Rafael Vivas

Speaking of him in a 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 interview published on May 3, 2026, Adam ForoughiAdam ForoughiAdam Foroughi is the co-founder and chief executive officer of AppLovin, an advertising technology company whose Axon AI recommendation engine powers performance advertising for mobile-game, e-commerce and other advertisers and whose shares are listed on Nasdaq and included in the S&P 500.Open the full entry said: “He’ll turn 34 this year”; in the interview published on November 1, 2026, David Senra described him as being in his early thirties.⁠[1][2]

He said that he comes from a family of four brothers and two stepbrothers, all boys; his parents divorced very early, and he did not grow up with his oldest brother.⁠[2]

He said that his father is from Ibagué, Colombia, and that the family came from Colombia to West Palm Beach 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. In his account, his grandfather was a lawyer who died when his father was 15; his father had four other siblings to look after and a mother who could not speak English, and the household had nothing to fall back on. His father, he said, became a doctor not because he wanted to but because he had to: it was the only way to make enough money to support the family.⁠[2][2]

He said that he grew up in a nice neighborhood and went to a nice school but was the poorest kid among all the rich kids, with five pairs of pants and five shirts for the whole school year. When he came home complaining that a friend had Nikes or a nice shirt, his father’s answer was that if he wanted things he should go out and work for them; this, he said, pushed him to become a better version of himself.⁠[2][2]

He said that he played soccer and baseball as a child but was good at neither; what he loved about video games was that, whether multiplayer or single-player, they were decided purely on merit.⁠[2]

He said that as a boy he was always online and at the computer, building websites, and that for a while he ran a game-server business; at 14, while still in middle school, he was making $1,000 a month selling things online and running game servers.⁠[2]

He recalled that his brother, on a visit to their father, mentioned that he was doing performance marketing, and that their father proposed that he intern for his brother for a summer. He was against it at first, and his brother talked him round. His place there, he said, was “below the water boy”: whatever work the others did not want was pushed onto him, such as adding the terms of service and the privacy policy to websites. In this way he learned what kinds of products people are interested in, what kinds of ads get their attention and how money is made online.⁠[2][2]

He said that he began working online at about 14, doing performance media buying. He saw the people at his brother’s company making $20,000 to $30,000 a day in profit by advertising different products, while his teacher made $25,000 a year, and he quickly concluded that the upside of school was nowhere near that of putting all his effort into performance marketing. The episode summary on David Senra’s website likewise states that he started in performance marketing at 14, working for his older brother.⁠[2][2][3]

He said that his brother and Adam Foroughi had worked together, that he had known of Adam Foroughi since he was 14, and that he first met him at 15, when Adam Foroughi came to the office and his brother sent him to fetch Adam Foroughi a water. His brother’s company kept a kind of leaderboard on which Adam Foroughi was then at the top and he was the one behind him. Adam Foroughi’s account is that he started working for Adam Foroughi at Adam Foroughi’s old company when he was 16.⁠[2][2][1]

He said that he did not wait to be given opportunities: he began by building websites, then out of curiosity started making ads in Photoshop; after someone showed him how to put up a MySpace campaign, he wanted more traffic and began reaching out to brands on his own, without anyone’s permission.⁠[2][2]

He said that he was not good at school, with horrible grades, unable to pay attention and uninterested in anything the teachers were talking about; once he got into internet advertising, he stopped going to classes, skipped school and worked around the clock.⁠[2][2]

He recalled that his father finally said that if he thought he was such a hotshot making all this money online, he should move out of the house; about a day later he packed his things and moved to his best friend’s house, offering his friend’s mother a deal: he would employ her son as an intern in his business and help clean the house. He said that he was around 16 at the time.⁠[2][2]

He said that his father wanted him to be a doctor, thought the internet was a scam and did not take the time to care about what he was doing; he has it in him, he said, to prove everybody wrong.⁠[2][2]

He said that his father’s influence on him ended at the point where he left his father’s house, and that what drove him afterwards was that he could not fail: he had moved out of his parents’ house, was living in San Francisco, was working for his brother and then doing the startup, and there was no way he would move back; having dropped out of high school he could not have got into a good college and was, on paper, all but unhirable, and going back to work for his brother would have been an equal failure in his eyes. His brother, he said, gave him the tools he needed to succeed, and he paved his own way.⁠[2][2]

He said that when he was about 17, an advertising platform they were buying from, which had its own advertisements and offers, banned them because they were competitive. He recalled that he went home that night so angry that he pretty much cried, resolved to bury that company, and then announced to his brother that he was leaving to start his own ad platform and go head-to-head with it; his brother laughed, said he was not going anywhere, gave him a few engineers and let him build what he wanted.⁠[2][2]

What came out of this, he said, was a mobile ad platform. The episode summary on David Senra’s website states that at 17 he built his own mobile ad platform and that Adam Foroughi was one of its customers.⁠[2][3]

He said that by then Adam Foroughi had left his brother’s company, was done with ads and wanted to build consumer products, first a dating app, then a fashion app and others, and that this was the beginning of AppLovin; Adam Foroughi bought traffic for those apps from his platform, he was in effect Adam Foroughi’s account manager, the two talked a great deal over AIM, and they grew closer when he was 17 or 18. He said that Adam Foroughi is 12 years older than he is and far smarter, but that he used to tease Adam Foroughi online, offering to teach this customer how to make money online and how to run a real business.⁠[2][2][2]

