AppLovin

“Well, it's great. I mean, uniquely focused ruthless, and I mean it in a, you know, in a positive way when there's a goal, goes for it, very rational, effective, I mean, 10 out of 10 on that in, in those areas, I think.”

“We had a model that powered our advertising business axon one model, and it was written on outdated machine learning techniques. And so we were looking for a researcher to come in and help us architect the axon two model, which we released. I don't know, proba…”

“An advertising company, if you can't make money, then you probably shouldn't be in business. Doesn't make any sense, because you're trying to deliver value to advertisers, you get paid for the value you deliver, and in theory, that should generate you somethin…”

“Basel probably wrote, I don't know, 60% of the code of the company like himself.”

“I'd say the company's been around of 400 people for a while. And About two to three years ago, we probably cut it down from 600 to 400, and we haven't really changed all that much since, and people come and go, but that's what you got.”

“The ads inside games are much more similar to what television is, but specifically for games, You have somewhere around 60 seconds that people sit on an ad, and they're not just sitting there doing nothing, they're playing mini games that we serve them. So the…”

“One of the cultural philosophies we had is almost no product management and have engineers that are competent enough about business problems to just write their own architecture, write their own product to solve business problems that maybe not even a business…”

“So one of the things that's a little unique is like whether geo is an intern or a full-time employee just started maybe even right out of school they can push code within the first week of being here.”

“We don't have the traditional training processes that bring people along. There's no training manual. There's no come in and, like, someone's gonna, like, tell you what to do.”

“You can use AI however you want. But in the end of the day, you as a human is held accountable for every decision that your AI made for you. So it is absolutely not acceptable when I come to an engineer and say, hey, why you did, why you implemented this syste…”

“The advertisers that invest in creative and are good at it, whether they're using AI tools to develop them or they're using people to develop them, can create lifts in an advertising system where everything else is automated.”

“We have to create a tool that can fully automate everything. The other choice is you just create a tool that allows advertisers to interact with, to allow them to collaborate with the AI tool to create their own content. So right now we see that the second typ…”

“We probably on an EBITDA basis, I think we're over a seven billion dollar run rate, and we generate somewhere around 75% cash off the EBITDA dollar.”

“The mobile gaming category is not big enough in terms of user acquisition dollars to support the type of cash flow we need to be valued at a trillion dollars.”

“We dropped 92% in the first 18 months of being public. That, that dream seemed very, very far away, but post-Axon, too, we recovered, and now we're a hundred-billion-dollar company.”

“We actually didn't do any investor relations for well over a year at the bottom, because what were we going to convey to investors is we're rebuilding our technology stock is dirt cheap, but nobody buys something that's dirt cheap.”

“I'm not out there super active on social media. I'm not out there making a whole bunch of other investments. I'm not out there speaking at a lot of different conferences. I'm basically a hundred percent wired in to try to do the best job that I can with this.”

“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.”

“At the same time, interestingly, we went out with seven hundred million dollars of EBITDA in 21. We did a billion dollars plus of EBITDA in 22, so like fast growth, executing on the business, yet public market investors were telling us business is terrible”

“And so for the following 18 months, we ended up deploying somewhere around six billion dollars of buybacks of our own capital, and we leveraged some to buy back shares in the company. And over time, that ended up creating somewhere in the neighborhood of 50, s…”

“When we first started the business, I went out and talked to VCs to raise capital, and I got turned down by all the top VCs. So a million dollars over four million dollar valuation at some point in spring, 2012.”

“So we raised four over twenty five million dollars pre as a convertible note to common in, in November. The business by that point in time had gotten a million dollar a month run rate. So we went from launch To a million dollar a month run rate and profitable …”

“So back to the board point, and we did raise another round, there was more liquidity later, but back to the board point I didn't have a board in this business until 2018.”

“We started getting interest from other tech companies to buy us, and so got as big as an offer for six hundred million dollars cash.”

