Lenny Rachitsky: uncertainty

Transcript context

…That's right. That's my claim to fame. Great. That's a large growth trajectory. So one thing I wanted to ask broadly is it feels like B to C subscription apps never work. They never last. There's so few success stories of consumer subscription apps. There's Duolingo there, Calm maybe, but I don't know, it feels like it's slowing down, Headspace, Grammarly. And there's a few that are okay, but most die. I 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 believed that we were going to make it, not surprisingly. Even though we had this amazing team, et cetera, now it looks almost obvious, it's like B to C language learning just seems so niche. And plus education, there's no money in education. It's been stuck for so long. And what I kept hearing, "You guys, did you hear about Rosetta Stone? This solution already exists." So I think that there are a couple of things that really made Duolingo's success, which are very hard to replicate. Number one, an obsession for the mission. That sounds cliche. I think a lot of founders and startup 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 socioeconomic zone are very diminished. More specifically, you can double or triple your income potential by learning English in a developing market like Latin America. And 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. So 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, ed tech founders, and I am very biased probably because of this experience. I will say that I had one of those, what's it called, the experiment where 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. And then they realized that-…

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