Furkan's Applovin Journey

A story about how an early engineer at Applovin quickly rose to become a cofounder through exceptional performance.

"Furkan joined the company before it was even Applovin. He was not one of the cofounders, he was just a random engineer they hired - he was like person 9. Within a couple months, they were like 'alright, this guy is the guy.'

They went to him and said 'Hey, I think we kind of built this team wrong. Now that we see you and look at the other 8 people we hired before you, we realized we did this backwards. Can you fire all these people and rehire a new team of people like you?'

He said 'okay.' So he did that, ends up getting a cofounder equity stake, and the company goes public - becomes like a $20 billion company years later.

Same thing happens when I hired him. I'm looking for him as an Android engineer only. Above him there's a director of engineering, above him is the CTO, above him is me. Within a couple months I was like 'oh this guy is a superstar.' I told him 'Look, you're gonna end up in a different role, just give me a month to figure this out.' Within a month we had switched it up where he ended up becoming CTO and we basically rebuilt the whole team around him."