applovin
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Eduardo Vivas and the expensive mistake that became Curated
The Curated co-founder bought the wrong gear, found the right advice, and built a business around the difference. His career runs from job matching at Bright and LinkedIn to expert commerce, Flip, and the AppLovin board.
Adam Foroughi and the upside of being turned down
Early investors passed. A billion-dollar sale unraveled. Then AppLovin’s stock collapsed. Adam Foroughi kept building an advertising business whose fortunes depended on what happened after the click.
Jim Payne
Jim Payne is the co-founder and CEO of CloudX, an AI-native mobile advertising platform that treats ad monetization like code and hands the busywork to autonomous agents. An MIT-trained computer scientist and former Google product manager, he built MoPub (sold to Twitter in 2013) and MAX (acquired by AppLovin), two products that shaped how apps make money. After years investing through his firm Breakpoint Capital, he returned to building in 2025, launching CloudX with a $30M Series A led by Addition to rewire the mobile ad stack for the AI era.
Pejman Nozad
Pejman Nozad is the Founding Managing Partner of Pear VC, a $800M+ AUM seed-stage venture firm he co-founded in 2013. Born in Tehran, he arrived in Silicon Valley in 1992 with $700 and no English, worked as a car washer, lived in a yogurt shop attic, then became the top Persian rug salesman on University Avenue in Palo Alto — selling $8M in a single year to the Valley's most powerful VCs and founders. Those relationships became deal flow. He backed Dropbox, DoorDash ($1.9M seed → $440M), AppLovin, and Andy Rubin's pre-Android company Danger. Forbes ranked him #1 on its Midas Seed List three consecutive years (2023, 2024, 2025). He has no CS degree, no MBA, and never worked in tech — yet built one of the highest-performing seed funds ever and joined the board of Sheffield United FC in 2025.
Ullas Naik
Ullas Naik is the Founder and General Partner of Streamlined Ventures, a Palo Alto-based seed fund with $325M+ AUM across 8 funds and 200+ portfolio companies. A Mumbai-born immigrant who cold-called his way onto Wall Street 40 days straight, he went on to back AppLovin and DoorDash at seed stage before either company had a name anyone recognized - a combined market cap now exceeding $170B. With 21 unicorns and 3 decacorns in his portfolio, he operates as a solo GP with a reputation for being a 'founder whisperer' who brings candor, empathy, and conviction to early-stage investing.