AppLovin

“AppLovin started with an $8 domain and no VC funding and became one of the largest ad platforms in the world.”

“AppLovin pulled back to 14.1x from 15.3x despite margins barely moving (85% EBITDA, 89% gross margin, both months), pure multiple compression with no fundamentals change behind it.”

“Shikin personally wrote around 60% of the company's code before Ge arrived.”

“The new generation model is very powerful and efficient with the modern GPU architecture. Axon 2 introduced learnable embedding tables encoding user and item IDs into semantically meaningful vectors, enabling pattern extrapolation to unseen user-item pairs.”

“CTO of AppLovin; joined November 2022 from big tech”

“Co-Founder & CEO of AppLovin; 21 years in advertising”

“Architect of Axon 2; joined after a 30% stock drop and built the training infrastructure for the new model partly on a transatlantic flight”

“The Axon 2 approach uses this concept nowadays people are very familiar with thanks to the language model. It's called semantic embedding. So basically we use learnable embedding tables to encode those ID-like item IDs, user IDs that otherwise would make no meaning.”

“Joined November 2022 from big tech when the stock dropped 30% on his start date. Built the neural embedding-based recommendation system that powers AppLovin's advertising engine.”

“Not including those and not including Adjust, which is a software as a service company we bought, never integrated.”

“AppLovin runs its entire advertising engine — now a $100B+ company — on roughly 400 people total, with ~100 on engineering.”

“I was listening to this podcast you did with Patrick O'Shaughnessy back in 2022 and you were explaining how delicate but dynamic and competitive the gaming ecosystem is.”

“AppLovin (NASDAQ: APP) is one of the most efficient company in public markets at ~400 people. Approaching $7B in EBITDA. That's ~$17M per employee, roughly 3x the revenue per head of Nvidia & 7x Apple, Meta, or Google. Engineering hasn't grown in 3 years (100 people) while cash flow scaled 20x.”

“AppLovin started with an $8 domain and no VC funding and became one of the largest ad platforms in the world. One cookware brand went from $4 million to $16 million, turned profitable, and is on pace for $80 million this year.”

“AppLovin pulls back to 15.3x on 89% gross margin and 85% EBITDA margin, the most efficient business in the cohort”

“AppLovin started with an $8 domain and no VC funding. They built anyway and became one of the largest ad platforms in the world.”

“AppLovin holds at 16.9x on 89% gross margin and 85% EBITDA margin, the most efficient business in the cohort.”

“Adam from Applovin... every great CEO hates HR.”

“They developed a great relationship with Adam Ferrogi. He's one of the best managers out there.”

“AppLovin (17.8x, up from 16.3x) stands out on efficiency: 85% EBITDA margin paired with 40% growth.”

“Cloudflare at 21.4x, AppLovin at 16.3x, CrowdStrike at 15.8x, and VeriSign at 14.8x hold the next four positions.”