YouSaid · the spoken record

Adam Foroughi

lines on the record: 84
first: 2026-04-27
most recent: 2026-04-27
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Not really. I mean, I guess I just don't think about it much. I don't live in much of a world of regrets. I live in a world of almost short-term memory. I make a lot of decisions. A lot of them end up wrong. I optimize they go forward. Same thing with interpersonal relationships. I really do want to be surrounded by people who are great, who I can work with for a long time, who I can become friends with, and would love to be surrounded by a core group of family and friends for a very, very long time. As long as I'm here around all of that, When you're moving fast, you're certainly going to rub people the wrong way at times. And you're going to miscommunicate. You're going to do something wrong. But if you live in fear of that and you allow that to impact your pace, you'll slow down. And I'd rather just go fast, know that that's a risk, and it is what it is.”
2026-04-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Applovin: $160BN Market Cap, $5.48BN Revenue, $10M EBITDA Per Head | Why the Best Do Not Need Mentorship | Why Founders Should Not Angel Invest | Why Kindness in Business Will Slow You Down with Adam Foroughi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I love being aggressive. I mean, look, 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. They sort of like it. Half the people will say I'm an asshole. They'll all say I'm competent. So like on the one hand, it sort of checks the boxes I care about. I mean, like people think I'm competent, great. But the reality is aggressive can rub people the wrong way. But I found, and the reason I just reacted a little awkwardly to the kindness point, 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 sugar coating things, I'd much rather be aggressive and rub some people the wrong way and surround myself with people that want to push hard than really be surrounded by people who care so much about kindness that they're willing to slow down.”
2026-04-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Applovin: $160BN Market Cap, $5.48BN Revenue, $10M EBITDA Per Head | Why the Best Do Not Need Mentorship | Why Founders Should Not Angel Invest | Why Kindness in Business Will Slow You Down with Adam Foroughi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a weird one. Look, maybe kindness is like in those dark moments, whether it's my wife, close friend, people checking in on me. But the reason I say it's a weird one is like we don't tend to push the word kindness around very often at the company. Like we believe you're pushing forward in an aggressive fashion, almost cutthroat.”
2026-04-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Applovin: $160BN Market Cap, $5.48BN Revenue, $10M EBITDA Per Head | Why the Best Do Not Need Mentorship | Why Founders Should Not Angel Invest | Why Kindness in Business Will Slow You Down with Adam Foroughi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, tough question to finish the sentence on because I don't think it's any. We build a business trying to help an advertiser reach a consumer, drive a transaction inside this gaming audience billion plus daily active users. We're trying to create incremental transactions. When you do a performance marketing platform, we're not trying to take from others. We're trying to give an advertiser the chance to go, you spend $100,000 a day growing your business today, spend an extra $20,000 a day with us and create more transactional volume. Don't take from anyone else. Take your $100,000 a day investment business that might have $300,000 a day of revenue with it and add another $20,000 of media spend, get to $120K and get to $360K revenue. Your business grows 20% by investing an extra 20% in our technology, our platform, our audience that you otherwise weren't accessing in that moment.”
2026-04-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Applovin: $160BN Market Cap, $5.48BN Revenue, $10M EBITDA Per Head | Why the Best Do Not Need Mentorship | Why Founders Should Not Angel Invest | Why Kindness in Business Will Slow You Down with Adam Foroughi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I really am not focused on where the sock's going to be next score. Three to five years from now, we better be higher than where we are. By enough so that I feel like people made a good return on investment, owning our shares today. They better make more on us than they can make by owning the basket of the SP, just putting their money in debt. And if they make a good enough return on us over the next few to five years, I feel like I did my job right as CEO, and then they need the next three to five years and the next three to five years after that. But we owe it to investors to make them a return greater than what else they can put their money in.”
2026-04-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Applovin: $160BN Market Cap, $5.48BN Revenue, $10M EBITDA Per Head | Why the Best Do Not Need Mentorship | Why Founders Should Not Angel Invest | Why Kindness in Business Will Slow You Down with Adam Foroughi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I don't question the past because the past makes up where you are in the present. I've made a lot of decisions. A lot of them end up wrong, but we pivot and we learn from them. We went public in a very difficult time towards the late of the growth stock run up during COVID. And the second COVID ended in usage patterns returned to what they were pre-COVID. Everyone collapsed in gross stocks. In particular, those late to market IPOs. So you could say like, okay, we didn't time the market right. As you just said, there's no right time to go public. I also think the learning for us and anyone going public is the moment in time. It's like a series A, series B, series C. It's a, it's a fundraising round. If you have a business that has long-term growth opportunities that you have high conviction in and can be big enough to be owned by anyone in the world and interesting enough to be owned by anyone in the world 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. And really what's important for me running the business is.”
