Adam Foroughi, AppLovin CEO: A Fortt Knox Conversation

welcome to fort knox i am john fort once again and this time i'm here with adam perugi uh co-founder and ceo of applovin uh adam great to have you welcome um

i wanna first ask what i always do which is the toughest problem that you're solving for today i mean you were you were just on tech

check days ago and i can guess that it's getting people to understand your business and what is and isn't affecting it but i don't know what is the toughest problem there's there's many things to solve

yeah i mean we started the business we actually i can answer by going back a decade we had our one 10-year anniversary of launching the product yesterday and we we actually started as a mobile

app developer and we built some apps and we couldn't get distribution we couldn't get people to discover them and that led us to wondering why there wasn't in 2011 a marketing platform built for the app

developer to help them go promote themselves to consumers and get discovery on their products and so we pivoted and built that and that's what we launched literally 10 days and

10 years and a day ago into the market and it was a platform to put the app developer on our solution help them market their product to the end consumer do the matchmaking and

scale the product and we went from launching a decade ago to now driving over billions of installs of applications every single year between these developers to that consumer

but i mean is that the big challenge to help people understand that or what's what's consuming most of your your focus and attention these days it's it's always been the biggest

challenge because that's the biggest goal that we have those customers um really that they they pay us they keep the lights on but everything we've done strategically in the business since and we've done a whole bunch over the last

few years to add i guess it could be seen as complexity to the business but different business units then all all feed the system and make us better at solving that core

problem and that problem's a big one i'd say there's just millions of app developers at this point millions of apps in the app store um and as a consumer how do you know what to go download and then if you think about

categories in games like which became the biggest app store category and somehow turned a gamer out of everyone who has a mobile device when you go to the app store and search for a word game or a solitary game how do you know out

of the thousands that are there which is the relevant one and so that it's definitely been both our goal and our biggest task and challenge and opportunity to add a whole bunch of functionality into the

business that allows us to solve that problem better for our customers how does it work um what is it that you actually do to help the discoverability

uh problem help solve it and how is it different from one user versus another uh where do you get the signal on what people are more likely to download what they're more likely to enjoy

yeah for sure so obviously it's a two-sided marketplace to be able to do it and so on the one hand let's say you've got a company that just built the word game something super innovative they want to bring to the

market well they have to go get discovery on it they come into our platform and want to market themselves they might build a video advertisement to showcase that cool new user experience and they put it live and on

the other side we're we're integrated into at this point tens of thousands of mobile applications and our platform serves ads to 2 billion

mobile gamers a month and so just massively scaled in global and the key there is exactly what you said figure out the signal of which of those

users and in our case because we actually don't know the user which of these mobile devices are a good fit for this advertiser's new game and if the system in real time can do all the

matchmaking um and deliver that video advertisement for that word game to the right customer on the other side we'll drive engagement with the video we'll drive an action hopefully an app install but everything in our system then

optimizes to actually usage so what we're trying to drive them isn't just someone downloading their app it's someone engaging with their app and being retained in their app and delivering them revenue over time that

is greater than what they spend on our platform for that for that end customer and in the middle there we collect a lot of signal um and one of the as i touched on like we added a bunch of of

complexity but also created opportunity to get better at solving our core problem we added a whole bunch of games into our own business model where we

became a first party publisher of now hundreds of games that are some of the most popular on mobile and have 200 million players playing them every single month and that gave us data and

visibility into more consumer patterns and of people playing our games and then you pair that with the fact that we have billions of users a month and billions of ads a day that we're serving there's

just a ton of data that comes into the system that can allow us to in a real-time format figure out what's great for that customer to go discover so in a practical sense

um explain i think i get this but i i don't think um a lot of people spend time thinking about it what that games business that you have

does for the discoverability business that's the growth business that you're building uh what kind of first party data it's almost i don't want to call it like a

focus group but it's like you've got access up close to a group of users that are then helping to inform what you're seeing in the broader marketplace right

yeah and focus group is actually is is maybe a good way to phrase it we have these users who are playing our games and call them like every single day let's call it 40 million um roughly

every single day playing our games and then on the platform every single day we see over 400 million daily active devices again we don't we don't know the end customer we just know they're on an

iphone and so when we have a data set that gets trained from this user group in the world of just technology and machine learning and mathematics and and

implementation of data into bigger systems we can take some data and then extrapolate what the system would have would have determined was a great result

