20VC: Duolingo Co-Founder on Why $3M is Harder than $100M to Raise | Why You Should Always Take Tier 1 VCs Even at Worse Terms | Why Europe Can't Win Unless the US Screws Up | How AI Impacts the Future of Work and Education with Severin Hacker

24:18And I'll plan some of this. So there was never a concern for you in Tunnel. You never had a cool with Lewis where you're like, oh shit, it's so I'm going to do this. And I assume here you mean like open AI or chat -yptie, building a really good language to it. Yeah, like can they take away a lot of your very, very casual users by doing a very simplistic chat with a friend choose your language. That's definitely, you know, some of the of a concern. I think there's a bunch of things to be said about that. So first of all, what is the hardest part about learning a language? I would say the discipline.

24:52Yes, it's the actual motivation. And, you know, by the way, this is one of the key insights of Dueling. We've been sharing this with the entire world for the last 10 years and still nobody seems to believe us. So the hardest part is motivation. And Duolingo is because it's so gamified. It's really good at this. It's a motivation engine. I call it the motivation engine. It really gets you to come back every day and do Duolingo. And if you stick to it and you do the hard material, you will actually learn the language. That is the power of Duolingo. In general, people underestimate how important that is.

25:24So if you want to build something that is as good as Duolingo, you have to solve this somehow. If you ask our users, what do you do if Duolingo went away? They never mentioned any of our language learning competitors. They're like, oh, I'd spend more time on social media. And the second thing is, if I was Sam Altman, I would go after the big trillion dollar companies. Why go into language learning when you can go into search or social media? Those are the things I think are important. Well, if you're sitting there as Sam's day, you're thinking there's kind of a couple of core areas which are winners.

25:57There's chat, which we already own. There's two which is customer support which I think they'll buy someone very soon. There's coding which they've obviously just bought someone and then I'd say language learning is the fourth. As you said, it's so perfectly, I mean, Al Alams is kind of in the name. It is so perfectly aligned to the use case of what they are best at. It's not a stretch. Yeah, well, we'll see. We shall see. One thing that I'd love to do is... You know, the other thing is like, it's the... I lose how it says it's like there's a difference between being first class citizen and a second class citizen as a feature right So doing a works because we have these gamification mechanics.

26:34We have the streak. We have the XP. We have the deletes and and all that And you can build this all inside a different app But if it's just kind of a second class citizen buried somewhere again, it's like it's hard to Make that experience as sticky as it if you build an app just for this Is there anything within Juleingo that's the second class citizen that you wish you could make a first class citizen? There's one thing maybe so so we have these stories inside Dueling going so so every now and then you get a story I think they're actually becoming really good again with AI and there's kind of an entertainment aspect with this Like maybe you could actually make them more prominent go into more like reading including like your first language which L1 or maybe something for kids, like learning how to read, but you haven't done that yet.

27:24Yeah, when you, It's not at the level of Harry Potter. Yeah, one thing that strikes me when I, I use Julian of every day, it's exactly what you said though, which is like the little things which make the product experience delightful. And it reminds me of Gustav Sodistrum from Spotify, who always told me the details and not the details, they are the product. And there's so many little things which make me feel that when I use Julian go. To what extent do you believe that and advise that to founders who call you versus Jesus? Don't spend too long on the way that something pops up. Just get it done in the early days.

27:59I think ultimately product quality is details. Luis is obsessed with details. You know, he can spot something like being not properly aligned within half a second. The details really really matter. If you look at retention, which is the domain metric we care about, But it's like the details really matter. It really matters. It also matters in terms of how likely are you to recommend it to a friend. And you're not going to say, oh, it's super like details are really good. But it's a great app. That's all details. Difference between a good app and a great app is details. Can I ask you, where did you spend time that with the benefit of hindsight, you're like, we shouldn't have spent time there.

28:40So we started with languages. But the mission was always all of education. So at some point, it's like, let's build new subjects. We want a new subject and then someone said let's add math. Math is another one of these like fundamental skills that will probably need to learn for the next hundred years or so And then the first idea was to build a new app. In fact, we built a new app. We built a new math app Completely standling. Completely standling. Wow. There was Doolingo the main app and there was an entirely new math app. Did it have a name? Well, yeah, it's the Doolingo math app Creatives Well, that's a wonderful.

29:15And then we realized, you know, this is looking more like the main dual -angle app. And it's like, we were about to add a leaderboard and, you know, a leak system and a streak. And it was like, why are we doing this? Like, library replicating this whole functionality. That was inside number one. And then inside number two is for the user, it was also not a great experience. Because first you had to know that dual -angle had a map app. then you had to find an apps or then you had to download it, then you had to install it, then you had to grant it permissions again to send you push notifications.

29:47It was like, wait, is this streak different from my dualingo streak? It feels very much like dualingo, but it's not quite dualingo. And then we said, no more new apps. If it's education and goes into the main app, but it's kind of like a super app strategy, right? So now the good thing is like all the content and all that, we kept just transferring. So we didn't throw it out, but merged with the main app. Can you talk to me about chess? How did the chess come about? We mentioned it outside, and it was a great story. How did chess come about and talk to me about that? chess is an interesting one because, you know, is it really education?

30:20You know, it helps you think. I mean, we had this discussion before, should you still study computer science? I think chess is similar in a way that it helps you think, helps you think logically. And so we believe it fits within the mission of Duelingga, at Summer 1. And then it was two people who were just super passionate about chess and it's like hey, let's let's try to build a chess course And we were two people in town internally. Yeah, yeah, and we were not convinced at first But this is why we're not convinced we don't want to build just a game right like there needs to be some educational aspect That that's always a trade -off between okay, are you just a game or are you an educational game?

30:54Or are you just you know a textbook pouring experience? So you have to find the balance between the two. We don't want to just the game. So with chess it's different. So chess is not like a racing game or so. chess is like, it helps you think. So that's why we're good with it. But then how does this fit into the path? How does this look inside Duolingo? Can we make it fit into the Duolingo design language and all that? So that does not a concern. But then this is again super interesting. And so the two of them, they built this prototype with AI, The PM and designer and the PM, he has some engineering background, so he knows how to think logically.

31:30But he hadn't written much code before doing a link or a dual link. But he was able to build this first version just using cursor and a bunch of AI tools. And the prototype is what convinced us that we should do this. You know, if it had just been a Figma design, we probably was like, you know, maybe, maybe not. But the prototype was so good that it convinced everyone. It's like, yeah, let's build this. What was it about the process? How it was so good? It was fun. It was progressive in terms of mindset It was you could play it and it just felt like this this belongs inside You know, it's like when when you just see a screen is like, yeah, maybe you have to come imagine it versus if you have the prototype It's like well this looks and feels like dual like the other thing is because of AI again We were able to build this within nine months fastest way ever created a new course So it nine months from start to finish.

