Adam Foroughi, Applovin CEO: Surviving a 92% Drawdown, Ads as ML 1.0 & the $50B Game Ad Market
September 21, 2026
AI Summary
5 min readAdam Foroughi, CEO of AppLovin, built a $250 billion advertising company that almost no one in the mainstream media talks about. His company sits inside 100,000 mobile games and now quietly outperforms Facebook ads for e-commerce brands. The opportunity is staggering: roughly $50 billion of advertising is spent annually inside mobile gaming, and AppLovin’s own platform processes about $20 billion of that. Foroughi’s path to this position involved surviving a 92% stock drawdown, ignoring investors for months, and buying back $6 billion of his own company’s shares when the market had written them off.
The Mobile Gaming Ad Market and Discovery Economics
The core of AppLovin’s business is helping mobile game developers monetize their users through advertising. Over a billion adults play casual mobile games daily, and they regularly watch ads in exchange for rewards like extra lives or in-game currency. This creates a unique dynamic: the ad itself becomes a value exchange, not an interruption. For most of AppLovin’s history, the company focused on moving users from one game to another. But deep learning models have become powerful enough that AppLovin can now take that same audience and show them shopper experiences—ads for real products, not just other games. That opens a much larger economy.
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What you'll learn
- 1 Timestamped Outline
- 2 (00:48) **Introduction & What AppLovin Does** - Adam explains the business as an advertising company for mobile game developers, framing the massive market opportunity
- 3 (03:34) **Advertising as ML 1.0** - Adam connects advertising technology to the broader AI revolution and explains why advertising is the most profitable implementation of deep learning
- 4 (05:30) **ChatGPT & The Future of Ad Models** - Adam distinguishes between search-based advertising (bottom of funnel) and discovery advertising (creating new demand)
- 5 (08:10) **The Creepy Factor & Privacy** - Adam addresses the perception that phones are listening to conversations and explains the reality of ad targeting
- 6 (10:12) **The 92% Drawdown** - The remarkable story of AppLovin going public at $28B, crashing to $3.8B, then recovering to $250B in two and a half years
- 7 (12:48) **Managing Culture During the Crash** - How Adam kept the team together when the stock was down 92%
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
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
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