for that data set and that set of users to the entirety of the user base and so we do a lot of that in our system where we don't know the actual user on the other side but we know some information

about them we have some history on how they've engaged with our ads um and then maybe they don't play our games but we have other users who play our games who look similar to them and we can extrapolate to a result that ends up

showing them something relevant and so our job really is to drive relevancy if we get the consumer to see a relevant ad they're going to engage they're going to download and then subsequently engage with that game if it's not a relevant ad

it's a failure and then in our business model we also take the cost burden of that if our system's wrong we lose dollars and so we've got to be very good at doing this and the reason why this is important

right now is because actions apple has taken over the last few months to kind of shore up privacy on ios that has

facebook and a lot of other people very upset the effect of that is you get less signal purely from the third party data now on ios and

it seems like what you're saying is you don't need as much signal from just the third party data because you've got that focus group you've got that first party data your own games and you can sort of

then have profiles for the broader ecosystem based on the data that that you uniquely have yeah and like the reality is like

with the privacy changes like the the what it's trying to do is disrupt identity matching so that users really that in and in the world of privacy we talk about personally

identifiable information a lot of users are browsing the internet but they want to browse content use content and not have their identity paired and data shared against their identity across every single site they

go to and so apple gave consumer a choice to not share that identity crossout that impacts our business as well both on the third and the first party if one of our our first party consumers goes to another app and

decides they don't want to be taken from our app to the other app and have data sharing happening against their identity then then we can't do that as well and so but the reality is

in the system that we have we never had identity we had a lot of context around user behavior but by user device behavior and so we didn't actually have

to do the identity matching our models got better at contextual matching and relevancy because of that that training set of information that we get from our own games

and then a lot of information that just comes back from something as as simple as if we show an advertisement to a customer did they engage or not well if they didn't we lost money don't show that advertisement again the next time

and so there's tons of signal that comes into the system when you're you've got something as big scale as our platform and so we're able to use it all and in a privacy safe way deliver value both to

the advertiser and to the consumer and and really that's i think the the world of privacy that we're marching towards um i i don't always take questions as early but uh got a couple hear from

somebody i've known for a long time david kalash he asks has scaling the business been difficult given the times and any plans to go beyond games which i

guess dovetails really nicely with the connected tv acquisition that you guys just did yeah so it's a scaling of business is always difficult um it's been you know

it's been a decade we've been working really hard uh every every year you're hoping you scale a little bit more than the year before and you've always got to maintain that growth trajectory and maybe

the hardest part and one we've been able to to so far execute well on is seeing where you want to take your business years in advance and really what what we go and accomplish

this year was already pre-defined in terms of outcome a couple years ago a lot of the tools that we built technologies that we built and decisions that we made to influence

2022 were decisions that we made probably in 2018 19 and 20. and so the key that we've found in scaling a business hopefully well over time

is think ahead and plan ahead and try to execute on some of the decisions that you make because you'll never execute on all of the decisions that you make so that you've got a good road map and

and then that you know as you talk about our business being concentrated on gaming there's two things that just in real time give us access to a broader audience one is we did the mopab

acquisition um that we announced in in uh october of 2021 this was to buy one of the most popular app developer modernization platforms from twitter and

and really bring it into our platform unify it with a pre-existing solution max that we'd built and scaled in the marketplace we'd focused on gaming companies with our technology mobab had a lot of

penetration in non-gaming companies and a fair amount of the revenue comes from non-gaming customers and so by bringing those things together the mobile app ecosystem we expand our

audience and then we just announced an acquisition we're very excited about two days ago for a company called wurl and they're on tv

helping content creators think the brands the channels the the television shows that you see on on traditional cable tv come to the streaming device and deliver

that content across the 1500 plus and user devices that are accessing the internet to watch tv and stream and so they've effectively built a relationship

with the brand and they've become the cdn and then they can become the ad management solution as well and so this gives us access to not only a new audience the connected tv viewer it

gives us access to an entirely different advertiser base and the implications for that are something we're excited about both on the connected tv advice device and how we can bridge the connected tv device

and the mobile audience together to bring a more unified holistic advertising experience to the consumer yeah that was going to be my next question is how do you bridge that because then it's really powerful right

if somehow you can know that the same person or the same household whatever is the behavior on this connected tv and this mobile device are are together and

therefore you've got data sets to connect so a how do you do that and then b does we'll have access to say apple tv

