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
Adam Foroughi is the Co-Founder and CEO @ Applovin, one of the most underdiscussed but incredible businesses. Applovin has a market cap of $160BN, the company does $5.48BN in revenue and has an astonishing $10M EBITDA per head. The margins; 80%+. There is almost no other business in the world like it.
AGENDA:
00:00 – Why Winning (Not Fear) Drives the Best Founders
04:30 – When Money Stops Mattering: The Real Founder Motivation
07:15 – $83M CEO Payday: The Truth Behind the Headlines
10:45 – The Hidden Cost of Being a CEO: What No One Tells You
13:00 – Down 92%: How Do You Not Lose Your Mind?
17:00 – Layoffs: AI Revolution or COVID Hangover? Will the Layoffs Work?
24:30 – Why Most Companies Can't Build a Culture of A-Players
29:30 – What % of Applovin Code is AI? What Will it Be in 5 Years Time?
33:30 – Building on OpenAI: Opportunity or Existential Risk?
40:00 – The Dark Side of Short Sellers & Market Manipulation
50:00 – Do Great Founders Doubt Themselves?
52:00 – TikTok, Meta & The Future of Recommendation Engines
53:30 – The Path to a $1 Trillion Company: What Needs to Happen?
56:00 – Stock Buybacks: How to Do Them and When They Go Wrong?
59:00 – Is the SaaS Model Breaking? What Happens Now?
$100B Founder Breaks Down The Biggest AI Business Opportunities For 2025
Episode 653: Shaan Puri ( https://x.com/ShaanVP ) talks to Furqan Rydhan ( https://x.com/FurqanR ) about the biggest opportunities in AI right now.
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Show Notes:
(0:00) Intro
(4:42) Define the Job-to-be-done
(8:20) How to build an AI Agent workflow
(11:16) AI Tools break down
(27:05) How Polymarket won
(31:48) Why VR is a sleeping giant?
(44:43) Be a lifelong player in tech
(58:52) The unbeatable combination
(1:02:27) Adam Foroughi’s A+ execution
(1:18:35) Betting on -1 to 0
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Links:
• Furqan’s site - https://furqan.sh/
• Founders, Inc - https://f.inc/
• Applovin - https://www.applovin.com/
• Claude - https://claude.ai/
• OpenAI - https://platform.openai.com/
• Langchain - https://www.langchain.com/
• AutoGen - https://autogenai.com/
• Crew - https://www.crewai.com/
• CloudSDK - https://cloud.google.com/sdk/
• Perplexity - https://www.perplexity.ai/
• “Attention is all you need” - https://typeset.io/papers/attention-is-all-you-need-1hodz0wcqb
• Anthropic - https://www.anthropic.com/
• Third Web - https://thirdweb.com/
• Luna’s AI Brain - https://terminal.virtuals.io/
• Oasis - https://oasis.decart.ai/welcome
• Polymarket - https://polymarket.com/
• Gorilla Tag - https://www.gorillatagvr.com/
• Yeeps - https://tinyurl.com/59z2yrdu
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Check Out Shaan's Stuff:
Need to hire? You should use the same service Shaan uses to hire developers, designers, & Virtual Assistants → it’s called Shepherd (tell ‘em Shaan sent you): https://bit.ly/SupportShepherd
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Check Out Sam's Stuff:
• Hampton - https://www.joinhampton.com/
• Ideation Bootcamp - https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/
• Copy That - https://copythat.com
• Hampton Wealth Survey - https://joinhampton.com/wealth
• Sam’s List - http://samslist.co/
My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by The HubSpot Podcast Network // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano
AppLovin: Monetizing & Marketing Mobile Apps - [Business Breakdowns, EP. 55]
Today we’re breaking down AppLovin. It’s a business you may not recognize but have likely interacted with. Founded in 2012, AppLovin provides a platform for developers to market and monetize their mobile apps. The business also owns some of the most popular mobile games in the world, which they use to feed richer data into their software platform. To help breakdown the business, I’m joined by its CEO and co-founder, Adam Foroughi. Please enjoy this breakdown of AppLovin.
