A mechanical engineer who decided the most interesting machine to build was a measurement company - one that tells a mobile game studio, in plain numbers, whether the user it just bought was worth the money.
Most founders in mobile advertising arrived from advertising. Christopher Farm arrived from a chemistry bench at Procter & Gamble, a trading floor at Deutsche Bank, and a corporate development desk at Microsoft where the job was buying companies, not building them. Somewhere in that detour he figured out the thing he actually liked was making things - and that the most useful thing he could make was a way to see clearly.
Today he runs Tenjin, the San Francisco company he co-founded in 2014 with Amir Manji. It is a mobile marketing analytics and attribution platform, which is a dry way of describing a hard problem: a game studio spends money to get a player, and then spends months waiting to learn whether that player ever paid it back. Tenjin shortens the distance between the spend and the answer. It tracks ad spend, ad revenue, in-app purchases, subscriptions and retention, and it lets a customer query the raw data directly instead of staring at someone else's dashboard.
The pitch Farm gave when he raised money in 2016 still holds up. He wanted to "help developers connect the digital dots in a user's lifecycle using a single service." Most of mobile measurement is exactly that - dots that refuse to connect. An install here, a purchase three weeks later, an ad view from a network that reports its own numbers. Tenjin's job is to make those dots into a line a marketer can actually trust.
Finding ways to integrate and make use of all the unique data now being produced is what will drive growth for mobile games.- Christopher Farm
Farm studied mechanical engineering at MIT and added management science and economics at MIT Sloan. He started as an R&D engineer at Procter & Gamble, then spent two years as an investment banking analyst at Deutsche Bank, then moved to Microsoft as a manager in corporate development and M&A. It is the resume of someone collecting tools rather than climbing a ladder.
The pivot came in 2009, when he founded Mobvestor and stepped into mobile for the first time. From there the path narrows toward the thing he does now: product manager at Tapjoy, where he and Manji both worked on the mobile ad platform, then director of product management at Playnomics. By the time Tenjin started, Farm had seen the measurement problem from the inside of the companies that caused it. He knew where the dots got lost.
It's what will enable indie and mid-size developers to compete with the big guys going forward.- on why data access matters
Tenjin went through Y Combinator's Summer 2014 batch. The founder bios from that era tell you most of what you need to know about the company's personality. Farm's reads, in full: "Like to make things." Manji lists his title as "Founder/Head Barista." It is a serious infrastructure company run by people who refuse to take their own seriousness too seriously.
The early numbers were not a joke, though. Within its first year Tenjin had processed more than $100 million in ad spend and nearly $25 million in ad revenue, moved over 300 million events a month, and integrated with more than 70 advertising and media partners. Yelp, NaturalMotion, Playdots, N3TWORK and KLab were among the early customers. In 2016, NetEase Capital led a $2.5 million round, joining earlier backers Y Combinator and Lightbank.
The ReckoningFor a company built on connecting a user to the money they generate, Apple's 2021 decision to deprecate the IDFA - the identifier that made that connection possible - was an earthquake. Farm did not hedge about it.
Apple's de-facto removal of IDFA and implementation of the App Tracking Transparency framework was undoubtedly the biggest news for mobile games.- Christopher Farm, 2021
His read was that the change hurt the small players most - "it has made it more difficult for indie and mid-size publishers to grow their games" - and that one visible side effect was advertisers shifting budget from iOS toward Android. Rather than fight the tide, Tenjin rebuilt around Apple's replacement. As Farm put it, the team "took the time to think differently about Apple's SKAdNetwork and how our customers can make the most of it in the long-term." The instinct is consistent with the whole career: when the machine changes, build a new measuring stick.
He is also clear-eyed about where the industry is going. He has pointed to Axie Infinity as something that "could expand the way a lot of game developers think about economies within their games," and his recurring theme is that whoever learns to use the new flood of data best will win the next round - and that this is the opening that lets smaller studios punch up. In early 2022, Tenjin joined Meta's Mobile Measurement Partner program, extending the same connect-the-dots mission into one of the largest ad ecosystems in the world.
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