This is the best founder you've never heard of. Adam Foroughi's company prints $5 billion in cash a year with just 400 people. When his stock price dropped by 92%, he borrowed money to buy back $6 billion in stock. That bet made the company more than $60 billion. The entire C-suite is just 4 people. To this day, Adam approves every hire. This episode has the highest insight-to-minute ratio of any conversation I've had so far. Here’s our full conversation: 0:00 The $6B Buyback That Made $60B 2:15 Borrowing Money To Buy Back Stock At A Discount 5:02 Why VCs Passed On AppLovin In 2012 9:00 From App Discovery To Ad Platform 14:45 Beating Google's AdMob With Performance Marketing 19:30 No Board For Six Years 30:12 The China Deal That Almost Blew Up 37:45 The Convertible Note Pivot And KKR 46:30 Buying Gaming Studios To Get Data 51:45 Losing Trust With Game Developers 58:20 The 2022 Crash And How He Kept His Team 1:02:00 Building An Hyper Competent & Efficient Company 1:07:25 Why Every New Hire Needs His Approval 1:19:06 The Axon 2 Inflection Point 1:21:15 One Great Engineer Now Beats A Hundred Includes paid partnerships.

48 out of 50 @AppLovin incrementality tests came back positive at @CommnThreadCo in 2026. Tony Chopp’s (@tonychoPPC) BFCM predictions for the channel based on last year’s performance.

The Pets Table came in skeptical. We respect that. They ran an incrementality test with @HausAnalytics to verify our numbers. We love that even more. The results? Truly incremental, strong customer quality. "I'm definitely going to have AppLovin as part of my marketing mix." — Dovas Zakas, Co-Founder & CMO, The Pets Table. #DTC #ecommerce #performancemarketing

🚨 Lead Gen Advertisers: We want to hear from you. We’re exploring how we can make AppLovin a much bigger channel for lead generation, and our engineering team wants your input. If you run paid lead gen, we want to understand what you optimize for, your goals, and what you’d need from AppLovin to scale. The more demand we see, the more we can prioritize building for lead gen. Survey below 👇

People won’t remember what you say, they remember how you made them feel. Building a business is hard. There are so many challenges and most of us don’t know many other people in our local communities who can relate to the obstacles we face every day. I’ve gotten feedback from hundreds of @9operators listeners over the last year. I’ve learned that the podcast meets a need that no on else is addressing. But I also have more clarity than ever about our mission. We exist to provide community and practical help to people in the trenches building companies. Creating something new and valuable in the world is ludicrously hard and lonely. Our insecurity ratchets up the challenge. All of us, myself included, can find ourselves playing the numbers game. Trying to define our value from a number on a dashboard. One of the biggest breakthroughs in my life has been realizing that my identity is not in the size of my company. I’m as driven and ambitious as I’ve ever been, but not because I need my company’s growth to make me feel like I have value. There’s a reason why social media has been proven to reduce our happiness and emotional stability. It activates our worst tendencies and biggest insecurities. It encourages us to embellish the wins and hide the losses. Success porn content like that will always do numbers, but it leaves us feeling more empty and insecure after we consume it. Because even if social media presents a world where everything is always up into the right, no one’s real life works that way. We have made almost 200 episodes of Operators. I’m confident the next 200 will be even better. Because we know the mission that we are chasing AND the pitfalls to avoid.

Applovin CEO, Adam Foroughi, on stage at All In Summit. “Here’s something that got us to this point, we never think we won….there’s this ability to take on giants if you remain lean and move faster than them.”

I just had lunch with a founder who is coming on the show soon. He told me Applovin is crushing for them. Then immediately after said: “Can’t talk about that on the podcast. Don’t want my competitors to know.”

