Adam Foroughi

He was born in Tehran, Iran, in 1980, which Kayhan Life’s article notes was a year after the Iranian revolution.⁠[1][2]

Accounts of his father’s work differ: Yahoo FinanceYahoo FinanceYahoo Finance is a Yahoo brand offering financial news and investing tools, including market news, market data and video programming; Yahoo describes it as the No. 1 financial news site in the U.S.Open the full entry’s 2019 profile calls him the son of a prosperous real estate developer; Kayhan Life writes that his father was an engineer and co-owner of a large construction company who was responsible for building military runways; and he himself said in the 2026 interview that his father had one of the most successful real estate development companies in the country, with thousands of people working for him.⁠[3][1][4]

The EDGAR filing index of the U.S. Securities and Exchange CommissionU.S. Securities and Exchange CommissionThe U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is the federal securities regulator of the United States. Created during the Great Depression by the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and led by five commissioners, it has a three-part mission of protecting investors, maintaining fair, orderly and efficient markets, and facilitating capital formation.Open the full entry for a Form 4 (statement of changes in beneficial ownership) filed for him on May 22, 2025, gives the reporting owner’s name as “Foroughi Arash Adam.”⁠[5]

Kayhan Life writes that the family left Iran in June 1984, settled temporarily in the south of France, and then moved to Irvine, CaliforniaCaliforniaCalifornia is a U.S. state on the Pacific coast; its capital is Sacramento and its largest city is Los Angeles. California was admitted to the Union on September 9, 1850, as the 31st state. Its population at the 2020 Census (April 1, 2020) was 39,538,223, the largest of any state.Open the full entry.⁠[1]

Yahoo Finance’s profile states that the family fled first to France and eventually received asylum in the United StatesUnited StatesThe United States is a federal country in North America made up of 50 states, the District of Columbia as the seat of government, and territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam; its capital is Washington, D.C. The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted a resident population of 331,449,281, and the 435 seats of the House of Representatives are apportioned among the states on the basis of the census.Open the full entry, settling in Southern California in 1984, when he was 4 years old.⁠[3]

The episode summary on David SenraDavid SenraDavid Senra is the founder and host of the Founders podcast, on which he reads biographies of entrepreneurs to discuss starting and running businesses and making personal decisions. He began producing the show in 2016, partnered with Colossus in 2022, and in 2025 launched David Senra, a long-form interview show under his own name.Open the full entry’s website states instead that he was four when his family fled the Iran-Iraq War and settled in Laguna Niguel, California.⁠[2]

He said in the interview that the family was booted out of its country and that he was four when they arrived; his father gave everything up to bring them over, and growing up he could tell that a big part of his father was lost and that he was not whole, which left him with an obligation, one that has never gone away, to do whatever he could to prove that he could have the utmost success.⁠[4]

Speaking of this history in 2019, he said, “For sure that shaped me,” and added: “Watching my late father, who was never able to build back what he had in Iran, that really motivated me to succeed.”⁠[3]

Kayhan Life writes that his parents kept their Persian traditions at home, including speaking Farsi and honoring cultural celebrations; it quotes what he said to the Huffington Post in 2017: that his parents had always been among the strongest influences in his life, emphasizing resilience, hard work and the importance of education, and that without the sacrifices they made in leaving behind a very successful business in Iran to give their children a better life in the United States, none of his success would have been possible.⁠[1]

Kayhan Life writes that he earned a business degree from the Haas School of Business at the University of California, BerkeleyUniversity of California, BerkeleyThe University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) is a campus of the University of California system; the University of California was founded in 1868 through a merger of two institutions and moved to Berkeley, California, in 1873.Open the full entry, in 2001; the school’s web page lists him as “BS 01.”⁠[1][6]

Other sources describe the degree and field differently: AppLovin’s prospectus and proxy statements state that he holds a “B.A. in Business Administration” from the university, Yahoo Finance writes that he majored in finance, and the episode summary on David Senra’s website says that he studied economics there.⁠[7][8][3][2]

After graduating he worked as a derivatives trader; the Haas School of Business biography states that in this work he built scalable, data-driven trading models that created profitable results. Yahoo Finance writes that he began his career as a derivatives trader before switching over to the world of startups.⁠[4][6][3]

He recalled that at his first job interview out of college he walked in wearing a suit and walked out drenched in sweat; he said that 25 years earlier he was far more antisocial than he is now and would have been too nervous to sit for an interview of this kind, and that he later learned to communicate because the job required him to do it well.⁠[4][4]

AppLovin’s prospectus states that he previously co-founded two advertising technology companies, Lifestreet Media Inc. and Social Hour Inc. Kayhan Life writes that by 2011 he had co-founded two successful startups, LifeStreet Corporation and Social Hour; the Haas School of Business biography gives the first as LifeStreet Media and says that he founded the two companies; and Yahoo Finance writes that he cut his teeth at LifeStreet and Social Hour.⁠[7][1][6][3]

He said in the interview that in 2005 he built an advertising business on social media with a few other people and that in 2008 he had another one; he had co-founders at all three of his businesses, AppLovin included — the first had investors and he was its junior co-founder, while the second, an advertising business on social media, was profitable right away and was bootstrapped.⁠[4][4]

He said that in 2010 he and others sold those two businesses, having had quite a bit of economic success, and that he then went to Palo Alto convinced that mobile was going to be big without yet knowing what he would do; working on desktop and social advertising when the mobile app store launched, he said, he had seen traffic shifting quickly while nobody was talking about it, which gave him a data advantage.⁠[4][4]

He said that Rafael VivasRafael VivasRafael Vivas is a founding team member of the digital advertising company AppLovin who has led its business development and its growth marketing, and who was president of Lion Studios, the mobile game publishing division that AppLovin launched in 2018.Open the full entry began working for him at his earlier company at the age of 16 and, by the time of the 2026 interview, had worked alongside him for about 18 years and would turn 34 that year. ForbesForbesForbes is an American business media brand that began with Forbes magazine, founded by B.C. Forbes in 1917. It is known for rankings such as the Forbes 400, the World’s Billionaires list and 30 Under 30, and operates Forbes.com, ForbesLive events and licensed editions in 81 countries. Since 2014 a majority stake has been held by the Hong Kong investment group Integrated Whale Media; a 2021 plan to list on the New York Stock Exchange through a special purpose acquisition company was terminated in 2022. It is headquartered in Jersey City, New Jersey.Open the full entry writes that Eduardo Vivas co-founded an earlier startup with him and later invested early in AppLovin; AppLovin’s prospectus states that Rafael Vivas is the brother of Eduardo Vivas, whom Foroughi called Rafael Vivas’s older brother in the interview.⁠[4][4][9][7]

AppLovin was incorporated under the laws of DelawareDelawareDelaware is a U.S. state in the Mid-Atlantic region on the East Coast, with its capital at Dover and Wilmington as its largest city. On December 7, 1787, it became the first state to ratify the U.S. Constitution, entering the Union as the 1st state, and it had a population of 989,948 in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020).Open the full entry in July 2011; he is one of its co-founders and has served as chief executive officer and a member of the board of directors since December 2011.⁠[7][10][8]

In the founder’s letter included in the prospectus he wrote: “When we founded AppLovin in 2011, we thought our vision for solving the mobile app discovery problem was exactly the kind of big idea that every venture capitalist would love.” The episode summary on David Senra’s website likewise states that he co-founded AppLovin with two friends in 2011.⁠[7][2]

Other sources give the founding year as 2012: the About page of AppLovin’s website states that the company was founded in 2012 “by a handful of performance marketers with an $8 domain,” the Haas School of Business biography and Yahoo Finance’s profile also give 2012, and Kayhan Life’s own text says that he co-founded AppLovin in 2012 in Palo Alto.⁠[11][6][3][1]

