The Ledger
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Foroughi: AppLovin's $6B buyback generated $50B to $60B in value
“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…”
AppLovin restructured a $1B Chinese buyout into debt to pass CFIUS
“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 …”
Foroughi: AppLovin bought 14 to 15 game studios to train its ad models
“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 …”
Foroughi: A 10-person Turkish gaming studio sold for $1B built entirely on AppLovin
“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…”
Foroughi: AppLovin operates with no CRO or COO in its C-suite
“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…”
Foroughi: AppLovin valuation rose from under $4B to peak of $250B
“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.”
Foroughi: AppLovin reaches over 1B daily gamers globally and 150M US adults
“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.”
Foroughi: AppLovin generated $1.3B cash in a single quarter
“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.”
Foroughi: AppLovin grew EBITDA from $700M in 2021 to over $1B in 2022
“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”
AppLovin brought in KKR and formed its first board in 2018
“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…”