2026-04-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Applovin: $160BN Market Cap, $5.48BN Revenue, $10M EBITDA Per Head | Why the Best Do Not Need Mentorship | Why Founders Should Not Angel Invest | Why Kindness in Business Will Slow You Down with Adam Foroughi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I don't invest anymore for a couple reasons. One is in order to invest, you've got to sell shares in your own business to have liquidity to go invest. And I don't know, again, if I didn't start this business for money, I don't know what I need to invest to create more return on. And if you're an investor, hopefully you really want to create return or impact or something that is a KPI that you care about. But 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. And for me, my goal in life is to make my company as good as it can possibly be three years from now, five years from now, ten years from now, 20 years from now. If I plot into the future, every second of my available time should be committed to it. Otherwise, there's some loss. I don't know what that loss is, but if I get distracted on other things, there's some loss that I can't measure. And as those losses start adding up, they can compound and it can make it less likely that you can succeed.”
2026-04-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Applovin: $160BN Market Cap, $5.48BN Revenue, $10M EBITDA Per Head | Why the Best Do Not Need Mentorship | Why Founders Should Not Angel Invest | Why Kindness in Business Will Slow You Down with Adam Foroughi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stepped aside as the chairman of the board to hand it over to this gentleman, Craig Billings. He's CEO of Wynne, one of the smartest people I've ever met, very, very competent at building businesses and understanding corporate governance. And I felt like my job is to run the business. And I don't want to be consuming my own time on anything other than day-to-day operations. And board is something that I've got to really work with and allow to be pulled into the business and contribute back to the business and work with me on the business. But it's not something that I'm going to be good enough to be the chairman on versus someone like Craig who is exceptionally talented at all aspects of building a big business. And so I felt like that trade was a good trade. And it's not common that you'll see CEOs step aside as chairman, but I've always believed that in every role that we all do, whether it's me or someone else on the team, if there's someone better to do it, step aside and let them take over. And that's something that allows you to always be leveling up.”
2026-04-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Applovin: $160BN Market Cap, $5.48BN Revenue, $10M EBITDA Per Head | Why the Best Do Not Need Mentorship | Why Founders Should Not Angel Invest | Why Kindness in Business Will Slow You Down with Adam Foroughi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is a tough question for me, too, because I think we have a pretty well constructed board, but I don't have a lot of experience with boards. 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. I just ran on my own. And we ended up just deciding and making choice as I sort of saw fit. Obviously, I would consult my co-founders, other people on the team, but there was no board because we were bootstrap business with just a convertible note round. Then we had a three-person board. Now we've got quite a bit bigger than that, but not that much bigger than that. I think it's eight or nine people. And we have a really good composition of people now. The people around the table are a mixture of people who have worked at the company, know me intimately well, and are supportive, or have really good business instincts outside of us who bring great things to it. And I actually recently”
2026-04-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Applovin: $160BN Market Cap, $5.48BN Revenue, $10M EBITDA Per Head | Why the Best Do Not Need Mentorship | Why Founders Should Not Angel Invest | Why Kindness in Business Will Slow You Down with Adam Foroughi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know if I've changed my mind much in the last 12 months. I mean, like, when I hit that low point in 22, I sort of got to a place where I said, I'm going to think forward about what I do professionally and then maybe this translates to my personal life too. And I'm going to plan out three to five years and work back from it. And so when you think about the current year, 12 months, 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 research today can change an outcome one, two, three, four, five years down the road. But because it's undefined still and you're in that moment of, I think this is something interesting, it's very hard to challenge that thought. If you believe in it and you've got conviction in it, you sort of just run with it. So I don't know that I would change anything.”
2026-04-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Applovin: $160BN Market Cap, $5.48BN Revenue, $10M EBITDA Per Head | Why the Best Do Not Need Mentorship | Why Founders Should Not Angel Invest | Why Kindness in Business Will Slow You Down with Adam Foroughi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, as you do what you do, like I said, a lot of times you're not really connected to reality, to what's happening around you because your mind is wandering. I mean, my mind is always on business, even when I dream and I wake up. It's like something about business. And so I think back at like moments where the kids were growing up and sort of”
2026-04-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Applovin: $160BN Market Cap, $5.48BN Revenue, $10M EBITDA Per Head | Why the Best Do Not Need Mentorship | Why Founders Should Not Angel Invest | Why Kindness in Business Will Slow You Down with Adam Foroughi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's really hard. I mean, like, look, as human beings to become really good at something, you have to focus on it. And you have to put out a lot of effort. At least me, I'm not like all that great at multitasking. Being a parent is a really difficult thing. So if you are a founder running something and you want to become the best, you want to be the best podcaster, I want to become the best in advertising with my team leading us the way there. To do that, you need to prioritize that task. And the second you do that, in essence, you're deprioritizing the task of being a parent, being a husband, being a good person in the personal life, it requires having a family that understands the commitment you have to the day job. And it requires a balance that is really hard to attain.”