“And so I always looked for people on the team that had some reason to have a grudge or a chip on their shoulder or something that would motivate them. If they didn't have that in life was really easy. Those were not people that I was going to introduce to the …”

“We got to, like, I think it was 2017, you're talking over, well over a hundred million dollars of EBITDA. We cleared whatever numbers we told them.”

“We ended up doing it so that instead of their billion dollars being an equity investment for 70% where they would get control, which is what triggers this scrutiny, we ended up pivoting it to a billion dollar convertible note that if on conversion we pay them …”

“Bring in traditional US capital, get some debt. Clear out the Chinese convertible debt. Give them their ownership. Off we go. Clean cap table. And so, we did that, I believe it was in the summer of 2018, and we had to build the first board that I'd ever been p…”

“A lot of people get complacent with the leaders that they have, and those leaders, if they're not at that moment as good for the role of someone underneath, that person underneath is going to leave and start a new business. So like you owe it to every single p…”

“Too low a float makes you more volatile, and if the valuation is lower and you can do a 10 to 15% float, you end up attracting better investors who can end up being long-term with you. If you push the valuation where you can't fill a bigger round, you end up w…”

“We believe there's a path to a trillion dollar outcome, and we don't set time, it's just that this business can be as big as what you would need to be a trillion dollar business, and we actually just did a comp plan to some of the key people that, is built on,…”

“So actually like the business from KKR investment to IPO ended up looking wildly different than an advertising business because we ended up with like 14, 15 different game studios across all categories of gaming that we ended up owning so that we can not only …”

“Probably, I don't know how big, but maybe even almost the over 50% of the marketing dollars in the space go back to our platform because the developers on the other side are seeing the best returns that they've ever seen in their existence on the dollars that …”

“As you said, our core team on advertising is only 400 people. Well, to run studios is a huge lift. You need a lot of headcount. There were 1500 plus people on those businesses, and it was distributed over the world.”

“We didn't want to go through. And say, we own 15 studios. We're going to sell off one at a time just to make a profit. So instead we just priced it down enough to make it enticing to a company like Triple Dot to just take the whole thing off our hands.”

“I mean, run, run rate wise, I think Q one we made, or I guess Q four, what we just announced in, in Q one was I think it was 1.3 billion in cash just in a single quarter.”

“And so we took it down to a little over a hundred people that we give equity to in the business.”

“The business grew nearly a hundred percent year over year, and we fired about 40% of the team because I wanted to distill it down to these eight players.”

“To this day, we don't have a CRO. We're an ads business. I mean, anywhere you look, advertising business, who doesn't have a CRO? We don't have a CRO. We don't have a COO. We have today this, the C-suite is myself, the CFO, the CTO, and we have a general couns…”

“And if you do that, and what I call performance marketing is that make the advertiser an arbitrage. Very few people define performance marketing as that, and very few companies have executed. Facebook's done a fantastic job of it. Google, part of their busines…”

“I think it was April, 2023 was when the stock was nine, 10, 11 bucks. So we peaked it was probably six months ago or so at 750 bucks. So the valuation went from under four billion to a peak of two hundred and fifty billion.”

“Over, I think it was about a year and a half ago, over 80% of our code was LLM written, and now it's much higher than that”

“In our business on the, on one hand, we have billion users who are playing games, billion plus users who are playing games every single day around the world in the U S over a hundred and fifty million only adults.”

“Our average ad is over 35 seconds long.”

“There's a company that recently exited out of Turkey and mobile gaming that I believe was like 10, 15 people and sold for a billion dollars. They sold under one year from launch for a billion dollars. Almost all of their business Growth on the marketing and mo…”

“In order for me to get paid anything, the stock had to clear that, and then keep going up from there.”

“We got approached to sell the business for quite a lot of money in the hundreds of millions of dollars, all cash.”

“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.”

“In 22, we fell about 92% to a little bit under four billion dollar market cap.”

“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.”

“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.”

“As a CEO of a public company, I'm committing for the next 1020 years. I need to be here a long time.”

“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…”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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…”

“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.”

“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…”

“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.”