He said that Adam Foroughi, seeing his ad platform succeed in a wide-open space, decided to build a mobile ad platform of his own. He recalled that one day Adam Foroughi was in the office with a broad grin, that he pushed Adam Foroughi into a room to ask why, and that the answer was: “Hey, don’t be mad. I’m building a competing ad platform.”⁠[2][2]

He said that he did not care at the time, because he was a massive gamer and was about to join a friend’s company in Y Combinator that built mobile games. Adam Foroughi then urged him to come and work for him instead, saying that he knew how to work extremely hard and knew everyone in mobile gaming but knew nothing about building a real business; out of respect for Adam Foroughi, he went down to Palo Alto to meet the rest of the team.⁠[2][2]

Adam Foroughi’s account is that he, then 19, first tried to hire Adam Foroughi into the business he was working on, that Adam Foroughi laughed in his face and answered that he had a good opportunity for him instead, and that he shut his own business down and came over.⁠[1][1]

He recalled that after the interviews he judged these to be the smartest people he had ever spoken to and decided to join. In the negotiation he asked for half the company, and Adam Foroughi answered that somebody in his role typically gets a quarter of a percent; he said that he ended up with a little more than that, though obviously not half.⁠[2]

His one condition was that he live inside the office. He explained to Adam Foroughi that the company had a goofy name and no venture funding and would be sending a chubby kid of five foot eight out to sell to game developers and advertisers, so the only way to win was to out-hustle everybody else, which meant that he had to live there. Adam Foroughi and another engineer went to IKEA and built bunk beds for him and for another engineer he had brought over; the other engineer took one look at the bunk beds and refused to live there, while he felt at home.⁠[2][2][2]

Adam Foroughi said that he was the company’s first business hire, alongside one other person at the time, and that for the first six months he really did live in the office in downtown Palo Alto, sleeping in a bunk bed; he moved out after someone tried to break into the office in the middle of the night and was caught on video.⁠[1][1][1]

The episode summary on David Senra’s website states that Adam Foroughi hired him as the first business hire in 2011 and that he has worked at AppLovin since that year. The registration statement that AppLovin filed with 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 states that the company was incorporated in 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, and its proxy statement that Adam Foroughi has been chief executive officer since December 2011; the company’s own About page gives 2012 as the year of founding.⁠[3][4][5][6]

He said that when he moved into the office the company was pre-revenue and “like an animal house”: Adam Foroughi had a group of engineers working on different apps and looking for product-market fit, and their next idea was to build an ad network. He said that Adam Foroughi had earlier run a very successful ad network on Facebook called Social Hour, knew the space very well and had already seen user activity moving from the PC to mobile, and that his own arrival connected the company to the right advertisers and publishers. AppLovin’s proxy statement states that Adam Foroughi previously co-founded two advertising technology companies, Lifestreet Media Inc. and Social Hour Inc.⁠[2][2][5]

He said that the field already had plenty of very well funded companies, backed by the top-tier venture firms of the time such as Benchmark and Sequoia CapitalSequoia CapitalSequoia Capital is a venture capital firm founded by Don Valentine in 1972, investing from the seed stage through the growth stage. Its historical investments include Apple, Cisco, Google, YouTube, Airbnb, and Stripe; in 2021 it introduced the Sequoia Capital Fund structure, which can continue to hold public securities, and in 2023 its regional businesses became independent brands and partnerships.Open the full entry, and that the market looked mature. David Senra recalled in the interview that Adam Foroughi had tried to sell 25 percent of the company to venture capitalists for $1 million and was turned down; when Adam Foroughi went out to raise that money, Vivas said, the company was already profitable, its revenue was growing rapidly month over month and its margins were world-class compared with everyone else in the space, and it was still turned down; he puts this down to their untraditional background: the founders of rival companies had worked at Facebook or 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 or come from the AdMob team, whereas they were performance marketers who had always run arbitrage businesses and had never taken an ad network through to a very profitable asset.⁠[2][2][2][2]

Adam Foroughi said that he ran the company’s business development efforts in the early years and was at it 24 hours a day, that his particular skill is striking deals, and that he can remember every word of a conversation 15 years later.⁠[1]

He said that the company beat its rivals because Adam Foroughi went all in on the technology: the others focused on sales and had hundreds of advertisers and premium publishers, but their algorithms were poor and in many cases were optimized by hand in the background; AppLovin did not then have a state-of-the-art machine learning model, only rules and regression to decide what to serve, yet it often monetized at double the rate of a rival. So when he walked into a room or reached out to a publisher, his pitch was a guarantee of more money than the publisher was making elsewhere; many thought it too good to be true and made them put it in writing, which they did.⁠[2][2][2]

He said that his mentor was Mark Rosner. In his account, Mark Rosner had been chief executive of Zedge, a company that did ringtones and wallpapers, then went out on his own and wrote a blog about ways to make more revenue from apps; because he wanted to work with Zedge, he suggested that Adam Foroughi reach out to him, and what was first meant to be a consulting arrangement ended with Mark Rosner joining as chief revenue officer (CRO). The author biography in App Developer Magazine states that Mark Rosner began his career on Wall Street, was CRO and CEO at Zedge, has been with AppLovin from its birth and is charged with the growth of both the demand and the supply side of the business.⁠[2][2][7]