2026-04-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Applovin: $160BN Market Cap, $5.48BN Revenue, $10M EBITDA Per Head | Why the Best Do Not Need Mentorship | Why Founders Should Not Angel Invest | Why Kindness in Business Will Slow You Down with Adam Foroughi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. All of a sudden you burn your budget. You're paying really big checks and you don't have revenue on the other side of it. Companies need to get to the point of understanding what are they actually optimizing to and who's utilizing the technologies and creating token consumption that actually aligns with those KPIs. When that happens, you won't be in the mindset of token budgeting. You will want to invest in tokens because there's revenue on the other side of it. But I think today people are just blindly going at spend a bunch of money, get on the leaderboard, use the tools, something good's going to happen. You better be able to measure that. Otherwise, you're going to get a lot of bad behavior. It's no different than companies that staffed up to very, very large team sizes. And blow-to-teams over the last decade, 15 years in the valley, because they had the means to. And it was, let's just get on a hiring quota. Token quotas and token budgets are no different than hiring quotas.”
2026-04-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Applovin: $160BN Market Cap, $5.48BN Revenue, $10M EBITDA Per Head | Why the Best Do Not Need Mentorship | Why Founders Should Not Angel Invest | Why Kindness in Business Will Slow You Down with Adam Foroughi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, look, again, are you playing to win or are you playing not to lose? And so I feel like we're very, very transparent with our employees today. Anyone ask me, I'll say you're here because you're an exceptional talent. And what does that mean going forward? You use these technologies to create more output. You become AI native. You're going to have a role here. If you avoid utilizing these technologies, you're not. And you're going to 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 difficult discussion that they're not able to do that there's a role somewhere for them, but it wouldn't be at our company.”
2026-04-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Applovin: $160BN Market Cap, $5.48BN Revenue, $10M EBITDA Per Head | Why the Best Do Not Need Mentorship | Why Founders Should Not Angel Invest | Why Kindness in Business Will Slow You Down with Adam Foroughi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do think there needs to be a lot of honesty around what is the world going to look like as these AI technologies continue to get more powerful if every technology company could stand to lose 75, 80% of their talent and get more efficient. What does that actually mean? Well, does it mean that there's going to be 10 times more startups? So the startup funds are going to be crushing it and like people are going to be way more productive and we're going to get way more product in the world. Plausible. I'm a believer that the technology unlocks a lot more output and our ability to imagine things and then go and create becomes not only cheaper, much more believable, but it requires people to really level up. I think we need to be honest about what the bath is going to look like because 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.”
2026-04-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Applovin: $160BN Market Cap, $5.48BN Revenue, $10M EBITDA Per Head | Why the Best Do Not Need Mentorship | Why Founders Should Not Angel Invest | Why Kindness in Business Will Slow You Down with Adam Foroughi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, obviously, there's a risk there. No, you could say is anthropic slowing down the rollout because they don't have the computer, is anthropic slowing down the rollout because they're really concerned about the risk. It's probably somewhere in between. There's obviously a risk, though. These models, one of the things they're built for is audit code and expose any vulnerabilities or bugs and solve them. And so you would hope that we will be a lot more buttoned up on security in the future than we are today. But 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 security breaches most likely. But once you get past that point, you're probably going to be in a point where the technology is a lot more bundled up than it was before.”
2026-04-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Applovin: $160BN Market Cap, $5.48BN Revenue, $10M EBITDA Per Head | Why the Best Do Not Need Mentorship | Why Founders Should Not Angel Invest | Why Kindness in Business Will Slow You Down with Adam Foroughi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure, that the code is up to security standards, the code's not slopped, the code is good enough to contribute to your main code base. So like there's a lot that still comes from having a traditional engineering background that's valuable in today's world.”
2026-04-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Applovin: $160BN Market Cap, $5.48BN Revenue, $10M EBITDA Per Head | Why the Best Do Not Need Mentorship | Why Founders Should Not Angel Invest | Why Kindness in Business Will Slow You Down with Adam Foroughi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, we chose not to have it because we wanted to have exceptional engineers that understood the product. The belief was if our engineering team is writing the product that delivers revenue, our sales team and all other teams are effectively cheerleading for the engineering team, making sure they have what they need, and then eventually going out and selling their product. But we can only sell the product if it's good enough to be sold. The engineers, if exceptional, better be good enough at understanding the product that they need to build to go build it. 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. And so what usually happens, whoever becomes AI native and knows how to utilize these tools will become those powerful 10x, 100x output folks who know how to use the tools to create that kind of output. I do think for some time still though, you're going to need an engineer doing the work and still making.”