devices roku tv and roku devices amazon fire tv devices or is it mainly

what's built directly into the the tv sets manufacturer-wise which i guess is also roku os in a lot of a lot of cases how does worlds access work

yeah so so i'll say on on really the the first question um when we started the business we had no idea how big mobile advertising could become and we didn't even have video advertising at the time so i had no idea where it was going to

evolve to we just thought it was going to be a big problem to go solve and as the problem became bigger the technologies got better and innovative and connected tv really accelerated

adoption over covid they call it a couple years at least that more people got on streaming television devices and so companies in that space have just

wildly grown over the last couple years now innovation has to catch up and as you think about the marketing model linear tv advertising is very much brand dominated the connected tv device should

have the opportunity for both brands and performance marketers to succeed given the connection to the internet and so as this market grows we should see innovation where you start bridging the

two devices well the popular coinbase qr code ad on the super bowl shows us how you could actually do a version of that where you had users go see a qr code nothing else scan it with their mobile

device and then on the on the browser on their mobile device start accessing coinbase and so you start seeing stuff like that and you can imagine a universe that a few years from now should be able to bridge these devices

together and create a much more holistic experience for that consumer that's valuable as well as a advertiser on the other side and really unify the access to content and then on the world

question around what type of devices i'll say like we just signed the deal we close the deal hopefully in a couple of months i'll learn more about the business i don't have the best answer to

that question today i do know they access tens of millions of end customer devices every single month and so it's a large scale product offering the other side we also have

a device sort of walled garden experience in connected tv devices as you mentioned apple tv these types of devices have walled off their own audience to their own experiences but there's just a lot

of connected tvs coming online every single day and there's a lot of fragmentation there whereas in mobile we've got the google android store and and the apple ios

store on connectedtv there's 1500 plus end device types that the world had to build their technology to go adapt to on behalf of these content creators and that's why the opportunity is so big

yeah it's fascinating i mean we've been using an apple tv device at home for a long time and then we've got our comcast xfinity box for

cable then we recently got a samsung tv that's a connected tv and we're using all of these things sort of in combination with each other depending on

which one has better performance for what we need it's it's it's a very uh diverse and somewhat confusing environment uh in tv right now uh to

answer another question uh that i saw uh applovin is public ticker symbol app all right so we've talked a lot about the business and i hope to get

back to that as well but uh now i want to learn more about you um i like to start from the very beginning so like where were you born tell me

about household parents siblings yeah so so uh hopefully i don't know if i'm better at answering questions about me or the business at this point so it's been so integral um

integrated over the last decade but i was born in iran in 1980 so 41 years old and i have a younger sister we ended up having to leave the country

just because of the revolution and the changes there family for safety reasons we ended up leaving and moving to the united states when i was four so in 1984 we we landed in

southern california and i grew up in orange county and and uh and that's it upbringing was i would call it um more in a

beach town so like not a super traditional middle eastern upbringing just given you lost that opportunity when the culture was left behind it's also very very difficult um for

successful parents to to have to uproot their life for the safety and opportunity of their children and my dad was one of the the most successful entrepreneurs in the country with a huge

company and so when the times changed you to leave all that behind and when we came over here i was given a lifestyle that was very much integrated into american culture and american lifestyle

because it was hard for my parents to to tie back a lot of my upbringing to the reasons that that they had to leave and what they had to leave behind for our benefit so what

was your dad's business situation before the family had to leave iran and then what did he do um in in france and then in california when

you guys got here he had one of the largest uh construction and development companies in the country so thousands of people working for him um and he was building just all sorts of different things

bridges buildings and so just tons of infrastructure and when we came over here we were we were more fortunate a lot of people because he had the means to get a little bit of his wealth

out of the country what was remained in the country for a lot of people that had to to flee the country at the time um became inaccessible but what was what was uh taken out gave him a nest egg to

start just building a life in america and he became an investor and and and was able to build up some presence here it was always difficult though because coming over not learning the the

language growing up you don't you don't know the culture you don't know the language you have to learn it you certainly don't end up in that environment having the confidence to recreate a business and

and so you lose that and so he lost a big part of him in doing it but he gave us the opportunity myself and my sister to really get

the chances here that we otherwise may not even live to see in iran and so that's one of the the reasons i have really aspired to try to build stuff

build big because i feel like i was given the opportunity and he had lost an opportunity and therefore i i just have to go out and perform as best as i possibly can

