
Understanding Duolingo’s quiet $10M raise - prostoalex
https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/27/understanding-duolingos-quiet-10m-raise/
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johntiger1
Duolingo recently introduced a dark pattern where ads are shown after
completing every exercise. Before, we were given the option to not see them
(or see them for some "gems"). Evaluating Duolingo, I find it is not the most
effective language learning app anyways, instead teaching pattern matching for
some of the lesser popular languages like Chinese

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michaelcampbell
If I may ask, what do you find more effective? I've dabbled with Duolingo
before and am not a paid user, but it seemed to kind of work for me. But open
to alternatives (modulo, "move to the country where <x> is the native tongue"
type stuff.)

~~~
tdrp
I completed Spanish, Portuguese, and Chinese on Duolingo (as in level 5/gold
completed) and feel like I know the equivalent of _at best_ a 3-month one-
hour-a-week type entry level class.

The stuff that works better for me are actually online classes (for example
Coursera has 6-part HSK Mandarin classes) since they are well structured, they
have lots of video with natives speaking, and they deal with relatively useful
topics. Duolingo taught me to say things like "the book was eaten by the
yellow horse" before I could even ask someone how old they were.

That said, I feel like they've been going in the right direction by adding
things like duolingo stories. If they expand those and add more interactive
stuff it could get more interesting.

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untoreh
My experience with russian or swedish is that the comments give a lot more
insight on many excercises and what it is they are trying to teach and the
grammar part of things. If you just chug along without taking the time to
browse around then very little remains with you. I am not sure this is a
compliment to Duolingo though as I am mostly praising the usefulness if their
users...

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ConsiderCrying
Huh, I had no idea Duolingo was this successful. Anybody with insight into
General Atlantic that could speculate on what changes they could bring? I've
read their Wiki page but it's pretty barren, although they seem to be enacting
some curious initiatives like: "In 2018 General Atlantic invested in UK
investment start-up Greensill in an attempt to challenge traditional lending
systems"

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chris11
I knew they were successful, but I didn't know they were valued at 1.5
billion.

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shiningdays
I can see this.

I moved abroad in 2018 to a non-english speaking country and just about
everyone I met had Duolingo on their phone. You'd be surprised at how many
would cough up for a Premium membership just to keep their streak from
breaking and making the cute green owl cry.

That said, apparently their biggest market is actually people trying to learn
English, which... checks out. In our modern times, english is the lingua
franca. There's a bottomless pit of people who want or need to learn it.

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danielscrubs
It's weird, because it's not very good at understanding the need of the users.
If you are Chinese and want to learn English, you have to show the contrast
between the grammar-points from a Chinese perspective in an meaningful way.

It really feels like: how can I, as an english developer, teach language?
Instead of: -How can I, as an elite teacher, create an app to teach language?

Now that I think about it... is there any teachers with SF-developer-salary?
Is there any language-teachers that talk about being the 10x teacher?

Duolingo has done some cool stuff with AI:
[http://sharedtask.duolingo.com/](http://sharedtask.duolingo.com/) they just
don't seem to use it?

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bravura
What's weird about this round is that they gave away a board seat to a new
outside investor, who has ownership of under < 1% of the company.

Is this common? I thought board seats were prized, and only given in deals
where the investor is capitalizing the company and owning something like 20%
post-money.

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cbowal
The new seat is an "observer" seat which doesn't have a vote.

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gumby
I have never understood the value of an observer seat as you get exposure and
concomitant liability without the ability to actually vote on something. Plus
observers are not included in the usual D&O package.

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RandomBacon
Hopefully they'll be able to afford some more support staff.

I sent them an email asking for a simple feature request, and they never even
acknowledged receiving it. A simple, "We will pass this along to the
appropriate team to consider" would be sufficient.

Otherwise great app! (I am a paying user.)

Edit: If I'm doing something wrong, please let me know. Downvotes are fine,
but it doesn't let me know how to improve.

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cmrx64
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

I'm not one of your downvoters, but since you asked for feedback, I will try
and inhabit the mind of one: a complaint about duolingo's non-response to your
email isn't terribly interesting. (And neither is a comment replying saying
that your complaint isn't very interesting, sorry everyone who sees this
before it disappears from the front page)

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RandomBacon
Fair point, thank you.

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enahs-sf
I wonder who got liquidity here. C suite? Rank and file employees? Early team
members?

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TrainedMonkey
> In this case, an existing investor in Duolingo sold a small portion of their
> existing stake to allow General Atlantic to have a bigger stake in the
> company.

Looks like it was an earlier investor.