2026-04-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Applovin: $160BN Market Cap, $5.48BN Revenue, $10M EBITDA Per Head | Why the Best Do Not Need Mentorship | Why Founders Should Not Angel Invest | Why Kindness in Business Will Slow You Down with Adam Foroughi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The rate of advancement is astounding over the last few months. You see the amount of products that are rolling out. It's like every day there's something new. So I think the coolest thing that we're seeing right now is for people who know how to utilize it, the ability to just launch an army of agents to do certain tasks. And obviously coding is the most obvious utilization today. So if you see that today and believe we're already at a point where the Army of agents can continue to start improving the code that's available to them and the products that are available to them in a recursive way, the rate of acceleration of technology in R&D and our imaginations becoming products is only going to get faster. Where does that lead us to? I don't know, but I think it's going to be a much more productive future than the present.”
2026-04-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Applovin: $160BN Market Cap, $5.48BN Revenue, $10M EBITDA Per Head | Why the Best Do Not Need Mentorship | Why Founders Should Not Angel Invest | Why Kindness in Business Will Slow You Down with Adam Foroughi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These companies that we have today as some of the SaaS leaders are completely going to wipe out because I don't think that happens. Companies, once they're embedded with utilizing a certain software, usually don't change. But it may be that a lot of the growth opportunities are gone for these businesses. And usurp out growth opportunities in businesses. I mean, the reason we went and traded down to under four times EBITDA is because investors did not believe in our future growth prospects. And when you're a public market investor, you”
2026-04-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Applovin: $160BN Market Cap, $5.48BN Revenue, $10M EBITDA Per Head | Why the Best Do Not Need Mentorship | Why Founders Should Not Angel Invest | Why Kindness in Business Will Slow You Down with Adam Foroughi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As an investor, if I was one, when you get into an unpredictable outcome in the future, it's very easy to sell businesses. And the rapid rate of product delivery in the large language model space makes a lot of traditional enterprise companies hard to bet on years into the future. So what happens? Well, terminal value is dicier. So you value the company less you get out. Their stock-based comp was high, but it was an acceptable percentage of total value. Stock tanks, stock-based comp becomes too extreme. Now they're in a position where not only are they going to lose their heads, they're also competitively challenged. So you're in a really bad downward spiral. 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. Again, I'm not a trader, a businesses, but I do think we're going to go through material changes in the market, especially when it comes to enterprise SaaS over the coming years. It may not be that.”
2026-04-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Applovin: $160BN Market Cap, $5.48BN Revenue, $10M EBITDA Per Head | Why the Best Do Not Need Mentorship | Why Founders Should Not Angel Invest | Why Kindness in Business Will Slow You Down with Adam Foroughi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's the problem you start doing the buyback, and if you're not right, you don't time it well, and we're not, none of us are day traders when we're running businesses. You can burn the capital that you made really quickly, and then you're in a much forest spot.”
2026-04-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Applovin: $160BN Market Cap, $5.48BN Revenue, $10M EBITDA Per Head | Why the Best Do Not Need Mentorship | Why Founders Should Not Angel Invest | Why Kindness in Business Will Slow You Down with Adam Foroughi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 $150 billion roughly. So let's call it 50 billion around. Yeah, it was a goodbye.”
2026-04-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Applovin: $160BN Market Cap, $5.48BN Revenue, $10M EBITDA Per Head | Why the Best Do Not Need Mentorship | Why Founders Should Not Angel Invest | Why Kindness in Business Will Slow You Down with Adam Foroughi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Able to take out the selling pressure. And then as the business started accelerating, you removed the selling pressure and overhang, then you're set up in a position where you can now go attract the right investors.”
2026-04-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Applovin: $160BN Market Cap, $5.48BN Revenue, $10M EBITDA Per Head | Why the Best Do Not Need Mentorship | Why Founders Should Not Angel Invest | Why Kindness in Business Will Slow You Down with Adam Foroughi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so when we went and did our buyback, we didn't say, hey, we're just going to go to the market and take float out, like take a share back from every single shareholder. That would imply that even partially part of my shares are getting bought back, right? And so what we instead did was go and say, if you are a seller, please work with us to sell back to the business. And so we went and deployed every dollar that we made, and including we raised some debt to deploy even more and took back a lot of the shares on the cap table that we're going to inevitably sell into the public markets over the coming months. By doing that, we were able to get liquidity to company folks, investors, and old ex-co-founders and other folks on the cap table that needed liquidity. We were able to get them liquid, no problem. We're happy to do the trade. And we were able to take out that selling pressure with these folks being, the fact that they were willing to work with us was a gift. They were willing to work with us.”
