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Duolingo reaches $6.5B valuation on day of IPO

reuters.com

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Re: Duolingo reaches $6.5B valuation on day of IPO

#51

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

paxys wrote: post #21
poorjohnmacafee wrote: post #3

Quick look at financials, they lost $25M in trailing 12 months, lost $14M in the previous year, lost $10M in the year before. How is Duolingo supposed to become profitable? How is a $6.5B valuation justified?

Why is this always the comment whenever any startup or IPO is discussed on this site? Every company at this stage loses money. It would be stupid to chase profits over user or revenue growth. They have 40 million monthly active users. Registrations grew 67% YoY. Their revenue doubled in a single quarter. Expenses are mostly stock comp. They have nearly $200M cash on hand. The numbers are all solid.

While I agree with you that focusing on profitability for valuation at this stage doesn't make much sense, I still don't understand how a 6.5 billion valuation is ever something they can live up to. That amount is 40 times their revenue for 2020, and even for a fast growing stock that's a huge multiple, especially for a 10 year old company.

Re: Duolingo reaches $6.5B valuation on day of IPO

#52

Post by bawolff »

least wrote: post #46

I was a cryptologic linguist for the army and went through a 16 month course of 6-7 hours of classroom instruction per day M-F, native speaking instructors, tons of immersion, and a couple hours of homework each night and left still feeling like I hardly knew the language that I was supposed to be interpreting. Unless your major in college is a specific language, you probably won't achieve any sort of fluency in your…

People learn languages for a variety of purposes. Some people just want to know enough to be able to ask where the bathroom is and read a menu at a resturant.

Re: Duolingo reaches $6.5B valuation on day of IPO

#53

Post by bawolff »

wyxuan wrote: post #41
Areading314 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't agree more. I made some progress on Japanese only to find that when I spoke it was completely incomprehensible to a native speaker. I think speech/pronunciation correction is still an unsolved problem.

I've done duolingo for 300+ days and can tell you that Japanese and Arabic are uniquely bad/hard to teach

If your native language is english, surely romance languages are going to be easier than something like japanese

Re: Duolingo reaches $6.5B valuation on day of IPO

#54

Post by this_is_not_you »

vncecartersknee wrote: post #4

Honestly from using duolingo pretty heavily for a couple of years, attending language classes and doing my own individual study I've found duolingo pretty useless. It's "fun" and gives one the sense of progress without really accomplishing much.

I wouldn't call it "pretty useless". I think it has two distinct places in a language learning process.

1) They make learning a new language very accessible and fun to get started. Books and courses do not have such a low level of entry. 2) It's good for learning new words in a context. Memrise for example often just gives you a single word and translation. But I think it's much more effective to then put words into sentences.

That said, if you really want to learn a language past the "I can manage for a few days as a tourist" you need to add other methods to it. Read books, listen to audio content, watch TV, have lessons (speak the language!), study grammar etc.

Then not everybody is alike. So try different methods. See what works for you. Some might have more success with Duolingo, some will have less.

Re: Duolingo reaches $6.5B valuation on day of IPO

#56

Post by gokhan »

vncecartersknee wrote: post #4

Honestly from using duolingo pretty heavily for a couple of years, attending language classes and doing my own individual study I've found duolingo pretty useless. It's "fun" and gives one the sense of progress without really accomplishing much.

For Duolingo, you might mix it with other materials for a much better experience. I told our kids' experience learning foreign languages here [1]. My wife used the same technique to learn some French, Duolingo reinforced with audio and visual materials, songs with lyrics, regular learning books, podcasts etc.

Duolingo is used daily in our house and we're paying for not seeing ads.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25408576

Re: Duolingo reaches $6.5B valuation on day of IPO

#57

Post by bawolff »

urda wrote: post #48
paxys wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is this always the comment whenever any startup or IPO is discussed on this site? Every company at this stage loses money. It would be stupid to chase profits over user or revenue growth. They have 40 million monthly active users. Registrations grew 67% YoY. Their revenue doubled in a single quarter. Expenses are mostly stock comp. They have nearly $200M cash on hand. The numbers are all solid.

> Every company at this stage loses money. ... why are companies still getting a pass with this 10 years in? No, this isn't an acceptable excuse here.

Because investors are interested in making money in the end, not some arbitrary metric over if a company is behaving as they should.

Whether or not this company makes sense, there are plenty of companies that have been losing money at this stage and ended up working out. (Plenty that didn't too)

Re: Duolingo reaches $6.5B valuation on day of IPO

#58

Post by N00bN00b »

hardwaregeek wrote: post #45
vncecartersknee wrote: post #4

Honestly from using duolingo pretty heavily for a couple of years, attending language classes and doing my own individual study I've found duolingo pretty useless. It's "fun" and gives one the sense of progress without really accomplishing much.

The problem is that language learning is inherently about putting your brain in tricky, slightly painful situations. You have to decipher confusing sentences, handle unfamiliar words and wrestle your brain into thinking in a different language. You can't really make a fun game that does this. Therefore Duolingo makes a game that focuses on translating the foreign language to your native one. That's great for starting…

>The problem is that language learning is inherently about putting your brain in tricky, slightly painful situations.

I think that's a really good description of learning in general.

Re: Duolingo reaches $6.5B valuation on day of IPO

#59

Post by devin »

gokhan wrote: post #56
vncecartersknee wrote: post #4

Honestly from using duolingo pretty heavily for a couple of years, attending language classes and doing my own individual study I've found duolingo pretty useless. It's "fun" and gives one the sense of progress without really accomplishing much.

For Duolingo, you might mix it with other materials for a much better experience. I told our kids' experience learning foreign languages here [1]. My wife used the same technique to learn some French, Duolingo reinforced with audio and visual materials, songs with lyrics, regular learning books, podcasts etc. Duolingo is used daily in our house and we're paying for not seeing ads. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/ite…

This proves the OP's point. Duolingo is trash if you aspire to fluency. It's only useful in fluency as an additive to a robust training program. You don't get fluent by following Duolingo alone.
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