Rafael Vivas

This is the best founder you've never heard of. Adam Foroughi's company prints $5 billion in cash a year with just 400 people. When his stock price dropped by 92%, he borrowed money to buy back $6 billion in stock. That bet made the company more than $60 billion. The entire C-suite is just 4 people. To this day, Adam approves every hire. This episode has the highest insight-to-minute ratio of any conversation I've had so far. Here’s our full conversation: 0:00 The $6B Buyback That Made $60B 2:15 Borrowing Money To Buy Back Stock At A Discount 5:02 Why VCs Passed On AppLovin In 2012 9:00 From App Discovery To Ad Platform 14:45 Beating Google's AdMob With Performance Marketing 19:30 No Board For Six Years 30:12 The China Deal That Almost Blew Up 37:45 The Convertible Note Pivot And KKR 46:30 Buying Gaming Studios To Get Data 51:45 Losing Trust With Game Developers 58:20 The 2022 Crash And How He Kept His Team 1:02:00 Building An Hyper Competent & Efficient Company 1:07:25 Why Every New Hire Needs His Approval 1:19:06 The Axon 2 Inflection Point 1:21:15 One Great Engineer Now Beats A Hundred Includes paid partnerships.

We know what every top-performing ad and advertiser has in common The hooks. The formats. The CTAs. How often the best advertisers ship new creative. We'll share every benchmark - but only if enough of you want it. Join the waitlist 👇

We need new threads on X to show what's killing it on AppLovin. Will someone please show the way? 🙏

Pura Cashmere launched on AppLovin and hit 78% above its ROAS goal in the first month, with no new creative built for the platform. All of it came from repurposed Meta assets. The reason it worked was not the creative, but that AppLovin's audience matched Pura Cashmere's customer demographic almost precisely, and that fit changed the expected performance profile before a single ad was written. The team's approach was to validate the channel fit first and build platform-specific creative second. In month one, they got the validation they needed. Phase two is building on top of it. We put the full breakdown in a case study. Check it out if you are thinking about channel expansion beyond Meta and Google. Link in comments.