Duolingo's CEO explains the move to bring employees back to the office — and why he thinks he avoided backlash

• DuoLingo's CEO said being in-office is key for brainstorming.
• Toward the end of the pandemic, "we had run out of new ideas," he said.

For DuoLingo's chief executive, a return-to-office mandate was key to translating fresh ideas at the language-learning app.

In an interview on The Verge's "Decoder" podcast, Luis von Ahn said that employees must come into the office three days per week.

"Most of what we do, is creative stuff," von Ahn told Decoder. Towards the end of the pandemic, "we had run out of new ideas," he added, but within three months of returning to the office, "you would see all these ideas popping up."

Duolingo has roughly 400 employees at its Pittsburgh headquarters, and 200 in New York City, with smaller outposts in Detroit, Seattle, Berlin, and Beijing, von Ahn said.

To be fair, cultivating a unique brand voice — that's infamous for negging users into spending more time on the app — has been a key to Duolingo's success. In August, the company reported its fifth straight profitable quarter, and its stock has been surging in recent months, up 32% year-to-date.

While RTO mandates have proven massively unpopular elsewhere, von Ahn said the transition at DuoLingo was smooth because the company consistently managed expectations.

When it first went remote, von Ahn said he warned employees — and new hires — that they would eventually be going back.

"This was not a surprise for anybody," he told Decoder. "I don't think we lost a single employee from that."

Still, there's some flexibility. Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays are mandatory, but von Ahn said he doesn't feel like he has the "political power" to ask employees to come in five days per week.

"I feel like that would not go over well," he said.

Duolingo did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.