He recalled that at Mark Rosner’s first sit-down with Adam Foroughi a non-disclosure agreement was put in front of him; most people simply sign, but Mark Rosner asked for 15 minutes and marked up the whole document, noting each point he could not agree to. He pulled Adam Foroughi aside and whispered that this man could not be trusted; Adam Foroughi took the opposite view, that someone diligent enough to redline the agreement in detail was exactly the person they wanted to work with.⁠[2][2]

He said that Mark Rosner managed the supply side while he was focused on the demand side, and that at first the two did not get along at all; in time he came to work under Mark Rosner, and the relationship turned into a mentorship. In his account, Mark Rosner saw a raw kid with a great deal of energy and skill that had not yet been honed, and always pushed him to dig into the details and to be very specific in contracts. Before the company had a lawyer, he said, Mark Rosner acted as its in-house counsel and did more than 200 agreements himself, and the company was caught out on only one of them; when the company hired its first lawyer, Mark Rosner would redline that lawyer’s agreements.⁠[2][2][2]

He gave an example: a deal with a company a little outside Los Angeles had taken months, and he finished the agreement in the hospital, where his grandmother was being treated for breast cancer, and both sides signed. Mark Rosner then called and, instead of asking after his grandmother, said that he had got the deal badly wrong, one point being off by 1 or 2 percent; when he protested that after months he could not go back to the client, Mark Rosner asked only whether he wanted to be like the very greatest athletes in their sports and hung up. He went back and renegotiated; the client was irate, but the deal was done, and Mark Rosner called back with a “good job.” That, he said, is why he cares so much about every single detail.⁠[2][2][2]

He said that AppLovin did a great deal of business in Asia and that China is one of his favorite places to do business. In his account, one partner of that time was among AppLovin’s biggest publishers and squeezed AppLovin in every way it could, repeatedly disregarding an agreement that it had signed; he often stayed up until four or five in the morning in the United States to manage the relationship and also spent a lot of time in Asia with that company’s leadership.⁠[2][2][2]

He said that this convinced him that the company must never again depend so heavily on a single partner, and that, having seen what NetflixNetflixNetflix is a U.S. entertainment company that offers streaming series, films, games, and live programming, headquartered in Los Gatos, California. Founded in 1997, it grew from online DVD rental into an international subscription entertainment service and also runs original content, advertising, and in-person experience businesses.Open the full entry had done with content of its own, he believed that owning content as well as the platform would bring better economics and a distribution advantage; this, he added, is not an uncommon approach in Asia, where the biggest gaming companies in the world, such as Tencent and NetEase, are also distribution companies.⁠[2][2]

He recalled that he was full of rage and wanted nothing but to dominate that partner, and that he put it to Adam Foroughi that he would either leave to build a competitor to it or build it inside the company, which was what he really wanted. He confirmed in the interview that the partner’s name refers to the animal, the cheetah, and said that he called the new business Lion Studios because “a lion is the only animal that can kill a cheetah”; the thesis was to work with the best developers in the world and use AppLovin’s very large distribution platform to help distribute their games.⁠[2][2][2]

PocketGamer.biz and GameDaily.biz wrote that Lion Studios had been in a pre-launch phase since March 2018 and had already released several titles. On July 12, 2018, TechCrunchTechCrunchTechCrunch is an American technology news outlet founded in 2005 by Michael Arrington and Keith Teare and headquartered in San Francisco; it mainly covers technology companies, startups, and venture capital, and hosts events such as TechCrunch Disrupt. Its ownership passed successively through AOL, Verizon, and Yahoo, and in 2025 Regent announced its acquisition.Open the full entry carried the news that AppLovin had launched the app publishing studio, describing him as the company’s “vice president of strategic initiatives”; the next day’s articles in PocketGamer.biz and GameDaily.biz call him president of Lion Studios, and PocketGamer.biz names Kyler Murlas as head of operations.⁠[8][9][10]

In the company’s announcement he said: “AppLovin is a growth engine for all app developers, and that approach inherently fuels the mobile development ecosystem,” adding that Lion Studios is an extension of this and goes one step further by helping developers publish and promote their apps, giving great talent access to many of the same resources as larger companies.⁠[8][11][9]

TechCrunch relays the company’s statement that AppLovin had helped developers get their apps downloaded 200 million times and had published five apps that reached No. 1 overall; the article separately names Love Balls and Weave the Line as recent number ones, mentions Draw In and Cash, Inc., and adds that AppLovin declined to say what it charges for the service or what equity it might take in exchange. Drawing on the press release, GameDaily.biz wrote that in the pre-launch phase Lion Studios drove hundreds of millions of app downloads, took four apps to No. 1 overall free in the App Store and placed 13 in the top 10 overall and 16 in the top 20.⁠[10][9]

To mark the launch, AppLovin ran the Ultimate Game Changers contest, with $300,000 in prizes for the four mobile games with the most potential to top the charts; it was aimed at small independent studios with fewer than 30 employees whose submitted titles had fewer than 100,000 installs, opened on July 13, 2018, closed to entries on August 13, 2018, and the winners were to be announced on September 13, 2018.⁠[8][11][12][13]

He said that within two years Lion Studios went from zero to more than $250 million in revenue, profitably, that it drove more than 20 games to No. 1 and more than 3 billion downloads, and that it was one of the biggest publishers of its time. He compares the business to Universal Music Group: it had the distribution and went out to find talented game developers and bring their games to the masses. The episode summary on David Senra’s website calls him a co-founder of Lion Studios.⁠[2][2][2][3]

