Insight
Adam Foroughi: Successful Founders Must Actively Chase Winning Over Avoiding Failure
“The founder mentality has got to be chase winning.”
Disclosure
AppLovin CEO Compensation Required Stock to Clear Specific Performance Targets
“In order for me to get paid anything, the stock had to clear that, and then keep going up from there.”
Disclosure
Adam Foroughi: Fear of Catastrophic Failure Is a Major Personal Motivator
“That fear of blow up is one of my big motivators.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
AppLovin Received Early Acquisition Offer Worth Hundreds of Millions in Cash
“We got approached to sell the business for quite a lot of money in the hundreds of millions of dollars, all cash.”
What-if
Adam Foroughi: Prior Financial Security Prevented Early Buyout of AppLovin
“Had I not had the singles before it might've been something that was very enticing to just cash out the whole thing at that point in time.”
Assertion Supported
AppLovin Market Cap Dropped 92% in 2022 to Under $4 Billion
“In 22, we fell about 92% to a little bit under four billion dollar market cap.”
Disclosure
Adam Foroughi Took Zero Compensation Prior to AppLovin's 2022 Stock Crash
“I, for the life of the company, had only taken equity that was my founder stock, and based on the money that I originally put in the company, so I had taken no compensation.”
Insight
Adam Foroughi: Founder CEOs Need Ongoing Upside Potential to Remain Motivated
“If the belief is that the CEO should then never get compensation ever again, it's completely flawed logic. You want to give people who chase really big upside by creating really big things, the potential to continuously have that really big upside because it a…”
Insight
Adam Foroughi: Very Few Highly Successful Founders Maintain Great Personal Lives
“I don't know many founders who have had that kind of success, That have fantastic personal lives. Yet you end up distracted from your kids because you're always focused on work. It consumes you.”
Opinion
Adam Foroughi: Calling for Public Company CEOs to Take Lower Pay Is Unjust
“And therefore to then say the CEO should take less pay is something that's quite unjust because it's not understanding of the role that the CEO has to absorb.”
Prediction Open · timeframe Apr 2036
Adam Foroughi Commits to Staying AppLovin CEO for Next 10 to 20 Years
“As a CEO of a public company, I'm committing for the next 1020 years. I need to be here a long time.”
Disclosure
Adam Foroughi: Public CEOs Who Claim They Ignore Stock Prices Are Unrealistic
“When you talk to some execs who are at public companies, they'll say they don't look at the stock price. It is, I can say I, 100% look at the stock price. Like it is very, very hard to run a public company and say, I'm just going to choose not to look at the s…”
Disclosure
AppLovin Scrapped Its Core Ad Tech Stack in 2022 to Rebuild Around AI
“Well, in 22 at the very bottom, we said, we're on an older version of machine learning. We're going to completely throw out our technology, rebuild it, and go to what is really cutting edge and current and in the field of recommendation systems.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Adam Foroughi: Tech Layoffs Stem From COVID Overhiring, Not AI Efficiency
“I think it's the latter today because the former is still yet to take full effect at most companies”
Assertion Contradicted
AppLovin Cut Departmental Staff 40-50% in 2024 Despite Fast Growth
“Mostly in 24, we had a year where we probably grew near double digits. Sorry, near triple digits. But we ended up cutting the team's staff by 40, 50% in most departments.”
Insight
Adam Foroughi: Lay Off Teams Slow to Adopt AI and Rebuild
“And the reason I did that then is a belief that if the role was going to get automated, Or that AI was not being adopted fast enough in those departments. It's time to let those people go and rebuild the organization as if we were building it knowing what tech…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Adam Foroughi: AI Automated Creative Production Will Reduce Human Designer Headcount
“We felt like AI is going to get to the point where creatives are going to be automatically produced. You still need humans to innovate, but you can have less humans because a lot of the design work can be handed off.”
Insight
Adam Foroughi: Top Engineers Achieve 10x-100x Leverage Using AI Coding Tools
“In engineering, you have your best engineers can use these tools to really accelerate themselves. And your weaker engineers might not understand how to use these tools or might only get a two X instead of a 10 X or a hundred X increase in output.”
