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Adam Foroughi

Co-Founder, Chief Executive Officer & Chairperson, AppLovin Corporation

Search every verified Adam Foroughi interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Adam Foroughi, co-founder and CEO of AppLovin, discussed the company's trajectory and strategy in several recent appearances. In a September 2026 podcast, he recounted the company's post-IPO decline of 92% and its subsequent recovery, describing how he decided to stop communicating with investors and instead initiated a stock buyback program, which he said retired 20–25% of shares outstanding. He also discussed the company's expansion into e-commerce advertising and its work with teams in China, which he described as a competitive advantage. At a September 2025 conference, Foroughi noted that AppLovin reaches over a billion people daily through mobile games and carries over $11 billion in annualized advertiser spend, and he announced the company would rebrand its advertising product as "axon.ai" in October. During AppLovin's Q2 2026 earnings call in August 2026, Foroughi reported nearly $2 billion in revenue for the quarter, which he said fell just below the midpoint of guidance, and acknowledged the company fell short of its own expectations. He stated the issue had been addressed and that Q3 was off to a strong start. He also outlined growth priorities, including expanding into non-gaming apps, the open web, and connected TV, and said the company believed it could compound at roughly 30% annually over the longer term. In an August 2026 interview, Foroughi attributed the success of the company's Axon recommendation engine to decisions about what not to do, and described the company's evolution from a goal of becoming a billion-dollar company to a hundred-billion-dollar company after recovering from its post-IPO decline.

Recent appearances

Notable quotes

“What you learn pretty quickly and I'm a finance background so I had good education on this is that your price in the markets is determined by the quality of your investors and we had private market investors both private equity and and ex-coounders and other team members that were going to sell when we went public and because there were so many companies going public during co by the time we went out blue chip invest”

“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 ”

“When we first started, it was I want to become a billion dollar company. When we got to a billion, it was okay, let's become a $10 billion company. When we went public, we wanted to become a hundred billion dollar company. We dropped 92% in the first 18 months of being public. That dream seemed very, very far away, but post Axon 2, we recovered and now we're hundred billion dollar company.”

“We ended up deploying somewhere around $6 billion of buybacks of our own capital and we leveraged some to buy back shares in the company. And over time, that ended up creating somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 to 60 billion of actual proceeds from the buyback. One of the more successful buybacks in the history of companies.”

“I never believed in saving cash for a rainy day. I feel like I'm a big believer in what we're building. I believe in where we're going. So if I believe in the future and we're a really high cash generative business, we should always be buying back our shares. So at a bottom point where the valuation became that juicy, there's no reason to be afraid of it.”

“If no one's going to buy our shares, why don't we just start buying our own shares? And so we kicked off a really successful buyback. The company at the bottom was worth $3.8 billion market cap and we were generating over a billion dollars of EBITDA. So you think about the cash flow to market cap. It was about 1/5 that we were generating every single year. Well, in theory we could buy back 20% of the shares of the co”

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