Adam Foroughi, Applovin CEO: Surviving a 92% Drawdown, Ads as ML 1.0 & the $50B Game Ad Market

Adam is probably the best founder no one's ever heard of. There's an ad platform hiding inside 100,000 mobile games and is quietly outperforming Facebook ads for ecommerce brands. Of all those thousand plus IPOs, the number one most valuable is AppLovin. AppLovin's CEO, Adam Ferruggi. The founder mentality has gotta be chase winning. They're gonna print something like $6,000,000,000 in cash this year. In a world where things don't make sense, people think you're cheating. Instead of realizing you built one of the cooler technologies the world's ever seen. Please welcome Adam Farooghi. Hi. Welcome, Adam. Hey, man. Hey, man. How doing, bro? Good to see you. Likewise. Adam, thanks for being here. We thought it'd be really great to chat because a lot of people don't talk as much about you're not in the headlines all the time with your business. You're operating your business almost like absent media. You don't do a lot of press. You don't get out there a lot talking about the the company, but it's such an incredible business. Can you just tell the audience kind of what AppLovin is and maybe also frame up the market a little bit for us? Yeah. Totally. I think the the fact that we were able to build a very big company without having VC funding at the early stage created this world where we just had to build quietly. And and then obviously the goofy name didn't help us all that much as well, but what we are ultimately is an advertising company that's helping mobile game developers monetize that space. Now, what people don't realize is just how big the mobile gaming universe has become. You've got over a billion people a day playing mobile casual games. These are all adults, heads of households, and the scale of the opportunity is just humongous. We disclosed last January, so nearly two years ago, that on our own platform there was $11,000,000,000 a year of ad spend. Since then we've grown 60% year over year roughly, and so if you grow set up to a nice round number today, get 20,000,000,000. Now we're not the only player in this marketplace. This is a market that's monetized by a lot of other ad companies as well. So then you'd probably more than double that again and round it off and say, there's probably about $50,000,000,000 of advertising being spent every single year in this mobile gaming ecosystem. It was not very long ago that social was a $50,000,000,000 opportunity. Space is growing really quickly, a lot of audience. These people watch ads. They a lot of times, watch the ads to get rewards. And so that dynamic creates this possibility to create intent. For the most of the light company's life, we've been creating that intent to drive a user to take one game's experience and go to the next game's experience. And what's really gotten investors excited about our company and just us excited about the …