He said that the period was very tough: AppLovin’s advertising business was then still only game installs, and once the company began making games, all of its customers started to look on AppLovin as a competitor and as hostile; in his view there was in fact more benefit for them, since the games created more inventory for the market and their data improved AppLovin’s machine learning model, which made it more efficient at driving traffic for those customers, so that the partners went on working with them for the value delivered even though they did not like them, at the cost of a great deal of internal stress.⁠[2][2]

He said that the games business is hit-driven and meant working around the clock, and that the best partners they published with were not in America but in Europe, Asia and elsewhere. He gives two reasons: labor costs much more in the United States, and the hyper-casual games they were then building did not need the best of the best but as many repetitions as possible, with methods, based largely on how marketable a game was, for determining what would be a hit; and the teams there out-hustled the American studios.⁠[2][2][2]

His example is a development team of three, a husband, a wife and a younger brother, whose house was also their office and whose game Happy Glass, released with Lion Studios, brought in close to $100 million in revenue. The App Store listing for Happy Glass gives Lion Studios as the developer. He said that the three had staked everything and would have had to go back to jobs if it had not worked within a month; he loved making underdogs like these successful, and seeing where they came from drove him to work harder.⁠[2][2][2][14]

He said that he was then between 26 and 28, with no children, and that nothing mattered to him besides work: Adam Foroughi was pressing him very hard, he felt that the future of the company was on his back, and he would wake at about 4 a.m. and stay up until about midnight, listening to motivational videos all day as he worked; he added that he had announced to the woman he was dating at the time that he was going to go “complete black mamba.”⁠[2][2]

The registration statement that AppLovin filed on March 2, 2021 states that he received annual salary and other cash compensation of $375,000, $500,000 and $266,667 in 2018, 2019 and 2020 respectively, together with a cash bonus of $25,000 in 2020, and benefits consistent with other employees serving in similar roles; the company granted him a stock option to purchase 810,000 shares of Class A common stock at $2.806667 per share during 2018 and a stock option to purchase 600,000 shares of Class A common stock at an exercise price of $5.05 per share during 2019, both figures giving effect to the company’s forward stock split.⁠[4]

On August 1, 2018, PocketGamer.biz published Craig Chapple’s interview with him. He called Lion Studios “a single, comprehensive platform” offering everything developers need to publish their apps, and said that most independent developers cannot afford the heavy investment it takes to get noticed in the charts and to monetize quickly, which Lion Studios helps them do with little overhead. The article states that the division had generated hundreds of millions of downloads before its official announcement and that SuperTapX’s Love Balls had been downloaded more than 100 million times in less than three months.⁠[13]

On hyper-casual games, he said that the experience is “precisely tailored for mobile”: the games are addictive, can be played for hours or in bursts of about 30 seconds, have no language barrier because they use few or no words, and have a very shallow learning curve but enough depth to keep players engaged for months; the article states that he admits the company is “super bullish” on the category. Asked how it achieves large numbers of installs at low cost, he said that it comes down to knowledge, smarts and hard work, adding: “If there were an easy formula or playbook for this, then everyone would do it.”⁠[13]

On August 8, 2018, ExchangeWire published a question-and-answer piece with him by Lindsay Rowntree, first published on TheGamingEconomy.com. He said that Lion Studios operates independently of AppLovin and can publish apps outright, provide upfront funding, optimize promotional campaigns, or do all three, and added: “Ultimately, Lion Studios will help us create a stronger independent app ecosystem.”⁠[12]

In the same piece he argued that the middle of the market is under pressure: attention is concentrated on hardcore titles such as Fortnite and PUBG and on hyper-casual hits such as Hole.io and Love Balls, while casual and mid-core games will keep a large audience but a smaller share of a growing market. He said that hyper-casual games have simple development cycles, so that developers can make more games in a year, and that their minimal text needs little localization.⁠[12]

On August 14, 2018, Allison Schiff of AdExchanger wrote about the work of the Jakarta-based game studio Alegrium with Lion Studios: Alegrium’s chief executive, Stefan Damasena, had met him earlier in 2018 and then decided to have Lion Studios publish Cash, Inc. He is quoted as saying, “We work to try and figure out what data is most correlated to success,” and as saying that one of the game’s mechanics did particularly well during the World CupFIFA World CupThe FIFA World Cup is FIFA’s men’s national-team football tournament, held every four years.Open the full entry and increased user value by “a substantial amount.” The article states that Cash, Inc. had 20 million downloads after launch, was named an editor’s choice on the Play Store by Google in July 2018 and reached the top 10 for games on AppleAppleApple is a public technology company founded in 1976 and headquartered in Cupertino, California, United States. Its business includes the iPhone, Mac, iPad, wearables, and services such as digital content, payments, and cloud storage. The company builds its product system through in-house hardware, operating systems, and services.Open the full entry’s US App Store.⁠[15]

AppLovin’s registration statement and proxy statement disclose that on March 8, 2019 the company entered into a promissory note with him to advance funds for the early exercise of his stock options, in a principal amount of $2,273,400 at an interest rate of 2.59 percent; on August 7, 2020 the note was amended to lower the rate on the outstanding balance to the then-applicable IRS annual mid-term rate of 0.41 percent. The registration statement filed on March 2, 2021 states that the note was still outstanding at that time.⁠[4][5]

He said that two years into Lion Studios he looked up from his laptop and realized that the business no longer needed him, and that the company had also acquired other game studios; he asked himself what he really wanted, and the answer was a family: he had always known that he wanted to be a father, and he was 28.⁠[2][2]

