Duolingo has fundamentally changed the landscape of self-guided education, starting with language learning. It is now a $9B publicly traded company in a space where everyone thought you could never build a large and exciting company. We’re joined by Duolingo founder and CEO, Luis von Ahn. Luis dives into how learning English was transformative in his personal trajectory and opportunities in his life, inspiring him to create the most successful EdTech product of all time. A few topics in this episode:

• How Duolingo became a leader in the gamification and mobile-first movements in the early 2010s
• How the company balances rigorous experimentation with gut instinct to build an app with customer experience at its core
• The backstory of Duolingo’s “unhinged, yet wholesome” green owl mascot trending on your TikTok feed

Sponsors:

• Vanta

We sit down with Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue to understand the current state of the open source AI ecosystem. Hugging Face is the leading platform to host and collaborate on AI models, datasets, and applications. They also have a compute offering for AI builders to train their models directly on the platform. Clem has a contrarian take on the future: there will not be just a few major foundation model companies with everyone using their APIs. But rather, that thousands of companies will have their own specialized AI models built in-house for their particular use case. It's obviously a very dynamic landscape and we'll have to see how it shakes out, but Clem has a pretty great viewpoint to see it all, working with their 5 million registered Hugging Face users!

Links:

• Hugging Face
• Hugging Face's Series D valuing the company at $4.5 billion

Sponsors:

• Vanta

We sit down with legendary quarterback Joe Montana to discuss his transition from one of the greatest athletes of all time to… one of the great venture investors today. Joe shares some of the lessons that he learned winning Super Bowls with the 49ers that he applies to his investing career at Liquid 2 Ventures. Joe also goes into their firm’s strategy and performance, finding and investing in dozens of unicorn startups at the seed and pre-seed stage.

This interview was recorded live at Modern Treasury’s Transfer conference in May 2024.

Acquired’s arena show at Chase Center in San Francisco is just a few weeks away! We hope you can join us. acquired.fm/sf

Sponsors:

• Vanta