@AppLovin has quickly become one of the most talked-about ad channels in ecommerce. But does it actually create incremental revenue? Or is it just good at claiming credit for conversions that would have happened anyway? We analyzed 12 months of data across 755 shops using three different measurement methods: - Attribution - MMM - Real-world geo holdout tests Here's what we found: 1. AppLovin generated a 2.90 lifetime Triple Attribution ROAS, compared with 2.08 across the other platforms in the study. 61% of qualifying shops saw a higher ROAS from AppLovin. 2. Our Foundation MMM found that 66% of AppLovin advertisers had a higher expected incremental return per additional dollar than their own benchmark across other platforms. 3. Five of seven geo holdout tests produced statistically significant results. All five showed positive revenue lift, averaging 8.3% and ranging from 3.5% to 13.5%. 4. AppLovin represented only 7.7% of combined ad spend across the cohort. TL;DR: AppLovin is creating real incremental revenue. The results show that AppLovin deserves a legitimate test with enough budget and runway to prove itself, especially before BFCM. Full report: triplewhale.com/blog/applovi…

CTC tested AppLovin and the results were so strong that the team initially assumed something was wrong. @RSteveData, Director of Data @CommnThreadCo, said "Our AppLovin test came back at 252% for a brand. And we’re like, ‘This can’t be right.’” They tested again and saw a 171% increase. “If you’re going to double the spend, triple the spend in this channel, you’re still getting great returns.” Since then, CTC has put approximately 15–20 brands on AppLovin. “Pretty much 90% of the tests have come back with over 100% incrementality. Some as high as 300% and 400%.” The results were so unusual that they repeatedly checked for technical problems. But that’s exactly why the channel is exciting. @chrislukehall: "The days of Meta arbitrage, they are over.” Brands are searching for another place to find new customers who don’t already know them at an efficient price. @ecommcowboy is live M-F at 12P CT.

“What’s up with older women playing games on their phone?” -Lil Sas

BREAKING: Inside AppLovin's $100B+ Ad Engine Co-Founder & CEO Adam Foroughi CTO Giovanni Ge FULL INTERVIEW AppLovin is one of the most efficient companies in public markets at ~400 people. Approaching $7B in EBITDA. That's ~$17M per employee, roughly 3x the revenue per head of Nvidia & 7x Apple, Meta, or Google. Engineering hasn't grown in 3 years (100 people) while cash flow scaled 20x. The most extensive breakdown yet of how they built the ad model that grew @AppLovin ( $APP ) from a -92% post-IPO decline to $100B+ company, with billions in profit Gio joined AppLovin in late 2022, when the company was worth ~$5.5 billion to help architect Axon 2, the recommendation engine that became central to AppLovin’s transformation. The new architecture improved predictions & advertiser returns, helping drive the company’s expansion beyond mobile gaming into e-commerce ads & a full recovery "Technology moves really fast, & you gotta be humble about what you have. If technology goes faster than what you've developed, you gotta throw away what you have & rebuild it. And it's probably gonna happen every couple years, or even faster in the future." - Adam Foroughi We go inside the machine: › Rebuilding Axon from scratch with 100 engineers › No one-on-ones, no training manuals, almost no PMs › New hires ship production code in week 1 › Engineers on top of AI, not next to it › The e-commerce product designed on a napkin › Dropping 92%, then becoming their own best investor › The math to $1 trillion 𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒 (00:00) Adam Foroughi, Co-Founder & CEO & Giovanni Ge, CTO at AppLovin (00:52) Gio's first impression of AppLovin (03:38) Joining AppLovin after a 30% stock drop (09:59) How Axon 2 actually got built (20:23) Why AppLovin never needed a sales team (21:59) From gaming ads to e-commerce (24:47) From a napkin drawing to a real product (30:54) The onboarding mistake most companies make (34:37) What "AI-Native" actually means (36:37) Should new engineers still learn to code? (41:41) UGC vs. traditional ads: what's winning? (47:56) Adapting to AI without rebuilding from scratch (54:50) Gio's daily tech stack (1:02:17) AppLovin's path to a trillion-dollar valuation (1:06:19) Recovering from a 90% stock drop (1:09:47) What's next for AppLovin? (1:13:44) What happens when AI takes over? (1:15:48) Adam and Gio's hottest takes (1:19:50) How to actually stay locked in (1:24:47) Building something that lasts

I’ve lost money on over 9,000 ads I personally wrote. I’ve had over 2000 1-on-1 sales consults reject my offer. My first 300 episodes of my podcast I published with barely any downloads. In 9 different business partnerships, I was the reason we failed. 3 times I pitched an entire audience - and sold no one. Nobody is special. Everybody sucks when they start.