He said that about a year earlier he had begun writing down where he was the bottleneck and where the business needed to be for it not to need him, and then marking the items off one by one; only when new games were being released and revenue was growing without him did he speak. Adam Foroughi, he said, is like a big brother to him, and he is not good at breaking such news to him, so he waited until his own birthday to call; Adam Foroughi asked only whether he was sure and then said that he respected whatever he wanted to do.⁠[2][2][2]

He said that many people then called to ask what he was thinking, and that his brother and others tried to convince him to stay, offering him various packages; his answer was that it had nothing to do with money and that there were other things he wanted to accomplish in his life. The transition was meant to take six months, and within three he was more or less out.⁠[2][2]

PocketGamer.biz wrote that Nicholas Le took over Lion Studios from him in 2020 and became its chief executive; the registration statement that AppLovin filed in March 2021 describes him as the chairperson and former president of its subsidiary Lion Studios, LLC.⁠[16][4]

He said that he had expected to be out of AppLovin for good, to enjoy life on a beach and never work again. San Francisco, shut down by Covid, was depressing; he went to Miami for what was meant to be a weekend’s vacation, found everything open there, and ended up planting his roots in the city, meeting “the love of my life” and having a family.⁠[2][2]

He said that he was not good at taking time off: three months in he was going crazy and began building products for fun. He found a great technical team and worked opportunistically, building into whichever vertical looked right and showed good numbers; one project was a dating show on the mobile phone in which contestants competed for love or for fame. Watching 12 hours of dating shows a day, he said, makes one want to jump out of a window, and he added that the business is dead.⁠[2][2][2]

He said that he quickly found it a depressing life without purpose: on a Wednesday afternoon there was no one to play games with, because all of his friends were being productive. He had no connection with the products, he said, and did not truly care about the people he was working with at the new company, whereas at AppLovin he cares about helping customers succeed and cares deeply about the success of Adam Foroughi and the rest of the team.⁠[2][2][2]

AppLovin’s About page states that the company went public in 2021 at a valuation of $28 billion, with the ticker NasdaqNasdaqNasdaq is an exchange operator and financial technology company headquartered in New York. It runs The Nasdaq Stock Market and other markets and provides capital markets technology, regulatory technology, and data and index services. Founded in 1971, it combined with OMX AB in 2008, and in March 2026 the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission approved its rules for trading tokenized securities.Open the full entry: APP. He recalled that on the day of the listing he was still outside the company and joined the others to ring the bell, at what he calls in the interview the “New York Stock ExchangeNew York Stock ExchangeThe New York Stock Exchange is a securities exchange on Wall Street in New York City. It traces its origins to the Buttonwood Agreement signed by 24 stockbrokers in 1792, has used its present name since 1863 and has been owned by Intercontinental Exchange since 2013.Open the full entry”; the stock dropped on its first day, and the group drank their sorrows away.⁠[6][2][2]

He said that, talking to people there, he saw that the company was still growing but that the business clearly had flaws, and that it became very clear to him that he needed to be there; in his words, “this is my company.” Adam Foroughi looked at him and said that he had heard he was thinking about coming back, he answered that he was in, and he has been at the company ever since. Had the business been in a good spot and the stock rising, he said, there would have been nothing for him to offer and he would have stayed out and found something else; he came back because he felt that the business needed him.⁠[2][2]

He said that after the listing the stock kept falling while revenue was rising, that the company was at one point worth only $4 billion (he first said $3 billion and corrected himself) and that the stock fell by more than 90 percent; the figures David Senra gives in the interview are a fall from $28 billion to $3.8 billion. He said that Adam Foroughi’s response was to double down on buying back the company’s stock and to lever up the company, which became one of the greatest returns of all time; they also considered, if the stock kept falling, buying the company and taking it private, as Michael DellMichael DellMichael Dell is the founder, chairman, and chief executive officer of Dell Technologies. Starting from a direct-sales personal computer business, he led the company’s take-private, its acquisition of EMC, and its return to the public market, and with his wife Susan Dell co-founded a foundation that funds education, health, and children’s investment accounts.Open the full entry did with his own company.⁠[2][2][2][2][2][2]

Asked whether he was stressed at the time, he said that he was not: his hobbies cost $15 a month, the subscription to World of Warcraft; he spends his time with the same friends he had in high school and with the people he works with, wears cheap clothing and never let his lifestyle creep upward, so he was never concerned about cash flow.⁠[2][2]

AppLovin’s proxy statements disclose that on March 8, 2024 the principal of the 2019 note plus accrued interest, $2,309,526 in all, was repaid in full and the note was extinguished.⁠[5][17]

The related-party section of AppLovin’s 2026 proxy statement states that he is an AppLovin employee, that in 2025 he received an annual salary of $400,000 and an award of restricted stock units covering 4,856 shares of Class A common stock, that his salary remains the same for 2026 and that he receives benefits consistent with other employees in similar roles.⁠[18]

PocketGamer.biz wrote that Tripledot Studios completed its acquisition of AppLovin’s mobile games business on June 30, 2025, for $400 million in cash and a 20 percent equity stake in Tripledot Studios, the deal covering 10 studios, among them Lion Studios, Machine Zone, Magic Tavern and PeopleFun. AppLovin’s About page gives the purpose of the sale as focusing on the ad platform.⁠[19][6]