Yahoo Finance writes that he co-founded AppLovin with John Krystynak and Andrew Karam, and Forbes also calls Andrew Karam an AppLovin co-founder. The prospectus describes him as “one of our co-founders” and lists John Krystynak and Andrew Karam in its table of principal stockholders: as of February 28, 2021, they held 24,062,858 and 21,957,897 shares of Class A common stock, or 13.0 percent and 11.8 percent of that class.⁠[3][9][7]

He said in the interview that his co-founder John Krystynak was in charge of technology and was originally chief technology officer, and that the other co-founder was more of a head of product and left the company three or four years before the interview. Forbes wrote in September 2025 that the co-founder Andrew Karam left the company at the end of 2024 to focus on philanthropy and investing. As the company moved from a fast-growing small private business toward a public listing, Foroughi said, the kind of people it needed changed, and many of the early team were replaced over time.⁠[4][4][9]

He said that after selling his first two companies he did not want to do advertising again and wanted to build a direct-to-consumer product: in 2011 the team launched a dating app and a fashion app, which he called two terrible ideas, since he was married at the time, owns about four outfits and has no fashion sense; the dating app predated Tinder, and the fashion app launched around the time Pinterest did, with Pinterest’s office down the block. The team, he said, had no idea how to take a direct-to-consumer business to market, and the products were poor.⁠[4][4][4]

The third app, he said, was an app discovery tool launched in late summer to fall 2011, the first version of AppLovin: users connected on it and it would tell them which apps their friends were using (Words With Friends, in his example) and recommend them. Nobody used the app itself, he said, but the response rate to its recommendations was very high, which led the team to conclude that the app store would be bigger than people realized and to turn the recommendation algorithm into an advertising platform running inside other apps.⁠[4][4][4]

He said that he financed the company himself for its first year and a half: he felt he would be fine even if he never made another dollar (a line, he added, that always moves higher as one gets richer) and did not want to deal with investors while the product was still pivoting, so he set the company up as a limited liability company (LLC), a tax-efficient way to cover the cost of the engineers, and did not go to venture capital firms until he knew it would be an advertising business. The founder’s letter states that AppLovin “was bootstrapped with a few developers in a small Palo Alto office.”⁠[4][4][7]

He said that Rafael Vivas was the company’s first business hire, joining alongside one other person; before that, Rafael Vivas, then 19, had tried to hire him into a business of his own, and he laughed, turned him down and persuaded him to come to AppLovin instead. For his first six months, he said, Rafael Vivas lived in the office in downtown Palo Alto, sleeping in a bunk bed there and working around the clock; he first ran business development and by the time of the interview ran marketing and growth marketing. One night, he said, someone tried to break into the office and was caught on video, and that was probably when Rafael Vivas moved out; his great skill, he said, is striking deals, and he remembers every word of a conversation years later, which made him the counterpart to the forgetful Foroughi. He said he considers him a little brother and a co-founder-like figure of the company.⁠[4][4][4]

He said that the team hired people to build a software development kit (SDK) and launched the advertising platform in March 2012, scrapping the app discovery app; from the moment it reached the market the business grew quickly.⁠[4][4][4]

He said that in spring 2012 he asked venture capital firms for $1 million at a $4 million valuation, offering a quarter of the company, and was turned down by all the top firms; in his view the reason was that the company was in advertising and in games while GoogleGoogleGoogle is an American technology company founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin and incorporated in 1998. It became an Alphabet subsidiary in 2015. Its businesses include internet search, advertising, software platforms, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence.Open the full entry, Facebook and Amazon were in the space, so investors did not believe that a small company with a goofy name could compete, and they overlooked that this was his third advertising business and that the mobile app market was still nascent. The founder’s letter states that “not a single VC chose to invest with us after countless meetings” and places that trip down Sand Hill Road in 2011. Kayhan Life quotes him as saying that starting a business from the ground up is always a struggle, particularly the financing part, and that when he was pitching the idea of AppLovin to investors in 2012 they simply were not responding.⁠[4][4][4][7][1]

He said that the same firms that had rejected him later put a lot of money into several companies that had appeared at the same time with the same idea, which was very motivational for the team, whose goal became to put those companies out of business; the venture-backed private ones, he said, were later either sold for very little or are gone, and no competitor is remotely close to AppLovin’s scale.⁠[4][4]

He said that the company did not sell to brands and went directly to app developers instead: it paid to place its ads inside their apps (a calendar app with a million users, in his example, could be paid $10,000 a day) and let developers who needed users buy advertising on the platform on a performance basis; the developers’ alternative at the time was AdMob, owned by Google. The App Store of 2012, he said, was full of calendar and flashlight apps, with games such as Candy Crush and Clash of Clans only beginning, and developers were desperate for money. Early on, he said, he went to New York to talk to advertising agencies and found a business in which budgets went to whoever wined and dined the client most and results could not be proved, which he did not want to be in; he wanted a business with no sales and a high-value product.⁠[4][4][4][4][4]

He said that in November 2012 the company raised $4 million at a $25 million pre-money valuation as a note convertible into common stock, from a few people he had known for a while, a few he thought could be helpful to the business, and himself; between the launch in March and November, the business reached a run rate of $1 million a month and a small profit within eight months. Yahoo Finance likewise writes that he was unable to secure venture funding and raised $4 million from angel investors.⁠[4][4][4][3]

The founder’s letter states: “Without venture capital, we committed to profitable growth from Day 1.” It adds that the company has had positive cash flows from operating activities each year since 2013.⁠[7]

He said that the company had no board of directors until 2018 and that every share certificate bore his signature as president, vice president and so on, so that every decision ran through him; the advantage, in his view, was that he could make every call himself, and the drawback was that he made mistakes in the capital markets and in raising capital that he would not have made with a board.⁠[4][4]

He said that the company grew very quickly in 2014 and 2015 and that in 2015, about three and a half years after launch, it was on track for roughly $50 million of EBITDA with a small team; other technology companies were interested in buying it, and the largest offer was $600 million in cash from a company he did not name.⁠[4][4]

He said that the business was still growing 100 percent a year and would have grown a great deal between the term sheet and a closing, that the price at which he would have done the deal was around $1 billion, and that he walked away; he added that it was hard for him to imagine being an employee of the company on the other side.⁠[4][4][4]

Had there been a board of investors, he said, he might have faced pressure to take the offer; as it was, parts of his team knew that he had turned the money down and could work out what they would have made, which put him under pressure to do something.⁠[4]

He said that it was in 2014 that he first said to his team that the company would be worth a billion dollars.⁠[4]

In September 2016, AppLovin announced its sale to the Chinese private equity firm Orient Hontai Capital for $1.4 billion; the deal was expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2016. He said at the time that the company had seen a high volume of interest in its business and had ultimately chosen to partner with Orient Hontai because of its strong connections in the Chinese market.⁠[12][3][13]

He said that in late 2015 Chinese investors were buying many U.S. technology companies with the aim of listing them in China and capturing the difference in valuations; he said that he understood multiples and capital-markets arbitrage and went to talk to such investors. As he described it, the deal was a $1 billion cash investment at a $1.4 billion valuation that would give the buyer 70 percent of the company and buy out most of the other shareholders, while his own shares would mostly remain and anyone else who wanted to roll over could; the company would then be taken public in China, and part of the consideration depended on its reaching $85 million of EBITDA in 2016.⁠[4][4][4][4][4]

He said that the buyer was a small team, that he met four of its people and got along with them in China, and that, speaking perhaps five words of Mandarin, he would not have made a great chief executive of a company listed in China. He said that at the time he did not even know what a state-owned business was and learned only later that the buyer was a partially state-owned private equity fund.⁠[4][4][4][4]

When the deal was announced, he said, he held an all-hands meeting at which he said that the company was going to be a $10 billion business.⁠[4][4]

The cross-border deal was subject to review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS). PocketGamer.biz’s article of November 22, 2017, which credits ReutersReutersReuters is an international news agency founded in London in 1851 by Paul Julius Reuter and is now the news business of Thomson Reuters. It provides text, photo, video, and graphics coverage to media and institutional clients and distributes it through channels such as Reuters Connect.Open the full entry, states that CFIUS had concerns about a foreign company having access to AppLovin’s data and that AppLovin backed out of the original sale after pushback from the U.S. government.⁠[12][13]

