00:16:54 · David Senra, Rafael Vivas
[00:16:54] S0: Why do you think that is? [00:16:56] S1: I think what it came down to was that we have a very untraditional story and background. A lot of people that, you know, had raised money before, you know, they were doing these mobile game app, they were game publishers or they were part of these big corporate companies. And so on paper, they worked at Facebook or they worked at Google, they were on the AdMob team, which was one of the biggest ad platforms at the time. They worked for all these businesses. On paper, they looked great Versus us, we were performance marketers who... We always ran arbitrage businesses. We'd never run an ad network that had kind of seen its way to... It's like a very profitable ad set. So I I think that's really what it was. [00:17:35] S0: How do you start? Like, you guys are a smaller team, no funding, you're essentially bootstrap competing against already established players that have more money and have more people. So how do you guys start building company? How do you start winning?
00:17:49 · Rafael Vivas
[00:17:49] S1: What Adam understood better than anybody else in the space was that the tech is the most important part. Everyone else focused on sales. Right? So they had, you know, hundreds of advertisers and they had, you know, these premium publishers, but their algorithms were shit. A lot of these algorithms were people just, like, manually optimizing things in the background. Now we didn't have a state of the art machine learning model that's not what existed back then, but we had rules in place and we did regression learning around deciding what to serve. And that in itself allowed us to outcompete our competitors even though we didn't have as much demand and even though our publishers at that time weren't as high quality as some of the other ad platforms. And so when we would go and we'd actually see our monetization, let's say we'd go head to head with another ad platform, And a lot of times we would monetize at double the clip of somebody else. So the conversation of when I would walk into a room where I'd reach out to a publisher was, I guarantee you more money than you're making elsewhere. It was a no brainer. A lot of people, they believed it was too good to be true actually, so they make us put it in writing. We had no issue doing that. I would really say it was like Adam's vision in going all in on the tech is what allowed us to succeed.
00:18:57 · David Senra
[00:18:57] S0: Okay. We were talking before we started recording. You're like, I think our brand is like too soft and it doesn't represent like the insane performance culture that we have inside the company. Okay. I wanna skip ahead... Way ahead in the story because this is... Spent a ton of time with you, spent a ton of time with Adam. And it does kind of remind me of like the Chicago Bulls being led by Jordan that you see in like the last dance. So just talk about like what it's like working inside of AppLovin.
00:19:21 · Rafael Vivas
[00:19:21] S1: AppLovin is a company where we're always on and our goal is to make sure that any dollar that is given to us, that we're driving a profitable return. And so the businesses that we partner with and we work with, we treat ourselves as an extension of their team. And that is really different than a lot of these other ad platforms where they look at it as they're just providing a service. So I'll give you an example. Like We've interviewed a lot of people from some of these bigger ad platforms and they try to come and get a job at AppLovin. And one of the questions I'll simply ask them is that, Hey, would you set up a campaign? Would you upload ads? Would you come up with creative ideas? And a lot of times like, Woah, I haven't done that. Why would you do that? And for us, we do all of these things. And this is a part of, like, our operational excellence is that it's... We feel like all of these little things, they all add up to delivering incredible returns for our advertisers. And so that I would say is one big thing that's different. We are so focused on performance. That is actually like the cornerstone of our company. So a lot of people may say to us, like customers, they love and hate us for it. Some customers say like, or well, I'd say a lot of customers would say, we're very competent, we're great, we deliver great results for them. But they would say like, you guys are pretty arrogant and aren't always the nicest people. But it's not that we're trying to be arrogant, it's that we just ultimately are trying to deliver the best returns for them. And so we are very opinionated on what they could be doing better and always pushing them versus other companies out there. They would say, well, whatever the customer wants, the customer is always right. It's like, if our goal is to deliver more customers profitably for you, then there is data that you can look at and there is right and wrong decisions. And for us, we're always trying to push towards the right decision.
00:21:00 · David Senra, Rafael Vivas
[00:21:00] S0: So say more about this anti delegation take that you have. [00:21:03] S1: Yeah. So we talked about this before the show. A lot of leaders, like, you know, and you hear about it in podcasts is, like, hire people, delegate, delegate. That's not a cloth we're cut from at AppLovin. And the reason why is kind of, like, to be a great leader, you have to be in the weeds. If you think about it in a sports analogy, why did Michael Jordan always get the ball? Why was he effectively considered the captain of the team? It wasn't because he was the oldest person there, the most senior there. It's because when they gave him the fucking ball, he made the shot. And so for us, we look at it as if you're in the weeds, you understand what the customers want, you understand what the customers need for them to succeed, and you understand what's also important. When you delegate and you hire all these people, you focus on a lot of things that are not important for your business. But you've hired these people, so they need something to do, right? So you just go and have them work on these tasks that don't really move the needle. [00:21:51] S0: Did you watch the Todd Graves interview that I did? I did. Where he says that he's a delegate. He's like, what does that word even mean? He had like this nasty look on his face. It's like completely anti. There's a lot of great founders that are kind of, like, anti delegation.
00:21:51 · David Senra, Rafael Vivas
[00:21:51] S0: Did you watch the Todd Graves interview that I did? I did. Where he says that he's a delegate. He's like, what does that word even mean? He had like this nasty look on his face. It's like completely anti. There's a lot of great founders that are kind of, like, anti delegation. [00:22:04] S1: Yeah. I I also think it's, like, it's what makes the game fun. Right? Like, going back to, like, video games, it's, like, imagine, like, you play all these levels and then you get to, like, a boss, like, the final boss. Like, you can hand the control to your friend? Fuck no. You're gonna like go and do it yourself. Like, that's a new challenge, right? And that's what keeps the the job exciting for me personally. [00:22:22] S0: What do you spend most of your time on? Because Adam told me he thinks like you're one of the best deal guys in the world. [00:22:26] S1: I focus on doing the highest leverage deals that we can that's possible for the business, right? So like we have a very small team. Luckily, we're a business that's very profitable and growing very quickly. And so we try to do deals with whether it's companies that are advertisers or doing partnerships with other companies that can bring us thousands of advertisers. That's my goal is to generate or to bring as many customers onto AppLovin as possible so we can build the best business possible and one of the biggest ad platforms in the