2026-04-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Applovin: $160BN Market Cap, $5.48BN Revenue, $10M EBITDA Per Head | Why the Best Do Not Need Mentorship | Why Founders Should Not Angel Invest | Why Kindness in Business Will Slow You Down with Adam Foroughi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's tough. So here's why it's tough it's easy when you're inside a company to think you're cheap, but you sort of trade where you deserve to trade and it's really hard to know when is it cheap enough. The reason why our buyback was very, very successful is when we went public during COVID, we didn't build a really big roster of blue chip investor. So we had a very flimsy cap table. And then this led to the stock collapsing much more than it should have. When we went public in 21, we had $700 million of EBITDA. $28 billion IPO company goes to $40 billion. In 22, we cleared a billion dollars of EBITDA. So we grew 40%-ish in 22. Yet, like I said, the stock fell 92%. We got to under four times EBITDA. So why did that happen? Well, we went public and COVID didn't attract blue chip investors. So our cap table was basically the private market cap table that needed to sell. That's a real big problem. Most companies that are private probably have half their cap table that's sellers.”
2026-04-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Applovin: $160BN Market Cap, $5.48BN Revenue, $10M EBITDA Per Head | Why the Best Do Not Need Mentorship | Why Founders Should Not Angel Invest | Why Kindness in Business Will Slow You Down with Adam Foroughi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So buybacks are interesting because if you look at history, the concept of buyback doesn't usually pan out. It's not usually good financial bet.”
2026-04-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Applovin: $160BN Market Cap, $5.48BN Revenue, $10M EBITDA Per Head | Why the Best Do Not Need Mentorship | Why Founders Should Not Angel Invest | Why Kindness in Business Will Slow You Down with Adam Foroughi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That someone is interested in, they'll go to a different company, and you've got people that like working on recommendation system models, and they're not bound by compute. They're bound by curiosity and application of techniques to create a better output.”
2026-04-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Applovin: $160BN Market Cap, $5.48BN Revenue, $10M EBITDA Per Head | Why the Best Do Not Need Mentorship | Why Founders Should Not Angel Invest | Why Kindness in Business Will Slow You Down with Adam Foroughi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Depends on the space. So, large language models obviously have the ability to scale with more compute, and therefore it is attractive to researchers to join companies that can invest a lot in compute. But if you look at right now, I mean, we can all say probably anthropic is doing the best in terms of releasing models and product in the large language model space as of this moment. Anthropic probably does not invest the most in compute, yes. So like if you think about that, how did they actually get really good researchers creating the best product output? Well, they have really good culture and they have really good people and they really tuned what they were going after. Recommendation system space does not need as much compute to create the output that's necessary to succeed. So it's quite different. You're looking for people that still want to solve really big problems and are very mathematically inclined. But there's different spaces in modeling and there's vision models. There's the LLMs. There's recommendation system. There's others. So depending on the product.”
2026-04-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Applovin: $160BN Market Cap, $5.48BN Revenue, $10M EBITDA Per Head | Why the Best Do Not Need Mentorship | Why Founders Should Not Angel Invest | Why Kindness in Business Will Slow You Down with Adam Foroughi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have yet to have a chance to have our team work on an engagement model. So a social network for us is not a requirement to get to a trillion dollars. It's an interesting play to recruit talent and continue to tune our skills and modeling. And as you think about the research labs and any company that's building models, they better have things that are interesting for new researchers to come in to work on new applications of technology. And so for us, a lot of these bets will also be means to go higher into some of the best people in the world. And if we execute on it, obviously great, but not a requirement.”
2026-04-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Applovin: $160BN Market Cap, $5.48BN Revenue, $10M EBITDA Per Head | Why the Best Do Not Need Mentorship | Why Founders Should Not Angel Invest | Why Kindness in Business Will Slow You Down with Adam Foroughi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, if you think about what creates a trillion dollar business, and I sort of said cash flow minus SPC before is a real, real important metric, right? Like if we ever got to generating 30, 35 billion dollars of cash a year, we'd probably be a trillion dollar business, right? So you think about what can get us to that point. And so there's a couple things that can get us there. One is continue to execution in the domain that we're in. We think we can get much bigger just to better monetizing the gaming audience. It's a billion plus daily active users who play these games. adult audience, a lot of heads of household. The next thing you think about is how do you expand what you have? So in the past, I've talked about connected TV as one of the holy grails of advertising. If you can port the performance ad we serve on mobile to the television and allow small and medium-sized businesses to serve there and make it all performance-based, that's a really big unlock. So it's something we still take seriously. Then you think about what are other applications of the technology. We're really good at advertising model.”
2026-04-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Applovin: $160BN Market Cap, $5.48BN Revenue, $10M EBITDA Per Head | Why the Best Do Not Need Mentorship | Why Founders Should Not Angel Invest | Why Kindness in Business Will Slow You Down with Adam Foroughi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say when it comes to engagement, creating the ability for social network to not need any social interaction and still be able to deliver you fantastic content, the TikTok recommendation algo is quite phenomenal. And if you think about recommendation systems, like what's the world we operate in? Well, on the one hand, the content you see on Instagram, the content you see on TikTok is very dialed in to what you're interested in. It is a constant loop. It's very interesting. The advertising systems too, the ads you see on Instagram have become very much like content. They're highly relevant. The ads that we're able to show consumers now are getting very relevant. And they drive action. As the technology and recommendation system models and just generally in AI models has gotten better, 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.”