32:20Yeah, wow and normally it would be years. What do you not have that you would love to have in terms of activity? You said that you've added languages, you've added maths, you've added music, and now we have chess. What's the next one that you'd love to have? What I'm most passionate about is the social aspect of that. I think we have these leaderboard mechanic. We now have these massive user rays and we have all these brand -lob. People love Duolingo. And I feel like there's an untapped potential of connecting the people that are on Duolingo. I don't know how to do it. So, but I'm worried. What would that look like?

32:52It's like, duo social, duo date. Because duo date's not a terrible idea. It's not. Well, yeah, I don't know. It could be something like that. It could be, you know, learning together, but it could also be a lot of untapped potential that there's not that many apps that have. Would you ever open a physical school? And I know that sounds completely counter what Julin goes all about, but having in New York a branded, amazing experience where people could go for a week, meet the owl, sit with people in their leaderboard and build that community play that is really special and different. It's a good question.

33:29So, not sure about that directly. But one thing that is interesting about education is, okay, so there's K to 12 and then there is higher ed, University College, etc. One thing that is interesting when people talk about education, we always This is the instruction. Here's skill. I learned the skill and now I go from A to B. That's kind of like how we think of education. But higher ed for example, it's actually more than that. Going to college, it's three things. It is the actual instruction. It's actual teaching. It's actually the learning of new skills. Okay, that's number one. But then there is also the degree, the credentials.

34:04So the universe says, Harry, you got a degree. You successfully finished this course and you can put this on your LinkedIn or resume and then an employer can say, Oh, I guess Harry did take this computer science class and therefore we can hire them as an engineer. So that's credentials. Number two, very important because otherwise you would always have to prove again that you know something, right, but that's the purpose of the degree. And number three is the social aspect. So a lot of people meet the partner at the university and their friendship network. So most companies that look inside at tech, they just focus on number one.

34:45But I think if you really want to, let's say, if you really want to disrupt the harbours of the world, you have to solve all three. Do you want to disrupt the halftop? No, so we want to achieve our mission. That's why we started this company. But by achieving your mission, you're not disrupting how that will. Yeah. It would be. But one thing on the second thing, so we have not solved the social thing, right? Okay. This is what Hyred does. But on the number two, the credentials, one thing we're also very passionate about is the dual and go score. I'm not sure if you if you notice it within dualing, but we now give you a score like how good you are at this language.

35:19And we want this to become the way people talk about language proficiency. So it's like, hey, my dualing score is 61 in French and then people know, okay, I guess you can have this kind of conversation, etc. So we're getting into the credentials or the degree aspect of it with this score. It's actually pretty helpful. The amount of times you're all say, oh, you know, she's speaking French and you're like, a little bit and it'll be helpful to say, oh, I'm actually a 40 and they're like, okay, not really. He's stupid. Whatever it is, do you not mean it's like quantifies it a lot more easily. It can't ask you, and this is going to jump around, but you mentioned the push notifications element.

35:56Does that make a difference still? We have so many push notifications with the oversupplied push notifications. You're like, that was ruined, it was good or not? It still makes a huge difference. And we know because whenever the service goes down that sends the push notifications, you can see the tip. Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah, 100%. It's huge. It's massive. Wow. Going back to the diaric, diaric. So there was the high -red three things for K12. Well, people also, okay, my kids, they go to school to learn things. But again, it's not just a learning. In fact, a lot of K12 is child care. So even if you solve one aspect of it, like let's say you have an AI tutor that is really, really good, you still need to solve the child care problem.

36:38It's unlikely that people will just go to a school without any humans, without any teachers and just use apps and then go home, or that we would have some sort of optimus in the school. I think there's a lot of it needs to be done by humans still. And by the way, the other thing is like, I do believe that the AI tutors will become really, really, really good. It's going to be the way most people learn most things in the future. What does the future of schools look like then with that? Is it like 10 children sitting in a class with AI tutors? I think that there's still going to be this human element of what do I need to learn, kind of guidance and coaching and motivation and also why should I learn this.

37:15And AI will never tell you like why you should learn this. It's like, to help you learn it, but it's not going to tell you, you know, why should learn it? Why is this important? Do you know what I wish you had? I'm sorry. You have leaderboards, which is like social status or social mechanics that drive motivation and incentives. I'm sure you've studied this. I have because I'm a loser. It's financial incentives. And it's actually when you offer someone money, they are much less likely to do something. When you take money away from them, they are much more likely to do it. Basically, the fear of losing is much more than the gain of winning.

37:45And I wish that you will go ahead this for every day you don't do your street will take a committed amount of you So I commit to a hundred pounds a day. Dude, I do that 100 % 100 % you can you can just give me the money whenever

38:09Turn off his push notifications guys is no more. Yeah, yeah. I mean, the streak is exactly this loss of version mechanic, right? So it's like, it's motivating to build up your streak, but it's like, I absolutely do not want to lose my streak. I'll do a lot of crazy stories of people who do crazy things to... Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's great. And we also sometimes get emails like, you know, I was on this trip to a climb Mount Everest and it couldn't extend my streak. Can you please, you know, restore it or something? and I had no internet taxes and... Do you go now? No, no, no, we were at the...

38:46By the way, also when there was a power outage in Portugal and Spain, we practically extended their streak, so. I do want to talk a little bit about how you work because you're fascinating in how you work. I saw in some of your posts, you said, you're not good at finishing the final 20 % of a project or a bit of work. That seems problematic, is it? And how do you reflect on that? It would be problematic if it was just me and everybody was like me. You need to have complementary skills within the founders but then also within the whole accepting within the whole company. So if everybody was really bad at finishing, by the way, the last 20 % are basically details.

39:25You need to have someone who's obsessed with details in Duolingo that it does Luis from they want him just obsessed with details and he really cares. And I also care about details, but he is an order of magnitude better at that. I think he ever been obsessed on details to the detriment of the company. Dude, we don't need to obsess over that much. Come on. Uh, that was a yes, but I'm not sure whether I should say it.

39:55You know, he mostly works with the PM or the product org and they would probably say something like that when, you know, we still have this product review process where where every change goes through a review and loses it sits in most of those. So he still does. He still does. So that's a founder mode for him is like he's still in most of the product reviews. And I think that's rare for a company CEO of our size where the CEO sits in most of the product reviews. Wow. So you decided to delegate that to the product team on whether he obsesses or not. I love him. How do you you said founder mode that it drove so much engagement and discussion?

