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?
00:34:18 · Rafael Vivas
[00:34:18] S1: I think they weren't in America really for two reasons. One, the the cost of labor is a lot higher here. And games... Like the games that we were building at the time, you didn't need the best of the best. It was just about getting the most amount of reps as possible. And a lot of the games that we built, there are these games called hyper casual. There were these methodologies we would use to determine what would be a hit game. And a lot of it was just based on like how marketable was the game. What we saw was you could get more cost efficient employees over there. And then also they would just work. They would out hustle the hell out of the American studios. So we'd interview these people at some of these game studios and they'd be like, Yeah, I worked nine to five, I handled this really small part of the equation for this game studio, they have these bloated teams versus I would go meet... It is actually a perfect example. There was this team called Game5 Mobile, We released a game that did close to $100,000,000 in revenue together called Happy Glass. It was a husband, wife, and little brother. And they were so poor that they all lived in the same house. And their house was also their office. I think at one point, and I may be wrong right here, I'm pretty sure they all slept in the same bed. Think this is literally how poor these guys were. So when you come from that, you can't compete against somebody like that. They will die before they fail. Right? And I think, you know, the... Two things. One, those, like, partners, like, they're incredible to work with, but also drove me to work harder. Right? Because I saw what they came from, and I know this was their big shot. I loved making people like that successful. They were the underdog. Nobody had believed in them. And and, actually, it was funny. This company, Game5, these three people, they worked at, like, an HP. They took this bet on this game studio. And for them, like, if it didn't work in, like, the next month, they were gonna have to go get jobs again. So it was, like, make or break for them.
00:36:07 · David Senra
[00:36:07] S0: I found one of my all time favorite quotes when I was reading the book zero to one. The quote says, the single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places, and they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas. That is exactly what AppLovin has done with their advertising platform. AppLovin connects you with over a billion potential new customers in mobile games. AppLovin allows you to capture undivided attention. AppLovin ads are full screen videos that are watched for an average of thirty five seconds. That is retention that blows other ad platforms out of the water. And you can launch on AppLovin in minutes. You set the goal and AppLovin achieves it. No complex setup, no expertise needed. And AppLovin scales quickly. They can put your ads in front of over a billion potential customers. Other businesses have seen immediate results scale to hundreds of thousands of dollars of spend per day and increase their revenue by millions. So you wanna get started quickly before all of your competitors are on AppLovin. And you can do that by going to applovin.com. That's applovin.com. Your story is similar where you've told me in the past where it's just like, you're the kind of person that's like, I couldn't go back. I got kicked out of my house. I'm moving into the office. Like this either works or I die. Yes. That was literally what you said. Yep. Like there is no turning back. Like, I'm going to die. I'm going to succeed. It's like 50¢. It's like, get rich or die trying. I'm gonna succeed or die trying.