Duolingo CEO Luis Von Ahn said that his leadership style had changed when the language learning application went from a few dozen to more than 800 employees.
“If you create a business, you should be a microometer until employees 30,” said Von Ahn in a conference at Stanford University published last week. “I went too far, I went to about 50 years.”
Von Ahn, who co -founded Duolingo in 2011, added that he does not lead this way anymore – not because he does not want, but because it is impossible to microchip only many people.
“At this stage, I also learned that most of my work is a culture, mascot carrier and who just takes part of the kind of difficult philosophical decisions,” said Von Ahn.
The CEO said that he had learned to abandon the tasks in which he was not good or that he does not like.
“Two of my management team are seated here-responsible for people and chief of finance. I am neither good in these things nor that I have no energy, so they have all the freedom in the world,” he said. “But our poor product manager does not have much freedom.”
Edtech has become an investor darling. It has reached more than 46 million daily active users this year, and its stock has increased by 205% in the past year. Duolingo has widened its offers from languages to mathematics, music and recently, chess.
Duolingo did not immediately respond to a request for comments.
Difference take “Fourmer mode”
Duolingo’s CEO’s approach differs from leadership styles of certain high patterns of technology. Jensen Huang, for his part, is known to have up to 60 direct reports, and the CEO of Airbnb, Brian Chesky, has reorganized the post-paymic company to exchange a divisional structure for the one that allowed him to make the contribution in many other decisions.
Chesky’s management style has become engraved in Silicon Valley Zeitgeist last year when Paul GrahamA writer and founding partner of the Startup Y Combinator accelerator, published a test entitled “Founding fashion” on the Chesky argument according to which conventional advice on the scaling of a startup are broken.
During a combining event mentioned in the test, said the Airbnb executive, As he has already donethat investors and external managers simply do not have the ideas that the founders do. He said that the division of an organizational level company – insulating the founders of anyone except their direct reports – often kills the company.
The Von Ahn of Duolingo also said that he was in founding mode – but he sees it a little differently.
In an interview with The Verge last year, he said that even if he had a “view of everything” in the company, other managers, such as the vice-president of product management and the head of the design, also have this point of view.
He added that in Duolingo, the data calls more than him or other leaders.
“If we perform an A / B test and the metrics say something, my opinion does not matter as much unless it is something that we think is really as a dark pattern or something,” he said at the time.
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