Duolingo is saying no, non, nein, and nyet to San Francisco.
The language learning app is headquartered in Pittsburgh, which isn’t exactly known as a booming hub of startups and venture capital. But Duolingo said in a post on LinkedIn that it will never open a San Francisco office, in part because it helps them maintain the culture they want.
“We built our headquarters here because we believe you don’t have to chase trends or sky-high rent prices to do meaningful work,” Duolingo wrote in a blog post last year. “For us, Pittsburgh isn’t a ‘backup plan’ to the Bay Area.”
The company’s other U.S. offices are in Detroit, New York City, and Seattle.
Startups can thrive all across the world — and not just in Silicon Valley — but the pressure to build near the Bay Area looms large enough that we’re hosting a Tech Zone Daily Disrupt 2025 panel about this very topic.
“Pittsburgh isn’t trying to be the next Silicon Valley — and that’s exactly the point,” the company wrote.
Maybe this is all just fodder to advertise a city that doesn’t even have a passably good baseball team. But they’re probably right that building outside of San Francisco helps the company tune out the noise of the Valley.
