Warning: It’s 80 minutes long.
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Uhm…what did you think about it? What are your take aways? What analysis should we be looking for in this video?
This board has never been about posting blind links to something, I would guess same for a random video with no comments or thoughts or feedback.
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I agree. I watched the video. Here’s my impression. IMO, Adam Foroughi is among the top ten CEOs. Or at least of the CEOs with which I am familiar.
I worked at Boeing for thirty years. The best senior manager I worked under was Alan Mulally (who was not promoted to CEO at Boeing though he deserved to be - He left Boeing and saved the Ford Motor Company as CEO there). Alan was brilliant. I once watched him ring more information out of 2D graph than seemed possible, but he was able to produce insight after insight from the graph. He could simplify complex subjects by reducing interactions and interdependencies to their essence.
The two men are not the same, but they both appear to reduce problems to their basics. They both recognize difficult truths and accept facts for what they are. They both have courage of their convictions. And they are both highly intelligent.
Maybe the main point of departure is that Alan was warm and personable. He treated everyone with respect. From the folks on the floor and support functions in the offices to top executives and powerful politicians and diplomats. Adan, not so much. I didn’t get the impression that he’s hypocrtical with a different persona depending on the company he’s in. By his own admission, in general, he’s somewhat distant and aloof.
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I made time to watch this yesterday, finishing it just before bed. It was so intense that I woke up in the middle of the night thinking about App and Adam, as if I was an employee about the get the axe!
I am really happy that he is the CEO of APP, which is by a long shot my largest holding. Having said that, I have to admit that I would hate to work for the guy. Because the interview was very long, and also very dense, what follows is a pretty disjointed series of anecdotes and some of my impressions. This is not chronological (in the video) – I really recommend people who hold or are thinking of buying APP watch it to get the full flavor.
He was asked if APP has a road to 1T market cap. He did not answer with a clear ‘yes’, but he certainly implied it; moreover, he spoke to their pathway without invoking new markets such as e-commerce or CCTV (though he did say CCTV was something like a huge prize). He said the mobile market is 1B users/per day, and those users are often the purse string holders of the household. He said he did not think they were anywhere near saturation in that market. He felt they needed to get to ~30B or so revenue/yr to justify 1T; in peak growth years they have been >100%, and while he did not claim that was coming he sounded very confident about the future.
For those of us who spent the past year or so gnashing our teeth whenever the short report du jour surfaced, only to be met with silence from APP, there was an interesting backstory that explained much. Shortly after APP IPO’ed, its stock tanked, losing 92% of its value. This was an existential crisis for the company (the discussion of this was really interesting), and one of the things he did was to fire all the IR people. He figured it was a waste of money to have people on staff whose job was to sell the company to investors, when every investor they had only wanted to dump their holdings. So, he took on the role, and as he hates public speaking, he never acquired the habit of attending investor conferences (‘he took on the role’ means he basically ignored it). When the stock started to recover, indeed to take off, there was no company mechanism to get the word out about what they do. In other words, the company was a black box, and to many still is. This was capitalized on by the short sellers, and it has taken a while for APP to get its act together. One reason this happened is because someone on the board pointed out to Adam that as a publicly held company they have a legal requirement to communicate things…
Which brings me an important insight about Adam and the company he has built. It is an overwhelmingly geek/nerd/engineer company. Emotions and human relations (HR was another topic and he was withering in his assessment of the value of HR) seem to play no role at all. It is 120% KPI etc measurables based, and absolutely everything is measured.
He was asked how big their headcount would be when they reached 1T, and he said he would like it to be 50, but it is more likely to be pretty much exactly what it is now. Chew on that for a while!
An aside – years ago I knew a person who had lived in Taipei, who got around on a motorbike. I don’t know if you’ve every seen youtubes of traffic there, but it looks like mad max combined with fast and furious. When I asked him how he did it, he said the only way to survive was to drive absolutely as fast as you dare, and hope to God that somebody behind you doesn’t run you over. That memory came to mind when listening to Adam. His drive to succeed seems to be wedded to a fear that if they do not go full bore all the time, they will be overtaken. I think he’s probably right, actually, and as I mentioned above I’m glad he is the CEO.
Finally, he had a few comments about enterprise software, SAAS, Saaspacolypse (sp?) etc. He had very high praise for Anthropic, and said that any company that was active in a sector that looked like it could be addressed by an Anthropic release/tool ought to be very very concerned. He didn’t think it was highly likely that the large enterprise software companies would vanish, but he did say their valuations are predicated on future growth prospects, and suddenly that looks far less certain.
That doesn’t do justice to the 80 minutes. As I said, I recommend it!
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