Under the restructured arrangement, Orient Hontai Capital, which had taken a 9.98 percent stake in AppLovin for $140 million in January 2017, provided $841 million of debt financing and received no control. He said at the time that the fully restructured agreement allowed the company to keep full control of its business while gaining additional liquidity. VentureBeat writes that AppLovin declined to explain why the original deal was withdrawn and referred readers to its blog post.⁠[12][13]

Yahoo Finance writes that, by his account, his team tried to explain that a mobile gaming platform might not be strategically significant or a security threat if owned by a Chinese investor, but that the lift was just too great; after more than a year in regulatory limbo with no end in sight he pulled the plug, and in the fall of 2017 the deal was restructured so that Hontai became primarily a debt investor with a small equity position. He is quoted there as saying, “There was a huge backlog of Chinese-U.S. deals at the time getting road blocked,” and “We were a pawn in that.” Kayhan Life writes instead that the deal was blocked by the United States Committee on Foreign Investment, following the Donald TrumpDonald TrumpDonald Trump (born 1946) is an American politician and businessman, a Republican who ran the real estate company the Trump Organization and starred in the television series The Apprentice. He served as the 45th president of the United States from 2017 to 2021 and has been the 47th president since 2025.Open the full entry administration’s reluctance to approve Chinese deals.⁠[3][1]

He recalled in the 2026 interview that Donald Trump had just been elected president and that relations between China and the United States were worsening; with no board to turn to, he hired a law firm and went to Washington, D.C., to make his case to the committee, which was made up of many government agencies. The room, he said, was icy: he was a Persian chief executive, the colleague who had just become chief technology officer was Russian, and the buyer was a Chinese firm with four Chinese investors, who were asked to leave the room at the first meeting. As he recalled it, people from the NSA, CIACentral Intelligence AgencyThe Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is an independent U.S. intelligence agency established under the National Security Act of 1947 to provide national security intelligence to senior U.S. policymakers. It is headquartered in Langley, Virginia.Open the full entry, FTC and DOJ, among other agencies, were in the room; the officials never voiced their concern outright, he said, but from their questions he understood it to be the risk that a data platform of that scale could pose in the wrong hands.⁠[4][4][4][4][4][4][4]

The process, he said, lasted more than a year, during which the company could not issue options and hired almost no one, yet the business doubled again and by 2017, he said, the figure was well over $100 million; the lawyers concluded that the deal would not get through. A board, he said, would have advised him to rip up the deal and walk away, since the company was by then worth much more than $1.4 billion, but he felt that the four men had bet on him and that he owed them loyalty, and he did not know what would happen to a group of people who had taken a billion dollars out of China if the deal collapsed, so he did not want to leave them hanging.⁠[4][4][4][4][4]

As he described it, the solution was to turn the $1 billion from an equity investment for 70 percent into a convertible note under which, once the company repaid the money with interest, the investors would convert into 10 percent of the business, a holding below 10 percent carrying no control. The company then paid a $1 billion dividend to shareholders, he said, which he regarded as a liquidity round before an initial public offering in which no one sold shares, and was left with a very large convertible debt that had to be unwound.⁠[4][4]

AppLovin closed its acquisition of the game studio PeopleFun, Inc. in March 2018; the founder’s letter states that the company created AppLovin Apps in 2018.⁠[14][7]

He said that the company’s earliest algorithm was simple, recommending games on the basis of what people who played solitaire and poker also played, and that in 2018 the team realized that Facebook had used machine learning to turn ads into content and that a rules-based algorithm would no longer do. Training a model of its own required data from the advertisers’ side, namely what users were spending on inside mobile games; advertisers shared such data with Facebook and Google but would not share it with AppLovin, he said, so he set out to buy game studios.⁠[4][4][4][4][4]

He said that almost no time passed between the idea and the purchase of the first studio, PeopleFun, that the company was building up a studio of its own at the same time, and that KKRKKRKKR (Kohlberg Kravis Roberts) is an investment firm engaged in alternative asset management, capital markets services, and insurance. Jerome Kohlberg, Henry Kravis, and George Roberts co-founded the firm in 1976. Its managed funds invest in private equity, credit, and real assets, and its subsidiary Global Atlantic operates retirement, life insurance, and reinsurance businesses. KKR listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2010 under the ticker KKR.Open the full entry was supportive; between KKR’s investment and the initial public offering the company came to own 14 or 15 game studios across all categories of gaming, and it used their data to train the first Axon model, which it launched in 2020.⁠[4][4][4]

This, he said, made the game companies that advertised through AppLovin see it as a competitor, and some chose to stop working with it; his mistake, in his view, was that he did not tell the community of game developers directly and explicitly why the company was getting into games, so that people found out on their own and suspected malicious intent, and trust was rebuilt only after he sat down with the companies one by one. Mobile gaming, he said, has very little venture funding, most of its companies are bootstrapped, and most of those AppLovin works with are not in the United States but in Europe and Asia; the company’s own studios were the first to use the new model and grew quickly, and small and medium-sized game companies were willing to feed their data into the model in order to grow. By the time of the interview, he said, perhaps more than half of the marketing dollars in the gaming sector went to AppLovin’s platform, though he said he did not know the exact share.⁠[4][4][4][4][4][4]

PocketGamer.biz wrote on July 13, 2018, that AppLovin had launched a publishing division, Lion Studios, to help developers publish and promote their apps, with Rafael Vivas as its president; the division had been in a pre-launch phase since March of that year. AppLovin’s prospectus describes Rafael Vivas as the chairperson and former president of Lion Studios, LLC.⁠[15][7]

In August 2018, AppLovin sold 109,090,908 shares of Series A convertible preferred stock to KKR Denali Holdings, L.P. for an aggregate purchase price of $399,999,996.00. Yahoo Finance’s profile of May 2019 places the investment in the preceding July and states that KKR paid $400 million for a minority equity stake that valued the company at $2 billion.⁠[7][3]

To unwind the convertible debt, he said, he called several private equity funds, and that is how KKR became an investor: bringing in traditional U.S. capital and debt, paying off the Chinese investors’ convertible debt, giving them their ownership, and leaving a clean capitalization table. The KKR partner on the deal, he said, later remarked that on the strength of the company’s goofy name alone he would not have invested, but that his team changed his mind once it had looked closely.⁠[4][4]

The deal closed in the summer of 2018, he said, and the company then formed the first board he had ever been part of, with three members: himself, Eduardo Vivas and the KKR partner. The prospectus states that Herald Chen and Eduardo Vivas have both served on AppLovin’s board since August 2018 and that Herald Chen was head of Technology, Media and Telecom at KKR from 2007 to 2019.⁠[4][4][7]

Since KKR’s investment, he said, he has not had a single acquisition discussion with anyone; after the dividend the team no longer had to worry about liquidity and turned to running the company for the long term to see what it could become.⁠[4][4]

On May 21, 2019, Yahoo Finance published a profile of him by Andy Serwer with Max Zahn, which gives his age as 39 and describes him as “Lanky and with a big smile”; it states that AppLovin then had some 200 employees, a revenue run rate of around $1 billion and more than 300 million daily active users.⁠[3]

He is quoted in it as saying, “We’re laying the foundation to go public sometime early next year,” and “We’re a profitable business.”⁠[3]

The profile also gives the origin of the company’s name: some had suggested that AppLovin is an homage to “McLovin,” a character’s pseudonym in the 2007 film Superbad, which he said is not the case: “I mean I like the movie, it’s pretty cool,” but the company simply needed a name, knew of the content-organizing platform Bloglovin’ and followed its lead.⁠[3]

Herald Chen served as AppLovin’s president and chief financial officer from November 2019 to December 2023.⁠[7][8]

On December 20, 2019, the company repurchased 2,475,000 shares of Class A common stock from him for $9,999,000, paid by a promissory note bearing interest at 2.00 percent.⁠[7]