out of respect for my parents and and what they ended up doing for me what about your mom how did her uh prospects and situations shift uh with that um

traumatic move yeah it's it's tough like she had well-educated masters had a life i had just given given uh given birth to

to myself and my sister and so the uprooting she she was more well versed in english and so she she really helped guide us through how to actually live in the early years in the country but once

you once you uproot and move over she was more adaptable to the culture therefore she took more of the ownership over making sure that we were learning we were picking up the language

we were we were adapting and assimilating to a new new world that we had over here and while all the while my dad was trying to build the economic presence for the family so they took these

different tasks but we ended up becoming much more of the focus as the children because we were the reason they left what what are your earliest memories um from

your earliest days do you remember the the move to the u.s itself do you remember having to adapt i guess as a kindergarten aged kid to a different culture

you know it's it's a little sad because i i was poor and and given the experience i don't remember anything about iran and then i don't really have the the opportunity to go back

necessarily and so so my memories really date back to preschool and kindergarten coming over here like not knowing the language i i came over and

was a little bit slower in the early years um because i was going through trying to process i mean i did a lot of bilingual children but mine was was flipped on the moment we landed here

where i had to learn english and as a four or five year old it takes a little while to then process and be able to communicate so i was quite behind and then eventually i was able to

catch up and and obviously at some point i became a reasonable student what what was community like for the family back then in southern california

did you find um cultural connection where your parents were able to transition from uh the culture that they had known into american culture and english and all of

that or was it very disconnected i'll say like it's interesting because because some people call a tarantula there's a lot of persians in in los

angeles and uh and there's a lot of persians that have landed in orange county as well and so there is some sense of community just by that token that that you have a fairly large

population of people that went through something similar because a lot of it was just driven by the same reasons we ended up moving over here and so they had that as a foundation and then then

really like the desire um was to assimilate and get us to to grow up with american culture so we did end up with friends who grew up in a good community

um and so you look at that and to answer that i look back at like friendships i had friendships they had and they were multicultural they weren't just um with people who went through the same things they did and grew up in iran

and they weren't just with people who grew up in america it was it was all of the above and i think that helped give me a much broader perspective also on

life and culture um and and uh that's actually carried forward into how we operate a very multinational and multicultural business today

what were you excited about as a kid in your early days like whether it was a subject in school or a sport or video games what were you doing

um in your spare time when you could break away yeah i'd say i don't know if it was school it was more uh mario kart and zelda and playing street baseball and basketball and and uh eventually having

the rude awakening that i was not very athletic but you i grew up a normal kid lifestyle and and uh did a lot of the things that i think everyone was doing as video games and

the first nintendo came out and um really really started getting into the population i was into all the same things um when did kind of a a career path or or

those sort of practical interests come into play so i ended up going through i went to cal i was undergrad undergrad business focused on finance

and so when i came out i thought i was going to be an investment banker but i graduated right after 9 11. so there

wasn't much opportunity there i ended up becoming a derivatives trader and did that for a year and a half and then got into tech and and worked at a couple startups at the time for a couple more

years but i always had that itch i always wanted to go off and do my own thing and so i got to a point where i just realized i got to take a shot and i was young enough i was single i didn't

have the the downside of needing to support a family and therefore i could take no salary i could take a shot and i ended up partnering with some people and then co-founding a first business

when i think i was 25 and not taking a salary and really just building it up and and that ended up doing pretty well and then that from there i just knew that i

wanted to build my own businesses and and be able to make my own decisions about them and so that set me off on the path i've been on where did that itch come from why did you want to start your own thing i i

think honestly for me it was i always knew what my dad gave up for me so he gave up his company and so i i felt like okay well if he was able to do what he

did have the type of successes he had in iran which frankly infrastructure and opportunity is more limited than than what we all get access to in america i had to go out and try to prove myself and so i i don't know if it was

it just just something that was deep inside me or i don't know if it was because of environment and what i saw but it was always there and i had to go take the shot and and ended up doing it and i haven't always had successes i've had successes and

failures but through both the successes and failures i only got my joy from taking those shots tell me about live stream corporation what was what was the idea and um why did you

start it we had a couple ideas there and and i was a co-founder over there and and it was i worked at a company called claria and one of their co-founders that that really

him and my my direct boss of that company were leaving to start a business they brought me along both ended up mentoring me along the way and life street itself um was a business that we

wanted to to start to help small businesses market themselves and so we were looking at how do you build marketing solutions online for the local dentist because they're not filling the