On October 1, 2025, AppLovin rebranded its ad platform as Axon and launched the self-serve tool Axon Ads Manager on a referral-only basis. Modern Retail’s article of that day calls him AppLovin’s “vp of growth marketing” and quotes him as saying in an interview, “We started looking at e-commerce because it’s naturally the largest vertical of advertising,” and that once the product was released to customers the company saw that it “actually has legs.”⁠[20]

He said that about 80 percent of conversions happen within the first hour, which makes it easy for brands to see the impact and scale up quickly; the article states that only a few hundred advertisers were then live on the platform, and he said that “thousands of organizations” had shown interest and that some enterprise clients spend six figures a day on it. Black Friday, Cyber Monday and holiday spending, he said, are like nothing the company had seen before, which was the catalyst for launching self-serve by that point and offering an alternative to the massive social ad platforms; he added that Ashley Furniture was buying profitably and that business with it was growing week over week.⁠[20]

The same article states that several short sellers, among them Muddy Waters, 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 and Fuzzy Panda, have alleged that AppLovin’s technology relies on fraudulent tactics, that AppLovin has rejected these accusations, and that Adam Foroughi has argued in blog posts that the company’s methods are consistent with industry standards.⁠[20]

In the David Senra interview published on May 3, 2026, Adam Foroughi said that the two had worked alongside each other for about 18 years, that he regards him as a little brother and as something like a co-founder of the company, and that he has made a huge difference; he added that he now runs marketing and growth marketing, which is how he and David Senra came to intersect.⁠[1][1]

Adam Foroughi said that in hiring he had always looked for people who “have a chip on their shoulder,” and that he was a high school dropout who would not get a job at a big technology company but whose selling skills and charisma far exceeded everyone else’s, so that the thing to do was to bring such a person in and empower him. David Senra said in this interview that he had sent over many notes about Adam Foroughi, among them an early email in which Adam Foroughi wrote that he was sure they could build a billion-dollar business.⁠[1][1][1]

On November 1, 2026, David Senra published 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 a conversation with him titled “High School Dropout to Multi-Billionaire: The Relentless Drive of Rafael Vivas.” The episode page on David Senra’s website writes his name as Rafael “Raf” Vivas and introduces him as a founding team member of AppLovin who has worked there in business development, e-commerce and growth marketing roles; the page’s “Follow” section describes him as “the vice president of growth marketing and founding team member at AppLovin.”⁠[2][3][3]

The conversation opens with how he came to be thrown out of his father’s house and then moves in turn to his start at 14 and dropping out of school, video games and “being the most valuable person in the room,” how he met Adam Foroughi, the ad platform he started at 17, joining AppLovin and living in the office, how the company beat its rivals without venture funding, its performance culture and his objections to delegation, how he does deals and keeps after customers, his attitude to swings in the stock price, and the goal of building AppLovin into a business that outlives him.⁠[2][2][2][2][2][2][2][2][2][2][2][2]

The second half covers, in order, why he started Lion Studios and how it ran, leaving the company at 28 and moving to Miami, the products he built while away, his decision on the day of the listing to return, the fall in the stock and the buyback, frugality and small headcount, how Adam Foroughi pushes people beyond what they think they can do, outside doubts about the company and how it means to present itself, his relationship with his father, his mentor Mark Rosner, and the best advice he has received.⁠[2][2][2][2][2][2][2][2][2][2][2][2]

The episode carries sponsor reads, one of which is David Senra’s presentation of AppLovin’s advertising platform. David Senra said that the two met because Vivas is a fan of the Founders podcast, and that he has spent a great deal of time with both Vivas and Adam Foroughi; Vivas said that he had not wanted to do the show, that David Senra pushed him into it, and that he had done one other podcast beforehand as a kind of media training. The “In the news” carousel on AppLovin’s blog page includes an item titled “Rafael Vivas Live on TBPN.”⁠[2][2][2][2][21]

David Senra asked whether he had watched his interview with Todd GravesTodd GravesTodd Graves is an American entrepreneur and the founder of the fast-food chain Raising Cane’s Chicken Fingers. In 1996 he opened the first restaurant, serving only chicken finger meals, near Louisiana State University; he has since held to a single-item menu and company-owned expansion while retaining the great majority of the company’s equity, growing it into a chain of more than 1,000 restaurants.Open the full entry, and he said that he had; on hiring, David Senra compared his approach with that of Luca Ferrari (Bending Spoons)Luca Ferrari (Bending Spoons)Luca Ferrari is an Italian engineer and entrepreneur who in 2013 co-founded, with fellow students, Bending Spoons, a technology company whose business is acquiring and operating digital products for the long term; he has been its chief executive officer since its founding and also chairs its board. The company listed on the Nasdaq in July 2026.Open the full entry. David Senra also mentioned a dinner the two had with one of the founders of Long Lake (Holding Company)Long Lake (Holding Company)Long Lake is a holding company that acquires services businesses and uses artificial intelligence to transform their operations. In September 2026 it completed its acquisition of the corporate travel platform American Express Global Business Travel for about $6.3 billion.Open the full entry, after which, he said, he walked away thinking, as he rarely does, that this was a deeply impressive person.⁠[2][2][2][2]

