"Welcome to Stanford, Luis. >> Speaker 2: Thank you for having me. >> Speaker 1: We're so excited to have you here for the Last View from [LAUGH] the Top. >> Speaker 2: Some of my executive team is jus..."

"that we want to get through, but before we go any further, do you mind providing a verification code for us? >> [LAUGH] >> Speaker 2: Man. >> [LAUGH] >> Can I tell you that it's really, really annoyin..."

"your environment shape that? >> Speaker 2: Well, I learned how to code because of necessity. I was 8 years old, and I wanted a Nintendo, and my mother bought me a computer instead, and so, I had to fi..."

"wanted to be in my life. >> Speaker 1: Well, I want to touch on that because you're right, you became a professor at Carnegie Mellon, but you tinkered a little bit. >> [LAUGH] >> But you were tinkerin..."

"reward from that, yeah. >> Speaker 1: And part of those early papers that you were studying and your thesis was this whole idea of human computation. And you had this interesting insight that gamifica..."

"computers could not solve. So, for example, again, another problem that back then was unsolvable by computers, giving it an image and telling it, asking the computer what's in the image, that was a ve..."

"helped with all kinds of things with image search. >> Speaker 1: Well, Luis, this is just one of the various creations you had at that time. And eventually, you also had tenure at Carnegie Mellon. You..."

">> Speaker 1: Well, I think we're glad that PhD thesis became a lot more. >> Speaker 2: It did, he finished his PhD thesis after we started Duolingo. He told himself that he was going to, this is much..."

"One of the ways in which I knew he was going to treat me fairly was very early on, this is before anything had started. Now, bear in mind, I was a professor and he was a student, I was his supervisor,..."

">> Speaker 2: [LAUGH] >> Speaker 2: Well, they were wrong. >> Speaker 1: They were wrong and I'm happy about that. We stuck with it, but really the main belief at the time was that education was not a..."

">> Daily, yeah. >> Speaker 2: You guys are worth over $14 billion, and you have- >> Speaker 1: You got to check the stock. >> Speaker 2: I do need to check the stock price, that's the latest numbers t..."

">> Speaker 2: Sure. >> Speaker 1: So we learned that. Animation just beautiful animation, the app really helps in mood metrics. And then the other thing is our notifications are very quirky, we've spe..."

">> Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't know if we want the owl vaping >> Speaker 2: [LAUGH]. >> Speaker 1: It'd be funny, but no, not going to do it. >> Speaker 1: [LAUGH]. >> Speaker 2: We'll definitely talk ab..."

"to figure out how to make money, and it was this amazing thing, I had never seen anything like this, nobody in the company wanted to make money. We had hired a bunch of people who were like communists..."

"And with that, you're redefining language proficiency. Can you tell us what that means and what it takes to basically build a new universal standard? >> Speaker 1: Yeah, so we have this test called th..."

"But we made a test that was online and we started trying to compete with the TOEFL. The people at the TOEFL laughed at us at first because they're like, what are you trying to do? It turned out that i..."

"We just put the score in the app. So if you use the app from not for every language, for a lot of the languages, you get the score right next to it. What we want, particularly for English, is that thi..."

"about what subjects to teach. There's a few things that we need them to do. First of all, we want very large demand, so like hundreds of millions of people need to be able to learn it. There's a reaso..."

"So that's one thing. Another one is we want it to be good for the world. So turns out a lot of people want to learn like Pokemon cards. >> [LAUGH] >> We're not going to do that. So we want it to be go..."

"a few years ago? >> Speaker 1: Okay, AI, completely transformative, at least for our business. In particular for language learning. I mean, it's AI, the big advance in AI over the last couple of years..."

"That's what people are going to learn. It turns out we can generate content really fast, really high quality and iterate a lot on it with AI. So all our new subjects, the content is generated now with..."

">> Speaker 1: I don't think so, I mean, for example, last week, when I sent my email to the whole company, there were negative reactions. Not inside the company, but outside there were negative reacti..."

"All this stuff that, for example, a good example is animators. Animators spend most of the time just making sure that the movement is just precise. That's going to be done all by computers. And then t..."

"I know we're not laying off anybody. >> [LAUGH] >> Speaker 2: And a lot of maintaining that kind of culture integrity that you're talking about really starts at the top with you. So I want to make sur..."

"So I've learned not to do that, I've learned to delegate. And I think 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 philo..."

">> [LAUGH] >> Nor do I get energy from them. >> [LAUGH] >> Speaker 1: So they have all the freedom in the world, but our poor Head of Product- >> [LAUGH] >> Does not have a lot of freedom. >> [LAUGH] ..."

"Obviously, we try to really bring people who are very good at whatever their function is. So if they're engineers, we try to look for really good engineers. That's kind of table skates like, sure, you..."

"So we did that. What that does is it makes it so that all the notifications that you get on the phone look like they're coming from the masco, because every notification has the app icon in it. So it ..."

"But after five days, we stop, because we're nice. >> [LAUGH] >> But after five days, it occurred to me, I wasn't really trying to come up with anything to get people to come back. It occurred to me th..."

"you to come back. And then also, the Internet came up with the fact that then the owl's willing to go to anything to get you to come back, including kidnapping your family. And so all these memes that..."

">> Speaker 1: [LAUGH] >> Speaker 1: But anyways, that's kind of our first thing. We leaned into that, and then we just started leaning in more and more. And every time we leaned in more towards the me..."

"I was wrong. >> [LAUGH] >> Speaker 1: I was wrong, I was wrong. But yeah, that's kind of what happened. And over time, we really embraced it. >> Speaker 2: And I think you leaning in, it just speaks t..."

"Luis, we have one last question for you before we open up to audience Q&A, and so we're asking all of our guests. So our theme for this year is leaving your mark. So, Luis, how do you want to be remem..."

"there's no Internet, there's no power, a lot of time that wastes a lot of precious learning time. And then the ability to download lessons and do them offline, that's behind a paywall. So is there any..."

"and stuff like that. By the way, it is not the case anymore that offline lessons are behind the paywall. Everybody gets access to offline lessons now, so that has changed and we're working quite a bit..."

"to get gamification right. >> Speaker 1: I don't know exactly how that helped, but you are right that a lot of people ask, what is it that we do well? I think the main thing we do well is motivation. ..."

"because I thought that making money was evil. >> Speaker 6: Hi, I'm Philip, I'm a second year in the MBA program. You started out your career back in the stone age of the Internet, getting humans to c..."

"basically return on investment. Not that many people are learning them compared to other languages. I mean, if you actually look at what languages people are learning on Duolingo, 50% of the people on..."