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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“I mean, our business is pretty simple. So I don't know that we ever optimized to something that turned out to be wrong because we've always optimized the same thing. There are two things that drive our business. If the model is more accurately predictive, it's going to drive more revenue for the customer, the advertiser, than their media costs spent and everything is measurable in our system. And if that function holds true, revenue should grow as well alongside it. And so because everything is real time tracked and because we've always had a very consistent business model where we don't sell the belief that something worked. We sell the actual fact that something worked and we can measure everything. We ended up in a lucky spot where the business was built really well to be able to go utilize the types of technologies that we're seeing out there today.”
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
“With what an agent is going to, or army of agents going to do on their behalf and try to get to that point of get the most value out from the investment that we're making. I think it's very hard in a lot of businesses to understand exactly what are the KPIs that we're optimizing to. So they just go, let's just write a bunch of things and see what sticks. Then you're walking on a slippery slope. It's you may have so much cost ballooning from token usage that you don't actually get the type of revenue growth you need to cover it.”
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 have to understand the KPIs of the business that drive the business. And so our organization was built pretty nicely for the era that we're in. One, we don't have a product organization. Our engineers are meant to be product managers. And 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 because frankly, you can't just go type out what you need in a complex system and get a deliverable and it's done. They still need to be able to review the code to make sure what they're checking in is safe and high quality. But first and foremost, they need to know what the business needs and they need to know how to measure it. And so our business with a lean team and one where when you push a model improvement, it is with certainty that it's easy to see it reflected in accuracy numbers in the model and also revenue growth in the business. The team knows what the KPIs are that they're optimizing to. And because they know that, they can then align.”
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, 80, 90%, probably, but like that discounts quality over quantity. So I think what's important is if you just shoot off for a percentage of tokens consumed, you could get to a place where you're just creating slop. If you're incentivizing slop, like you're not going to get very far as a business. You're not massive fees to go pay the large language model businesses, but you're not going to get further as a business. What's important is are your engineers.”
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 Cash is king. I like it's simple. I mean, I look at accounting practices and I look at like EBITDA numbers and like what's clean EBITDA versus not. End of the day like net income cash, these are clean things. If a company generates a billion dollars of cash but gives out a billion dollars of equity and says I'm just going to buy my equity at a billion dollars, they're not generating any cash. So like what's the real value of that business? Either you're diluting and they're paying all of the cash they generate to buy the equity back to offset the dilution or they're building up a cash balance that just offsets the dilution. So like what's the point of believing that the cash flow is real in that case? So I think for me it's just distill businesses down to the simplest metric, which is cash flow minus SPC.”
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
“Away their stock too cheaply and too broadly not understanding who actually can drive the value of the equity and also believing that the investors are going to be accepting of really high burn rates.”
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
“Have enough compensation to not take risk on the stock if the stock's going to be volatile. 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. They'll have the right to buy equity. And there's ESPP programs that let employees buy equity at a discount if they so choose. Otherwise, they'll just be paid on cash. And I remember when I first started my career, I couldn't have taken risks. Like I was basically going paycheck to paycheck, right? Like if you got 25% of your pay in stock and it went up great, you feel great. But if it falls 92%, you're like, damn, I can't pay my rent. That's a real problem, right? So we took it to a point where people who had the luxury of being able to take upside got upside. Everyone else got cash comp. They had the decision themselves. And we controlled this burn. And so we got into the position where it just wasn't burdensome to our business. And I think companies tend to give.”
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've given roughly the same amount of stock every year in terms of absolute amount. It's roughly $300 million. And so if you think about our market cap, I think our market cap is about $150 billion. Our burn on stock-based comp is very, very low. And so you can judge us on cash flow minus SBC, which I generally think is the right way to judge companies. What's happened in tech, though, is that there's been an expectation that stock-based comp will be high at companies, and as stock prices have gone down, especially in software companies of late, you have a downward spiral that's formed where all of a sudden a company that was burning three percent of their cap table every single year to pay out equity to the team falls 66%, and now you're at 10%, and you're at a level of dilution that's incredibly hard to come out from underneath. And so it makes it hard to bet on those companies when they're burning that much equity. What I found in what we did implemented in 2022 when we fell a lot is that certain people”
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
“They really know what they're doing and they understand how the company looked when it was highly efficient, when it was founded, then it's plausible that it can get back to the roots. But if it's a company that's gotten bloated to the point of mediocrity and it's just, let's fire half and try to automate roles, it's probably not going to get to the place that people think it should.”
