Earlier this week, Duolingo published a culture handbook that I suspect will soon take its place among the legends of tech lore. Their handbook features five guiding principles, which are:
Take the Long View: If it helps in the short-term but hurts Duolingo in the long-term, it’s not right.
Raise the Bar: To change how the world learns, we must do world-class work.
Ship It!: For a good idea to become reality, we need to push experiments with a sense of urgency. So go, go, go!
Show Don’t Tell: We use clear, concise communication that is grounded in data and real impact.
Make It Fun: We bring a sense of humor, joy, and imagination to everything we do.
The guide then invites the reader to unpack each in a playful experience of discovery, which includes light language and fun drawings on each page. This is one of my favorite sections in the book:
What I love about it is that this handbook rings 1000% true to their ethos and vibes. Anyone who’s spent even a single day in Duolingo’s office will tell you that this story (and their self-proclaimed "wholesome and unhinged' vibes) checks out. Over the years, I’ve found the cognitive disconnect between expectation and reality is not so frequently met in corporate culture.
I was lucky enough to spend a few days with Duolingo’s leadership team at their Pittsburgh HQ back in 2018. During that visit, I shadowed team members through their workday, getting a firsthand look at their culture in action.
One moment stuck with me: after a team-wide lunch in the cafeteria, about two dozen people crammed into a tiny conference room. One person, stationed at a laptop—”mission control”—had the screen projected for everyone to see.
The room fell silent, laser-focused. On screen, the self-appointed mission control captain awaited instructions, fingers poised over the keyboard. Then, rapid-fire: A clue from that day’s New York Times crossword appeared. Someone called out an answer. If no one had one, they skipped ahead, wasting no time. A speed crossword showdown.
They finished in record time. Wholesome? Yes. Unhinged? Absolutely.
Reading Duolingo’s handbook prompted me to dig through the archives for some of my old favorites. These corporate culture decks and onboarding guides emerged around the time I landed my first full-fledged startup job at Stack Overflow in 2012, shaping my perspective on startup culture then—and still influencing me now.
They are:
(and what we can learn from them)
The Netflix Culture Deck (2009)
Provocative at the time, Netflix was one of the first organizations to actively announced themselves as the anti-Enron in terms of values alignment. They also recognized early on the tradeoff that process has on creativity and set out to design a resilient system that encouraged both.
Zappos Culture Book (2010)
When I first encountered Zappos in the early 2010s, it was the first company I’d ever seen that sought to lift an entire ecosystem along with its success. In addition to their “weird” vibes, they leaned proudly into their Las Vegas roots and catalyzed a paradigm shift for the entire city. (By the way, Duolingo is another company that lifted a city along with its own success, having done the same for Pittsburgh.)
Shopify’s Draw the Owl (2011)
I got to know the talent team at Shopify back in my days on the sales and marketing team at Stack Overflow. While this “draw the owl” meme largely flew under the radar, it also arrived at a moment in time when companies were unafraid to be a little funky and unusual. At the time, Shopify needed to draw folks into their Toronto HQ and setting themselves up as an anti-prototype to business culture like this was a really smart strategy that ultimately helped them win on talent.
Trello’s Employee Handbook (2013-ish)
One of the fun parts about working at Stack Overflow was being able to pick up snippets of culture from some of our parallel universe counterparts and other companies that were also seeded from Fog Creek Software, a developer shop led by Joel Spolsky and Michael Pryor. Chief among them was Trello, the dead-simple project management software company. What I like about this handbook is that they built it in a way that was completely native to their company’s DNA, using their own tools.
LinkedIn's Tour of Duty framework (2013)
Reid Hoffman’s Tour of Duty concept (the idea that employers and employees should change up or re-negotiate contracts every 2 or 4 years) is one of my all-time favorite credos in the industry. While it’s never been as normalized and formalized as I would have liked to see industry-wide, I’ve essentially led myself my own self-guided “tours of duty” through the tech industry. I believe this concept is more important than ever right now, when talent is at its most restless.
- Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha, and, Chris Yeh
I’ve noticed that corporate culture has been a little light on robust examples of culture and peak performance lately. Particularly since COVID, it’s almost as if organizational leaders are afraid to draw a line in the sand with anything too provocative.
After all, how can you argue on behalf of IRL collaboration if you’re still figuring out your work-from-home policy? How can you publish a handbook that talks up a great company culture in a macro-economic environment ripe with such wild industry swings and increasingly company downsizing events?
That’s part of why I think Duolingo’s handbook arrives at an unlikely time. They are giving us the throwback vibes of the feel-good early 2010s era of company culture, in a moment when job satisfaction nationwide has hit a 10-year-low and people are feeling less secure than ever in their jobs. It makes you wonder: Today? Is this really still a thing?
One observation: Save for a few mentions of AI in feature and character development, Duolingo’s handbook is notably light on mentioning how aspects of their cultural frameworks might ideologically shift as a result of this new way of work. It’s also quite apparent that the team made a deliberate design decision to not write this book with AI, but instead lean into the bespoke craft of writing and illustration. That choice is a meaningful signal.
I suspect this may be one of the last standing organizational culture books that can make a splash in this way, in this era. The DNA of an AI-native startup will look quite different from the “everyone in the same room” vibes of 2010s. What does a company prize in the work of a human colleague vs. increasingly available AI counterparts? How does a company determine the right pacing for new initiatives, given the accelerated rate of change today? What does culture “feel like” when not all of your workers are human?
These are some of the questions I’m excited to see unpacked in the next set of culture handbooks for this AI-native era. And I think we’re about to see a lot more of that this year.
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love this post and the issue of company culture, particularly with growth and over time. That small startup changes not only in size but as the founders enter new phases of their lives.
Thank you so much, Mike!!
Duolingo's new culture handbook highlights five guiding principles that encourage a fun and data-driven work environment. From prioritizing long-term growth to fostering joy, this guide captures the company's quirky ethos. Dive deeper with insights from @bethanymarz on industry impact and future challenges.