High School Dropout to Multi-Billionaire: The Relentless Drive of Rafael Vivas

Rafael “Raf” Vivas says he was never good at school: he had horrible grades, could not pay attention, and did not care about what teachers were discussing. At 14, he began doing performance media buying online. While working for his older brother, he saw people making $20,000–$30,000 a day in profit from advertising products, while his teacher made about $25,000 a year. From his perspective, the upside of school was obviously much lower than putting all his effort into performance marketing. He began skipping classes to work around the clock. When his father told him that, if he thought he was such a successful online entrepreneur, he should move out, Raf took the instruction literally. At about 16, he moved into his best friend’s house, offering the friend’s mother a deal: he would employ her son as an intern and help clean the house. Raf had first interned with his brother after his father suggested it. He initially resisted because he was already making about $1,000 a month selling things online and running game servers, which felt like a lot of money to a 14-year-old. At the company, he started with unglamorous work such as adding terms of service and privacy policies, but learned which products attracted consumers, which ads got attention, and how online businesses made money. Video games also shaped his outlook: because he was not good at sports, he liked that games rewarded merit and competition. He carried that idea into business, focusing on being the most valuable person in the room rather than following titles or seniority.

Raf says his career path was never linear. After building websites, he taught himself to make advertisements in Photoshop, launched a MySpace campaign, sought out more traffic, and contacted brands without waiting for permission. When he realized his team was buying from advertising platforms, he asked why they could not reach publishers directly since they already had advertiser demand. At about 17, the advertising platform they used banned them because they were becoming competitive. Raf went home angry and crying, told his brother he was leaving to build a competing ad platform, and declared that they would “bury these guys.” His brother laughed but gave him several engineers so he could build what he wanted. That project became Appenda, a mobile advertising platform. Adam Foroughi, who was roughly 12 years older than Raf and had previously been near the top of Raf’s brother’s performance-marketing leaderboard, was buying traffic from Raf for his own apps. Foroughi was experimenting with dating, fashion, and other consumer products before deciding to build a competing mobile ad network. When he told Raf, “Don’t be mad, but I’m building a competing ad platform,” Raf was not initially worried; he was considering joining a friend’s mobile-game company. Foroughi instead recruited him, arguing that Raf knew how to work hard and knew everyone in mobile gaming, but did not yet know how to build a “real business.”

Raf negotiated to join Foroughi’s new company, but his main condition was that he live in the office. He compared the situation to the Vietnam War: AppLovin had a goofy name, no venture funding, and needed an inexperienced-looking salesperson to persuade game developers and advertisers. The only way to win, he argued, was to out-hustle everyone else. Foroughi and an engineer went to Ikea and built Raf a bunk bed; another engineer refused to live there, while Raf regarded the office as “home, sweet home.” When Raf arrived, the business was pre-revenue and looked like an “animal house,” with engineers building various apps while searching for product-market fit. Foroughi had already run Social Hour, a successful Facebook ad platform, and understood that users were shifting from PCs to mobile. AppLovin was turned down by venture capitalists even though it was already profitable, growing rapidly, and had strong margins. Foroughi had reportedly offered 25% of the company for $1 million, but investors viewed the founders as unproven performance marketers rather than people with the conventional backgrounds of Facebook, Google, or AdMob executives. Raf says AppLovin won by prioritizing technology over sales. Competitors had hundreds of advertisers and premium publishers, but their optimization systems were poor and often relied on people manually adjusting campaigns. AppLovin used rules and regression learning to decide what to serve. Even with less advertiser demand and lower-quality publishers, it sometimes monetized traffic at twice the rate of another platform. Raf could therefore tell publishers that AppLovin would make them more money, and was willing to put that promise in writing.

Raf describes AppLovin as relentlessly focused on profitable performance. The company treats itself as an extension of an advertiser’s team rather than merely a service provider: employees set up campaigns, upload ads, suggest creative ideas, and examine small customer accounts. Raf says customers may find the company competent and effective but also arrogant or unpleasant because AppLovin is willing to tell them that their decisions are wrong when the data indicates a better way to grow profitably. He rejects the common advice to hire people and delegate everything. In his sports analogy, Michael Jordan gets the ball because he makes the shot, not because he is merely the oldest or most senior player. Leaders should remain in the weeds so they understand customers, priorities, and what actually moves the business. Delegation can create work that does not matter simply because someone has been hired to do it. AppLovin instead gives people substantial ownership and work, then looks for ways to automate it or eliminate low-value tasks. Raf’s own role centers on high-leverage deals and partnerships that can bring thousands of advertisers to AppLovin, but he also pursues apparently small opportunities. For two years he contacted Nadir Khan, a founder who had sold an app company for several hundred million dollars, always sending concrete suggestions for increasing revenue rather than simply asking for a meeting. Khan eventually called Raf one of the most persistent people he had ever encountered, and they began working together. Raf says persistence works when every contact delivers value; repeatedly sending empty requests only gets a person blocked. Internally, AppLovin leads with bad news rather than celebrating prematurely. The company’s instinct is to say, “This sucks,” identify the problem, and fix it. Raf says the team does not care about short-term stock-price movements: AppLovin had once fallen from roughly $4 billion in value by more than 90%, so a 20% decline was “another day in the NFL.” The company focuses on doing the right things for customers and expects the score to take care of itself.

