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 just ran four months of AppLovin incrementality tests across multiple brands. Discovery campaigns are averaging 284% incrementality. Even excluding the outlier, it's sitting at 190%. For context, prospecting campaigns on the same platform benchmark around 120%. If you're running an 8-figure brand and looking for truly incremental customer acquisition, AppLovin Discovery is the channel to test right now. New episode breaks down exactly how we're running it. youtu.be/07ElWiWPM_4

This is WHOLESOME AF 1 - great proof point that Boostcous customers do live on mobile games 2 - that we need to double down on the GLP1 angles. More to come there!

Boarderie deals with massive seasonal spikes, so being able to scale quickly really matters. Lexi Grossman, Director of Growth at Boarderie, shares how Axon by AppLovin helped them ramp campaigns from $2K/day to $50K/day in under a week, while continuing to see strong new customer CPAs relative to their top-performing channels. When asked what she’d say to brands that assume their customers aren’t mobile gamers, her response was simple: “Do you REALLY know that your customers aren’t mobile gamers?”

“The channel just ripped.” - @Seanfrank “We ended up spending more money on @AxonAdsManager in Q4 2024 than Meta, and it was a brand new channel.” “It’s never happened before.” “We’ll probably spend $5-6 million on it this year. …It should be part of your mix.”

GOAT Foods is a holding company behind some of the most recognizable domain-based food brands on the internet. Co-founder Jonathan Packer already had a good paid media mix, but at the end of 2024, he heard about AppLovin from his peers and decided to give it a shot. The setup was easy, the early results were strong, and Jonathan kept increasing the budget. As he put it: "We went to the moon." Since then, GOAT Foods has launched a Discovery campaign on Axon. Now they reach both new customers and new site visitors, opening up the top of the funnel in ways they couldn’t before. For DTC brands looking to diversify their media mix, scale ecommerce revenue, and find new customer acquisition channels that actually perform, Jonathan puts it simply: "easy to get started and worth a shot."

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.

Chips on shoulders put chips in pockets. How Adam Foroughi, founder of Applovin, built one of the most efficient companies by hiring outcasts with something to prove: “One of the things that I always looked at for hiring was to find people who have a chip on their shoulder. Someone who has a reason to push hard. We ended up with this group of people that were outcasts from other places. One of the best hires I ever made was this kid who was a high school dropout. He was not getting a job in big tech. But he had skills that smoke everyone else when it comes to selling. I knew I could bring that person in, empower that person, and they're going to be hungry and they're going to push harder than the others.”

My shoes didn’t even have laces. I was hungry for success.