The prospectus states that Vasily (Basil) Shikin has been vice president of engineering since January 2012 and chief technology officer since January 2020. In the 2026 interview he said instead that Basil Shikin, one of the company’s first engineers and its lead engineer at the time, was moved into the role of chief technology officer in 2016, after which John Krystynak transitioned out of the company.⁠[7][4][4]

AppLovin filed its registration statement on Form S-1 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on March 2, 2021; he was designated chairperson of the board of directors in March 2021. The filing gives his age as 40 as of February 28, 2021.⁠[7]

The filing states that as of December 31, 2020, the company had 902 full-time employees in eight countries and that its headquarters is in Palo Alto, California.⁠[7]

Under the filing, each share of Class A common stock carries one vote and each share of Class B common stock 20 votes; he, Herald Chen and KKR Denali were expected to enter into a voting agreement under which two of the three (one of whom must be Foroughi) would direct the vote of all Class B shares.⁠[7]

AppLovin’s announcement of the pricing of its initial public offering set out 25,000,000 shares of Class A common stock at $80.00 per share, of which the company offered 22,500,000 and the selling stockholder KKR Denali Holdings L.P. 2,500,000; the shares began trading on the Nasdaq Global Select Market on April 15, 2021, under the symbol “APP.” Company filings state that the IPO was completed on April 19, 2021, and show proceeds from the issuance of common stock in the IPO, net of issuance costs, of $1,745.2 million for the first nine months of 2021. Kayhan Life writes that the initial public offering raised $1.8 billion and gave the company a market capitalization of $28.6 billion.⁠[16][8][17][14][1]

He said in the interview that the company was worth about $28 billion when it went public and $40 billion within the first six months; as he recalled it, the IPO raised about $2 billion and sold a float of only about 7 to 8 percent, which in hindsight he considers a mistake, because too small a float makes a stock more volatile and fails to attract the large institutional investors who can stay for the long term. For the company, he said, the IPO was in effect its Series B.⁠[4][4][4]

On the first day of trading, he said, the stock fell about 15 percent, and he used the moment to rally his team, saying that hearing others call the company no good was a motivation and laying out a plan to reach $100 billion.⁠[4][4]

Kayhan Life wrote in August 2021 that AppLovin’s total revenue for the second quarter of 2021, announced after the listing, had more than doubled year on year; he said, “We are pleased to report excellent progress during 2Q21.”⁠[1]

On October 6, 2021, AppLovin entered into a definitive agreement to acquire the MoPub business from Twitter, Inc. for approximately $1.05 billion in cash, with closing expected in early 2022; the company’s annual report for fiscal 2021 states that the acquisition was completed in January 2022. SiliconANGLE wrote in August 2022 that MoPub had been folded into AppLovin’s MAX advertising platform.⁠[14][17][18]

The company’s filings also list earlier acquisitions: SafeDK in 2019; Machine Zone, Inc. on May 19, 2020, for an aggregate acquisition price of $328.6 million; and Adjust GmbH on April 20, 2021, for stated purchase consideration of $980.0 million, comprising $578.0 million in cash, a $50.0 million cash holdback and convertible securities with a stated value of $352.0 million, which converted into 6,320,688 shares of Class A common stock in May 2021. The annual report for fiscal 2025 describes Adjust as the company’s measurement and analytics marketing platform and MAX as its monetization solution.⁠[14][17][10]

He said in the interview that through 2022 the company’s stock fell almost every day, from $115 a share to $9, a decline of 92 percent, to a market capitalization of about $3.8 billion at the low, even though the company had $700 million of EBITDA in 2021 and more than $1 billion in 2022. He gave two reasons: the company was in advertising and gaming, two businesses that are hard to understand in the public markets, and there were too many IPOs during the pandemic for large funds such as Fidelity InvestmentsFidelity InvestmentsFidelity Investments is a privately held financial services group headquartered in Boston, United States, with FMR LLC as its parent company. Founded in 1946 by Edward Johnson 2d, it operates in mutual fund and ETF asset management, brokerage and wealth management, workplace retirement plans and digital assets. Controlled by the Johnson family for three generations, it had $7.1 trillion in managed assets and $18 trillion in assets under administration at the end of 2025.Open the full entry and BlackRockBlackRockBlackRock is a publicly traded investment management company headquartered in New York, founded in 1988 by Larry Fink and seven others and listed on the New York Stock Exchange (ticker BLK); its businesses include the iShares family of exchange-traded funds and the Aladdin investment and risk management platform. As of June 30, 2026, its assets under management totaled $15.3 trillion.Open the full entry to research each new listing, so the company had a shareholder base without support while its pre-IPO investors were selling.⁠[4][4][4][4]

Since nobody wanted to buy the company’s shares, he said, the company began buying them itself: at that market value, the cash it produced each year was about a fifth of its capitalization, so that in theory it could buy back 20 percent of its shares in a single year. Rather than buying in the open market, it went to shareholders it knew would sell at some point — private equity investors holding roughly half of the shares, together with other founders who were no longer at the company — and got them to agree to sell back to it over time; over the following 18 months it deployed about $6 billion on buybacks, using its own capital and borrowed money. Those buybacks, he said, ended up creating somewhere around $50 billion to $60 billion of actual proceeds. The company’s annual report for fiscal 2021 states that in February 2022 the board authorized the repurchase of up to $750.0 million of Class A common stock.⁠[4][4][4][17]

He said that he has never believed in saving cash for a rainy day and that a highly cash-generative business whose future he believes in should always be buying back its shares; at a valuation of five times cash flow, the board was very supportive.⁠[4][4]

When the stock was depressed, he said, many employees complained that their equity had shrunk, and he gave up the practice of making everyone a shareholder: employees with lower total compensation moved to cash only (anyone at the company can still buy its shares), and equity was reserved for a little over 100 people critical to the business, mainly in core product and engineering.⁠[4][4][4][4][4]

An engineer who joined in November 2022 and went on to lead the work on the Axon 2 model, he said, kept asking him why the company had certain people, teams and processes, which led him to rethink the company’s culture and structure and to decide on cuts across the board.⁠[4][4][4][4]

In February 2022, AppLovin entered into a definitive agreement to acquire all of the equity interests of Wurl, Inc. for approximately $430.0 million, expected to be funded 55 percent in cash and 45 percent in the company’s Class A common stock, with closing expected in the first half of 2022. The annual report for fiscal 2025 describes Wurl as the company’s connected TV (CTV) platform.⁠[17][10]

On August 9, 2022, AppLovin announced that it had submitted a non-binding proposal to the board of directors of Unity Software Inc. to combine with Unity in an all-stock transaction valuing Unity at $58.85 per share and a $20 billion enterprise value, a premium of 48 percent to Unity’s share price on July 12, 2022, and of 18 percent to the closing price on August 8, with each Unity share to be exchanged for 1.152 shares of AppLovin Class A voting common stock and 0.314 shares of Class C non-voting common stock. GamesBeat’s headline put the proposal at about $17 billion.⁠[19][18][20]

Under the proposal, Unity’s stockholders would hold about 55 percent of the combined company’s shares and about 49 percent of its voting rights; Unity’s chief executive, John RiccitielloJohn RiccitielloJohn Riccitiello is a games industry executive who served as chief executive of the video game company Electronic Arts and of the game engine company Unity Technologies, and co-founded the private equity firm Elevation Partners.Open the full entry, would become chief executive of the combined business and Foroughi its chief operating officer, and Unity would appoint a majority of the board. One condition for signing a definitive agreement was that Unity terminate its proposed acquisition of ironSource; SiliconANGLE writes that Unity had announced that $4.4 billion merger less than a month earlier. J.P. Morgan served as AppLovin’s financial adviser and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & RosatiWilson Sonsini Goodrich & RosatiWilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati (known as Wilson Sonsini) is a law firm headquartered in Palo Alto, California, founded in 1961 and known for serving technology, life sciences, and other growth companies and their investors; it served as counsel on the initial public offerings of companies including Apple, Netscape, Google, and Tesla. As of December 2025 the firm had more than 1,000 lawyers, and its 2025 revenue was $1.4 billion.Open the full entry as its legal adviser.⁠[19][18]