2026-04-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Applovin: $160BN Market Cap, $5.48BN Revenue, $10M EBITDA Per Head | Why the Best Do Not Need Mentorship | Why Founders Should Not Angel Invest | Why Kindness in Business Will Slow You Down with Adam Foroughi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, but I don't feel that way because I've been doing this a very, very long time. And with the team that I've got working on these technologies, this product, this platform, and the opportunities in front of us, I've always had conviction that the future was going to be better than the past. And that has kept me in a position where I can voice confidence in what we're doing.”
2026-04-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Applovin: $160BN Market Cap, $5.48BN Revenue, $10M EBITDA Per Head | Why the Best Do Not Need Mentorship | Why Founders Should Not Angel Invest | Why Kindness in Business Will Slow You Down with Adam Foroughi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I'll say, like, building the business almost every morning I'd wake up thinking, I got to check stats, make sure we're still operating, or are we going to go bankrupt today? So in a way, I've always had this doubt that this is real, that what we're building is going to last, that what we're building is going to be really big. In essence, like that fear of blowup is one of my big motivators. And so I feel like I always have that doubt. I don't ever feel like we've made it. And that pushes a lot of us to want to keep pushing forward because we are in a very, very tough space. Advertising is very competitive. Obviously, there's a lot of technology that's improving in terms of technology capability for our performance stack, but also that forces us to continue to be innovative, otherwise we'd fall behind peers. And so if we ever get complacent, we're almost certain to lose. And I always tell investors or team,”
2026-04-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Applovin: $160BN Market Cap, $5.48BN Revenue, $10M EBITDA Per Head | Why the Best Do Not Need Mentorship | Why Founders Should Not Angel Invest | Why Kindness in Business Will Slow You Down with Adam Foroughi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Explain the business. And we owe it to our partners in the industry because when people take shots on us, on the other side, you've got advertisers who are buying on a performance basis. They're spending billions of dollars a year. We put out that a year ago, the scale of investment on our platform was $11 billion run rate. We've grown a ton since then. So that was a little over a year ago. So you're talking well over $10 billion a year of dollars spent on a performance basis. So shot on us is effectively calling all these advertisers they're spending at that large scale a bunch of morons. So not only did I owe it to my team, I owed it to our clients to go out and explain our business and explain why some of the world's best marketers are buying on the other side. Some of the world's best businesses are growing really quickly and profitably on the other side. And our engineers have built really exceptional technology.”
2026-04-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Applovin: $160BN Market Cap, $5.48BN Revenue, $10M EBITDA Per Head | Why the Best Do Not Need Mentorship | Why Founders Should Not Angel Invest | Why Kindness in Business Will Slow You Down with Adam Foroughi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, honestly, I don't remember exacts, but near triple digits each year, I mean, our rule of 40 in the last quarter, I think was like 150. So not only are we growing, we grew like 70% year over year, we have 80, I think 4% EBITDA margins. The revenue growth since we launched Saxon 2 model has been astounding. The profitability profile of the business is crazy. The business is expanding without adding heads. We have a very odd financial profile because when you look at it, like you go, how can a business have 84% EBITDA margins? There's not another comp in the world that looks like it. And so a lot of the things that we've been able to accomplish just don't make sense to people. And in a world where things don't make sense, people think you're cheating. Instead of realizing you built one of the cooler technologies the world's ever seen. And then you go as a team and me as the CEO of the business, it's my responsibility to go out and explain the business. I owe it to my team who's built this really cool technology to go.”
2026-04-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Applovin: $160BN Market Cap, $5.48BN Revenue, $10M EBITDA Per Head | Why the Best Do Not Need Mentorship | Why Founders Should Not Angel Invest | Why Kindness in Business Will Slow You Down with Adam Foroughi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, it's easy to say in hindsight it could have been a mistake. We grew really fast. Like I said, when you're going, your head's down, you're working in a lean organization.”
2026-04-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Applovin: $160BN Market Cap, $5.48BN Revenue, $10M EBITDA Per Head | Why the Best Do Not Need Mentorship | Why Founders Should Not Angel Invest | Why Kindness in Business Will Slow You Down with Adam Foroughi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, look, first of all, when you go down 92% in a year, you sort of learn to take your beatings. And so I've gotten to the point, like, that was a massive blessing. Go public and immediately take that beating. You realize that the public markets are volatile. There's things outside your control. The short seller attacks were not particularly surprising to me because we went from a low point of $9 a share to a high point of $750 a share in two and a half years. That kind of a run-up from under $4 billion market cap to around $250 billion market cap. I don't know if anything, any other company has ever seen that kind of value creation in that shortened amount of time. In history. And then you looked at the companies that were at our market.”
