AppLovin runs a large public company without a CRO, COO, CMO, or chief people officer, and treats that absence as strategy

AppLovin’s executive suite consists of a chief executive, a chief technology officer, a chief financial officer, and a general counsel. Adam Foroughi, the company’s chief executive, is direct about what is absent: no chief revenue officer, no chief operating officer, no chief marketing officer, no chief people officer. For a public company operating at scale, that is not an oversight. It is policy.

Foroughi does not hold one-on-one meetings and does not conduct formal performance reviews. Feedback travels in real time over chat, negative feedback immediately, positive feedback not at all. “Good people don’t need that type of handholding usually,” he has said. The logic is consistent with the broader org design: structures that exist to manage uncertainty or soften information flow are treated as costs, not amenities.

The compensation architecture follows the same principle. Equity at AppLovin goes to the top 10 to 15 percent of employees. Everyone else receives cash, with an optional employee stock purchase plan that allows buying shares at a discount. That is a significant departure from the broad-based equity grants that became standard practice in technology companies over the past two decades. It concentrates ownership among a smaller group and removes a retention mechanism that, in Foroughi’s framing, may also function as a performance insulator.

We don't have a CRO, we don't have a COO. go down the list of other C levels that people might have. We don't have a CMO. We don't have a chief people officer. Adam Foroughi

The stakes attached to that concentrated ownership can be substantial. Harry Stebbings, an investor who tracks compensation structures at late-stage companies, describes a pattern in which a small tier of key employees at high-performing firms hold equity stakes ten times what a typical late-stage employee would receive, alongside seven-figure pay packages. That scale of concentration, applied to the cohort Foroughi describes as the top 10 to 15 percent, reframes what the equity restriction actually means: for those inside it, the terms are unusually rich precisely because the pool is so narrow.

Tom Verrilli, who leads product at Whatnot, describes a structurally similar posture at his company. Whatnot runs roughly 21 or 22 product managers, a figure Verrilli acknowledges is small given the volume of goods moving through the platform. Every product manager who manages others spends more than 90 percent of their time on individual contributor work. The management function does not disappear; it is compressed into the margins of a role that is primarily about doing.

Shaan Puri, an operator and investor, describes a communication model that points in the same direction. His approach to requests from reports is to reply with either “okay” or “no” by email. Synchronous conversation is reserved for situations that genuinely require it. There are no recurring calendar meetings. The system is binary by design: it forces clarity from the person sending the request and eliminates the ambient meeting load that accumulates around conventional management.

What these operators share is not a single method but a shared premise: that the scaffolding built around management, the recurring check-ins, the layered approvals, the diffuse equity, and the specialized C-suite roles, carries a cost that high-density organizations are unwilling to pay. The question the evidence raises is whether this model is transferable or whether it depends on a specific kind of hiring bar that is itself the actual variable. Foroughi’s structure works if the top 10 to 15 percent who hold equity are doing the work that would otherwise be distributed across a much larger, more conventionally managed team. If that is true, the org chart is downstream of the hiring standard, not the other way around. The companies running this experiment are, for now, running it at scale.