He said in the announcement: “We believe that together, AppLovin and Unity create a market leading business that has tremendous growth potential.”⁠[19]

On August 15, 2022, Unity announced that its board of directors, after a financial and strategic evaluation of AppLovin’s unsolicited proposal, had unanimously determined that it was not in the best interests of Unity shareholders and would not reasonably be expected to result in a “Superior Proposal,” and reaffirmed its recommendation that shareholders vote in favor of the ironSource transaction. Unity’s chief executive, John Riccitiello, said: “We remain committed to and enthusiastic about Unity’s agreement with ironSource.”⁠[21][22]

On September 12, 2022, AppLovin confirmed that it would not submit another proposal to combine with Unity and that it had withdrawn its initial proposal of August 9; the company said that, after review, it had concluded that continuing as an independent market leader better served its stockholders and other stakeholders. He said in the announcement: “We remain excited about the long-term growth potential of our core markets and AppLovin.”⁠[23]

In his article of February 2026 he wrote: “In April 2023, we rolled out our AI model, Axon 2.”⁠[24]

He said in the interview that the company’s first system was rules-based, that the first Axon was a more traditional machine-learning model, and that Axon 2 is a deep-learning model with a much greater ability to predict value for advertisers: any advertiser can plug in, spend money, get revenue on the other side and make a spread. When Axon 2 was rolled out, he said, the stock was at $9 to $11; the company’s valuation then went from under $4 billion to a peak of about $250 billion and the share price to about $750, a peak that he placed roughly six months before the interview, after which it came down somewhat.⁠[4][4][4]

He said that while the business was growing nearly 100 percent year over year the company let go about 40 percent of its team (in 2024, as he recalled it) in order to distill it down to its best people; the core advertising team, he said, is only about 400 people. Those who left, he said, included many long-tenured employees and people whose roles he expected to be automated by large language models, since he did not want to keep anyone in a dead-end job; people judged not to be cutting it leave with a very good severance.⁠[4][4][4][4]

During a period of turnover in human resources, he said, he took over the function himself and found that whenever someone left, a backfill posting went up automatically, so that headcount could only rise; he began requiring teams to convince him that a hire was needed, and the number of new hires fell from hundreds a year to tens.⁠[4][4][4][4]

On March 6, 2024, in connection with a secondary offering by KKR Denali of 19,866,397 shares of Class A common stock, the company repurchased 10,466,397 of the shares from the underwriters at $54.46 per share; under an agreement dated March 7, 2024, it repurchased 3,000,000 shares from Midterm Success, then a holder of more than 5 percent of its stock, at $60.74 per share, or about $182 million. The proxy statement states that in 2024 KKR Denali ceased to satisfy the ownership thresholds for nominating a director and that the Director Nominations Agreement has terminated.⁠[25]

On February 14, 2024, the company agreed to invest $50 million in the Series C preferred stock financing of Humans, Inc. (Flip Shop), after which it expected to hold approximately 4.1 percent of the fully diluted shares; the proxy statement notes that Eduardo Vivas is that company’s chief operating officer, a member of its board and a holder of more than 5 percent of its stock.⁠[25]

CNBCCNBCCNBC is an American business and financial news cable channel launched by NBC in 1989; it merged with its rival FNN in 1991 and since January 2026 has been part of Versant Media Group, spun off from Comcast.Open the full entry writes that AppLovin’s stock surged over 700 percent in 2024 and was the top performer in its sector; the company’s 2025 proxy statement gives the increase over 2024 as 713 percent, and the episode summary on David Senra’s website gives 735 percent. CNBC writes that AppLovin’s advertising revenue rose 73 percent in the fourth quarter of 2024 to almost $1 billion.⁠[26][25][2]

On February 26, 2025, after the short sellers Fuzzy Panda and Culper ResearchCulper ResearchCulper Research is an activist short-selling research firm that publishes investigative reports on listed companies and discloses in them that it holds short positions in the companies’ shares, which profit when the share price falls. Its targets have included LifeMD, SoundHound AI, Acadia Pharmaceuticals, Kaspi.kz, AppLovin, Gorilla Technology, Archer Aviation, Tecnoglass and NVIDIA; several of the companies named have publicly rejected its claims, and LifeMD, Gorilla Technology, Tecnoglass and investors named in its AppLovin report have sued it and its founder, Christian Lamarco, for defamation. Its report on NVIDIA of May 13, 2026, wrote about Jensen Huang’s dealings with Megaspeed and Alice Huang and drew renewed media attention in November 2026.Open the full entry published reports on AppLovin, the company’s shares closed down 12 percent. CNBC writes that Fuzzy Panda called the AXON model “the nexus of a House of Cards,” while Culper Research argued that AppLovin’s success in mobile gaming came from abusing app permissions so that ads could push installs onto users’ phones with one click.⁠[26]

Just before the market closed that day he responded that the reports were “littered with inaccuracies and false assertions,” writing, “It’s disappointing that a few nefarious short-sellers are making false and misleading claims”; he also noted that the reports had emerged after the company’s earnings report. CNBC writes that AppLovin had declined to comment to it directly earlier in the day.⁠[26]

On March 27, Muddy Waters Research published a third short-seller report, alleging that AppLovin’s ad tactics systematically violate app stores’ terms of service by extracting proprietary IDs from MetaMetaMeta (Meta Platforms, Inc.) is a publicly listed American technology company, renamed from Facebook in 2021, that operates social communication, digital advertising, virtual reality, smart glasses and artificial intelligence businesses.Open the full entry, Snap, TikTok, RedditRedditReddit is an online platform that organizes content and discussion around interest-based communities, founded by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian in 2005. Users take part in communities by posting, commenting, and voting; its operating company, Reddit, Inc., listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2024.Open the full entry, Google and others; the shares fell 20 percent that day, which CNBC called the stock’s steepest drop on record, and rose almost 4 percent the next day.⁠[27]

In a blog post he urged investors to “dig deeper,” writing: “Our business is technical, and we get it — it’s not always easy to understand.” The company said that it had retained Alex Spiro of Quinn Emanuel to conduct “an independent review and investigation” into the recent short-report activity directed at it; CNBC notes that Alex Spiro also represents Elon MuskElon MuskElon Musk is an entrepreneur who founded SpaceX and has long served as chief executive of Tesla; he also took part in creating PayPal, OpenAI, Neuralink, The Boring Company, and xAI. He acquired Twitter in 2022, and his businesses span spaceflight, electric vehicles, energy, artificial intelligence, and social media.Open the full entry. A company spokesperson said that he had been retained to investigate the short sellers and that tactics of spreading misinformation for personal gain could not be allowed to continue unchecked. In his post Foroughi also said that the claims about the company’s AI-powered ad tactics could quickly be disproved by AI models such as Grok. Loop Capital reiterated its buy rating and $650 price target the next day, saying that accusations of faulty conversions and fraud are easily disproved by speaking with performance marketers and measurement companies.⁠[27]

Modern Retail wrote on October 1, 2025, that short sellers including Muddy Waters, Culper Research and Fuzzy Panda had alleged that AppLovin’s technology relies on fraudulent tactics to bolster its ad business, that AppLovin had rejected those accusations, and that in blog posts he had argued that the company’s methods are consistent with industry standards.⁠[28]

Beginning in March 2025, purported stockholders filed securities complaints in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California under Sections 10(b) and 20(a) of the Exchange Act: Michael Quiero sued the company, Foroughi and chief financial officer Matthew Stumpf on March 5, and Ben Brownback on March 24 and the Wayne County Employees’ Retirement System on April 17 sued the company, Foroughi, Matthew Stumpf and Herald Chen.⁠[10]