AppLovin’s registration statement and proxy statements disclose his pay and his loan in their sections on related-party transactions, where the proxy statements describe him as “the brother of Eduardo Vivas, a member of our Board of Directors”; the 2026 proxy statement explains that this section lists transactions of more than $120,000 that involve the company’s directors, executive officers, holders of more than 5 percent of its stock or their immediate family members. The proxy statements state that Eduardo Vivas has been a member of AppLovin’s board of directors since August 2018; the 2026 proxy statement gives his age as 40 and lists him as a member of the nominating and corporate governance committee. Adam Foroughi said that Eduardo Vivas is his older brother, and that when 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 invested in the summer of 2018 the company formed its first board, of three people, among them Adam Foroughi himself and Eduardo Vivas.⁠[4][5][17][18][18][1]

The proxy statements state that Eduardo Vivas co-founded Bright.com, an employment website company, and was its chief product officer from October 2011 to February 2014; that he joined 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 through its acquisition of Bright.com and was head of product for Talent Solutions there from March 2014 to April 2017; that from August 2017 to March 2024 he was chief executive of Curated, Inc., an online outdoor sports retailer that he co-founded; and that from March 2024 to September 2025 he was chief operating officer of Humans, Inc., the developer of the social shopping app Flip Shop.⁠[5][18]

He said that his relationship with his father today is good and that he has never held his father’s hardness against him, because he thinks about how his father was raised; he also said that his father does not own AppLovin stock.⁠[2][2][2]

He said that money is of course important to him but that he does not work in order to make more of it or to buy a big house; he works for purpose. He describes himself as a very simple man who stays in $200 hotels and takes ordinary commercial flights.⁠[2][2]

He calls himself a massive gamer and uses video games to explain why he does things himself: a player who reaches the final boss does not hand the controller to a friend, and the new challenge is what keeps the job exciting for him.⁠[2][2]

The title that David Senra gave the November 2026 interview calls him a “Multi-Billionaire,” and in his opening words David Senra says that he is now a “multi-billionaire.” He himself said in the interview that when he reaches out to customers for an extra $5,000 a day of spending, their reaction is: “What the hell is this billionaire reaching out to me for an extra $5,000?” In his view this shows how seriously the company takes each customer’s business.⁠[2][2]

In the interview published in May 2026, Adam Foroughi said that advertisers laugh and ask him: “you asked me for an extra 5,000 bucks a day. You’re a billionaire. What are you doing?” In that interview David Senra said that he had gone from high school dropout to billionaire and that he picks up even when called at 11 at night on a Sunday.⁠[1]

He said that AppLovin’s goal is to drive a profitable return on every dollar given to it, and that the company treats itself as an extension of its customers’ teams rather than as the provider of a service. When candidates from the bigger ad platforms interview at the company, he asks whether they would set up a campaign, upload ads or come up with creative ideas, and many answer that they have never done so; at AppLovin everyone does these things, which he calls part of the company’s “operational excellence.”⁠[2][2]

He said that customers love and hate them: they grant that the company is competent and delivers great results, and they also find its people rather arrogant and not always the nicest. His explanation is that the company does not hold that the customer is always right; since the aim is to deliver more customers profitably, there are data to look at and right and wrong decisions, and the company always pushes toward the right one.⁠[2][2]

He rejects the management advice to hire people and delegate, holding that a great leader has to be in the weeds in order to understand what customers want, what they need to succeed and what is important; once many people have been hired and work is delegated, they are given tasks that do not move the needle simply because they need something to do.⁠[2][2]

David Senra relayed Adam Foroughi’s judgment that he is one of the best deal makers in the world. He said that he spends his time on the highest-leverage deals available to the business, whether directly with advertisers or as partnerships with companies that can bring thousands of advertisers, his goal being to bring as many customers onto AppLovin as possible.⁠[2]

He said that it took him two years to get hold of the head of an apps business in Miami, a business later sold for a few hundred million dollars, and that every message he sent was about ways that business could make more revenue, such as a level that could be optimized, a place where ads should be shown or a market where it was dropping the ball; inside that company it became a running joke to wish that they had a Rafael Vivas on their own team. The man finally wrote back that he was one of the most persistent people he had ever encountered, and the two companies then did a great deal of business together.⁠[2][2]

He said that the company leads with bad news internally, that much of its internal talk is about what is not good enough, and that it then tackles those things one by one; even Adam Foroughi sometimes sets up campaigns himself and checks in on small clients.⁠[2][2]

He said that the company does not care about the short-term stock price: if it is doing the right things for the business, the price will eventually reflect that, and after the fall that followed the listing, a drop of 20 percent or of half is just another day for them.⁠[2][2]

He said that AppLovin is on pace for $20 billion of advertiser spend, while the two largest companies in the industry together see half a trillion dollars of ad spend across their platforms, which leaves a great deal of room to grow. PocketGamer.biz wrote in September 2026 that Adam Foroughi had said at the All-In Summit 2026 that the company had grown 60 percent year over year, to roughly $20 billion in annual ad spend on the platform.⁠[2][2][22]

He said that purpose is extremely important in life: he will probably not be the one who cures cancer or builds artificial intelligence or robots, but he is confident that they can build a business that will help companies grow for many years beyond their own lifetimes, and if he does that he will count his life a success. He did not, he said, work 14 years of his life to leave before the game had even started; when the company helps businesses grow profitably, they can hire employees and invest in better products, which gets consumers buying and stimulates the economy.⁠[2][2][2][2]