AppLovin entered game publishing after dealing with Cheetah Mobile, one of its major partners. Raf says Cheetah repeatedly squeezed AppLovin and ignored the terms of their agreement, forcing him to stay up until 4 or 5 a.m. to manage the relationship and spend substantial time in Asia. He concluded that AppLovin should not be dependent on a partner that could treat it that way, and was also influenced by Netflix’s example of owning content as well as distribution. Raf told Foroughi that he would either leave and build a competitor to Cheetah or do it inside AppLovin. He was motivated by anger and wanted to “destroy” the company. The resulting business was called Lion Studios because, in his joke, a lion is the only animal that can kill a cheetah. Lion’s strategy was to work with talented independent developers and use AppLovin’s large distribution platform to bring their games to users. Within two years, it grew from zero to more than $250 million in revenue profitably, drove more than 20 games to number one, and generated over 3 billion downloads. The games business created intense internal pressure. Existing AppLovin customers saw Lion as a competitor, even though AppLovin argued that its games created more advertising inventory and supplied data that improved the ad platform’s machine-learning model. The business was also global and hit-driven, with key developers in Europe and Asia. Raf admired teams such as Game 5 Mobile, a husband, wife, and younger brother who worked and lived together in the same home and released Happy Glass, a game that generated close to $100 million in revenue. Their circumstances made Raf feel that they would work until they succeeded, and he was especially motivated by helping underdogs whose entire livelihoods depended on one game.

Raf worked from roughly 4 a.m. until midnight for two years while building Lion Studios. He listened to motivational videos to keep himself focused and described his mindset as “complete black mamba”: there was no path back to his parents’ house and no acceptable alternative to succeeding. Eventually, he realized the games business no longer needed him to be mission-critical. He had helped build a publishing operation comparable to a music distributor, but acquisitions and operating systems meant new games could launch and revenue could grow without him. At 28, he decided to step away to think about starting a family. He told Foroughi on his birthday that he wanted time away; Foroughi simply asked whether he was sure and said he respected the decision. Other people, including Raf’s brother and colleague Harold Chen, tried to persuade him to stay with new compensation packages, but Raf said the decision was not about money. A planned six-month transition became roughly three months. During the break, he moved to Miami, met his future wife, and had a family, but discovered that an unstructured life without a meaningful mission was depressing. He also tried building unrelated products, including a dating show called Love or Fame, but found that he neither cared deeply about the products nor felt connected to the people working with him. Raf returned after AppLovin’s IPO. The company’s stock fell on its first day, and he concluded that the business needed him and that AppLovin was his calling. He says the company later dropped from about a $28 billion market capitalization to roughly $3.8 billion while revenue continued to rise. Rather than panic, management used cash flow to buy back shares; at one point, they even considered taking the company private if the collapse continued. The buyback ultimately produced an approximately $50 billion windfall. Raf says his modest lifestyle—cheap clothing, ordinary flights, and a $15-a-month World of Warcraft hobby—made him less vulnerable to stock-price volatility.

Raf credits Mark Rosner, AppLovin’s former chief revenue officer and an experienced mobile-app executive, with teaching him meticulousness. Rosner first attracted AppLovin’s attention through a blog about generating revenue in the mobile-app ecosystem. When he interviewed, he redlined the company’s NDA instead of signing it immediately. Raf initially thought this meant Rosner could not be trusted, but Foroughi saw the detail-oriented review as evidence that Rosner was exactly the kind of person they wanted. Rosner and Raf initially clashed because Rosner managed the supply side while Raf handled demand. Over time, Raf worked under him and learned to examine contracts and operations closely. Rosner personally handled more than 200 agreements and, according to Raf, AppLovin was only seriously harmed by one. In one deal, Raf sent a contract while visiting his grandmother in the hospital and missed a discrepancy of roughly 1%–2%. Rosner called to say Raf had “screwed up big time,” then asked, “Do you want to be Michael Jordan or Tiger Woods?” and hung up. Raf had to reopen the deal with an irritated client, correct it, and then received Rosner’s simple response: “Good job.” Raf says the lesson was that excellence is built from details, not slogans. AppLovin has few management layers, no “peer managers,” and expects everyone—including the CTO—to remain a doer. The company keeps its team small, gives capable employees more work, and relies on automation and ruthless prioritization rather than hiring around every workload problem. Raf’s final advice, originally given by his brother, is to stay in the game: when work hurts and quitting feels attractive, that may be evidence that growth is happening. He says there were many times he wanted to quit despite already having “won,” but was told to “sack up” and keep working.