40:34How do you reflect on it? And when you look at your own style of management and leadership, how do you think about that? My role has changed practically every year since the beginning, since when we started. So, Tanzan told me this, that I spoke to him from General Antich, I stalked you, I told you. And he said your role has changed so significantly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, early on, I was implementing the thing. I was building dual -lingo. And then it morphed more into code -area architecture, how to build the back end system and all that. system design and then it morphed more into management hiring.

41:08I think I'm actually quite good at hiring. But then there's also other stuff that you people wouldn't expect from a CTO. I was the one who pushed for hiring our first product manager. It was actually interesting because Luis, at the time, he's like, oh, we don't need product managers. He had seen some of them at Google and he had worked with some of them. He's like, I don't think they provide that much value and we don't need is, you know, I can do it as myself and we just need a bunch of designers to say, no, no, we really should, you know, like if every single company has a product manager that resides maybe, maybe we're wrong.

41:40Let's hire one and if it doesn't work out, then, you know, we can still go with that. But obviously that was the right decision. Obviously that was the right decision. So hiring, what do you think makes you good at hiring that is non -obvious or not typical? We have a really strong consumer brand. So literally everyone knows doing it at this point worldwide. Given the strength of Jolingo's brand, do you think Jolingo is underpriced today? I think we dramatically underpriced brands. And when you think about global brands, which billions of people know. Underpriced in terms of... Monetary value.

42:17Like the stock price? Yeah, I cannot talk about that. But what, I mean, it is just amazing. Do you see what I mean by that? People often think about Manchester United. global brand, for example. And I think it's drastically underpriced given the fact that you have that children in India and Nepal, Brazil, why are you in New York? And it's a $5 billion company? I think at some point we were bigger on TikTok than Nike. A brand that has succeeded for a very long time, we all obviously know Nike. And the other thing that is like, I always say it's like, we run the world's most efficient marketing organization.

42:52It's like people think, oh yeah, they're big because they spend a lot of money on advertising and social media influencers. So by impact, we must be the most efficient marketing organization. This is multi -banks the team. 40 people or so. The reason for it is, for a very long time, we had no marketing budget. We didn't advertise nothing, like $0 marketing budget. Because we're also not profitable. We also didn't have any revenue. So we're just like, no, we can't spend money that we don't have. So there was like the constraint. But then the constraint was really good at enforcing us to come up with good ideas.

43:27We always say the dual -income marketing is not powered by money. It's powered by ideas. What do you see in our TikTok channel? So having the green owl, our mascot, having the costume, and also doing unhinged things, and it kind of goes on making fun of ourselves in a way. That is why it is so effective. You mentioned about the not having PMs. and actually, if all the biggest companies have, and maybe there's something to it, and it makes me think of this like, conventional rules are conventional for a reason sometimes. What conventional rules do you find are conventional for a reason one, and then what one conventional rule do you find?

44:07That's just the way it's been, but it's not right. You've got to feel sorry for my other half. I asked questions like this on date night. LAUGHTER Well, first of all, I would say you should not always, but every now and then, especially when there's a big technology shift like now, you should question all of these assumptions, how you build companies. I think we're in the middle of this massive transformation. You can build companies with probably 10 times fewer employees. So that convention is completely overthrown, that you need to hire a lot of people. That's one thing. I would say, early on, there was this belief that you can run a completely flat organization, right?

44:46No managers, no hierarchies, no levels. And that's not really possible. At a certain scale, you need to have managers or layers or you need to have some sort of hierarchy, career progression and stuff like that. I think that the oldest organization in the world, the Catholic Church is still around, it's very hierarchical. And I think there's probably some reason for it, yeah. Did San Diego against Founder Mode and Lewis sitting in the product reviews? And when you think about managers or managers and layers and the diffusion of knowledge and power that comes with those layers. Yeah, I think how do you strike the balance between the two?

45:23What do you still do today that you don't think you should do? So for me, I listen to every single show we do and I, yeah, yeah, 10 years in. Why? It's because it's my product. I'm not shipping product that is not perfect. You know, I'm actually quite good at delegating things and self awareness of what I'm good that what I'm bad at, what I like, what I don't like, what is beneficial to company and what is not beneficial. So that's also why my role has always changed. And one of my principles is reduce, automate, delegate. But then we threw that. Yeah, so that the main idea is maybe like once a month, once a quarter, so you really think about like, does this need to be done at all?

46:01What happens if you don't do it? If you just don't do it, is it the end of the world? Or is there an actual negative effect? So that's number one. And in particular, what happens if I don't do this? And the number two is what you cannot reduce, what you cannot remove. Let's say you decide, okay, this action needs to be done. Then the second question is like, can I automate it? Now again, with AI, it's a lot easier. Like, can I automate this part of my job? Can I use Tatchin PT to do this? Report or answer this question? Or that's suffringing, that's very natural. It's like, okay, can we build a tool that does this for me, or the company, or whatever?

46:34And then what you can't automate, you delegate. Okay, so that I try to delegate to other people in the work. You know, I've handled of most of the day -to -day engineering to our head of engineering. She's really good with this. I'm now a little bit out of the weeds. I'm thinking more, right now, actually, I'm only focused on two things. One is like, with AI, like, what's going to happen? What does the future look like in our space? What is the implications for Duolingo? What actions do we need to take? That's number one. I probably spend 80 % of my day thinking and acting on this, this AI question.

47:05And number two is, is more M &A. And it's related to the first questions. like, you know, what companies should be by where do we invest externally? That's basically all I do right now. Where have you not invested that you would like to invest? It could be an M &A strategy where I said, I wish we'd bought an avatar company. I wish we'd bought an early 11 labs competitor. I wish we'd integrated X. And we did make a bunch of acquisitions. How many have you made? Four or five. Any lessons from doing that? I remember having dyes to silver on from light speed that payments provider. And they've done that 18.

47:38and it was a lot less than so. Very interesting. So one inside and in hindsight it's kind of obvious. You know they say like what is the best predictor of two founders working out? Like you know they're actually, they're not going to get into a fight and a founder conflict. And the number one thing to look for is have the two founders work before they started this this company. Have they worked together? For example, Luis and I, we have been working together on you know research for two years prior to starting to like, oh, by the way, it's not the same as friendship. You can't know someone for a very long time, but they might be very different network.

48:14So, prior work experience or working together, that is number one. If M &A is the same thing, I actually think it's, do you have prior experience working with this company? Yes or no? So I would say that's the number one advice is like, have you worked with them before? Can also be an investment relationship? Do you do Jolingo Ventures? Do you invest early? We just made some minority investments, but it's not a lot. It's always with a view to buy, essentially. We have to figure this out. It's a competitive space. I've seen many competitors. I think I'm pretty close to doing around in practica.