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
“To build things, and founders remember the days, the glory days of 50 people in a room just building stuff and things moving incredibly quickly. It's not particularly easy to take a company that's gotten large scale with a bunch of layers, big exec suite, and then take it back 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
“I think it's really, really hard if the train leaves the station and your team becomes bloated to go backwards. And the reason I say that, and this is a challenge in software today, it's not as simple as go lay off 50%, 60% of people. If the team is bloated and there's a mixture of A's, B's, and C's, your A's have probably already long gone. And what's left is like A minus is to B pluses and then go down from there. But it's people who like working in a process-oriented bigger company that are sticking around. If you go fire 50% of people in the culture and the team is mediocre, you're left with half mediocrity. And you're not going to get to where we hopefully are at, which is just a bunch of A players who are doers. 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. It's exceptionally hard to do. Not a lot of people understand how to do that because they don't know what they're looking for. And it's very, very hard to do that as a public company. So I think it's challenging. People hear that this is the way.”
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
“Founding roots and try to go back to that culture of doers. And the question why I played a huge role in that, and we were able to get to a place where everything was leaned up to doers. So we no longer have a role or a layer that I don't appreciate.”
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, they manage the next person, the next person, and the next person to eventually the doer. The reason I state this is because we really built a culture of doers. And it is very, very hard when you grow up from a team you started and was small and was a team of doers to eventually get large and you go public, it's very hard to maintain that. We didn't until we ran through the layoffs and started leaning up. And really the catalyst for me was this guy who's now the CTO, Giovanni, came in and he started looking around the organization and kept saying, why do we have these people? Why do we have these processes? And it reminded me that the most important question to ask in business is why. And so he inspired me to go, you know, it's been 10 years. We're working with all these people. We have all these processes that we built over 10 years. Why do we have these things? Why is it that I have this person who has this title who means nothing? And I went through the whole organization and we just went back to the”
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, so long as I have all people who are doers, who are really high output, I don't dislike any role because it fits our culture. And every part of that comes together to build the business. But it's like, as an example, 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 roles.”
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
“In HR. They're the doers who are individual contributors. They just get stuff done. They don't get bogged down in process. And so every organization, we said, how do we slim down to the best people? And for us, the best people are defined by those that really want to come in and make a difference and learn and develop themselves that not need process to get there. No management layer, no slowdown. It's just people who just want to get shit done. And so that went through the entire organization where we leaned up to just those kinds of people.”
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, our core business, so we bought a couple of businesses, we have adjusted as an analytics company in World, as a CTV business. So those two aren't integrated, they run their own business. 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 really, really high number. I think it's reaching over 10 billion ahead now. So the question on can you have a team full of A players? Not everyone can be an A player in a team. You need some roles that are just there to be processed and keep the lights on, like we're a public company. So there's certain things that have to happen just because they have to happen. But HR, for example, like did I touch 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. The people that we retained are your A-plus.”
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
“To just go crush it, but they don't want to be distracted by unhappiness. They don't want to be distracted by people who are working at a role that is almost certainly going to get automated away. And so by taking it and saying, build the culture as if we were building it today, knowing what technologies are available to us, what would we look like? We just went to the what we would look like. And then that forcing function made us have to get to an automated place faster. And it would have been a lot slower had we had people that were trying to fight adoption of the technology because they were fearful it was going to lead to their jobless.”
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, your earlier question about winning ties in here is I don't play in fear of failure or fear of losing. And I also believe on my team across the board, our job for them has to be the right job for them at this moment and right defined by the best place to have personal development and growth. And if we believe that every single person has a good role, if we think that's no longer true, we should part ways. Good severance and make sure they're free to go do something else. Because I don't like to keep people in roles that are going towards a dead end. Now, it was a bet and a belief that these technologies were going to get good enough to automate these roles away, but we didn't want to take the risk that we were going to keep people in dead end roles. That just creates morale hit, that creates this organization that ends up optimizing to people who are just not happy. And we try to optimize to our best performers, best performers, your A players want free.”