Assertion Supported
AppLovin Core Ad Business Generates Over $10M EBITDA Per Employee
“So if I just went to the core business, Our core advertising products are about 400 people. So call it some very, very high percentage of all the companies EBITDA comes from the core business. So if you then calculate the EBITDA per employee over 400, it's a r…”
Disclosure
AppLovin Cut Its HR Department From 70-80 Staff Down to 15
“But HR, for example, like that I touched on earlier, we went and took a pretty large HR organization, one that I think had 70, 80 people on it, and now might have 15.”
Insight
Adam Foroughi: A-Players Will Not Stay in Bulk Alongside Lower Performers
“And so a players, what I've learned can exist, whether it is a back office role or an engineering role or front lines, revenue generating role, but a players won't exist in bulk. If you have a bunch of B C's and D's around them.”
Assertion Supported
AppLovin Operates Without a COO, CMO, CRO, or Chief People Officer
“If you look at our exec team, we have CEO, CTO, CFO, and general counsel. We don't have a CRO. We don't have a COO. Go down the list of other C levels that people might have. We don't have a CMO. We don't have a chief people officer. We don't have any of these…”
Insight
Adam Foroughi: Fixing a Bloated Company Requires Firing 99% of Staff
“The only way to fix a culture like that is to go and fire 99% of people and just rebuild it from the ground up.”
Disclosure
AppLovin Issues Roughly $300M in Stock-Based Compensation Annually
“So, we, we've given roughly the same amount of stock every year in terms of absolute amount. It's roughly three hundred million dollars.”
Insight
Adam Foroughi: Companies Should Be Evaluated on Cash Flow Minus SBC
“You can judge us on cashflow minus SBC, which I generally think is the right way to judge companies.”
Assertion Supported
AppLovin Restricts Equity Grants to Only the Top 10-15% of Employees
“And we used to believe that every single person should have equity granted by the company. Instead, we went to a place where we said the top 10 to 15% of the company will get equity, and the rest won't.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Adam Foroughi: 80% to 90% of AppLovin's Code Is AI-Generated
“Yeah, I mean, 80, 90% probably, but, like, that, that discounts quality over over quantity”
Assertion Partly supported
Adam Foroughi: AppLovin Operates Without a Dedicated Product Management Team
“We don't have a product organization. Our engineers are meant to be product managers.”
Insight
Adam Foroughi: AI-Native Engineers Need Product Vision Over Raw Coding
“If you think about what's happening with AI native or engineers today, they have to be really imaginative. They have to be product people. They don't have to know how to write code, but they have to be able to audit code”
Insight
Adam Foroughi: Custom Recommendation Models Outperform Frontier LLMs for Ad Delivery
“You can't just go defer to the large language model and say, hey, based on what you know about this user and the data I have available, what's the next ad to see? That wouldn't work as well as a custom model built for this purpose.”
Opinion
Adam Foroughi: Building a Startup Merely as an LLM Interface Is Extremely Risky
“I would be very, very nervous if I was building a business as an interface on top of those companies.”
Disclosure
Adam Foroughi: AppLovin Engineers Mainly Use Cloud Code, With Declining Cursor Usage
“Most people are on Cloud Code. Codex is utilized as well, and Cursor less of these days.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Adam Foroughi: AppLovin Core Business Headcount Will Not Grow Significantly
“Is it gonna be 800 on the core business? I highly doubt it. Is it gonna be 50 on the core business? I'd love it, but I highly doubt it too. So I think we're sort of in a range of a good level for what we need for what we're doing today. Now, if some of the thi…”
Insight
Adam Foroughi: High Performers Do Not Need Mentorship to Succeed
“One of my beliefs is that really good people figure out a way. They don't need a whole lot of mentorship,”
Disclosure
Adam Foroughi Never Holds One-on-Ones or Performance Reviews With Direct Reports
“If people on my team, if they directly report to me, I never do one-on-ones, I don't do reviews.”
Disclosure
AppLovin Eliminates Formal Learning and Development Programs for Employees
“We don't really have formal learning and development, and it's completely disconnected from what you would expect at a company but we don't want to structure people.”
Insight
Adam Foroughi: Business Communication Should Be Written or Video Recorded for AI
“I think you do have a loss in ability to feed that information in the model and show other people what you're doing in those in person. So what we tend to do is believe the vast, vast majority of communication needs to be written or through a video call.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Adam Foroughi: In-Person Interaction Will Gain Value as AI Automation Expands
“I think as human beings, as we go to this world where bots are going to do more for us, in-person is even more valuable.”
