Duolingo CEO says he doesn't worry about recession: ‘We want this to be a 100-year company’
As the possibility of a recession continues to weigh on tech stocks, language-learning website and mobile app Duolingo (DUOL) is shrugging off near-term volatility and focusing on future growth.
Duolingo shares jumped by about 30% on May 12 after the Pittsburgh-based company reported first-quarter earnings, and the stock has fluctuated as a sell-off driven by steep losses in tech stocks rocked the market in recent weeks.
“Our stock has fared pretty well, considering everything that's been going on in the market, and ultimately, we're very long-term focused,” Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn told Yahoo Finance (video above). “With Duolingo, we really want to develop the best education in the world and make it universally available, and we just want this to be a 100-year company. And there's going to be some temporary chop in the market, but that's been fine.”
In its first-quarter results, Duolingo posted strong earnings and increased its full-year guidance for bookings, revenue, and EBITDA.
“We basically had records in all of our metrics," von Ahn said. "Our daily active users increased 31% to 12.5 million. We got to almost 50 million monthly active users. Our bookings increased 55% year over year.”
'Our audience is extremely wide'
With the downward pressure on tech and the education sector, von Ahn emphasized two things that set Duolingo apart from other companies.
"I think the biggest difference is just our audience — our audience is extremely wide," he explained. "We have users in every single age range, from age 7 to 100. We have users in every single country. So things like a lower number of people going to college or stuff like that just does not affect us because our user base is so wide."
Product development is the company's other key differentiator, according to von Ahn.
“We really, really spend most of our efforts on making our products better, as opposed to on marketing or other things like that," he said. "And I think in the long term, that's just a better strategy. That's just our own philosophy.”
Adding features is part of the startup's plan to entice more users to its paid subscription. While a majority of users still use the free version of the app, “we just get better and better at converting our free users into paying subscribers by basically adding more features to the premium subscription,” von Ahn stated.
The CEO indicated he was confident that Duolingo can continue to convert users and reach profitability despite inflationary headwinds.
Edwin is a producer for Yahoo Finance. You can follow him on Twitter @Edwin__Roman.
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