Duolingo’s CEO says his role went from being a ‘micromanager’ to ‘mascot’ as the company grew

Duolingo’s CEO, Luis von Ahn, said that his leadership style changed as the language learning app grew from a couple of dozen staffers to over 800 employees.

“If you’re starting a company, you should be a micromanager up until about employee 30,” von Ahn said in a talk at Stanford University published last week. “I took it too far, I went to about 50.”

Von Ahn, who cofounded Duolingo in 2011, added that he no longer leads this way — not because he doesn’t want to, but because it’s impossible to micromanage that many people.

“At this point, I also have learned that most of my job is culture carrier, mascot, and just making some of the kind of tough philosophical decisions,” von Ahn said.

The CEO said that he learned to let go of tasks that he isn’t good at or that he doesn’t enjoy.

“Two of my executive team are sitting here — head of people and head of finance. I am neither good at those things nor do I get energy from them, so they have all the freedom in the world,” he said. “But our poor head of product does not have a lot of freedom.”

The edtech company has become an investor darling. It hit over 46 million daily active users this year, and its stock is up 205% in the past year. Duolingo has expanded its offerings from languages to math, music, and recently, chess.

Duolingo did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Different take on ‘founder mode’

The Duolingo CEO’s approach differs from some top tech bosses’ leadership styles. Jensen Huang, for one, is known for having up to 60 direct reports, and Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky, reorganized the company post-pandemic to swap out a divisional structure for one that let him have input in many more decisions.

Chesky’s management style became etched in Silicon Valley zeitgeist last year when Paul Graham, a writer and founding partner of the startup accelerator Y Combinator, published an essay titled “Founder Mode” about Chesky’s argument that conventional advice on scaling up a startup is broken.

At a Y Combinator event mentioned in the essay, the Airbnb exec said, as he has before, that investors and outside managers just don’t have the insights that founders do. He said that splitting a company into organizational tiers — isolating founders from anyone but their direct reports — often kills the business.

Duolingo’s von Ahn, too, has said that he is in founder mode — but he sees it a little differently.

In an interview with The Verge last year, he said that while he has a “view of everything” at the company, other executives, such as the vice president of product management and chief design officer, also have that view.

He added that at Duolingo, data calls the shots more than he or other execs.

“If we run an A/B test and the metrics say something, my opinion doesn’t matter all that much unless it’s something that we think is really like a dark pattern or something,” he said at the time.

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