seat at the dental office every day and so can you build a business around that and around that we actually also launched a marketing platform on social media as that was starting and that that

was the part of the business that i operated that was one of the the first advertising platforms to exist for app developers on on there was a time when friendster was around and then myspace

and then subsequently the facebook app ecosystem so i ran that and enjoyed doing so i mean it sounds kind of familiar in a way i mean helping small business

to get discovered i mean in a previous era right yeah it's a lot of this marketing has a lot of the evolution of mobile marketing um but the original roots were all on on

browser-based marketing and that went through several several uh evolutions and started with a lot of performance but eventually like the thing that taught me a lot of what we're doing today

started with the social media companies and learning how to work with app developers on myspace when they launched their app ecosystem and facebook when they launched theirs you saw this need for discovery

and so both for small businesses and for app developers once you learn the formula you can understand like different platforms have different um rules restrictions and

opportunities and but you can build against it but the core problem is the same really marketing drives discovery and without marketing businesses would be much smaller so if we can build technologies around that for one

platform in theory we should be able to for any it's interesting you mentioned myspace's app ecosystem my memory and maybe it's way oversimplified is that myspace

choked off his act ecosystem and that's what caused its decline in large part and uh and you know people fleeing businesses apps

fleeing to facebook because myspace tried to exercise too much control am i over simplifying that what did you see at the ground level when you were understanding what you know

entrepreneurial businesses were trying to do at the time and what worked and didn't it was interesting because on social both both facebook and myspace were had an app ecosystem and games were

were starting to prosper there and those games looked a lot different than mobile games a lot of them were quizzes but they existed on both platforms i think what we saw and really what what led to

myspace's eventual demise in terms of usage was that facebook was just getting an insane amount of usage and so we launched i think it was on the app

ecosystem around 2007 onto both those platforms and you were just seeing traffic shifting really quickly to facebook which really is a testament to all the things that they built and

executed on um over the years and i think that's what pulled audience away from myspace not necessarily the decisions that they made huh okay what did facebook do better

you know i like i always get asked even about us like how do you perform better than than others or what drives that i think it all comes down to execution it's sort of easy to say that

and easy to say that in hindsight but like if you look at what facebook is and what facebook grew up to be friendster came before myspace came before these properties had huge amounts of usage there was even babo at a time

sold for almost a billion dollars there were social networks but facebook just did it better and they executed better on how to give a clean experience to the consumer audience they executed better on recommendation engines around

content and friend discovery and they executed better around monetization so it really does come down to building a business requires you to make a lot of decisions but then execute on those decisions and the winners

usually ended up being the better executors um so after a live street was social hour and you know style page was

brief um what were you what were you trying to get to yeah we we left uh the the web to get into mobile and with with both livestream and social r we had

web traffic so we started seeing a quick shift to mobile usage and at the time it's it's pretty easy to forget that like 2010 app store was nascent the i first you were on the first couple versions of the

iphone was tiny screen and the usage was not easy um the device was much much slower but we started seeing traffic shifting and traffic shifting pretty quickly

and so we got into mobile and style page was a fashion app and we we just wanted to build apps we ended up building a dating app building a fashion app um

at the time i'd already gotten married so i wasn't single and and i'm not very fashionable so not the best use of resources but we built the products we thought it's so early really anything

should work and we put them out there and there just was no audience and that's when we saw the need to go go build the marketing platform because the expectation went from anything should

work to anything could work if it's a good experience and it's enabled and powered by marketing to drive the the discovery and that's what ended up becoming at 11.

okay so um that's what becomes app 11 how do you practically start it up do you have enough capital at that point do you have

the resources you need yeah we were we're fortunate enough to have had the past successes that we got to tinker and self-finance and hire some people that maybe at the

time in hindsight were crazy enough to join a group of people in a small palo alto office with no traditional financing um i think uh one of the stories someone shared yesterday was

he's worried we could even pay him his salary and so i offered a front pam prepay of the year and he realized like that's good enough for trust and he ended up joining us and he runs one of

our biggest teams today and so we we just financed it ourselves now when we launched stop loving's platform in 2012 it started growing really quickly every month the platform was working well i

went out and tried to raise traditional venture capital funding but at the time advertising and advertising platforms was not a an area that vcs were investing into and i couldn't and

actually like i think we were talking about like single digit million dollar um valuations which at the time that's where valuations for seed or a stage companies were and we couldn't raise a

