Duolingo CEO on owl's guilt-trip reminders: 'Passive-aggressive works' Paige Oamek Thu, November 12, 2026 at 2:16 PM EST 2 min read DUOL -2.96% AAPL -0.05% Explore stocks on Coinbase Trading disclosure Trading disclosure The above button links to Coinbase. Yahoo Finance is not a broker-dealer or investment adviser and does not offer securities or cryptocurrencies for sale or facilitate trading. Coinbase pays us for certain activity generated through this link. Prices displayed are informational.
Sometimes the face of a company is a CEO in a leather jacket. Sometimes it's a giant green owl with a grudge.
At Yahoo Finance Invest, Duolingo (DUOL) co-founder and CEO Luis von Ahn said he never expected the language learning app's mascot, Duo the owl, to become so popular.
For several years, the owl has been memed online. Duo recently crashed Apple's (AAPL) foldable iPhone Duo launch, giving away free apples. But more often, he can be found guilt-tripping you with phone notifications.
"Some of our notifications … are passive-aggressive because we have found that passive-aggressive works," von Ahn told Yahoo Finance on Thursday. "You know, parents all over the place have found this too."
Business Insider once called Duolingo "the world's meanest app," but in 2026, Duolingo pledged to dial back the "unhinged" marketing — if only slightly.
"The owl is beloved all over the world," von Ahn said. "I think that's one of the reasons why people keep coming back to Duolingo."
The language learning platform's stock is down roughly 8% year to date.
In the third quarter, Duolingo reported 64.9 million daily active users, 29% higher year over year. Paid subscribers grew 14% annually to 13.1 million.
Von Ahn told Yahoo Finance the company has also been able to cut back on costly AI spending mainly by switching from frontier models to open-weight models, reducing the cost of its AI video-call feature from about $0.30 per call to less than $0.01.
He added that Duolingo is shifting much of its other AI use, such as generating learning content, stories, and cartoons, to open-weight models as well.
"We're very happy with the cost reduction," von Ahn said. "We don't think we lost any kind of quality here. … The open-weight models are excellent."
