Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn took to LinkedIn on Monday to ship a direct message to the corporate’s 42 newly employed graduates: Be good, take initiative, and keep in mind that success doesn’t require sacrificing your well-being.
In his LinkedIn publish, the 47-year-old Guatemalan-American billionaire outlined 5 profession suggestions for brand spanking new hires, together with his first piece of recommendation being blunt: “Don’t be a jerk,” he wrote. “Duolingo has an allergic reaction to toxic behavior, and our culture quickly identifies and rejects it.”
The language-learning platform’s CEO emphasised that new workers ought to keep away from coming in with “massive egos” or being duplicitous with colleagues. His feedback come as office toxicity has emerged as a number one driver of worker turnover, with current analysis from Revelio Labs shared by MIT Sloan Administration Assessment displaying that poisonous company tradition is 10.4 instances as predictive of attrition as compensation.
Von Ahn’s second tip centered on proactivity, encouraging workers to unravel issues moderately than simply complain about them. He cited the instance of Duolingo’s firm weblog. “Early on, we didn’t have a company blog. Two engineers handled this differently,” he stated. “Engineer A: Spent months complaining to me. ‘We don’t have a blog! What are you going to do about it?’ Engineer B: Came to me once and said, ‘I noticed we don’t have a blog, so I started one.’”
“If something bothers you, you generally have the freedom here to fix it,” von Ahn added.
The CEO’s third piece of recommendation centered on prioritization and work-life stability. He informed new hires to assume so as: “What’s best for the company’s mission? What’s best for your team? What’s best for you?” However he was clear about boundaries: “This doesn’t mean work yourself to death. But people who focus on what’s good for Duolingo’s mission tend to do better than people who are purely selfish.”
Gentle abilities matter
This strategy displays broader office tendencies, as 65.1% of workers report experiencing excessive stress ranges, with practically 72% attributing this to unmanageable workloads, based on iHire’s 2025 Poisonous Office Tendencies Report.
Von Ahn’s remaining suggestions included utilizing the Duolingo app often to know the product and recognizing that profession success requires each luck and persistence. “You don’t have to be the most brilliant person. You just have to show up and keep going until luck finds you,” he wrote.
The recommendation comes as Duolingo has weathered controversy over its AI-first technique introduced earlier this yr. Von Ahn needed to make clear his place after backlash, stating that AI would improve moderately than exchange worker work.
Von Ahn’s emphasis on tradition and character over credentials aligns with rising trade concentrate on emotional intelligence and comfortable abilities. A 2024 LinkedIn report discovered a 31% improve in C-suite leaders highlighting comfortable abilities on their profiles since 2018. Relatedly, von Ahn beforehand stated he would “rather be understaffed than hire the wrong person,” recounting an incident the place a CFO candidate was rejected for being impolite to a driver.
For this story, Fortune used generative AI to assist with an preliminary draft. An editor verified the accuracy of the knowledge earlier than publishing.
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