million dollar check and so we financed it ourselves until we got profitable and then brought on some value-add angels that were friends of mine and then from there just grew profitably for years before we took any additional capital

what was the uh rationale that you kept hearing for why these folks wouldn't invest because usually there's some popular wisdom rolling down sand hill road for why

everybody is investing in one thing and not investing in another i don't know was were they just crazy about you know photo sharing and editing apps at the time and so advertising was not the thing what was

the line you kept getting i think a couple things one was at the time you had a couple branded advertising companies one one being rocket fuel they were public and

just crashed and burned really really quickly um and and uh and those businesses were built on brand advertising so people didn't understand what performance was people also didn't understand what the

app economy could become and so you had that so it wasn't a like this is a big tam we're excited about this market like go take your piece and you'll win so we didn't have that and then the other the

other part um that made the the narrative challenging at the time was just the belief was well why could a a company with the name applovin and a

small team succeed in advertising when in theory facebook and google um and even apple at the time and bought an advertising company should be able to just win the entirety of the sector and

so there there was a fear um and not as much of a focus on the team and dedication to success and the product differentiation that we had in the marketplace and so we didn't get the credit for that then we just went out

and had to go prove it yeah i forgot to ask why are you called applovin no association with mclovin despite what's out there and uh

and super bad but we were we had style pages there's a company called bloglovin our first app11 product was actually an app discovery app um i bought the eight dollar domain name and we had a dating

company called mingle we had a fashion company called style page and both those names were good and those products failed and failed quickly and we ended up with the name map 11 which people always told me needed change and i

always said look we'll build a business that will grow past the day and that's what we were able to do so you you intentionally stuck with a name that um

we'll say wasn't fancy it wasn't fancy but now people remember it so that's all you want yeah hey it's it's memorable for sure it's a it's a you know old school

marketing perspective there now tell me what happened as you were getting closer to coming public it didn't happen

the way you initially wanted yeah so we went through actually um an interesting path of financing in 2015 we'd grown up and started getting

unsolicited offers for the business but i wasn't ready to sell we were growing really quickly and maybe selfishly i don't know if i'll ever be ready to sell because i love doing what i'm doing and think there's a

huge future for us um and so we ended up getting to a point in 16 where i had to find a path to more capital and liquidity for a lot of the the folks that had been on the team and had been

working really hard for years and so we actually went out and announced the deal with the chinese private equity firm to capitalize the company with a billion dollars and then with their support to

help me go take us public in the chinese market at the time we were really a multi-national company with teams all over the world business all over the world and we saw china as a huge

opportunity for us and and they saw the same thing in the business and so we thought about that path then we ended up in a one plus year um

regulatory approval cycle and as we all know geopolitical stuff is and the climate has changed quite materially since 2016 and before and so we couldn't get the deal as we desired through um

approvals and so we ended up pivoting and and ended up meeting uh the great folks at kkr brought them on um harold chen led that investment now he's our cfo and

president and we partnered up together to work together and so they came on in 2018 and then there we we had a financing partner who was willing to be supportive

take risks and believe in our vision for growth and we executed on a lot of the things together that we had pitched them originally when they invested in the business and the business kept getting bigger and so we saw the public markets

as an opportunity to take a shot to be able to give us the access to capital to take bigger and bigger bets and we had the belief and still do that as the business gets bigger or so do our opportunities and so we've got to have

the access to capital to be able to execute on opportunities that we see those two three years in advance and if we can do that we we think we can make the business much bigger over time

so maybe now is the time to to get to uh death valley um it's a question i like to ask about the lowest point either in life or career um

i think there's a lot of of knowledge some good lessons that come out of that um did it have anything to do with that period is that your death valley was there something else along the way that

was particularly difficult you know i i think the moment that was hard for me was was uh actually failing to raise a seed

round um and really being unable to raise any sort of traditional capital for the business because i had to go explain it to my team and i was on the front lines i was selling it i've always been very passionate about what we're

doing but i couldn't convince people to cut us a small check and then all the while our team sees these other companies in the sector raising because the space did go from cold to pretty hot over the

years so we started seeing all these other companies in the space that had inferior products inferior market position less opportunity raising huge amounts of money from the same vcs that

said no to our our early stage round and so that was difficult and really like my narrative internally and my narrative to myself was like okay anyone doubt you in life go prove it and