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
“Who are the gatekeepers of those processes? You can remove those people. And then you go to the where are the areas that you're going to start seeing a lot more automation. So an example in our business is create a production. 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. In engineering, you have your best engineers can use these tools to really accelerate themselves. And you're weaker engineers might not understand how to use these tools or might only get a 2x instead of a 10x or 100x increase in 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
“I mean, it's like, first of all, a lot of one, you end up over time, companies get bloated. So I said, like, what are the process-oriented organizations? Like, what is created, even in our company, we run really lean. We've got a really high revenue per employee and EBITDA per employee. But even at that time, we'd gotten bloated over a decade plus. And so I looked at first like, what are the process enabling parts of the organization? So one was HR. HR as a function is necessary to have because you've got to be able to do things like hire people and fire people. But our team had gotten bloated and there was a lot of process that the HR team was introducing in the organization. As a founder, I still remember the days we were 10, 20, 50, 100 people, and you didn't have that much process. You had one HR person per 1 to 200 people. And things felt faster. So I wanted to get back to that point. And so I went through and said, what are the processes I don't like at the company? Let me just eliminate those. Then we can go through and say like.”
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, I think it's the latter today because the former is still yet to take full effect at most companies. But a couple years ago, we grew, I mean, we've been growing really fast ever since we launched this model Axon 2 in April of 2023 in the stock recovered. But I think it was in 24-25, but mostly in 24. We had a year where we probably grew near triple digits, but we ended up cutting the team's staff by 40-50% in most departments. 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 technologies were available to us today.”
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
“Doing okay, yeah, you almost like didn't get that, but you got looks like you should probably go consult a therapist because it looks like you're gonna kill yourself and like I wasn't given off those vibes because like at least I didn't think so because I've always had a belief that so long as we have conviction on a path and we've got a strategy that sounds right and we've got a motivated team behind it, we're good to go. And so I was able to voice confidence internally. In doing so, we were able to retain core team and the important people that we needed to go execute on this path forward. And that's really the challenge you get into when the stock falls that much. It's really, really hard to understand how can you retain people. People are working and seeing the exact same thing that we're talking about. And they're probably and their families are probably going. Is this company a piece of shit? Why aren't investors buying the shares? Well, it's easy to get tricked into believing it is when it goes down 92%.”
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 have to voice confidence in your own bet. And so it's very, very hard to walk around confident when your sock's down that much. I mean, people are calling you thinking you're suicidal. So like, you got to drown out of that noise. Like I said, you just wanted to chat.”
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
“To do that was a big internal change. One, we had to slow down basically all research and development on the current system because we said we're going to throw it out. It's now outdated. It's not going to carry us forward where we got to go. We had to turn over some people. We had to take some 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
“Guess yourself in the face of that, I think what's important is if you believe in your business, maintaining conviction. And so we did a couple things and really that allowed us to turn the business around. As an advertising business, there's an advertising model that drives a lot of the success that we have on platform. Everything we do is on a performance basis. So advertisers plug in. They aim to get a certain amount of revenue that's more than the ad dollars that they spend on the platform. Now, what delivers that equation for them is how potent are advertising model is. And these models are recommendation system models. And that's one of the earlier forms of machine learning that existed. And it's really gotten super charged with what we see today in AI and the research advancements in LLMs. 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 in the field of recommendation system.”
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, it's a lot. And also, when you realize you fall 92%, you got to go up 10x to get back to where you started. So it's like, it is a bloodbath. A couple things. Like one is a lot of people think your psyche is tied to the stock. And I mean, beyond that, when you talk to some execs who are at public companies, they'll say they don't look at the stock price. 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 stock price for a few days, week, whatever, because you've got investors. They care. You got your team that cares. And it's a real time ticker on what the world thinks of your business. The challenges there are when everyone is telling you that the stock is going down every single day, investors are not buying your shares. It's very easy to go, am I doing something wrong? Is the business fucked? Is something here that I don't understand that everyone else in the world is smarter than me on and understands? And so it can make you lose confidence in sex.”