Insight
Adam Foroughi: Social Dinners and Drinks Prevent Workplace Resentment
“What I've found is in the most productive moments in, with your best people, you get in heated debates, like yelling matches, and if you get really heated with someone and you go right back to let's just crank, and there's not moments where you go out to dinne…”
Insight
Adam Foroughi: Getting Drunk With Coworkers Often Produces the Best Ideas
“The other thing I found is when we go out and we drink and we start shooting the shit, really good ideas can come of that too. It's not that we're going out and with a bunch of coworkers and talking about baseball. We're going out with a bunch of coworkers and…”
Disclosure
AppLovin Shut Down Investor Relations to Buy Back Stock During 92% Crash
“So when we fell in 2022 one of the things we did on the investor relations side, you fall 92%, no one's buying your stock. We said, we're gonna buy our own shares, and we're gonna shut down investor relations, because what's the point? Why do I need to go to a…”
Insight
Adam Foroughi: Controlling Founders Struggle Greatly With Delegating Key Responsibilities
“It's very, very hard as a controlling founder led type business to have the founder go, I'm going to hand things off.”
Insight
Adam Foroughi: 'Founder Mode' Is a Reaction to Extreme Silicon Valley Bloat
“The whole notion of founder mode is an extreme reaction to extreme bloat that got created in most Silicon Valley companies over the last decade.”
Insight
Adam Foroughi: Delegation Is Essential Once a Company Has Exceptional Talent
“But once you get to that lean team of highly exceptional doers, if you're then controlling and not delegating, then what are you doing? You have a whole bunch of exceptional talent around you who in theory On their own roles in the business is going to be more…”
Opinion
Adam Foroughi: Short Sellers Face No Downside for Publishing Inaccurate Reports
“And at the beginning of their short report, they'll say, We've most likely covered our short report by our short position by the time you're reading this report. And so there is not only this massive financial incentive to make the post much more dramatic than…”
Disclosure
Adam Foroughi: Short-Seller Attacks Forced AppLovin to Step Up Investor Marketing
“The second piece that it did as a forcing function was it required us to go out to investors and the market and do more things about marketing the company and explaining the business. And so in a way it was like a rip off the bandaid moment for us when it come…”
Assertion Supported
Adam Foroughi: AppLovin Achieved a 150 Rule of 40 Score Last Quarter
“I mean, our rule of 50 in the last, rule of 40, sorry, in the last quarter, I think was like a 150.”
Assertion Supported
Adam Foroughi: AppLovin Platform Reached $11B Ad Spend Run Rate
“We put out that a year ago, the scale of investment on our platform was eleven billion dollar run rate.”
Insight
Adam Foroughi: Investors Should Doubt AppLovin Only if I Lack Conviction
“And I always tell investors or team, if at any moment I sound like I don't have conviction in our future path, we're sort of reeling, that would be a moment to doubt us.”
Opinion
Adam Foroughi: TikTok Recommendation Engine Is Phenomenal for Non-Social Engagement
“I would say when it comes to engagement, creating the ability for a social network to not need any social interaction and still be able to deliver you fantastic content, the TikTok recommendation algo is quite phenomenal.”
Insight
Adam Foroughi: Modern AI Serves Targeted Ads While Requiring Less User Data
“The capacity to serve more relevant, more targeted ads to the consumer, even knowing less about the person, has gotten so good that people are really able to use advertising to discover the products that they want.”
Opinion
Adam Foroughi: Anthropic Is Performing Best in LLM Model and Product Releases
“Probably Anthropic is doing the best in terms of releasing models and product in the large language model space as of this moment.”
