
链研社|Aug 18, 2025 16:46
Last week, I received two DUOL hands at 330, but it fell to 307 at one point, causing me to panic. Today I just returned to my valuation of Duolingo 360.
I have already said before that the key to value investing is to understand the moat of a company, what competitive advantages it has, and to deeply experience their products. Why do I firmly hold onto Google and Duolingo when the market looks down on them. When Gemini 2.5pro was released, there were no competitors in the market, and the daily active users of many neighboring countries exceeded those of many companies valued at billions.
Let's get back to the essence of the problem, what are the reasons for the decline of neighboring countries? Why does AI affect rather than support growth? The essence of the problem is that AI may have a much greater impact on the business growth rate of these companies than being replaced.
The big language model cannot solve the segmentation needs of search (Google), advertising (AppLovin), and design (figma), all of which have their own products in specific fields. The API services provided by the big model base are not what they want to replace your original business. That is not what they should do. Moreover, Duolingo has never solved the problem of how to learn, but how to persist. It not only solves the learning but also a spiritual need.
The biggest risk for Duolingo is that once AI tools completely solve the translation problem, there will no longer be a need to learn languages. Should Duolingo, which mainly focuses on speech, return to zero?
The only criterion for judging whether a company still has value is whether it can maintain high growth and high gross profit. If there are negative and substitution effects, the revenue growth rate should plummet. It is enough to focus on this point. The financial reports of Google and Duolingo have already proved that their moats have not been broken, and on the contrary, AI has helped them improve their corporate profits, reaching unprecedented growth rates.
Share To
Timeline
HotFlash
APP
X
Telegram
CopyLink