He Named His Game Studio for the Animal He Said Could Beat a Cheetah
After late nights managing broken deals, he gave his partner a choice: let him build a rival inside the company, or watch him leave to do it.
David Senra · High School Dropout to Multi-Billionaire: The Relentless Drive of Rafael VivasAt 4 a.m. in California, Rafael Vivas was still awake and working the phones to Asia, trying to keep a business partner in line.
Vivas, who helped build the mobile advertising company AppLovin, was managing Cheetah Mobile, then one of its biggest publishers. The companies had a signed agreement, but Cheetah kept disregarding it.
The nights piled up. Vivas said the publisher squeezed AppLovin in every way possible, broke the deal repeatedly, and forced him to stay up until nearly dawn to manage the relationship, with frequent trips to Asia to see its leaders.
That exhaustion became the start of a new business. Vivas concluded AppLovin should never be so dependent on one partner, and that owning its own games would bring better economics, a distribution advantage, and more enterprise value.
He pointed to precedent. He had watched Netflix move into owning content, and he saw the biggest gaming companies in Asia, including Tencent and NetEase, use distribution businesses to power their games.
Then anger made the decision urgent. Vivas went to Adam Foroughi, AppLovin's chief executive and co-founder, and said he would leave to build a competitor to Cheetah, or build it inside AppLovin. Vivas said he really wanted to do it inside the company.
Vivas said money was important to him, but it was not what drove him then. He stays in 200 dollar hotels and flies commercial, and he described himself as driven by purpose. At that point, Vivas said, “my purpose at this point was to destroy these guys.”
Vivas called the new game business Lion Studios, because, as he put it, “lion is the only animal that can kill a cheetah.” In reality, lions are not the only cheetah killers, as leopards and hyenas kill them too.
Questions people ask
Do lions actually kill cheetahs in the wild?
Yes. Lions sometimes kill cheetahs, especially cubs, and they will steal their kills and drive them away from territory. Cheetahs are built for speed, not fighting, so they usually avoid lions rather than challenge them.
What does a mobile ad platform like AppLovin actually do?
An ad platform sits between advertisers who want users and app publishers who have space for ads. It uses software to decide which ad to show, and to whom, in order to get the most profitable result for both sides.
What is vertical integration, the strategy Vivas described?
It means owning more than one step of a supply chain. In this case, it meant owning both the system that places ads in games and some of the games themselves, so the company controls both distribution and content.