2026-04-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Applovin: $160BN Market Cap, $5.48BN Revenue, $10M EBITDA Per Head | Why the Best Do Not Need Mentorship | Why Founders Should Not Angel Invest | Why Kindness in Business Will Slow You Down with Adam Foroughi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The whole notion of founder mode is an extreme reaction to extreme bloat that got created at most Silicon Valley companies over the last decade. So if you're in a company with a bunch of layers and a bunch of process, how do you reverse it? I mean, we talked earlier about how a team of mediocrity, you can't reverse back to a team of high output. And so in large part, the only way to reverse is to have a founder that takes control back. 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 of a subject matter expert than one individual who runs the business can be. In that case, delegation is very powerful.”
2026-04-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Applovin: $160BN Market Cap, $5.48BN Revenue, $10M EBITDA Per Head | Why the Best Do Not Need Mentorship | Why Founders Should Not Angel Invest | Why Kindness in Business Will Slow You Down with Adam Foroughi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sidecar. I can see what the team does, but I don't have to be in the weeds. And so it freed me up to do more strategic thought for the business long term. It freed me up to do more investor relations. But it's very, very hard as a controlling founder-led type business to have the founder go, I'm going to hand things off. And so those two things, I think were one internal, one external were important for me to really see as flaws and try to grow and develop through them.”
2026-04-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Applovin: $160BN Market Cap, $5.48BN Revenue, $10M EBITDA Per Head | Why the Best Do Not Need Mentorship | Why Founders Should Not Angel Invest | Why Kindness in Business Will Slow You Down with Adam Foroughi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So I'd say maybe the only other thing that comes to mind right now is it took me a long time to learn how to delegate. And this is something that I actually committed to in the dark year of 22 as well. I was a very controlling hands-on CEO for a very long time. It was almost like all roads of the company went up to me. When we fell and I realized I'm not making great decisions for the business, I also realized other people are smarter than other aspects of the business than I am. And so why am I not deferring to them? Why am I not delegating? And so where I got to was I started stripping away my own roles and actually it was almost not that I was handing things off. It was that the rest of the team said, I'm going to come in and just take these things away. And again, this Giovanni, I'll give another example is he just started taking the product role that I had run and owned for a decade at the company. He took it away from me. It was great because now I can.”
2026-04-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Applovin: $160BN Market Cap, $5.48BN Revenue, $10M EBITDA Per Head | Why the Best Do Not Need Mentorship | Why Founders Should Not Angel Invest | Why Kindness in Business Will Slow You Down with Adam Foroughi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On one conversation, they'll eventually air. This is relaxed, but like going to a conference, speaking in front of a couple hundred people, I've always had a fear of public speaking. And so I'm an introverted person that didn't want to put myself out there. But what I realized is now that we're playing at higher stakes tables, the company's getting bigger, we need to be out there. We need to be conveying what is it that we do so that people can understand the business model and can understand the prospects of the business model. And so I started doing more conferences over the last couple years. I think they've been rewarding because it's challenged me to do something that's naturally uncomfortable for me.”
2026-04-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Applovin: $160BN Market Cap, $5.48BN Revenue, $10M EBITDA Per Head | Why the Best Do Not Need Mentorship | Why Founders Should Not Angel Invest | Why Kindness in Business Will Slow You Down with Adam Foroughi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's not true anymore. I do go to conferences now. 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 going to buy our own shares and we're going to shut down investor relations because what's the point? Why do I need to go to a conference to explain to everyone who's selling my shares to buy my shares? You're not going to convince someone to buy your shares when they're convinced every day you're going down. And so I just said a better use of my time is focusing internal and focusing on the long term. And it's a bad use of my time to go to conferences. And as a public company CEO, you are supposed to go to conferences. You're supposed to meet with investors. So for a period of a couple years there, 22 and 23, we basically just shut all that down. Eventually, when the stock started gaining traction and the market cap was really recovering, I realized those were key parts of the role. And I like to challenge myself and do things well, even if they're uncomfortable to me. And so, I mean, here we're sitting and we're having a one.”
2026-04-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Applovin: $160BN Market Cap, $5.48BN Revenue, $10M EBITDA Per Head | Why the Best Do Not Need Mentorship | Why Founders Should Not Angel Invest | Why Kindness in Business Will Slow You Down with Adam Foroughi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I found in the most productive moments with your best people, you get heated debates, 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 dinner, you have drinks, you get to bond, you sometimes lose the human side of things. And you sometimes get in a place where resentment can build and then things can become unproductive. When you remember that you're just a bunch of smart people in a room trying to figure shit out, you really remember that at something like a dinner at something like drinks, you end up creating, I think, productivity out of those moments. 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 with a bunch of coworkers and talking about baseball. We're going out with a bunch of co-workers and getting drunk together and talking about work opportunities. And sometimes your best ideas come out of those moments.”