really like you only have a choice you can either live with what they doubted you on and and go fulfill that prophecy or you can go prove it and prove them wrong and that's what we've worked really hard to

do over the last decade was that your internal dialogue from the beginning though or did you have to get to that i mean if you look at other people they're getting money do you not think well maybe it's

me maybe somebody else should try i think that's the low point i think everyone gave me the here's how you can sell the business better and you get the feedback from all over and you're just

like all right well like the reality is with my immigrant roots my family having to to transplant and uproot their lives come over here you always end up needing to prove something and so i had that

built inside of me and that ended up more of my rallying cry than let's go out and raise the capital and so at some point we were just performing so well and so committed to what we were doing and doing so much better than these

other peers that were raising more dollars than us that we just said let's go and so that hasn't stopped we've maintained that culture that tempo that type of personality of the company

so um what's the what's the lesson what's the core belief that grew out of that experience maybe the tool in your toolbox that you continue to use in your

leadership and management going forward then i mean i imagine at a certain point not having raised a lot of money and giving away a bunch of your equity might have been an advantage

yeah i mean we ended up obviously it was a better financial outcome for anyone to add shares in the business to dilute less but i think really the the just fundamental lesson

there and life lesson is but if you're challenged and you're gonna be challenged at everything in life it's the winners are the ones that work harder and really dedicate themselves to the visions that they have and the

things that they're passionate about and plow through any doubters and you end up seeing this time and time again in athletics you see it in in music you see it in chess you see it in anything that

requires perfection and and perfection around execution and we were able to foster that energy and really build a team around that that

believed the same thing that now we've got to go prove it and either we're going to be winners or losers but if the first thing we do is work harder than everyone else as a collective whole then

we're likely to come out of it better i hear you again and again mention execution um and working harder

and i connect that in a way to the name of the company and how you said well you know we had some fancy names of things before that didn't work out as well it

reminds me of this is something that frank slootman has said in my conversation with him you know that that whole execution uh each strategy for breakfast idea it doesn't matter what

you call it doesn't matter if you you know have a fancy pitch that that gets the dollars in can you execute am i hearing that right yeah i think that's 100 right i mean when i started my entrepreneurial

career i thought an idea was worth a ton and so i wasn't even willing to talk about the ideas that i had because i thought someone might rip me off and

over time i've realized ideas are a dime a dozen like and in anything whether it's starting a business starting a new initiative anything that you're trying to go do it's almost with certainty someone else

has had some version of that idea or exactly the same idea but the things we end up talking about the athletes we end up talking about the musicians we end up listening to they execute and they they

push themselves to become better than the rest and so that that really like that fuels everything i think in business and the the people that i've met that have had more success

operationally know how to inspire that execution across everyone who's committed to that vision that usually comes from the person leading the company so not only inspiring it

but maintaining it yourself how do you do it how do you make sure that you're executing on the right things keeping the right things on your personal dashboard

which i guess also means leaving the wrong things that might seem interesting or might even be important but somebody else can focus on how do you how do you pick and make sure that execution is crisp

yeah i think that i think one thing you said there is critical is leveraging your own skills out and so like you have to leverage a team to to enable others to take some of those tasks that you just don't have

enough hours in the day to go accomplish and then if you've got a ton of stuff to go do which every single day i don't i can't even make it through what's on my list but i'm going to do something as well and i'm going to do some things poorly

if i know i'm going to do something poorly right away well got to hand it off let's make sure we've got people around me that can can cover those and we're good even the things that i can do well or the things that i think i can do

well it's almost with certainty that i'm going through so many different tasks and processing so much information that at least one out of two i'm gonna do poorly and you have to be willing to

move through that and just accept it and so the way i operate is try to process a ton and move forward and make small mistakes because it's inevitable don't make big mistakes take time to think

about those decision points and just keep pushing forward and so that's another theme we've got at our company both on engineering and on the business side is a desire to push forward requires you to just process a ton of

information make a bunch of decisions and be willing to fail in order to advance so is part of your management approach making sure that both you and

the people around you know what you're not as good at so you can hire for that because um talent uh and and measured ability and execution must be an important part of

making sure that you're you're continuing to make progress i think it starts at the hiring point you got to hire people who are willing to accept that they're not good at a lot of things i i'm willing to accept that

i'm not good at most everything yeah and i i think is like that i think i'm fairly intelligent but not that intelligent i wasn't a great student i could in a room i'm certainly not the

