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 94 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: 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.”
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…”
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.”
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: 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…”
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: 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.”
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.”
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: 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.”
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: 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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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…”
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.”
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…”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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”
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.”
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.”
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,”
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…”
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…”
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…”
Foroughi: High decision velocity yields better outcomes than strategic over-analysis
“By increasing the frequency and the pace, I'm able to process more. Therefore, my odds are better than someone who's overthinking, overanalyzing, or over communicating and strategizing about a thought process or decision.”
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 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: 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…”
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…”
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: 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”
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.”
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 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.”
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: '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.”
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: 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: 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.”
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.”
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…”