On frugality, he said that it is less frugality than the way people who look all day at return on ad spend think about life: if one can reach the same place at the same time for a tenth of the cost, there is no reason to pay more; he mentioned AmazonAmazonAmazon is a publicly traded U.S. technology and retail company founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994, with its principal corporate offices in Seattle. Its businesses span e-commerce, logistics and fulfillment, digital advertising, membership and entertainment services, consumer electronics, and Amazon Web Services cloud computing.Open the full entry as a company that made a point of being frugal, and said that AppLovin is founder-led and spends the company’s money as if it were its own. The company, he said, has few layers of management or approval and no pure managers; everyone is a doer, and even the chief technology officer, who manages an engineering organization of about 100 people, pushes code himself; only the algorithms are something that he and Adam Foroughi cannot do and that the company’s engineering team builds. When someone is overworked, the company does not hire more people but asks which parts of the work can be automated and which unimportant things should not be done at all.⁠[2][2][2][2][2]

He said that in its early years the company had neither the cash to hire large teams nor the pedigree to hire the best talent, so it took the people it could get and had to “torture them into greatness,” as Jensen HuangJensen HuangJensen Huang is the co-founder, president, and CEO of NVIDIA and has served on its board since the company was founded in 1993. He has a background in electrical engineering education and the semiconductor industry, and under his leadership NVIDIA’s business expanded from graphics chips to GPU general-purpose computing, artificial intelligence, and data center computing platforms.Open the full entry puts it; Adam Foroughi did this to him, and to this day there is always conflict and confrontation between them. Adam Foroughi, he said, is hyper-competitive and understands the right buttons to push in everybody.⁠[2][2][2]

He said that what outsiders get wrong about AppLovin is that, seeing an ad platform outperform its peers, they conclude that it must be a scam or a fraud, without taking the time to look at how much the company cares about every detail; he cites the company of Luca Ferrari (Bending Spoons) and Long Lake (Holding Company) as businesses that people likewise dismiss as private equity shops that merely fire people to become more efficient. In its outside communication, he said, the company will now concentrate on telling the stories of the founders and brands it works with and how they grew from small businesses into large companies.⁠[2][2]

He said that his journey will be over when he can walk down the street and everybody knows the AppLovin brand, whereas today 99.9 people out of 100 do not.⁠[2]

He cites a passage from Andre Agassi’s biography in which Agassi says that his father tortured him and that he later no longer needed his father to do so, being old enough to do it himself; that, he said, is how he now stands with Adam Foroughi. The episode page on David Senra’s website lists the book as “Open.”⁠[2][3]

He refers to “The Score Takes Care of Itself,” the book about Bill Walsh and the San Francisco 49ersSan Francisco 49ersThe San Francisco 49ers are a professional American football team that began play in 1946 and now competes in the NFL’s NFC West. Originally an AAFC member, the team joined the NFL in 1950 and won five Super Bowls under Bill Walsh and George Seifert. Its home is Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California. Kyle Shanahan has coached the team since 2017, and Jed York is its principal owner.Open the full entry: Bill Walsh, he said, took over a losing team that went on to win three Super Bowls under him by attending to every detail, from showing up on time for practice to how the phones were answered and how the locker rooms were kept.⁠[2][3]

He cites Richard BransonRichard BransonRichard Branson is a British entrepreneur and founder of Virgin Group. Beginning with a youth magazine and mail-order records, he expanded into aviation, leisure, telecommunications, finance and commercial spaceflight. He also founded Virgin Unite and is known for ballooning expeditions and his 2021 suborbital flight.Open the full entry’s remark that the only thing worse than being poor is becoming rich and then going poor again. David Senra said in the interview that both of them are fans of James DysonJames DysonJames Dyson is a British inventor, industrial designer, and entrepreneur, known for the bagless vacuum cleaner based on cyclonic separation, and the founder of the technology company Dyson, which bears his surname. The company later expanded into hand dryers, bladeless fans, hair dryers, and other products; he also established the James Dyson Foundation and the Dyson Institute of Engineering and Technology to promote engineering education, and has drawn public debate over issues such as Brexit and the move of the company’s headquarters to Singapore.Open the full entry.⁠[2][2]

Be the most valuable person in the room: he said that titles and seniority do not matter and that business, like sports and video games, is only about who delivers the most value (video at 3:55).⁠[2]

Instead of a linear path of promotions, ask what matters most to the business and how your own skills can deliver as much value as possible: he said that people who think this way are soon exposed to opportunities they would not otherwise meet (video at 4:29).⁠[2]

Get the small things right: he said that someone who cannot do the small things right cannot be expected to do the big things right (video at 22:54).⁠[2]

When pursuing a customer, bring something useful every time: he said that sending useless messages only gets one tuned out, and that what matters is to be persistent while always figuring out ways to deliver value for the customer (video at 24:30).⁠[2]

Fewer people is a good thing: he said that managing poor performers and working on things that do not matter are distractions, and that having fewer people forces a team to be very focused (video at 48:23).⁠[2]

There is no special magic; work on the things that matter and keep doing so for a long time: success, he said, will come (video at 50:32).⁠[2]

Doing every little thing right matters more than watching the scoreboard: drawing on the book about Bill Walsh, he said that if all the little things are done right the score will take care of itself (video at 1:05:13).⁠[2]

Stay in the game when it hurts and you want to quit: he said that this is the best advice he ever received and that it came from his brother, pain being the sign that one is growing (video at 1:05:45).⁠[2]

AppLovin: Official website: https://www.applovin.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[6]

Lion Studios: Official website: https://lionstudios.cc/ (opens in a new window).⁠[23]

X: Public account: https://x.com/rfvivas (opens in a new window).⁠[3]

LinkedIn: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rafaelvivas (opens in a new window).⁠[3]