Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Duolingo reaches $6.5B valuation on day of IPO

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 352 posts

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

#131

Post by yobbo »

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…

> won't achieve any sort of fluency in your target language from taking a course in it

For a randomly picked person, yes, but it doesn't matter to apps that specifically cater to motivated language learners. It's like saying "new training shoes will not make a random person run better or become healthier".

Obviously talent and motivation are mandatory.

However, any stock-market valuation right now is divorced from the success potential of the business. That's a separate issue.

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

#132

Post by csa »

ben_w wrote: post #101
least wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's fair, though I think in the case of wanting to be able to be a tourist in a place with a foreign language, you'd be better suited using phrasebooks and a translation app. Duolingo isn't going to really prepare you to have those kinds of conversations and isn't really a reference book, so being able to look up the few phrases you need to get around isn't practical. It's designed to teach you the language in a s…

> قابلی پلاؤ I’ve spent most of the last year struggling to learn the Arabic alphabet with Duolingo, yet FWIW my guess for what sort of dish Kabuli Pilau might be was fairly close. I wonder if anyone outside the UK knows, or can guess, what sort of dish a “spotted dick” or a “toad in the hole” is?

American here:

1. I have had some incredible Kabuli pilau. I hope everyone gets the chance to have some. There are quite a few restaurants in the Bay Area that serve it, but homemade is best in my experience.

2. Spotted dick is a cake (steamed?) with currants… at least the stuff I had. Delicious.

3. No idea about toad in the hole. It better be good with that name.

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

#133

Post by yobbo »

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?

> How is a $6.5B valuation justified?

The hope is to make a locked-in user base and a captive audience.

They are probably hoping to create various sorts of "attachments" between users and their "achievements" to drip revenue from users through either premium accounts or ads.

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

#134

Post by ZephyrBlu »

shapefrog wrote: post #118
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 This is the most retarded silicon valley vc tech bubble comment I have ever. There are 11million companies in the US, many will fail making money let alone being 'strong' companies that drop $10 mil a year. If the numbers are so great and they have so much money at hand why are the people who run the business selling some of their share? Possibly due to high market valuations…

This is a liquidity event. Why are you surprised that people are selling?

Even if the IPO didn't pop as much people would still probably be selling because their equity has likely been illiquid for years, especially if they were a founder, early investor or early employee.

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

#135

Post by captn3m0 »

selectodude wrote: post #38
paxys wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Average time to IPO for tech companies is 7-8 years, so ten years without a profit for a VC-backed company is not at all unusual. Palantir is coming up on 20.

>Palantir is coming up on 20. Palantir is a dumb shitty company that will file for bankruptcy. Unfortunately the VCs have already dumped it on to the dopes on Wall Street bets.

https://www.macroaxis.com/invest/ratio/PLTR/Probability-Of-B... says

Current Palantir Technologies Probability Of Bankruptcy = 24%

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

#136

Post by dubeye »

gambiting wrote: post #97
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…

I've learnt both English and German at school, for pretty much equal amounts of time - about 12 years each. And well, I can speak fluent English, but barely any German, despite usually having at least ~2 hours of lessons a week, plenty of homework, oral exercises..... For me, it has everything to do with actually using the languge in practice. English was and is everywhere - it's much easier to practice when all your…

I find it fun to learn language on Duolingo as a kind of game. But unless I have a need to regularly use the learning, I know for sure it won't stick.

And I'm afraid that last 0.1% of aquisition is pretty much impossible to obtain deliberately unless you abandon your native language. Even your English, whilst technicaly good, has a couple of flags.

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

#137

Post by k__ »

kouteiheika wrote: post #83
vncecartersknee wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's cool I'd love to hear more about it, I've actually been thinking about ways that a language app could work better. Seems like all the current research is that "immersion" in the target language is critical, an app that just played me conversations, had me read text, etc and 'creatively' formulate responses, not just simply fill in the missing word, obviously in increasing difficulty would be ideal.

> Seems like all the current research is that "immersion" in the target language is critical This, a hundred times this. Immersion is not only effective in getting you used to the language, but also really helps you solidify what you've learned, and is extremely motivating. Virtually all of the people that I know in the Japanese learning community who learned the language really fast heavily immersed in a lot of cont…

I had a somewhat similar idea once.

You share Twitter accounts with a service, and it would use the tweets of that account to generate a language course.

I was hoping that this would lead to learning something that I could use right away.

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

#138

Post by LAC-Tech »

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…

> Speaking and listening are related skills yet speaking is much harder than listening

Listening is much harder for me. I find it easy to mimic/parrot sounds, but not distinguish them when listening.

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

#139

Post by kelnos »

zarzavat wrote: post #117
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…

> Speaking and listening are related skills yet speaking is much harder than listening, and both are much harder than reading (for the vast majority of languages). In my opinion it's the other way around. Reading is easiest in any alphabetic language. Both intrinsically and to teach. Reading has no time limit so you can make your way through text at whatever pace you want. Reading instruction is strongly amenable to…

The parent did claim that reading is easiest (you've even quoted that), so I don't think you're disagreeing there.

I do agree with the parent that listening is easier than speaking. When you're speaking, you have to know the right words, and know what order to put them in. Sure, there's some leeway: if you put words in the wrong order, or incorrectly conjugate a verb, or forget some types of words, your meaning will probably still go through. But if you forget other types of words, you just can't be understood. And sometimes conjugating a verb incorrectly does completely change the meaning of your sentence, which can confuse the listener.

I agree that the things you mention -- accents, pace, content -- are somewhat out of your control. But you can always ask the speaker to speak slower, and that will often lessen the impact of the accent on your ability to understand. The content problem is still there, just as it is with speaking, but I've found that I can usually understand more words than I can think of to speak on my own. And often you can get the meaning based on context even if you don't understand a word here or there.

I'm just a single data point, but... I took Spanish way back in primary school, for 5 years. I'm terrible at speaking it nowadays (over 20 years later). When I hear others speak Spanish, however, I can usually understand things that I'd never be able to speak on my own, even if I had all the time in the world to think about it.

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

#140

Post by cpursley »

eythian wrote: post #130
zarzavat wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Speaking and listening are related skills yet speaking is much harder than listening, and both are much harder than reading (for the vast majority of languages). In my opinion it's the other way around. Reading is easiest in any alphabetic language. Both intrinsically and to teach. Reading has no time limit so you can make your way through text at whatever pace you want. Reading instruction is strongly amenable to…

As someone learning a second language through classes, immersion, and - when I remember - apps, I don't really agree. Certainly early on speaking is easy because you have a handful of words and know how to put them together, and listening is very hard because you can barely make out the sounds. However, in my experience and I've noticed this in others too, after a while you get better and better at listening and it q…

Yes, this right here! Not being able to reply to something you understand because you can't express yourself quite yet (but almost)...
Post reply on HN