The CEO of Duolingo says that his business is “allergic” to toxic behavior – and “do not work to death”

In his article LinkedIn, the 47-year-old Guatemalan-American billionaire described five career tips for new recruits, his first advice being frank: “Don’t be an idiot,” he wrote. “Duolingo has an allergic reaction to toxic behavior, and our culture identifies it and quickly rejects it.”

The CEO of the linguistic learning platform stressed that new employees should avoid coming with “massive Egos” or being duplicit with colleagues. His comments arise as the toxicity of the workplace has become a main engine of employee turnover, with recent research by revelio labs shared by Mit Sloan Management Review showing that the culture of toxic companies is 10.4 times as a predictive of attrition as compensation.

Von Ahn’s second advice focused on proactivity, encouraging employees to solve problems rather than complaining about them. He cited the example of the Duolingo corporate blog. “At the beginning, we did not have a corporate blog. Two engineers managed this differently,” he said. “Engineer has: spent months complaining.” We don’t have a blog! What are you going to do on this subject? “Engineer B: came to me once and said to me:” I noticed that we did not have a blog, so I started one. ” “”

“If something bothers you, you usually have the freedom here to repair it,” added Von Ahn.

The third Council of the CEO was focused on hierarchy and balance between professional and private life. He told new hires to think in order: “What is best for the company’s mission? What is best for your team? What is best for you?” But it was clear on the limits: “It does not mean that you work to death. But people who focus on what is good for Duolingo’s mission tends to do better than people who are purely selfish.”

Important general skills

This approach reflects wider trends in the workplace, because 65.1% of employees report that high stress levels, almost 72% attributing this to unmanageable workloads, according to the toxic report of toxic trends in 2025 of the IHire.

Von Ahn’s remaining advice includes the regular use of the Duolingo application to understand the product and recognize that career success requires both luck and persistence. “You don’t need to be the brightest person. Just introduce yourself and continue until lucky you can,” he wrote.

The advice occurs while Duolingo has resisted the controversy on its AI-First strategy announced earlier this year. Von Ahn had to clarify his position after the counterpoup, declaring that the AI ​​would improve rather than replace the work of the employees.

The emphasis put by Von Ahn on culture and character on references align with the concentration of industry with emotional intelligence and general skills. A LinkedIn report in 2024 revealed an increase of 31% of the leaders of the CONSULT C highlighting the general skills of their profiles since 2018. Connectedly, Von AHN previously declared that he “prefers to be in sub-employment only to hire the bad person”, telling a incident where a CFO candidate had been rejected to be impatient with a driver.

For this story, Fortune Used a generative AI to help an initial project. An editor checked the accuracy of the information before the publication.