smartest person in the room most cases and i have to own that and acknowledge that and be willing to use others around me to make the collective whole smarter than any way i could be personally and i

think that's hard for a lot of people to accept is it's the world around us is so complicated and there's always going to be someone better at every single thing that we do and so the second you realize

that you're willing to work with others and until you do um i i don't think there would even be a job for that person at our company because that's one of the earliest requirements is a willingness to acknowledge that you're

willing to work with others and that others will be better at almost everything than that person would do how do you um what's the best way to isolate

that characteristic of of being able to work well in that kind of environment or even determine that this really smart person

thinks they're good at everything and therefore they're not a fit here you know it comes out in the interview it's it's sort of surprising you you start talking about group dynamics team building exercises

they've done projects with teams um there's certain patterns that really come out and and you also talk about failures and some people are not willing to talk about failures

a really bad answer is i i've i tried to i haven't failed much and i've optimized things that weren't great and i've worked my way forward

everyone fails there's always failure in in a single day it's almost certain if you scored the 20 things that i'll do i fail on a bunch of the things

if you were scoring it a through f some of those would be f's that's just the fact i can't do everything well and i'm certainly not going to be able to process 20 things and do all of them well so some of those are going to be

failures and so you look in that interview for people who are willing to pinpoint look here are ways that i fail but here's how i learned from them here's how i grow and then you know you've got someone who's willing to

accept that not only are they going to have failures they're also not going to be as good at certain things than others huh interesting well now i want to get back

to app love in the business and the vision from here we talked about this a bit at the beginning but help me understand once you start in

gaming you through the mo pub acquisition start to branch beyond that and now through the world acquisition going even deeper through connected tvs what's the full

scope of um of the sort of measurable marketing and discovery ambition because everything's going digital um it's not like it's not like you're just

on one or two devices necessarily yeah i mean like we think all content is going to be consumed on a connected device at some point and so

you've got people accessing the internet across screen all these screens are just an access point to to something on the other side and they're all the same it's a gateway and so the

phone the television even the laptop all this stuff becomes one access point to to content on the other side and therefore you always need content discovery the other thing that

that we we pointed out in our last earnings call is we're also investing in some new initiatives and the belief is not only at this point in these markets the developers need

discovery they need more ways to make money as well um as do the consumers and so some of the the new initiatives we touched on ctv and and that was an interesting one and the world deal was

there and we expect that team and their founder and ceo sean is a great person tons of experience to run that initiative for us but that's an extension cross screen to be able to

create discovery one other one that we highlighted is blockchain and nfts and empowering the ownership of content to the consumer but also enabling the developer to expand their economy that's

something that's interesting to us and so we look at that and go well we built enablement tools we built discovery tools we built monetization tools can we do more and so every time we think about

where is this company going we think about our developer partners whether it's the app developer now that that brand on tv that has content that they need to get the consumer to consume how

do you help these creators monetize better and which then helps fuel their discovery and so we want to build things there and that's what we we think about and we think the world's going to be just a lot bigger than

people realize ten years from now how far are we from knowing whether blockchain and nfts in this context are gonna achieve velocity any time soon

i mean i think like if you look at the the volume on an open sea there's there's velocity in their scale but i think we're all still looking for what's that what's that user experience

that like we know a decade from now is going to be there today i don't know that any of us can look at any of the experiences and say with certainty this is the one this is the way it's going to

look and and just the game changing experience where now you've got your the gold rush is on and everyone's innovating around a single thing um that in the mobile world was the app store here

we don't know yet but i think the reality is there's a lot of consumption and there's a lot of obvious utility and there's a lot of credibility to giving the consumer ownership over what they're

investing in i mean we talk about mobile gaming being a 100 billion dollar a year plus industry well consumers are spending 100 billion dollars on really entertainment and enjoyment

but if they were spending 100 billion dollars on buying a car they'd still get entertainment and enjoyment but then have a depreciable asset that might also appreciate if it was rare and popular

enough that's when you've got a real two-sided economy where all participants are contributing and so that's what we get excited about is how do you expand the universe that we live in and can we play

a role in that and if we can do that then we think we've done our job right as an enablement solution all right makes sense and um

some so much rapid change in this space both with the stuff that we were talking about at first around the challenges uh in targeting and then the expansion of of um data and digital

signals to so many different spaces adam thanks for telling me about applovin and then about your own personal journey in fort knox thanks for