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
“Realized is like almost in every relationship in my life, I was never really present. What I tried to do to change that is at least take small moments to feel like I was present. And so small moments might be 10 minutes at a time because I'm not going to be able to sit down and have hours at a time. But if I gave myself 10 minutes at a time to hang out with one of my children or a couple of my children, I felt like, okay, now I'm actually committing to them to be 100% present. And that was a change. And the third change I made at the point in time was that I started introducing hobbies to myself. So for example, I started learning how to surf in the last year or two years. You have to put the phone down. You have to be completely disconnected. You get mental ease. And in the absence of these changes, I feel like I would have felt like I'm giving away a big part of my own ability to be stable and happy. And by getting that back, I became a better CEO of the business. I became someone who could be more thoughtful and who could be 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
“I would say at the low, low point in 22, I decided to make some changes because I did question the sacrifice I was making. There were two tolls that I saw that were being taken on my life. One was my health was decaying. And I felt like if I'm this stressed out where I'm not sleeping, I'm drinking eight cups of coffee a day. I'm losing, I mean, losing my hair, losing my fitness, just losing the things that allow me to focus. If I don't reverse that, I'm never going to be in a place to be mentally sound to run the business. And I felt like as a CEO of public company, I'm committing for the next 10, 20 years. I need to be here a long time. To do that, I needed my health. So I stopped what I was doing and reset that. The other piece was I felt like from my children I drifted a little bit more distant because I wasn't paying attention. And I think any founder, anyone who works at a tech company that's always on knows this experience if they have kids. You hang out with your kids, but your mind is elsewhere. Either that or you're on your phone. So you're never really 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
“Yeah, so to understand my comp in 23, you got to really look backwards in 22. When we went public, we went public in 21. In the first year, the stock went up to about $40 billion market cap. In 2022, we fell about 92% to a little bit under $4 billion market cap. 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'd taken no compensation.”
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 the business has grown really well. It's really sound. Why would we give it up on that upward trajectory? So we were able to really play along. And I think in large part, that's because I didn't start this at all considering the money that I can make from it.”
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
“There was a baseline that I needed to feel like family was good, and I was fortunate enough to start a couple businesses before they were successful. So I'd reached the baseline before I started this business. And I said those businesses, I really aspired to get a single. I just wanted to get enough money where I didn't have to stress about money. Once I co-founded this business with my team and we started getting going, I never really needed anything from this monetarily. And so as we were building up, we were growing really quickly. And in 2015, 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 have been something that was very enticing to just cash out the whole thing at that point in time. But because I knew my bank account was sound, I wasn't in it for money. I was trying to build big. And really, I felt like this had to be the home run. I was able to think about the deal process there logically and understand.”
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
“Because money is a very, very tough thing to continuously be motivated by. Eventually, you will reach a point where money is no longer a motivator and then you need to find something else. So I've always pushed to win and I've always pushed to learn and grow. And those are the things that really get me going.”
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 you almost, if you've had success, you almost have to be inspired by winning. If you're fearful of losing or you have a fear of failure, I feel like you're almost certain to be stuck. You're not going to take shots that are material and you're going to protect downside more than go after upside. And I don't tend to believe that's really the founder mentality. If you took a risk once upon a time to start a business where there was nothing, you didn't even know what it was going to become. And you knew the odds were 99, 5.9 is likely that you were going to fail. That in itself has to tell you the founder mentality's got to be chase winning. And so over the years, I've taken motivation through winning. And I think it's also important to note that founders don't tend to be motivated by money as well if they're really successful. That's something that I like to ask in interview questions. And I found the best people are motivated by personal growth, development, being inspired, finding things intellectually stimulating, winning, but it never tends to be money.”
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
“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. The founder mentality has got to be chase winning In order for me to get paid anything, the stock had to clear that and then keep going up from there. Almost in every relationship of my life, I was never really present. That fear of blow up is one of my big motivators. And so.”
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