Adam Foroughi, Applovin CEO: Surviving a 92% Drawdown, Ads as ML 1.0 & the $50B Game Ad Market
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
- Published
- September 20, 2026
- Duration
- 23:52
- Summary source
- description
- Last updated
- Sep 20, 2026
Discusses inference.
Summary
(0:00) Adam Foroughi joins the Besties! (3:07) Discovery vs search & is your phone listening? (10:04) IPO tumble & becoming your own best investor (16:00) Privacy rules, Apple's crackdown & how agents change people's shopping (20:00) How a lean team beats the giants, margin moats & building in China Thanks to our partners for making this possible! IREN is…
AppLovin CEO Adam Foroughi reveals how he bought back $6B in stock during a 92% crash, built 84% EBITDA margins, and why 1B daily mobile gamers are quietly outperforming Facebook ads for e-commerce brands.
Key takeaways
- AppLovin's 84% EBITDA margins and ~$6B annual cash generation stem from a focused, lean deep learning ad platform serving 1B+ daily mobile gamers, not from broad diversification.
- The company's turnaround from a $3.8B market cap low to $250B peak was driven by transitioning from ML 1.0 regression models to deep learning in April 2023, combined with aggressive share buybacks (~$6B) rather than investor relations.
- Upper-funnel discovery advertising (creating purchase intent that wouldn't otherwise exist) drives real GDP expansion, unlike search/LLM bottom-funnel ads which merely redirect transactions that would have happened anyway.
Why this matters
AppLovin's trajectory demonstrates that a focused, bootstrapped ad-tech company can build durable competitive moats against Meta and Google by combining proprietary first-party gaming data, deep learning recommendation systems, and extreme operational discipline—offering a replicable playbook for B2B platform businesses competing against hyperscalers.
Entities
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Intelligent Report
Adam Foroughi, Applovin CEO: Surviving a 92% Drawdown, Ads as ML 1.0 & the $50B Game Ad Market
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
September 20, 2026
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Show notes
(0:00) Adam Foroughi joins the Besties! (3:07) Discovery vs search & is your phone listening? (10:04) IPO tumble & becoming your own best investor (16:00) Privacy rules, Apple's crackdown & how agents change people's shopping (20:00) How a lean team beats the giants, margin moats & building in China Thanks to our partners for making this possible! IREN is a vertically integrated AI Cloud platform, delivering data centers, compute and software for AI training and inference. https://iren.com/ Orac
Themes
- inference