48:52How do you view the competitive landscape today and the distribution of value across it? Is it like Uber and an F2W? Uber takes 90 % and everyone else takes 10 % and that's duo and everyone else. Is it a much more distributed value kind of dispersion? What does that look like? And consumer, it's much more winner -take -all of your kind of mechanics. So we've been now running this for 12 years. Every single year there was one or two companies that grow really fast and in language learning. One or two. In nevut middle, they go down again. What happened is they used venture money to grow through paid acquisition.

49:32So they spend it on Facebook ads, Google ads, and they go really fast. But the only thing that matters is retention. You can spend as much money as you want. If you don't have retention, it's a leaky bucket. All these people are gonna leave. Now when you see one of those, we're not scared because we've seen this play out a million times. So the one company I'm scared of is one that has higher retention than dueling. What's the day retention number that matters to you? of the millions of millions of people that use the link that they how many come back tomorrow. All of these correlate with each other.

50:04So if your current user retention is very high, you also have very high, the 700 French and you also have very high, the 30 retention. But you get a data point every single day. Okay, that's absolutely fascinating. We're gonna see if Alex Schultz, who says exactly the same thing on retention, retention, retention. I do wanna ask, we move into a quick fire. You're a European. You're also based in New York. When you look at Europe today, I sit here, and I'm very aware of all fading into irrelevant, which is why we do things like project Europe. How do you think about Europe? Are we fading into irrelevant?

50:36And how do you see that having the perspective of being a European in the US? I'm very conflicted internally. I want Europe not to fade into irrelevant. Of course, however, if you ask me a young founder, European founder came to me, he said, hey, I have this brilliant idea of how to use AI or like a new model or something like that. What should I do? 100 % go to Silicon Valley, 100 % absolutely maximize your chance. And by the way, you know, this is why the environment is so much stronger. And I can say this because we built Doolingwood Pittsburgh. We're not a Silicon Valley company. We don't have an office in Silicon Valley.

51:13We succeed at despite not being in Silicon Valley. And by the way, there's also a pros of not being in Silicon Valley. But I can guarantee you Doolingwood would not have been able to raise any money in Europe. You know, we had $0 revenue for the first five years. Zero. There's no European investor who wouldn't have invested. Not into it, so not anywhere in Europe. Do you think that's true today? Well, I'm not being rude, dude. You're a really smart guy. You came out of great institutions. Lewis, I know, is a super smart guy too, out of great institutions. There's so much money in Europe now. Dude, I'll give you a term sheet today, when you would, just the two of you coming in with...

51:50I think it has changed to a degree, But it's still you need to look at what do these the most ambitious people and you know the founders Where do they go? It's a little bit sad because in in New York I see a lot of European founders and I often think like how successful would they be if they have stayed in Europe and I think for most of Them I would say mm -hmm best movie have a successful or maybe some of them zero person and I would like to change that I would like to change that I mean that's why you know I invest in project Europe We need to change that because how do you think then about Cynthia?

52:23About 11 labs about some incredible abutments we've been built from Europe? They should deserve all of our support. The sad part is also, I think in Silicon Valley, is like being a tech fundraiser is really, you're mostly a good person, of course, there's also. It's inspiring, right? So people want to be there. I think a lot of people in Europe, you're just like, why are you doing this? Like why or or or they they they look at it as like, oh yeah, you know, they're just doing it for the money or the suspicion, you can't be too successful or you can't be you shouldn't be too ambitious. And I think that that that is very detrimental to the the European startup ecosystem.

53:05You shared an insight with me before that I'd never thought about about having offices in San Francisco as a non SFHQ company. What was that insight and how did it lead to you not wanting to have an office in SF? Yeah, so Tulingo does not have an office in Silicon Valley or anywhere in California. The reason is when we thought about opening one and of course all of our investors, they said that you got to open a SF office and we in fact did go to SF and we looked at office space. We were disclosed to opening an office in SF. But before we pulled the trigger, we asked a bunch of founders who had companies that were headquartered outside of Silicon Valley.

53:44and then open an office in Silicon Valley. And we asked him, what do you think? It was a good decision about this. And all of them said, worst single decision ever. And I said, why? And they said, well, you know what happens is it creates this internal funnel of your best employees moving from your HQ to Silicon Valley, which by itself is not a problem. The problem is, then they get recruited away by the, whatever the hot Silicon Valley companies at the time. You know, like every B or Uber at the time, maybe now it's opening eye or entropic and you basically create a hiring of Fuddle Forest Silicon Valley and you lose your talent.

54:20That was also like new to me and then there's like no no let's not do that. I love that. I hadn't thought about that at all and so you will not do an office in SF. Do you think I would be more successful if I was in SF? And that's an unfair question to us but it's something that I've always been told seven for years and years. You have to, you have to, why are you in London? As a founder I would say 100%. Let me tell you my rationale and you can see if you think I'm right and you can call bullshit on me. Like, in SF, I'm competing against Peter Fountain, Mark Andreessen, Vinal Coastler, Eli Gill, the Colossons, Daniel and that Friedman.

54:53I rape myself, I buy my product, but that is a fucking hard market. And Mark Andreessen getting you round to his house for breakfast on a Saturday morning and in Europe, it's probably two good VCs. You know, by the way, so I started angel investing with very similar thesis in Pittsburgh because there's no one Orramean Lewis, but then you know a lot of those companies eventually moved to Silicimaria Valley. So but yeah, that was that wasn't exactly my my investment thesis in Pittsburgh, but I think as an investor It's not clear as an investor and you know doing the show. I think it's it's not clear because you this is much less crowded that you can really become the top investor that founders want to work with.

55:35In Europe, I agree. But I was explaining this as a founder. If you want to start a business, an AI business, and you have this crazy idea, what do you say or not, how would it move? But that's exactly the problem. How can we change that? Part of the problem, this little, not obvious, is part of the problem is it's so easy to move Silicon Valley. A good degree and you can raise money, et cetera. The US is actually really good at getting these brains to come to Silicon Valley. In a way, the best thing that could happen to Europe is if the US made it really hard to immigrate for founders. If they made it really hard, if they restricted the immigration such that people like me couldn't move there anymore, then I would build it here.

