whatever you want but I think it can really help you get out of the little hole that you would put yourself into and limit opportunities for yourself amazing this question was it's so many interesting insights and stories I appreciate you sharing all that final question you majored in philosophy if I'm not mistaken I'm curious do you have a favorite philosopher or someone that most influenced the way you think about the world you know I use a lot of philosophy in my day to day but it's not because I have deep knowledge is because I have light knowledge that I draw on that helps people like think I'm smart and relates to ideas like I often talk about thesis is ship to me like that allegory is like one of the most interesting ones because it's about identity and and building and whether you know I don't if the allegory is like you know the shiplet no please share the so thesis is on this on this journey I think he leaves Crete and he's going somewhere else and he's on a boat and then over the course of the trip like so many things happen they've hit so many waves and they have like storms that they have to replace like planks and and we sow the the sail and by the time they arrive at the next port nothing on the ship is the same as it was before like they'd replaced every single playing they'd replace every all the masks they've replaced all the sails and so the question is is this the same boat that left the dock and to me that's a really interesting concept around transformation and what it means to have an identity that exists over time even when so much of us or so much of a company or so much of a country changes and what is that core identity and you know so to me that shapes I think a lot of ideas because it's it's a cool allegory and it resonates a lot but yeah so I would say at this point I embarrassingly have very cursory knowledge of philosophy I could probably remember a lot of it if I if I went back to it but I don't use it in my day to day and I would love to take time off at some point and go study but I'm also embarrassed to admit that I'm not a person who just like finishes work is completely depleted and then wants to like bury my face in the philosophy book I don't I would like to I would like to acquire all of this philosophy knowledge but I rate I want to watch white lotus or if I'm going to force myself to like work out I'll listen to an audio book like that makes me feel good about myself and it's a fiction one I think this is actually a great example of exactly what you're talking about where we change and we are not necessarily the same person we were right that makes sense that you're not obsessed with philosophy having finished that a while ago and now working on something totally different yeah I think I still am like because I'm you know I consider myself to be very like existential I'm an atheist so I like to find meaning it's it's not so like it doesn't exist so much for me and I think about the big questions and and I am interested in philosophy I'm just not and interested enough to make time and effort for it in my life right now as I hidden gem at the end of this episode I'll share I'm also an atheist and actually ran a website called atheist spot calm it was like a Reddit for atheist news I went to conferences what is it news we didn't see got again today still no gods have we found yep the funniest thing is we had Google AdWords on there and the ads were based on the stories around like different religions and it says all like Christian Mingold um but atheist spot calm anyway yeah Gina we covered so much ground what an amazing episode I learned a ton for me I'm so excited for people to hear this two final questions work in folks find me online if they want to reach out and how can listeners be useful to you yes okay thanks Lenny so people can find me online if you want to see just ridiculous posts that's where my Instagram is and my Instagram is impressive because I'm Gina on Instagram yes I am just Gina wow so that's super impressive you won't even find it when you look for me because you'll see all these other genus but it's just act Gina that's me I do share some of professional things as well there too but I think it's my more entertaining channel you can find me on LinkedIn I'm a little more serious on LinkedIn I have a photo with Obama which will certainly impress you so find me Gina God Hill on LinkedIn um and I'm so many stories we haven't I know I'm Gina G on Twitter and that's probably you know what I did a Harry Stubbing spot kiss and then that got me 600 followers on TikTok but I've never posted so but maybe at some point I'm just I feel self -conscious but I think I could do it good to take to our group because I think I'm amusing well you're not gonna get followers by saying there's nothing good there so I think if you want people to follow you you should tell them it's gonna be great come here see my amazing contact on content on TikTok I will definitely start posting it soon and you can influence what kind of content will be there because I'm listening to my followers right now and then how you can be useful look if you if you know of an amazing founder in Latin America if you are an amazing founder in Latin America or if you are in touch with VCs who are interested in this then definitely tell them about latitude you go to latitude .com do not miss out on latitude it doesn't have any e at the end that's because latitud in Spanish is latitude however it's also because we couldn't buy latitude .com with an e but now that's what it is and it's grown at time so get in touch join the fellowship join our community we're particularly useful by the way to us people who are interested in getting plugged into Latin America because you if you get in you you just meet all the like all the top people in one in one fell soup and that helps you make friends relationships find clients find your business partners and understand the ecosystem in a hacky way so amazing Gina thank you so much for being here bye everyone goodbye everyone thank you so much for listening if you found this valuable you can subscribe to the show on Apple podcasts Spotify or your favorite podcast app also please consider giving us rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast you can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny's podcast .com see you in the next episode