For the full show notes, transcript, and links to the best content to learn more, check out the episode page here.
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Show Notes
[00:02:41] - [First question] - The first risk taken when creating AppLovin and how it all began
[00:05:05] - Why was there pushback against games and adtech back in 2012
[00:07:12] - What it was like in the early days to get the app in front of a customer
[00:08:54] - Building a platform and software product versus becoming an advertising agency
[00:10:47] - The major components of AppLovin and how it works
[00:15:21] - The space or areas where most people interact with them and see their work
[00:16:26] - What he considers to be the next key chapters after AppLovin’s early days
[00:18:25] - How they determine strategy between the app developer side of the business and app ownership
[00:25:50] - How AppLovin interacts with Apple, Android, and the relationship between products
[00:27:11] - What he’s learned about the importance of scale in advertising
[00:28:58] - The major breakout points in the business that led to where he is today
[00:30:22] - Their revenue model and it how it breaks between software and apps
[00:33:55] - The margins of gaming, its business proposition, and the future value of this side of the franchise
[00:38:53] - His perspective on what defines great digital marketing today
[00:40:31] - Walking through the shifts in privacy, targeting, and data as technology changes
[00:43:13] - His thoughts on emerging platforms as competitive threats and/or opportunities
[00:44:58] - How they’ve kept the business nimble and very product-focused on a corporate level
[00:46:53] - Their concept of meetings and how they’ve learned to run them effectively
[00:50:24] - The missing pieces in his strategic mission that he still wants to do in five years time
[00:51:42] - What he’s learned from Facebook, Google, and game studios he’s worked with
[00:54:32] - How he thinks about defensibility and power in the business as they evolve and grow
[00:57:19] - His philosophy on the maturity of the business and if they’d pay dividends in the future
[00:59:32] - How he has most improved in his career during his time with AppLovin
[01:02:03] - Questions that the world’s largest bear would ask him today
[01:03:18] - The most interesting trends happening around him in the digital space
[01:06:04] - His thoughts on the eventual impact of Facebook and Google becoming competitors rather than the collaborators they are today
20VC: AppLovin's Co-Founder & CEO, Adam Foroughi on How AppLovin Might Be The Venture Capital Industry's Biggest Miss, How To Run a 1,000+ Organisation with Very Few Meetings & Balancing the Demands of Wall St with Long Term, Sustainable Growth
Adam Foroughi is the Co-Founder and CEO @ AppLovin, the company that allows developers to market, monetize, analyze and publish their apps. Under Adam's leadership, he has taken the company public, grown the team to over 1,000 people around the world, and scaled revenue in 2020 to $1.5Bn. Prior to AppLovin, Adam founded two companies—Lifestreet Media and Social Hour, and before that Adam started his career as a derivatives trader.
In Today's Episode with Adam Foroughi You Will Learn:
1.) How Adam made his way into the world of startups and came to found one of the world's largest gaming, advertising and marketing companies in the form of AppLovin?
2.) Adam founded 4 companies before AppLovin, does Adam believe in the benefits of serial entrepreneurship? What has he done differently with AppLovin having learned from past experience? What did he do the same, having seen it work before?
3.) Why does Adam advocate for as few meetings as possible within the company? Why does Adam believe meetings are unproductive? How do decisions get made internally without meetings? What is the structure and process? How does Adam create an environment where people make decisions without the fear of the repercussions? What are the breakpoints in company scaling?
4.) Why does Adam think that VCs did not want to invest in the early rounds? What were his biggest takeaways from those early fundraising days? How has Adam found the transition to being a public markets CEO? What does he like? What does he not like? How does Adam feel about pleasing the street but also having a long-term mindset?
5.) How does Adam structure his day? With 5 children, how does Adam approach work/life balance? What does his exercise and sleep routine look like? How does he do both weights and running without losing the productivity of the weights? What changes has he made in the last year that have made a significant difference?