56:16What I would do first, let's first change the environment here to make it easier for startups to succeed. Right now, there's also no pressure from the industry to change the regulation to make it easier to start companies because I can just go, I can't vote with my feet. What would you change about Europe? Is it the regulation? Is it the level of capital? Is it the mindset that we tell young people? Regulation is definitely hurting. No grade entrepreneur was stopped by regulation, though, which is like Travis wasn't stopped by regulation with Uber, Elon, with SpaceX, wasn't stopped by regulation does not inhibit the greatest entrepreneurs.

56:53Again, I think it depends if there's an alternative or not. Again, as a founder, I can and like, okay, I can work with the EU regulation on AI, which is some of the dumbest regulation ever. You know, the Ottoman Empire, they had, when the printing press is like, oh, this is not good, it's not good for our community, it's not, let's not do the printing press. I feel like the EU AI act is that, let's not do AI, because they could be negative repercussions or negative side effects or something, it's that dumb. If there was no alternative, then I would agree. By the way, you know, for example in in in in in Uber's case and and Airbnb, there's a lot of local regulations There's actually lots of alternatives So even if it's like say one one city doesn't work like it's like New York.

57:37This is a regulation You have 200 other cities in the US if you could go back to the early days of Juleen going to do something differently What would you do most significantly? We're pretty open up this I think that the two mistakes with me at Dueling go never not fatal but Obviously, I believe in the two big ones where one we waited too long with monetization. So we just didn't take it seriously enough early on and we were operating under this business model. Let's raise more money. Our business model, people ask, what's your business model? Oh, it's a venture capital. And eventually we did take it seriously.

58:15And we're very good at this now. We have this internal concept of the green machine. It's like run a lot of experiments, see what works and then double down. And that's what we did with monetization. It's super good now. But we just waited for too long. Was that because of naivety? Was that because of a push for user growth and engagement? Yeah, a combination. So it was also like the investors that didn't push us to monetize our own. Which is, it was always counterintuitive to me. It's like, why don't they ask for monetization? But I never would because I'd want engagement and I want user behavior and I want habit forming.

58:45Don't fucking put a paywall in front of them. Yeah, and then you know our investors they also invested in Twitter and some of these and for those platforms It was always the right decision to grow users first Curve users first. So that's what we did so number one is we knew we could always grow users first number two is We knew we could always raise more money and I think the other one was our mission right so so our mission is to provide Best education and make it university available for a long time. We didn't know how to build a a business model that is compatible with this mission. Right? So for a long time, it's like, everything has to be free.

59:18But then we realize, no, no, no, no. What really matters is that we don't exclude people. You should be able to learn everything that is on dual -engeo without a bank account. And it's still true today. You know, most of our users do not pay dual -engeo. They use the free tier. That's actually another thing I'm very proud of. It's like, it's not just great business, but it's a great business with a great purpose. That's also like why we probably wait it for a bit too long. You know, we should have, sorry, two years earlier. Number two is what we also waited for too long, hiring more senior managers up until 30 employees are sorry, it was completely flat.

59:50A lot of people from Newgrad, it was pretty chaotic. That goes against everything everyone says to me on the show. Everyone always assues, don't hire the senior manager. If they've been there, done it before, the playbooks not transferable, you want youngsters that you bring up through the ranks, they want to be involved more in the weeds and the hands -on, beware of the manager. You cannot run a thousand person company with all new grettes. You need a little bit of a fun way. Today, it's still like doing as a very young organization. We still hire a lot of people directly from university. You mentioned you always knew that you could raise more money.

1:00:28I love that. I was the business model venture capital. How I was like, thank God I still have a job. But when you think about the fundraising that you did. What was the hardest? A series A. Talk to me about that. We started as a research project at the Carnegie Mellon University. The belief was, oh, it's these two academics. Luis was a professor and I was his PhD student. It's these two academics and they're going to build something. There's not going to make any money and they're going to sell to Google. Okay. And then that was kind of the belief. And by the way, that belief lasted until we actually made money.

1:01:00It's up for like five years, the first five years. Oh yeah, these two researchers and they're going to build this thing and eventually going to sell. They're not going to become a public company or anything. That was one reason. And then this was 2011. We raised on a prototype and there was a website. For a series of eye. Yeah, yeah. My co -founder, he had two prior exits. So he had a track record. That was actually the other belief was like, okay, these two researchers are going to sell to Google. and number two is like, even if this one doesn't work out, it allows us to invest in Lewis's next company.

1:01:37So they were basically buying a ticket for the next company, because including the first one, they didn't believe that this was gonna become this big. How much was the series A? 3 million net 15 here. That was a series A. Yeah, yeah, that's good. It's called pre -pre -seed today. That's like your friends and family. Yeah. Who do a PayPal round? Dude, that is... We never raised a seat or pre -seed. This was because we had these NSF grants so we built this project inside the university. So series A was our first. Who did that around and can you take me to the moment when you sign the term sheet?

1:02:10UNESCO are ventures. It was hard. I think we how many knows did you have to cut this afterwards but I think we only had one offer. It was UNESCO or back to university. But isn't that amazing that Union Square, one of the best firms in the world recognized and statistically proven with data, and the one offer. This is what I see so often though, but I don't think there's anything controversial about that that just shows quality in picking. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. I mean, and there were amazing investors. I, you know, if you, any found... What do you think they saw that others didn't? Okay, so one thing that was true back then is we did the Silicon Valley Rocho.

1:02:48We actually did get a lot of interest from Silicon Valley PCs at a time, But they all made it a requirement to move to Silicon Valley. That was always the question, they're super interested, we want to make a deal here and all of them, when I'm moving to SF or Bay Area. And we're like, we're not moving. And then they immediately lost interest. By the way, some of them later invested in later ads. But they didn't want to be the first one in a non Silicon Valley company. And so UNO Square didn't care. In fact, we're the only investor that doesn't care that you're in Pittsburgh. or as true? Do you think the best founders need investor value?

1:03:24No, I would say the best founders do not need investor value. However, I would say investors need to have your back. Absolutely, that is important. You should always try to hire raised money from the best tier one VCs, even if the terms are slightly worse. I mean, there's like, there's a lot. What was he saying that? Because so much signaling, Series A was the hardest, but because UNESCO is invested. It's like every other invested, okay, what is UNESCO? because they had this amazing track record and amazing performance and if Units Square invest in your company, they will look at it really, really, really powerful.

1:03:58Every other round it was a lot easier. That's that's weird thing. It's like it's harder to raise three million than it is to raise a hundred million. I totally see that. What was the easiest round to raise? The latest one. Yeah, it was just everybody wanted. Was there a question with you and where you were like, do we think five billion, and this is obviously at the time, do we think that's not a bit high? How do you reflect on price and over pricing when you have such demand? We were thinking like, we don't want to have a down run, no down runs. Okay, by the way, we also never had a layoff growing fast, but we never we never went on a hiring spree or and we never wanted to have a down run.