Insight
Adam Foroughi: Recommendation Systems Require Far Less Compute Than LLMs
“Recommendation system space does not need as much compute to create the output that's necessary to succeed.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Adam Foroughi: Corporate Share Buybacks Historically Do Not Yield Positive Results
“So, you know, buybacks are interesting because if you look at history, the concept of buyback doesn't usually pan out. It's not usually a good financial bet.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Adam Foroughi: Half of the Cap Table at Most Private Companies Wants to Sell
“Most companies that are private probably have half their cap table that's sellers.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Adam Foroughi: AppLovin's 2022 Stock Buyback Created $50 Billion in Market Value
“So probably I'd say like based on where we're trading today, roughly a third of the company's value came from that buyback. So you said a hundred and fifty billion roughly, so let's call it fifty billion around.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Adam Foroughi: Enterprise SaaS Market Sell-Off Is Not Over Yet
“So in a way, I would say not only is it fair because of the risks that exist, I'm not sure it's actually done yet. You know, again, I'm not a trader of businesses, but I do think we're going to go through material changes in the market, especially when it come…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Adam Foroughi: Companies Will Not Need Separate Product Managers and Engineers
“And so I do think the role of product should end up looking a lot like it does at our company over time is that either your product people become engineers or your engineers become product people, but you don't need both.”
Opinion
Adam Foroughi: Anthropic Model Rollouts Are Constrained by Compute and Risk Concerns
“Is Anthropix slowing down the rollout because they don't have the computer? Is Anthropix slowing down the rollout because they're really concerned about the risk? It's probably somewhere in between.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Adam Foroughi: Faster AI Code Deployment Will Temporarily Trigger More Security Breaches
“Because of how quickly these models are just getting exceptionally good, it's almost certain companies are going to be releasing code faster. When you release products faster, you ship fast, you break things, and because of that, you're going to have more secu…”
Insight
Adam Foroughi: AI Dramatically Lowers Creation Costs While Demanding Higher Talent Standards
“I'm a believer that the technology unlocks a lot more output and our ability to imagine things create and then go and create becomes not only cheaper, much more believable, but it requires people to really level up.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Adam Foroughi Predicts More Tech Layoffs Over the Next Couple of Years
“My guess is you're going to see a lot more tech layoffs over the next couple of years as companies really start understanding that not laying people off creates A blockade to actually getting to this AI native state.”
Prediction Open · timeframe Apr 2027
Adam Foroughi: AppLovin Employees Who Avoid AI Technology Will Be Fired
“If you avoid utilizing these technologies, you're not, and you're gonna get fired, and that's life, and so we demand that the people who are at the company are adopting these technologies rapidly to create more output, but we don't shy away from different diff…”
Insight
Adam Foroughi: Token Budgeting and Leaderboards Lead to Wasted Corporate Capital
“To my point, I think it's flawed logic, because if you just throw a budget at people and you create a leaderboard of token usage, what are people going to do? Create a bunch of crap that has no value. And all of a sudden you burn your budget, you're paying rea…”
Insight
Adam Foroughi: Present Decisions Only Impact Outcomes 1 to 5 Years Later
“I feel like whatever is happening now is defined by the decisions we made in the past. And therefore, like, nothing that I do today is going to change an outcome in that 12 months. What I'm thinking today or trying to execute on today or starting to, like, res…”
Assertion Partly supported
AppLovin Operated Without a Board From Founding Until KKR's 2018 Investment
“When we were private from 2011, when we started the business to 2018, when KKR invested and we got our first three person board, I didn't have a board.”
Disclosure
Adam Foroughi: AppLovin CEO No Longer Angel Invests in External Startups
“So I don't invest anymore for a couple reasons.”
Insight
Adam Foroughi: Active Founders Who Angel Invest Lose Focus on Core Business
“The second you care about that KPI and you chase it, you're selling from your own core business to go diversify. You're not focused on your day job.”
Insight
Adam Foroughi: Founders Should Not Try to Time IPO Markets
“In a world where there's no right time to go public, you can't time the market. Just go public, you take the capital you raise, and you build forward”
Assertion Supported
Adam Foroughi: AppLovin Reaches Over One Billion Daily Active Users
“We build a business trying to better, to help an advertiser reach a consumer, drive a transaction inside this gaming audience, billion plus daily active users.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Adam Foroughi: Reference Checks Reveal Half of People Think I'm an Asshole
“If you do checks on me and people who've come across me, you'll get half the people that say, I'm very aggressive, and they sort of like it. Half the people will say, I'm an asshole. They'll all say I'm competent.”
Insight
Adam Foroughi: Prioritizing Kindness Over Directness Wastes Time and Slows Progress
“If you're too kind and not as direct, not as aggressive, you're wasting time. And in a world where time is limited and you can't quantify the loss from sugarcoating things, I'd much rather be aggressive and rub some people the wrong way and surround myself wit…”