Item's Mentioned In Today's Episode with Adam Foroughi
Adam's Favourite Book: Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It
#180 with Furqan Rydhan - What it's Like Co-founding a $20B Company, Hardware for Mind Control & Vertical Farming
Shaan (@ShaanVP) and Sam (@TheSamParr) are joined by Furqan Rydhan (@FurqanR). Furqan was Shaan's CTO at Bebo and previously co-founded AppLovin -- a $20B+ company that recently went public. Shaan and Furqan host a weekly "Cool Sh!t Hour" between themselves to discuss the coolest innovations Furqan's seeing. We basically took that and made it into a podcast. Furqan talks about mind-control hardware, vertical farming, and a lot of interesting crypto projects. He also talks about what it was like starting a multibillion-dollar company and his mindset around making decisions on what projects to work on.
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Show notes:
* (5:33) Background on Furqan and his new venture (f.inc)
* (7:48) How AppLovin became a $20B+ company
* (24:20) The hardware Furqan is bullish on
* (35:33) DeFi and borrowing against crypto
* (48:38) The opportunities in vertical farming
* (59:59) The power of proximity and serendipitous opportunities
* (1:13:40) What are DAOs?
#45 - Drones Washing Windows, Airpod Guided Tours & Mario Kart VR with Furqan Rydhan
Sam (@thesamparr) and Shaan (@shaanvp) are back talking news, trends, interesting products and businesses. Today we’re joined by Furqan Rydhan (@FurqanR) who is a tech badass. He was paid $120K as a 15 year old programmer during the Dot Com Boom, made a million dollar e-com biz at 17 and was an early employee at Applovin that was valued last at $2 billion. Remember Ramon’s soap opera blog that he sold for $9M in cash? He did that through the online business broker Quiet Light Brokerage. We’ve partnered up with them to give you guys a FREE 25-point checklist to see how sellable your online business is. To receive this free guide, visit quietlightbrokerage.com/myfirstmillion. Topics for today: Our Guest’s @FurqanR Background (00:36), Funny Story about Vungle’s Jack Smith and Lance Armstrong (07:12), The Process of Brainstorming Ideas (09:36), VR/AR Experiences (10:16), Opportunities in Reviving Stale Franchises and Company Turnarounds (17:07), iPad Whiteboard Meeting Idea (22:44), Reinventing the Phone Call through Airpods (27:51), Furquan’s House Hackathon Ideas (29:49), Serialized Story Apps like Hooked (37:09), Drone Washing Windows on Big Buildings (38:38), Money Printing Mobile Apps (44:44) and What Furqan learnt being Applovin (50:20).
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Product Hunt Radio: Episode 1 w/ Shaan Puri & Furqan Rydhan
In the inaugural episode of Product Hunt Radio (PHR), Shaan Puri and Furqan Rydhan joined me (Ryan Hoover) to geek out about product. We chatted about the Bebo reacquisition, backstory behind Monkey Inferno's new video walkie talkie app, Blab, shared our favorite Product Hunt discoveries, and brainstormed epic product ideas. Overview: - 00:00 - Intro to Monkey Inferno, Shaan, and Furqan - 1:34 - Blabbing about Blab and Bebo - 23:00 - Favorite Product Hunt Finds - 34:02 - Billion $ Product Brainstorm Related links and products mentioned: - Blab on Product Hunt - http://www.producthunt.co/posts/blab - Momentum on Product Hunt - http://www.producthunt.co/posts/momentum - Tickle on Product Hunt - http://www.producthunt.co/posts/tickle - Homescreen 2014 on Product Hunt - http://www.producthunt.co/posts/homescreen2014 - #Homescreen2014 by John Borthwick - https://medium.com/on-startups/4d07472265c7 - Snappy Checkout on Product Hunt - http://www.producthunt.co/posts/snappy-checkout Intro/outro music by eldienneproductions -(https://soundcloud.com/eldienneproductions/hip-hop-beat-instrumental --- Product Hunt is a daily leaderboard of brand new products. Visit producthunt.co.