The plaintiffs in the Quiero and Wayne County cases voluntarily dismissed their complaints in May 2025; the court appointed lead plaintiffs in the Brownback action, who filed an amended complaint on September 12, 2025, adding Basil Shikin as a defendant and asserting a class period from November 7, 2024, through March 27, 2025. The defendants moved to dismiss in November 2025, with a hearing scheduled for March 2026; the company states in its annual report that it believes the allegations lack merit and will vigorously contest the action. The quarterly report that the company filed on November 4, 2026, describes the motion as “fully briefed as of February 2026.”⁠[10][29]

As for stockholder derivative suits, Amit Patel on March 25, 2025, and Nathan Smith on May 19, 2025, sued the then-current members of the board, Foroughi and Matthew Stumpf in the same court; the two cases have been consolidated and stayed pending resolution of the motion to dismiss in the Brownback action.⁠[10]

AppLovin’s annual report states that in April 2025 the company confirmed that it had provided an indication of interest to the President of the United States to explore a purchase of TikTok in all markets outside of China, but that it ultimately did not enter into a transaction.⁠[10]

CNBC writes that the plan AppLovin set out in a blog post was not to buy TikTok’s U.S. operations but to merge with the social media company, covering all assets outside China; in April, on CNBC’s program “The Exchange,” he called it a “much stronger bid than others.” On May 7 he called the proposal “a long shot” and said that the biggest priority was to solve the national security concerns, which required truly having operational control.⁠[30]

CNBC wrote on February 26, 2025, that he had announced that the company would spin off its mobile gaming business and continue expanding the AXON model to other e-commerce sectors; its article of May 7 states that AppLovin had signed a term sheet in February to sell its apps business for an estimated total consideration of $900 million, including $500 million in cash.⁠[26][30]

On May 7, 2025, AppLovin signed a purchase agreement with Tripledot Studios; the sale closed on June 30 for $400 million in cash, subject to closing adjustments, plus equity representing approximately 20 percent of Tripledot’s fully diluted equity at closing. The mobile gaming business that was sold comprised 10 game studios: Athena Studio, Belka Games, Clipwire Games, Leyi, Lion Studios, Machine Zone, Magic Tavern, PeopleFun, Zenlife Games and Zeroo Gravity.⁠[10][31]

He said in the closing announcement: “The closing of this transaction streamlines the Company to its core business and allows us to fully focus on the exciting opportunities that will shape and define the future of our company.”⁠[31]

The results for the first quarter of 2025, released on the day the agreement was signed, showed revenue of $1.48 billion and net income of $576 million, compared with $234 million a year earlier; advertising revenue was $1.16 billion, up from $678 million, and apps revenue was $325 million, down 14 percent.⁠[30]

He said in the 2026 interview that the company was never going to be good at gaming and that once nearly every advertiser in mobile gaming was connected to its models the studios became a distraction: they had more than 1,500 people spread around the world, and the company could not manage them. The buyer’s founder, he said, is someone he has known for a very long time, and the company priced the business low enough for the buyer to take all of it, not wanting to sell 15 studios one at a time for profit; the company had owned the studios for roughly five years.⁠[4][4][4]

S&P Dow Jones IndicesS&P Dow Jones IndicesS&P Dow Jones Indices (S&P DJI) is a global index provider that compiles and licenses benchmark indices including the S&P 500 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average. It was formed in 2012 by combining McGraw-Hill’s S&P index business with the Dow Jones Indexes business held by a joint venture of CME Group and Dow Jones, and it is now the index business division of S&P Global, which holds about 73% of the interest.Open the full entry announced on September 5, 2025, that AppLovin would join the S&P 500 effective prior to the open of trading on Monday, September 22, replacing MarketAxess Holdings, and would be classified in the Information Technology sector; Robinhood MarketsRobinhoodRobinhood is a financial services brand co-founded in 2013 by Vlad Tenev and Baiju Bhatt; its publicly listed parent company is Robinhood Markets, Inc., headquartered in Menlo Park, California, United States. The company has grown from commission-free mobile securities trading into crypto assets, retirement accounts, and other financial services, and trades on Nasdaq under the symbol HOOD.Open the full entry and Emcor Group were added at the same time.⁠[32]

In an article dated October 1, 2025, he announced that the company’s self-serve advertising platform was opening that day on a referral basis: existing clients would receive three invite codes, and each referred web advertiser would receive $5,000 in ad credit; feedback from this phase, the article says, would be used to fine-tune the product for a broader public launch the following year.⁠[33]

Modern Retail wrote the same day that AppLovin was rebranding its customer-facing platform as Axon and launching the Axon Ads Manager on an invite-only, referral basis; it identifies Rafael Vivas as AppLovin’s “vp of growth marketing” and quotes him as saying, “We started looking at e-commerce because it’s naturally the largest vertical of advertising.”⁠[28]

The article says that over the preceding year the company had quietly expanded into web and e-commerce advertising and onboarded hundreds of advertisers, and that earlier in the year it had moved to divest its remaining apps business in order to focus on advertising. AppLovin’s annual report for fiscal 2025 states that since 2024 the company has been expanding its customer base to include web-based e-commerce advertisers.⁠[33][10]

PocketGamer.biz’s article of October 7, 2025, which credits BloombergBloomberg L.P.Bloomberg L.P. is a global financial technology, data and media company founded by Michael Bloomberg in 1981. It began by providing terminal services that deliver data, analytics and news to financial professionals, and launched Bloomberg News in 1990. Michael Bloomberg has pledged the vast majority of the company’s profits to his philanthropic organization, Bloomberg Philanthropies.Open the full entry, states that the SEC is investigating claims that AppLovin breached platform partner agreements in order to deliver more targeted ads; the agency’s cyber and emerging technologies unit oversaw the probe, which followed a whistleblower complaint and the earlier short-seller reports, and no wrongdoing has been alleged against AppLovin.⁠[34]

After the news, AppLovin’s shares fell as much as 19 percent, their steepest intraday drop in six months. The company’s statement read: “We regularly engage with regulators and if we get inquiries we address them in the ordinary course,” and “Material developments, if any, would be disclosed through the appropriate public channels.”⁠[34]

The annual report shows that AppLovin’s revenue for 2025 was $5.481 billion, up 70 percent from $3.224 billion in 2024; net income was $3.334 billion, Adjusted EBITDA $4.512 billion (a margin of 82.3 percent) and free cash flow $3.952 billion. During the year the company repurchased and retired 5.5 million shares of Class A common stock for $2.2 billion, and about $3.3 billion remained under its repurchase authorization as of December 31, 2025.⁠[10]

The annual report states that as of December 31, 2025, the company had 898 employees (876 full-time and 22 part-time or intern) in 15 countries; it names him as a person on whom the company is highly dependent and states that it has no employment agreement with him other than offer letters and does not maintain key-man insurance for its senior management team.⁠[10]

In an article published on February 2, 2026, “The AppLovin business model,” he wrote that advertisers were spending well over $11 billion a year on media on AppLovin’s platform, more than they spend on Pinterest, Snapchat and Reddit combined, that MAX reaches over one billion daily active users, and that the company had become the largest user acquisition channel for mobile gaming in the world.⁠[24]

The article states that roughly half of impressions occur between game levels and the other half are rewarded video placements, with an average watch time of over 35 seconds. He wrote: “AppLovin is not optimized for budgets or reach. It is optimized for advertiser profit.”⁠[24]

Reuters wrote in February 2026 that the SEC had declined a request by Bloomberg News for documents on the probe and, when Bloomberg appealed, had answered that an “investigation involving AppLovin is still active and ongoing.” The SEC, Reuters wrote, had not specified the subject or scope of the investigation and had not accused AppLovin or its officials of wrongdoing; AppLovin did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comment.⁠[35]

AppLovin’s 2026 proxy statement states that the board, in connection with a periodic review of its leadership structure, appointed Craig Billings as chairperson of the board; Foroughi served as chairperson until April 2026 and remains chief executive officer and a director. Craig Billings is the chief executive officer of Wynn Resorts, Limited.⁠[8]