1:04:36And the problem also with raising a lot of capital at the super high valuation is like the expectations become very, very because obviously you're not of that much at a time, but they all want you to grow into that valuation, right? So that's why they invest. Oh yeah, you know, today, you know, if you take your ARR multiple or whatever, which by the way was infinite. The joys of raising when they're revenue is great. So so you're obviously not worth that much, but we believe that you're going to be worth that much a couple of years down the road. So that's one thing we wanted to avoid. We wanted to avoid a a downed round and we wanted to avoid having an investor that just has extreme expectations that we cannot live up to.

1:05:17That was kind of our philosophy. The other thing I learned on the fundraising is, you know, I thought every deal is custom. Every deal is custom. You know, your series is different from my series. And your series is completely different from my series. And when I realized there's only three possible deals. One is no deal. Nobody can buy this. Compatible. No, no. No, no. And that's a default, right? It's like nobody wants to invest. Number two is you get a standard deal. And the standard deal is what most companies get at your stage is the standard series ideal. I don't know what it is today. About 15, 20 % valuation.

1:05:51Whatever the price and impact it. That was basically our deal at the time, right? So you've got a standard deal. And then there's like the extreme outlier deal. That's like one or two companies of a generation get that one. Facebook got that one or Uber, Airbnb. That probably got some of those. You see it more and more today, which is actually, I think brilliant rounds for companies where they raise say 100 million on a two billion dollar price and you're like wow 100 million is a lot of money to bring into a company financing wise But only diluting 5 % is a small amount for quite a large and significant amount to bring in I think they're good rounds to do for companies Yeah, and so those are the three types those are the three types.

1:06:28Did you do the third type? We never did the third time we always got pretty much a standard deal I think the last couple were more competitive. And by the way, we could have raised a lot more at higher valuations, but we didn't do it. Who's the most helpful investor? You know what's great, Bing is actually great. Bing is a rare type of an investor because he is very product minded. He uses the product and he gives us a lot of feedback on the product. He's obsessed with product. Most investors are the more business types and like, okay, investment and, you know, return and maybe done and all that.

1:07:05And Bing is a very different type of investor. I'm going to a territory like your Harry, wave the white flag. Do you like being public? I have a new theory that why would anyone go public today when if you have a consumer brand, you never need to. And what I mean by that is, if you're the Colossans, if you're Ali, at Databricks, if you're Elon Musk, SpaceX, you don't need to go public today. The extension of private markets is so significant that there's no need. If duo were private today, would you go public? Yes, so I'm in the camp of yes, you should go public. It's actually the better thing for the ecosystem.

1:07:42In fact, I believe there should be more European companies going public because in the US or it doesn't matter, doesn't matter. As long as it kind of flows back to the European ecosystem. But for Duelingo, it's been a great journey actually. Going public, bringing the the NASA, the Bell career highlight. By far, it's incredible. You know, I felt like I grew up in this small town in Switzerland, made it to the US, got a PhD, started this company. It's my first shop. I've never worked anywhere else. And then this became this huge hit, massive audience. Many, many, many people loving the product, great purpose, unicorn, decor, and public company.

1:08:22You feel like it gives you this achievement. It feels like you want a big tournament. You're not done, right? It's not done. It's not. It's not. It's a milestone. Yeah, it's not finished. It's not and I think that that's also really important that you don't think it's done. Right? I'm still with the company most founders that are not CEOs. They leave after four or five years You know once they're fully invested or at least when they you know when they get acquired or IPO I'm still with the company. The one thing I think is yes, these these private markets are now much much much bigger And there's lots of pros of staying private right for us before we went public our finance team for example was two people.

1:08:57Now it's I think 25 or so. So there's a lot of overhead and the financial market is they really care about predictability. So in fact, I feel like they care even more about that than they care about the actual profit margins or growth or whatever. They really care that you can't predict. And I think the way they see this is like if you can't predict the future of your business, you're not a good operator. You probably don't understand what drives your business or they kind of like lose trust in the management team. So someone like that. Do you not think that's the biggest weakness now more than ever before because this is a time where there's no predictability where models can change where deep seat can come out and completely change how we think about money China's approach to AI or open source or whatever that is and actually respectfully I don't think we can predict very well to you now doing amnesty investing thinking about the future of AI God that's negative to place a premium on predictability.

1:09:50Yeah, there's so much uncertainty in the market right now. I think right now if you're a private company There's a stronger argument for staying private But for the very, you know the much more mature businesses like like Stripe I think you want to to go public because you create this liquidity for your your employees And yes, there's like other ways to do it and you can do secondaries and all that one thing I am also proud of is that you know we hired all these people we made lots of millionaires that money flows back into the ecosystem Now, it flows back into the Pittsburgh ecosystem and maybe some of it, the New York ecosystem, but if you had more European companies, Spotify, Go Public and then making lots of employees make some money and then maybe start own companies, that is what we need.

1:10:34That's what we need in Europe. I agree. I just don't know if that mechanism is IPOs. I think you need to consume a brand to have that extension in private markets. If you're a boring B2B company that does, I don't know, whatever no one cares about, you I kind of have to go public because there's not the appetite. I don't think on the latest age demand in the private markets, but like duo could stay private today longer. And there's so many different ways of getting shared by banks. There's so many people who want to have that late stage secondary access. I think you can do it. I think that's a big question for the next years.

1:11:02I think the other big question is like, delivery. So the delivery was sold for $2 .9 billion. It was priced at $1 .5 billion on the UK stock exchange. It's a $1 .4 billion delta in how they value a company. Megger, listen dude, I want to do a quick fire. I can talk to you all day. What's the biggest near death experience with duo? Is that like a day where you're like, oh my god, that was the hardest day. It's not a single day, but it's the first five years we had. We're very close. When you said five, I was like five days, five years? We got. Yeah, yeah. We just didn't know how to find a business model that aligns with our mission.

1:11:38It was hard. What's the best angel investment you've made? And why do you think? I'm not a good angel investor. Why? There's no overlap between being a good founder and a good investor, ultimately, there are different things. First of all, the investment cycle is 10 years, right? So versus as a founder, at least, or as the age, you get data points every day. You can learn the feedback loops are so much faster. I think I'm better with the fast feedback loops than the 10 year investment horizons. I've had a few successes like a 10X or something, but you've had a few 10Xs. Yeah, that's pretty right, you know?

