Transcript

You know when you're hiring somebody is because you have a hole in the organization. We have this rule that is better to have a hole than an *******. We don't do this for every single role, but. When we were looking for a chief financial officer for a CFO, there was one candidate that passed all the interviews, had an amazing resume. This was very competent person. We had a driver, picked them up and that driver is actually a driver that usually drives for us. That was actually part of the interview. I mean the driver, you know, we asked the driver were they nice to you? And it turned out this particular person was really mean to the driver and we did not hire them. You know, we do not like the people that treat us nicely, but treat people that they perceive. Be younger them not nicely. That's not good. First of all, it's, it's really not easy because you cannot have to start from scratch. My advice in general for doing something new, which was advice that was given to me and we really do do it here at Duolingo, whenever you're trying to get it into something new, the first thing you should do is try to talk to some number of people. You know, we try to talk to 10 to 20 people that know as much as as possible about the subject. You learn a lot by doing that. This is by the way, how we got to our monetization. We must have talked to almost. Every subscription company and we just try to ask them a lot of questions and it is surprising how much they're willing to tell you. When you're designing a product, a lot of startup advice is to build an MVP, minimum viable product. Like build a build a ****** thing first and let's see if it works. I don't think that works anymore and I don't know if it ever did. I think you have to put your best foot forward when you put it in front of users. So here inside the company, we've kind of banned the term MVP. And God, I hate it when you know, there's all this startup advice about like just just do quick and dirty, just like now that I don't think that works. I don't think people understand the cost of toxic employees. Is really expensive and I think you know as much as you can, you should not have them. It's easy with a toxic employee that is also not a high performer because you're like, well, this is a low performer and toxic. You can. But when it becomes hard as the high performing toxic employee. My God, they're very hard to for you to make up your mind because you always think you need them because they're so smart. But the reality is you don't need them. There are smart and nice people.