AppLovin announced in a press release on April 7, 2026, that Craig Billings had been appointed independent Chairperson of the Board and that he would continue as chief executive officer and a director; chief technology officer Basil Shikin would become Distinguished Engineer effective July 1, 2026, when Giovanni (“Gio”) Ge, the chief product and engineering officer, would become chief technology officer.⁠[36]

The proxy statement lists him as a director nominee for the annual meeting of stockholders on June 3, 2026, and gives his age as 45; it also discloses that Vasily Shikin will move to a non-executive-officer role as Distinguished Engineer effective July 1, 2026. In the interview published on May 3, 2026, he said that the company had announced the week before that Basil Shikin would shift to a different role and that a colleague whom Shikin had hired, who now runs the team and built much of the company’s new technology, would become chief technology officer.⁠[8][4][4]

The same proxy statement contains a stockholder proposal from the Connecticut Retirement Plans and Trust Funds asking the company to disclose voting results separately for one-vote and multiple-vote shares beginning with the 2027 annual meeting; the board recommended a vote against it. Another proposal, put forward by the board, would amend the certificate of incorporation to provide for the exculpation of officers as permitted by Delaware law.⁠[8]

On April 27, 2026, 20VC released an interview with him titled “Applovin: $160BN Market Cap, $5.48BN Revenue, $10M EBITDA Per Head | Why the Best Do Not Need Mentorship”; the episode page calls him the co-founder and chief executive of AppLovin and lists among its topics the 92 percent fall in the share price, layoffs, the share of code written by AI, short sellers, stock buybacks and the path to a $1 trillion company.⁠[37]

On May 3, 2026, David Senra published an interview with him on his YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry channel under the title “Bootstrapping a Business to $5 Billion in Free Cash Flow | AppLovin’s Adam Foroughi”; the show’s website carries a page for the episode with the same date.⁠[4][2]

The conversation covered, in order: the large share buybacks after the fall in the company’s stock; the rejections by venture capital firms in 2012 and his two earlier advertising companies; the turn from consumer apps to an advertising platform; bootstrapping and the angel round; the advantages and drawbacks of having no board, and the acquisition offer he declined; Rafael Vivas and his criteria for hiring; his family’s departure from Iran; the deal with Orient Hontai Capital and the CFIUS review; and KKR’s investment and the departure of his co-founders.⁠[4][4][4][4][4][4][4][4][4]

It then turned to the IPO, dilution and his market-value targets; the purchase of game studios and their later sale to Tripledot Studios; the changes to compensation and the staff cuts made when the stock was depressed; his personal approval of hiring and the small executive team; his approach to performance marketing and the Axon 2 model; and the effect of AI on the company and its expansion to e-commerce and other advertisers.⁠[4][4][4][4][4][4]

In the interview he put the company’s market capitalization at the time at about $140 billion and his own holding at about 12 percent of the company, against about 24 to 25 percent before the convertible-note round, the dilution in between having come from the conversion of the note, KKR’s investment and the IPO.⁠[4][4][4]

He said that people working on the business believe there is a path to a market value of $1 trillion, with no time set for it, and that the company had just adopted a compensation plan for some of its key people built on market-value triggers, the highest of which is $1 trillion.⁠[4][4]

He said that about a year and a half earlier more than 80 percent of the company’s code was already written by large language models and that the share is now much higher; the company has no chief revenue officer and no chief operating officer, its executive suite consisting of himself, the chief financial officer, the chief technology officer and a general counsel. The quarter the company had just announced, he said, produced about $1.3 billion in cash.⁠[4][4][4]

He said that the company has more than a billion users playing games every day around the world, more than 150 million of them adults in the United States; the company has no sales force and most wants to help small and medium-sized businesses, hoping that one day a local laundry can be discovered through an ad in a game by someone who needs clothes washed, and eventually to extend from consumer categories to the enterprise market.⁠[4][4][4][4]

What he calls performance marketing, he said, is making the advertiser an arbitrageur: the advertiser knows from the reporting that every dollar spent brings back more in revenue, so that the only limit on its spending is the money in its bank account; the company took the same approach to e-commerce, showing product ads to people playing games. The heavy users of casual games, he said, tend to be middle-aged people with more time, and the average ad on the platform runs more than 35 seconds; he cited a mobile game company in Turkey with 10 to 15 people that sold for $1 billion less than a year after launch, almost all of its growth in marketing and monetization having been built on AppLovin’s platform.⁠[4][4][4][4][4][4]

With AI tools, he said, one very good person can be as powerful as 10 or even 100, which is why the company has not hired a sales force ahead of its opportunity and instead looks for individuals who know how to deploy agents to do the work; it expects its engineers to be product people and therefore has little in the way of a separate product organization.⁠[4][4]

The episode includes three sponsor messages read by David Senra, for Ramp, Deel and Axon, AppLovin’s advertising platform; the episode page on the show’s website carries links for Ramp and Deel.⁠[4][4][4][2]

The Haas School of Business page for its 2026 undergraduate commencement gives the ceremony as Wednesday, May 20, 2026, at 9:00 a.m. at The Greek Theatre and lists him under “Commencement Address,” identified as chief executive officer and co-founder of AppLovin; the school’s speaker page presents him under the heading “Commencement Speaker.”⁠[38][6]

In an article dated June 22, 2026, he announced that the company’s self-serve advertising platform was open to all advertisers from that day; the platform, the article says, was originally named Axon and is now called AppLovin Ads, while Axon remains the name of the AI recommendation system.⁠[39]

The article lists three ways of buying: return-on-ad-spend targets, for games and online shops; cost per purchaser, for rideshare, subscription brands and prediction markets; and lead buying, newly introduced, for sectors such as auto insurance, health insurance and home services. It describes the company’s model as performance marketing and says that it does not do brand marketing.⁠[39]

AppLovin’s investor-relations website lists the company’s second-quarter 2026 earnings call on August 5, 2026. In the transcript the company posted there, chief financial officer Matt Stumpf, addressing the questions the company kept receiving about the SEC inquiry, said: “The SEC has recently advised us that it concluded its inquiry with no recommended action.” He added that it had been a voluntary request and that the company had never deemed it material.⁠[40][41]

PocketGamer.biz wrote on September 21, 2026, that on stage at the All-In Summit 2026 the week before he had said that the company had grown 60 percent year over year, to approximately $20 billion in annual advertising spend on its platform, and had estimated that the figure across advertising companies was “probably more than double,” which the article puts at around $50 billion a year in mobile games advertising. It quotes him as saying: “What people don’t realise is just how big the mobile gaming universe has become.”⁠[42]

On September 16, 2026, Stephen Talbot, an alleged stockholder, filed a putative class action in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California against the company, Foroughi and Matthew Stumpf under Sections 10(b) and 20(a) of the Exchange Act and Rule 10b-5, asserting a class period from February 12, 2026, through August 5, 2026; the complaint alleges false or misleading statements about the pace of improvement of the company’s advertising models and the development timeline for an ad-generation tool. The company states in its quarterly report that it believes the allegations lack merit and will vigorously contest the action.⁠[29]

On October 7, 2026, Amit Patel filed a shareholder derivative complaint in the same court against the then-current members of the board, a former board member, Foroughi and Matthew Stumpf, asserting violations of Sections 10(b), 14(a) and 20(a) of the Exchange Act together with breach of fiduciary duty and related state-law claims, on the same allegations as the Talbot complaint; the company states that it believes the allegations lack merit and will vigorously contest the action.⁠[29]

On October 29, 2026, stockholders holding a majority of the company’s voting power adopted resolutions by written consent approving the reincorporation of the company from the State of Delaware to the State of NevadaNevadaNevada is a state in the western United States bordered by Oregon, Idaho, Utah, Arizona, and California; its capital is Carson City. It was admitted to the Union on October 31, 1864, as the 36th state, and its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 3,104,614.Open the full entry by conversion; the company’s Form 8-K names the consenting stockholders as Foroughi, Herald Chen, The Foroughi 2015 Irrevocable Trust and HDF 2020 LLC, WNF 2020 LLC, DLF 2020 LLC, KMF 2020 LLC and OHF 2020 LLC, which together held 2,370,615 shares of Class A common stock and 30,063,730 shares of Class B common stock, about 67 percent of the voting power of the outstanding capital stock entitled to vote. The company said that it would file an information statement on Schedule 14C and that the reincorporation would take effect no earlier than 20 calendar days after that statement is first mailed.⁠[43]