2026-04-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Applovin: $160BN Market Cap, $5.48BN Revenue, $10M EBITDA Per Head | Why the Best Do Not Need Mentorship | Why Founders Should Not Angel Invest | Why Kindness in Business Will Slow You Down with Adam Foroughi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, we're at the day, we're a sales business talking to advertisers. So I do believe there's a lot of value to building relationships in person. 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. When you need to build a relationship with key clients, you go in person and you take them out. And if you take them out in a social gathering, you can send notes into a chat around that client and have that as your history on the in-person meeting. But you can't replace in person. I think as human beings, as we go to this world where bots are going to do more for us, in-person do more valuable.”
2026-04-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Applovin: $160BN Market Cap, $5.48BN Revenue, $10M EBITDA Per Head | Why the Best Do Not Need Mentorship | Why Founders Should Not Angel Invest | Why Kindness in Business Will Slow You Down with Adam Foroughi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Jobs out of school. I came in and I was just curious, and I figured stuff out. I've seen a pattern that our best people come in, they ask questions, they figure things out. And so 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. We want to get really curious minds who come in who are loud enough to get what they need to get and who can learn. And now I'm going to tie it to the AI native world today. The benefit of not doing things in these one-on-one silos and very structured is you can document everything in Slacks or transcripted video calls. If you do that, any new person can come in and go, hey, Claude, summarize for me what Adam cares about over the last quarter and write me a book of everything that matters to him and take the person who's running the best sales calls and summarize what he does or she does for those calls and tell me what I should know on this job. And then like you start asking these types of questions.”
2026-04-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Applovin: $160BN Market Cap, $5.48BN Revenue, $10M EBITDA Per Head | Why the Best Do Not Need Mentorship | Why Founders Should Not Angel Invest | Why Kindness in Business Will Slow You Down with Adam Foroughi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so it's really interesting. So I'll broaden this out a little bit. One of my beliefs is that really good people figure out a way. They don't need a whole lot of mentorship. So if people on my team, if they directly report to me, I never do one-on-ones. I don't do reviews. If I don't like something they're doing, they know about in real time via chat. If I like what they're doing, they don't need to know. They know that I respect them and they're good to go. Good people don't need that type of hand holding. And what ends up happening is people who need a lot of development do. Those people aren't the people that I want on this team of A players. And so we tend to shy away from a lot of traditional management techniques. Another example of this is something like learning and development. A lot of companies try to structure all the onboarding and learning and development processes in a company to say, you're new at my company. Here's how you should learn the business. Why are we in school? I hated classes that were structured. I didn't learn anything. You couldn't retain it. I wanted to learn as I went. My first couple”
2026-04-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Applovin: $160BN Market Cap, $5.48BN Revenue, $10M EBITDA Per Head | Why the Best Do Not Need Mentorship | Why Founders Should Not Angel Invest | Why Kindness in Business Will Slow You Down with Adam Foroughi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's tough to say, I mean, again, there's 400 people in the core business. We run lean. Is it going to be 800 on the core business? I highly doubt it. Is it going to 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 things that we'll take bets on over time work, we'll need more people around other businesses. But if we're just executing on our core business, it's very likely we don't need to go hire a whole lot more.”
2026-04-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Applovin: $160BN Market Cap, $5.48BN Revenue, $10M EBITDA Per Head | Why the Best Do Not Need Mentorship | Why Founders Should Not Angel Invest | Why Kindness in Business Will Slow You Down with Adam Foroughi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really, really fast given how exceptionally talented companies like Anthropic are about releasing product on top of their own models.”
2026-04-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Applovin: $160BN Market Cap, $5.48BN Revenue, $10M EBITDA Per Head | Why the Best Do Not Need Mentorship | Why Founders Should Not Angel Invest | Why Kindness in Business Will Slow You Down with Adam Foroughi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, look, we're not an interface on top of large language models. There's usage of large language models in the company for productivity. There's some usage of large language models in our core business as well. But a recommendation system model is something that drives engagement. What you see on content on a social network is something that drives most advertising products in the world today. Facebook's ad system, TikTok's ad system, ours. And so this is a space of machine learning that really hit its stride about a decade ago and I would say really accelerated with some of the research that we've seen come out of the large language model space lately. But it's a space where 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. In a world where you get to a place where you're in a category where you're utilizing the large language model or you're building an interface on top, you better build a moat.”
2026-04-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Applovin: $160BN Market Cap, $5.48BN Revenue, $10M EBITDA Per Head | Why the Best Do Not Need Mentorship | Why Founders Should Not Angel Invest | Why Kindness in Business Will Slow You Down with Adam Foroughi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source