1:12:11So, but I would not consider myself in an investor's life. They don't have that many ten access. We chatted big game. What do you hear a lot from investors that you're like, really? It's a one thing. They ask this question, what is the secret sauce? Why is tooling so successful? And they look for an answer that is like a one word explanation. And you can tell when you give them the actual answer, they're disappointed. They wish the answer was, it's a streak. That's the secret sauce. You know, it's this one mechanic. That's why we're so successful. And we invented it or whatever we maximize it or whatever.

1:12:50Or it's the leaderboards. Or it's like, oh, we're so good at this particular market. It's like Brazil. That's a secret sauce. We figured out how to crack Brazil. And whatever. They want the answer like that. Then Luis keeps telling them the true answer, which is it's running thousands and thousands of AP experiments. The streak mechanic, for example, we added it, that was one experiment, but then we've probably run 300 experiments fine tuning the streak mechanic, and that's where you get the gains in retention, and that's what ultimately drives the growth of Dooling Go. Which, you know, it's still super fast.

1:13:28I were still growing so fast. The green machine is like, what I mentioned before, it's like, we run a lot of experiments. This is also true for marketing. It's not the AB experiments, but it's more like let's try this on TikTok, let's try this on Instagram and then double down on the stuff that works. And that's it. That's the secret sauce. It's the process. It's not a single feature. The thing I find hard with that processor is the compressed timeline on outcomes and what I mean by that is, content's a really good example. It takes time to know if content works. And so you have to do things with no obvious gain in the short term for compounding long term advantage.

1:14:02So that makes sense. It's almost like the gym. You don't gain muscle day one, day two. What week one you'd be like, how I quit this, this AB test is failing, but three months in, it shows. I would agree with that. I think there's like the trap you can run into is you only run tiny experiments like on your purchase page or you run these tiny experiments on carpia or something. And I think it's very important to have your portfolio of changes. So you have lots of low risk, small changes, but you also have some big changes and big change could be adding chess or adding math And that that's how you stay innovative and relevant.

1:14:40Otherwise you end up in a local Maxima where you know you can't get that because you optimize yourself into that. What have you changed your mind almost in the last 12 months? AI and the impact of it. I've gone back and forth on basically any of the fundamental questions. It's like, is it going to change the world? Are we going to have more engineers, fewer engineers? One thing I think that gets lost in the conversation is that, okay, let's assume AI really drives productivity gains. We all become more productive. You become more productive. I become more productive. Everybody, we work with, becomes more productive.

1:15:15Let's say 20, 30%. Is that good or bad? Good. That's great. One of the big problems we have is demographics. We all need to become more productive. We don't have enough kids. You know, like, and then, you know, like, how are we going to finance our our welfare systems? How are we going to finance, you know, our governments? We need every single progativity gain we can get in the US as this huge deficit is all the debt. But if you can grow an economy 10 % year on year instead of 1 % or I guess right now we're in the recession. But if you can grow 10 % or more, all these problems will go away. It will really be an age of abundance.

1:15:53Well, we have AI friends in the future, more than normal friends. No, I that that I don't believe. No, I think the human to human interaction, the value of that will go up significantly. Why? There's going to be value on verified human, even if it's not as good. So for example, in the art world, I believe that art that was made before 2022, it's going to increase in value because it's verified human. You know, Picasso, we know, it was Picasso. But there wasn't some ultimate masquerading is exactly. It's amazing. He's the most underrated founder in AI right now. We talked about Decagon, I think that it's an amazing company.

1:16:33Who's life do you secretly admire and why? This is Navarrevacant's quote, sometimes again, the true measure of intelligence is if you get out of life, what do you want to get out of life. By that definition, I'm maybe 80 % successful or intelligence. What do you know I have? But I haven't I have an investor friend. I'm not going to share who he is, but but I feel that guy has kind of figured it out for himself. What do you know I have? He said 80 % what's the 20 % you know one one thing I would say is one of the reasons why I said yes. It is podcasts or why I wanted to be on this podcast is I feel like I'm reduced to just do a link.

1:17:11My identity is Doolingo said I'm a founder of Doolingo. Every introduction starts with Oh, it's ever a founder and CTO of Doolingo and I feel there's much more to me to my personal identity than just Doolingo. That's the other 20 % that I have not really explored or haven't been able to share. I think the hardest thing is I'd entity is tied to company and when you're at an empty start your company the performance of your company to know it's the happiness of yourself. I have this. I've never never a bond job, which is 20 BC, when we're not doing well either fund or media company, I'm depressed.

1:17:46That's hard. So true. And I have talked to many founders who left their company and there's like, I'd say half of them fall into a depression because their identity is the company. And you know, another thing, I don't know if you noticed this but could you ever leave? I don't know. Don't laugh, but when it is so tied to, like yours is to you and mine is to me, 11 years, He was his even longer. The things like I just still enjoy it so much. And sometimes I wish I'd hit my job. And it would make it easy to leave and do something else. But I still really enjoyed another point. It was like when early on, it's still somewhat true.

1:18:23When the employee leaves, it's like punching the gut. Sometimes when I see employee. Sure, sure, sure. But it's like, why did I leave? What did I do wrong? Did I not believe in this company anymore? or you know, I was like, I think about this for four weeks. Neil Matter asked a brilliant question from Greenice. He gets likes to go into a company and ask the employees, are you best days ahead or behind you? When I ask you that for duo, why would you say they are ahead of you? Well, thanks for assuming that there's a lot ahead of us. As I said, going back to the very beginning of the conversation, I was like, the mission is this, the problem is that the best education making you ever so settled.

1:19:01But now I think we can really do it. You know, we can really build an AI tutor that is as good as the best human AI tutors. And we can do it for everyone, not just the rich. And that will change the world. I really think this is the moment. You know, we have to wait for 10 years to get to this stage. But I think this AI way is going to really enable us to do this. Final one, on public market caps and stuff. I believe you probably, I don't know, ownership structures, which I've already should do. I believe you would probably be a billionaire technically. So well done. My question to you is, do you think about money and how does money and happiness correlate or not correlate fee?

1:19:41Yeah. And I've also spent a lot of time thinking about this question. The weird thing is, I wish I hadn't. I feel like it's not a productive. Am I happier now than that was when it was aggressive? And is it because of the money or is it because of the success or is it because I know myself better? And it's very hard to disentangle all the different factors that go into happiness. I would say though that there's different levels of wealth. And they actually did this study, I think, with post -exit founders. They asked him how much is enough? How much is enough? When do people switch their opinions?

1:20:16Okay, now this is enough. The answer they got was, you know what the answer was? $20 million. No, $100 million. $100 million. Jesus inflation is real. Whoa. So that's a long one. That was the answer of those people. It's kind of like when you stop, I guess, worrying about it, because it's so much. I mean, it's so much. Did you have a number when you saw this? No, I want this is a mission or a company. And I tweeted this recently. It's like, I think that the counterintuitive, intuitively, the founders that start with a purpose and a mission and are not focused too much on money and end up usually doing better.

