00:28:12 · Rafael Vivas, David Senra
[00:28:12] S1: Purpose is extremely important in life. And for me, you know, I'm probably not gonna be the guy who cures cancer and, you know, I'm not gonna build AI or robots or anything like that. But what I'm very confident that we can build is a business that will be able to help companies grow many, many, many years past our lifetime. And that to me, if I can do that successfully, I would say I have succeeded in my lifetime, personally. [00:28:41] S0: So is that what... Why you're still working? Is that why it keeps you going? Because, like, there's some people... I was just at this event in in England and one guy sold his company for like $13,000,000,000. And he's kinda like chomping at the bit to get back in the game, you know. He doesn't regret the sale, but he's just like, can't be an employee. I have to have a a company. I have to have, like, some kind of vehicle for all my creativity and my energy. And he... But he says his other co founders are just fine. They made, you know, a billion dollars each, whatever the case was. And he's just like, they're, like, building houses and they're, like, writing angel checks and they're hanging on the beach.
00:29:12 · Rafael Vivas, David Senra
[00:29:12] S1: So it's a few things. One, like, when I say, like, we're still early in the game, like, I didn't work fourteen years of my life to, like, leave before the game even got started. Like, what are we talking about? The job's not done yet. Right? Like, we are so early in our life, like, as a business and, like, our impact, like, it makes no sense to me. I'm like, why would leave this early? I have to be a part of of something bigger than me. Right? And bigger than me is helping businesses grow, delivering tens of billions of dollars, hopefully someday hundreds of billions of dollars of value back into the economy. I think that's one of the great things that we do, right, is that as we help these businesses grow profitably, they can hire employees, they can invest in better products, and ultimately that gets consumers purchasing their products more and stimulates the economy. I think that's something great that I can do for society. [00:30:05] S0: What happened where you had to like take a year off though? Were you just completely burned out? Tell me the story again. [00:30:12] S1: Yeah. Take a step back. So we started a games business. The reason of starting [00:30:19] S0: games Wait. You said the ad platform first, then the games business what was the reason for starting the games business after that platform?
00:30:26 · Rafael Vivas
[00:30:26] S1: We did a lot of business in Asia. China is like one of my favorite places to do business because the founders are so intense. They move very quickly. They're intelligent. Just like everything you'd want in a business partner, it's no bullshit. One of our partners at the time is this company called Cheetah Mobile. And they were one of our biggest publishers. And what they would do is they would they would just squeeze us. Right? Squeeze us in every way possible you could imagine. And like we had an agreement signed with them and they were like, screw the API. We don't care about it. Like, you know, and they would just break it all the time. You know, there were so many nights I stay up when I was staying in The States till four or 5AM to like go and manage them and then, you know, spend a lot of time in Asia with the leadership over there too. But throughout this journey, I know I was thinking to ourselves like, we will never be in a position where we are so dependent on like one of these partners. And and we'd also seen what Netflix had done at the time. And we thought there was this great opportunity, you know, for, you know, owning the vertical really. Great. We have that platform, but also having our own content as well. Have better economics. You have a distribution advantage, overall, you build more enterprise value. And by the way, this is not an uncommon business tactic in Asia. Like, the biggest gaming companies in the world are all also distribution companies, like Tencent being a perfect example, NetEase being a perfect example. These are companies that have other things outside of the games and they use that to distribute their games. So that's how we we got into the games business. But Cheetah really pissed me off so bad. It kind of like I told you the story earlier about how we started the ad platform because one of our partners fucked us I came back to this partner had pushed to the ends meet and I went to Adam and I said, it's very simple. I'm going to leave to go and build this competitor against Cheetah Mobile or I'm going do it here. And I really want to do it here
00:32:09 · David Senra, Rafael Vivas
[00:32:09] S0: because Wait, pause there. Why is that simple to you? Why would you leave to go build a competitor? It's Cheetah, the animal? Yes. [00:32:16] S1: Okay. It's a Cheetah. Because I had so much rage in my heart that I wanted nothing but to, like, dominate those guys. It wasn't about, like, you know, I'm a very simple guy, David. You know? And we talked... I I I stay in the $200 hotel. I'll take the, you know, the shitty, you know, commercial airline flight. So, like, money to me, like, of course, like, it's important, but, like I don't... You know, some people are hey, I'm gonna make more money and buy a big house. I don't care about any of that. Right? Like, for me, when I work, like, it's it's for purpose. And that company would push me to a point where I was like, my purpose at this point was to destroy these guys. And so that was really the start of, at the time, Lion Studios. And and why did I call Lion Studios? Because Lion is the only animal that can kill a cheetah. And our thesis was, let's go work with the best developers in the world. We have one of the largest distribution platforms in the world, and we'll help distribute their games. And within two years, we pulled that from zero to over 250,000,000 revenue profitably. It was a great business. But throughout that, it was it was really fucking tough for two reasons. One, as you can imagine, when you start building games, all of our customers started looking at us as competitors. Right? Because at the time,
00:32:16 · Rafael Vivas, David Senra
[00:32:16] S1: Okay. It's a Cheetah. Because I had so much rage in my heart that I wanted nothing but to, like, dominate those guys. It wasn't about, like, you know, I'm a very simple guy, David. You know? And we talked... I I I stay in the $200 hotel. I'll take the, you know, the shitty, you know, commercial airline flight. So, like, money to me, like, of course, like, it's important, but, like I don't... You know, some people are hey, I'm gonna make more money and buy a big house. I don't care about any of that. Right? Like, for me, when I work, like, it's it's for purpose. And that company would push me to a point where I was like, my purpose at this point was to destroy these guys. And so that was really the start of, at the time, Lion Studios. And and why did I call Lion Studios? Because Lion is the only animal that can kill a cheetah. And our thesis was, let's go work with the best developers in the world. We have one of the largest distribution platforms in the world, and we'll help distribute their games. And within two years, we pulled that from zero to over 250,000,000 revenue profitably. It was a great business. But throughout that, it was it was really fucking tough for two reasons. One, as you can imagine, when you start building games, all of our customers started looking at us as competitors. Right? Because at the time, [00:33:30] S0: the AppLovin is essentially... It's advertising in games, but at this point, you're still just doing game installs? [00:33:36] S1: Exactly. [00:33:36] S0: Okay.
00:33:36 · David Senra, Rafael Vivas
[00:33:36] S0: Okay. [00:33:36] S1: Exactly. We're the new kid on the block doing games and our partners didn't like that obviously. Right? They looked at us as hostile and in reality, you know, there was more benefit. We were creating more inventory for the market. This data was helping improve our machine learning model. So we're able to be more efficient and effectively driving traffic for them. So they worked with... Even though these partners didn't like us, they worked with us because of the value we delivered, but there was just a lot of internal stress. And then also the games businesses, they're very hitch driven. You're working around the clock. And our our best partners that we publish games with, they were not sitting in America. They were sitting in Europe. They were sitting in Asia, you know, all around the world. [00:34:16] S0: Why do you think they weren't in America?