The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 57 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 2 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
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.”
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…”
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…”
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.”
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.”
Foroughi: AppLovin will become the third-largest digital ad marketplace
“Like if you just to size it, that's Facebook, Google one, two, or in whichever order I'd have to check, but that's the third biggest digital marketplace for advertising in terms of scale that will exist.”
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.”
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…”
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…”
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.”
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.”
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…”
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.”
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…”
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.”
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.”
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.”
Foroughi: Present company performance is locked in by decisions made years prior
“The now is already defined. We're going to do what we're going to do because of decisions I made two, three years ago. I'm much more focused on the two, three years out, and that's what I'm working toward now”
Foroughi: AppLovin will clear over $15 billion in ad spend by 2022
“And we put out there by the time we're done with this next year, clearing over fifteen billion dollars of ad spend in our marketplace.”
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”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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…”
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.”
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…”
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…”
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.”
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.”
Foroughi: Being rejected for a $1M seed investment saved AppLovin's equity
“The best thing that ever happened to me was hearing no at a million over four. I would have given up 25% of the company for a million bucks.”
Foroughi: AppLovin entered mobile gaming to cost-effectively acquire first-party data
“And that's what took us into gaming, because it was really at the time a very cost-effective means to go scale a business that could get us that first-party data access, and then we can execute the rest of the vision off of it.”
Foroughi: Aggression signals respect for executives, while politeness signals lost confidence
“It's sort of like, it's varied, there's no formula, but I'll say I'm very aggressive and hard with the people I respect the most, because I really want to put pressure on them to develop them and teach them the fastest. The more respectful and quiet I am towar…”
Foroughi: Effective delegation requires total handoff without monitoring after trust is established
“And what makes me hand it off is when I see a similar mindset to me in someone, and I go, I want to get that person to be someone I can trust, someone I can grow, develop, mentor, to make just, in my mind, defined as great, and then I'll trust them wholehearte…”
O'Driscoll: High-multiple tech stocks remain vulnerable during paradigm shifts
“And I think what you saw in the case of AppLoving and Cloudflare is it turns out high-priced stocks At the start of a paradigm shift, no matter how amazing the quarter is, are just vulnerable to disruption.”
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.”
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.”
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…”
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.”
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…”
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.”
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.”
Adam Foroughi: AppLovin CEO No Longer Angel Invests in External Startups
“So I don't invest anymore for a couple reasons.”
Rory O'Driscoll: AppLovin is a highly efficient money printing machine
“It's a four and a half million per, whatever it is, per employee business, where unlike Atropic, our open ad, no CapEx, unlike Cursor, no token cost, it's just a money printing machine.”
Vivas: AppLovin Was Spun Out From My First Ad Tech Business
“So we sold that company. But before we did, we spun out a few assets. One of them was called Bright, which I went to go focus on. And then another one was called Applovin, where my brother and my co-founder Adam Fergie went to go focus on.”
AppLovin generated over $190M in software revenue in a single quarter
“And that's why last year we did two hundred million in software revenue. And you can just see acceleration this last quarter, we did over one hundred and ninety million in software revenue. So almost the entirety of last year in one single quarter because of e…”
Foroughi: Nearly all AppLovin acquisitions came from personal client relationships
“So a lot of our partnerships, I'd say probably pretty much every single one were from client relationships where we knew the executives. They personally knew me. There was already that foundation of trust and it was just say, Hey, let's work together.”
Foroughi spends eight months annually in quiet periods focusing on product
“So for eight months of the year, I actually have it nice. It's exactly the same as it was. I'm head of product. I'm thinking about the business. I'm focused on executing. And then for the four months of the year, I have the second job. It's to go out and reall…”