1:20:56Maybe people don't give them credit, but what I do, because I'm in the same situation, I think Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates wanted to put a computer on the every desk, and then he realized, okay, well, how do I do this? And one way of doing it, or maybe the only way of doing it, is starting a company. They're not like, I'm gonna start a company to become rich. That's like, captive reversing. It's like, you have to think like, okay, what changed your own scene in the world? What do people want? How can I help other people? That's ultimately in an ideal capitalist environment that should drive value and I do believe that that that's you know Why these companies got started and you know mark Zuckerberg maybe you know connect the people What do you think was the biggest needle mover for your happiness?

1:21:36And because for me, there's like pay rent easy. I can live life like I kind of want to but I'm not loaded It's a kind of need to work, but I'm not loaded probably a couple of million There's the 10 -20, which is like, I'm pretty good. Adding another 80s, not gonna change much, actually. I still have a super nice house, and I'm good. And then there's the 100, I can take jets when I want to. I do believe I'm happier now than not by a lot. I was pretty happy in my 20s too, but a little bit. I think there's this sense of achievement, and it will never go away. Even if you're doing your collapses tomorrow, it's still a good thing.

1:22:13It's like, I tried. And it worked out for a while and maybe it goes away. But I would still have this sense of achievement. And another thing is when people just share their dual -lingual stories, or when I was in Venice a year ago or two years ago, and the bus is about to write. So I took the bus on the canal. And next to me was this woman, literally sitting next to me, this woman doing dual -lingual. And I was just looking at it and I was like, you know, if she knew, you know, I was sitting next to her. Did you say anything? No, I said nothing. I was just for 10 minutes ride. She was doing her dueling.

1:22:53And I saw like how she used it. And I was just like, this is amazing. Does money change marriage? Wow. I thought it was going to be the quick round. It is, I think the answer depends on your answer of the question is, does money change people? because if it changes people will probably change marriage. So I assume the answer is yes, but it depends on the people. Did it change in your case? A little bit. So we met before, you know, I was successful. In fact, my now wife at the time girlfriend, she, for the first couple years, she made more than me. So we kind of reversed that. And she knows me from when I wasn't very successful when I was just a dude.

1:23:36We've met some crazy ideas. I think it's different than if I had to date someone now because again, everybody, like everything starts with this co -founder of DualLinGO and then super successful everybody, well, everybody knows DualLinGO, my CEO, like my co -founder is obviously way more famous, but it's hard to remove that. So in fact, I wish you could go into it, like you could switch, you know, like you could go into incognita mode, like in the browser. I'm just going to put on glasses and I don't want to... In fact, people sometimes always ask you, what do you do? When I'm in a room where I know they don't know who I am, I sometimes give a wrong answer.

1:24:17I used to say like a Uber driver. Of course nobody really believes that or I say like I'm a software engineer at a tech company or I say I'm a patron of the arts which is not entirely untrue because I know how the conversations go when I tell the truth. There's like, next question is, how many language do you speak? Next question is, how did you start to align that? You know, why has it been so successful? Was it? And the next question is, if there are users, like, oh, I love your, you know, my streak is this long. And that's actually what, if there are actual users, it's much more interesting to me.

1:24:56A final final one I promise, but an important one. Everyone has said, including Warren Buffet, the most important thing in life is partner selection, who you choose to spend your life with. I spoke to everyone on your cap table, and they all said about the special relationship you and Louise have. I'm intrigued. We mentioned marriage there. Whether it's Louis or marriage, I don't mind really. What would be your biggest advice on partner selection? So for founders, I think it's a little easier. One thing is, have you worked previously with with this person. The key is worked, not hung out at the bar.

1:25:29I was like, have you worked with this person prior to starting this company? And Lucy and I, we had worked together for two years prior. So we kind of all the way knew how we work and what we were good at, what we're bad at, priorities. And we actually had this very early on. We had this, because I went from, he was my superior. He was my PhD advisor and I was his student into an equal relationship, but we're equal co -founders. I was like, can I trust this guy? What if it just fires me after a year? So, you know, I wrote down a little contract between the two of us. I still have a copy at home, where we outline exactly like, you know, this is how we're gonna make decisions.

1:26:08It's like this short. This is how we're gonna make decisions. This is, you know, Lewis's responsibility. This is Severance's responsibility, and we both sign it. And I think that avoid a lot of conflict. And the other thing that's interesting, I think a lot of the conflicts happen in the first two years. And then the biggest conflict. Probably what to build the product itself The work conflicts there and then also on hiring not hiring firing etc There were a bunch of conflicts as well And then I think we had it all worked out and it's amazing I only meet with Luis every other week and sometimes the meeting is last 10 minutes We could go into a meeting like exact team meeting and I have a pretty good language model of like what he's gonna say or how he's gonna no reactors or an idea.

1:26:51Without, because we had been working together for, you know, the first six, seven, eight years in the same room every day for 50, 60 hours a week. I know him better than probably any other person in my life and vice versa. Your wife biggest advice on partner selection where you're man -sickly? I would say, do you enjoy talking to this person? You enjoy talking to many people. Yeah, but I think it's like, I call it the Tuesday night test, which is like in five years time, will you be excited for just you and them to sit down and just talk? And there's very few people where five years time, Tuesday night, it's a cold February evening in Pittsburgh or London or wherever you are.

1:27:33If it's like hell yeah. Yeah, I think that's one thing. And I think then also like mutual support, you know, do they support you and what do you do? Or is there a competition? I think competition, you don't want to have competition in any of these religious trips. This has been one of the most wonderful wide -ranging discussions I've had. I'm so pleased we got a chance to. Thank you for being so open. You have been amazing. Alright. I mean, it shows like that where I remember why I love what I do so much. I love the natural and authentic conversation at the end there. If you want to watch the episode you can find it on YouTube by searching for 20VC.

1:28:09That's 20VC. But before we leave you today, I love seeing the team come together to make this show happen. What I don't love is trying to keep track of all the information, the data and the projects that we're working on across dozens of platforms, products and tools. That's why we use Coda, the all -in -one collaborative workspace that's helped 50 ,000 teams all over the world get on the same page, offering the flexibility of docs with the structure of spreadsheets, Coda facilitates deeper teamwork and quicker creativity, and their turnkey AI solution, the intelligence of Coda Brain, is a game changer.

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1:31:38It's going to be a lot of fun this week. We have a lot to talk about.