The quarterly report that AppLovin filed on November 4, 2026, shows revenue of $2.185 billion and net income of $1.439 billion for the third quarter of 2026, and revenue of $5.951 billion and net income of $3.911 billion for the first nine months. In those nine months the company repurchased and retired 7,329,450 shares of Class A common stock for about $2.9 billion, and $394.3 million remained available under its repurchase program as of September 30, 2026.⁠[29]

As of November 2026, the About page of AppLovin’s website identifies him as “Founder & CEO of AppLovin.”⁠[11]

Kayhan Life wrote in August 2021 that he and his wife, Jaclyn, have five children; Yahoo Finance wrote in May 2019 that he had five kids under the age of 10.⁠[1][3]

In the 2017 remarks quoted by Kayhan Life he speaks of his parents moving “my sister and I” to the United States.⁠[1]

He said that he played games growing up but dislikes them as an adult and does not spend a minute on them: they consume time and are addictive, he lacks the patience to get good at them, and he does not like doing things he is bad at.⁠[4]

He said that he wakes at exactly the same time every day, follows the same morning routine and checks the same statistics; for a long time he would wake every morning and check the numbers first to make sure the company was still doing well.⁠[4]

He described himself as having a pretty reasonable but not exceptionally high IQ, his strength being that he sees patterns and problems well, proposes a solution and pivots quickly if he is wrong; he said that he is terrible at sales and forgets what he did the day before.⁠[4][4][4][4]

He said that he has always had the mentality that others would not bet on him and that he would prove them wrong, and that hearing others say his company is no good motivates him; he hires on the same basis, looking for people with a chip on their shoulder and a reason to push hard.⁠[4][4][4][4]

The prospectus shows that as of February 28, 2021, he beneficially owned 37,471,074 shares of Class B common stock, 24.9 percent of that class and 23.5 percent of total voting power before the offering: 27,936,907 shares held directly, 8,347,752 held by The Foroughi 2015 Irrevocable Trust, and 237,283 held by each of five companies (DLF 2020 LLC, HDF 2020 LLC, KMF 2020 LLC, OHF 2020 LLC and WNF 2020 LLC), with Mark Poelma serving as trustee for the trust and for those companies. In the same table, KKR Denali Holdings, L.P. held 110,550,489 shares of Class B common stock (73.6 percent of the class and 69.3 percent of voting power) and Angel Pride Holdings Limited held 26,021,583 shares of Class A common stock (14.0 percent).⁠[7]

The compensation table in the prospectus shows a salary of $400,000 in both 2019 and 2020 and total compensation of $409,800 and $409,462; its description of his employment letter states: “Mr. Foroughi’s current annual base salary is $100,000.” The 2025 proxy statement shows a salary of $100,000 and total compensation of $104,355 for 2022. Under the executive change in control and severance plan described in the prospectus, his severance would equal 18 months of base salary outside a change in control and 24 months within the change-in-control period.⁠[7][25]

The proxy statements show total compensation of $83,361,678 for 2023, of which $82,949,922 was stock awards; $11,202,098 for 2024, of which $400,000 was salary and $10,788,454 stock awards; and $12,969,001 for 2025, of which $400,000 was salary and $12,558,866 stock awards. The $13,644 of “All Other Compensation” for 2024 consisted of a $1,800 work-from-home stipend paid to all employees and $11,844 of company matching under the 401(k) plan.⁠[25][8]

The performance stock units (PSUs) granted in 2023 were tied solely to stock price performance over a five-year window; the proxy statements state that the stock price exceeded every hurdle, each sustained for 30 consecutive trading days, and that the awards were fully earned in less than 18 months, in 2024, because, in the words of the 2025 proxy statement, the company delivered a total market capitalization increase of more than $35 billion since the grant date; the PSUs carry a one-year holding period or, in the case of the chief executive, a minimum share holding requirement. In 2024 he acquired 6,432,189 shares on vesting, with a value realized of $577,513,004, of which $493,672,452 related to PSUs and $83,840,552 to restricted stock units (RSUs). The company granted no additional PSUs to its executive officers in 2024 or 2025.⁠[25][8]

On November 4, 2024, he was granted 67,805 RSUs, which vested in 2025 with a value realized of $29,601,301; on October 30, 2025, he was granted 20,236 RSUs, which were unvested at year-end and worth $13,635,422 at the closing price of $673.82 on December 31, 2025.⁠[25][8]

The ratio of the chief executive’s compensation to that of the median employee, as disclosed by the company, was 114:1 for 2024 and 97:1 for 2025; the median employee for 2024 was located in Germany and had total cash compensation of $98,555, and the median employee’s annual total compensation for 2025 was $133,808.⁠[25][8]

As of March 31, 2025, he beneficially owned 2,835,590 shares of Class A common stock and 27,936,907 shares of Class B common stock (91 percent of the Class B shares), giving him 60.9 percent of total voting power. As of March 31, 2026, he beneficially owned 2,420,296 shares of Class A common stock (5,059 of them subject to RSUs vesting within 60 days) and 27,936,907 shares of Class B common stock (92.5 percent of the Class B shares), or 61.6 percent of total voting power.⁠[25][8]

Under the Voting Agreement, all common stock held by its parties (Foroughi, Herald Chen and certain affiliated trusts and entities) is voted as determined by Foroughi and Herald Chen; the proxy statement states that AppLovin is considered a “controlled company” under the Nasdaq corporate governance rules. The annual report for fiscal 2025 states that as of December 31, 2025, the parties to the Voting Agreement collectively held approximately 67 percent of the voting power. Under the Investor Rights Agreement, he and an affiliated entity have the right to demand that the company file a registration statement.⁠[8][10]

In September 2025, Forbes listed the 14 newcomers to that year’s Forbes 400, among whom he ranked second with an estimated fortune of $17.4 billion (net worths as of September 1, 2025); it gives his age as 45 and states that he had held on to almost all of his stock since the company went public in 2021, leaving him with a stake of nearly 11 percent, and that his fortune had grown by more than $14 billion over the past year; AppLovin’s market capitalization, it says, had soared more than sixfold, to over $160 billion, since its 2021 IPO. The same list includes Andrew Karam ($4.7 billion) and Eduardo Vivas ($3.8 billion).⁠[9]

The Haas School of Business biography states that he received the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award in 2018.⁠[6]

He said that he has never believed in holding cash for a rainy day: a company that believes in its future and generates a great deal of cash should keep buying back its own shares (video at 3:51).⁠[4]

In hiring he looks for people with a chip on their shoulder, people who have a reason to push hard (video at 24:40).⁠[4]

He holds that a leader owes it to every person and to the company to make sure that at any given time the best person is in the right role, since otherwise the better people underneath will leave (video at 40:02).⁠[4]

He said that he has been transparent throughout his career, because reputation and trust can break down at any moment once the other side’s trust is violated (video at 50:28).⁠[4]

He holds that a company’s culture cannot stay static and has to be rethought at every moment for the world as it is (video at 1:03:39).⁠[4]

Hiring, he said, should upgrade oneself: hire people who are better than you at something, then be their cheerleader and give them whatever they need to succeed (video at 1:10:16).⁠[4]

He wants the people he works with to believe that at any given time they are in the best role for them anywhere in the world, meaning one with great room to grow professionally and personally; giving very smart people that room requires the company to stay lean and efficient (video at 1:13:04).⁠[4]

He holds that a product has to be good enough to sell itself; a company that has to beg for business does not have a good, scalable advertising solution (video at 1:15:51).⁠[4]

AppLovin: Official website: https://www.applovin.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[11]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamforoughi (opens in a new window).⁠[2]