Big Frameworks Guy
Systems, strategies, approaches, filters, rubrics, matrices. Whatever the tool and whatever you want to call them, I love (and depend on) these types of frameworks to make decisions and set goals.
Who loves Duolingo?
I love the design. It’s consistently quirky and delightful.
I love the characters. As you get further along in the lessons, Falstaff and Lily and Vikram actually gain depth of personality. You get to know them better over time!
I love the vision. Duolingo aims to bring high-quality education to all. They may have started with learning languages, but they aren’t stopping there. This North Star guides them in building a sustainable business and an ever-improving product, and unlocks creativity in pursuit of a higher goal.
And guess what? I also love that they share practical advice and lessons learned. Recently, Duolingo dropped what they call “The Duolingo Handbook,” a 66-page publicly downloadable PDF that charts their journey from an apartment above a bar to a billion-dollar business. You should give it a read but here is their quick summary…
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, the Duolingo must do world-class work.
Ship It!: For a good idea to become reality, the team needs to push experiments with a sense of urgency. So go, go, go!
Show Don’t Tell: Duolingo uses clear, concise communication that is grounded in data and real impact.
Make It Fun: The company brings a sense of humor, joy, and imagination to everything it does.
The handbook also describes Duolingo’s “Green Machine,” the company’s approach to building things, and summarizes it this way:
Staff it with great people
Define success
Set guardrails and think long-term
Build the thing and set up feedback loops
Execute with urgency and excellence
Double down on what works, stop what doesn’t
Go, go, go read the handbook now!
The Amazon Model
Two weeks ago, when I posted on LinkedIn about restarting this newsletter, I got a question about what I see as some of the major issues facing nonprofit leaders right now. I, Captain Obvious replete with cape, answered by saying one pressing issue is the development diversified revenue streams.
Duh.
But I do have some practical examples of how I have seen some nonprofits pursue new opportunities. My examples mostly follow what I will call the Amazon Web Services (AWS) model.
As Amazon built its retail business and put forth some ambitious growth goals, the company of course needed a ton of digital storage space and compute power to fuel that growth. So, in the process of building the infrastructure to succeed, they became experts in that type of infrastructure, eventually turning that expertise into a revenue-generating service. AWS was born.
Here are some organizations who’ve leveraged core competencies that they’ve built pursuing their mission to….expand their ability to pursue that mission:
New York Cares: When it comes to managing volunteer projects at scale, there is no organization better than New York Cares. A typical week at New York Cares: hundreds of projects, nearly a thousand volunteers in total, working all over NYC on all different types of projects. So if I am a leader at a company with a big presence in the NYC area and I want to offer the thousands of employees in my division a way to give back to the city, who do I turn to for help? New York Cares, of course.
Upwardly Global: I recently had the chance to learn about this nonprofit and how the staff there had placed nearly 12,000 recent immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers into skill-aligned, thriving-wage jobs through effective career coaching and workforce development practices. The winners of this arrangement were the employees, the companies, and the broader economy - or, in other words, everyone. Upwardly Global is now looking to bring those methods and practices to companies and workforce services, so they can meet their staffing needs and chase their growth goals.
Partnership to End Addiction: To take on something as complex and personal as addiction, you need to have highly customized, often one-on-one services for clients. The Partnership, a national nonprofit, has figured on a way to serve thousands of family members every month in this fashion, and is now offering its system and technology to other locally-based organizations taking on the addiction crisis in their communities, so they too can increase the number of people they’re able to serve.
Odds are that your organization has developed some pretty valuable skills, practices or technology as it seeks to deliver on its mission. When looking for ways to grow revenues, I’d definitely look there first for things you know others could benefit from.
Quick Tip
This recent opinion piece by August Lamm in the New York Times reminded me that this newsletter is not mine. Yeah, I write the words. I share it on social media so I have subscribers. But it’s not wholly mine.
Substack could go offline tomorrow or be purchased by someone with motives other than providing the service that it currently does. And let’s be honest, even now, Substack and LinkedIn and any of these companies do not really care about me and are not too concerned with what I do or think or who I connect with on their platforms. They’ll do what they need to do to increase the value of their business, and the viability of my work and my online relationships aren’t always going to be a part of that equation.
As I have gotten older and so much of my work and life has moved online, I’ve started to value my real-life relationships and communities even more and not simply because IRL is just fundamentally more engaging than online. It’s also because I actually feel like I have a larger, more independent ownership stake in these real-life connections and communities than I do with the online world, even if the scale is more limited.
Some friends and I have been going on a hiking and camping trip every year for the past 6 years and we just had our 2025 planning meeting. As I sat there and listened to various trip proposals for this summer, the immense value inherent in this annual trip really dawned on me. These are the things - friendships, experiences, communities, collaborative pursuits - that I truly own, that truly constitute my net worth.
So here’s the quick tip: at every opportunity, close the laptop, put the phone in a drawer, and start building your wealth.