# He left Lion once the business could succeed without him Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/s/he-left-lion-once-the-business-could-succeed-without-him/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy. - Speaker: [Rafael Vivas](https://realalpha.app/people/rafael-vivas/) · Rafael Vivas is a founding team member of AppLovin and cofounder of Lion Studios. · Co-founded Lion Studios, which generated over $250 million in revenue in two years, after joining AppLovin's founding team. - Host: [David Senra](https://realalpha.app/people/david-senra/) · Host, Founders · Has read an entrepreneur's biography every week for Founders since 2016. - Show: Founders - Episode: [High School Dropout to Multi-Billionaire: The Relentless Drive of Rafael Vivas](https://realalpha.app/v/IdvsD61Rmmk/), Nov 1, 2026 - Moment: 38:32 to 44:10 of the episode (6 min), playing on https://realalpha.app/s/he-left-lion-once-the-business-could-succeed-without-him/; the episode from there: https://realalpha.app/v/IdvsD61Rmmk/?t=2312 ## Quote > “I started like reflecting on myself and I was like, okay, so like the **business no longer needs you** to succeed.” > — [Rafael Vivas](https://realalpha.app/people/rafael-vivas/) at [39:08](https://realalpha.app/v/IdvsD61Rmmk/?t=2348) · Founders ## Takeaways 1. He left after Lion no longer depended on him to grow. 2. His side projects lacked a personal connection. 3. He returned because he cared about AppLovin’s team and purpose. ## About this segment After Lion could launch games and grow without him, Rafael Vivas stepped away to focus on family. Side projects showed him he missed AppLovin’s mission and the people he worked with. From “High School Dropout to Multi-Billionaire: The Relentless Drive of Rafael Vivas”, Nov 1, 2026. [Watch the full episode](https://realalpha.app/v/IdvsD61Rmmk/) ## Transcript Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there. [38:37](https://realalpha.app/v/IdvsD61Rmmk/?t=2317) Nothing else mattered to me besides work. It was the most important thing. So I did that for two years. And I kind of, at two years in, I kind of pulled my mind up again. Like from the frame, I realized like, oh shit, this business does like not need me anymore, actually. This is the game studio? The game studio. It was a game publishing business. Okay. So like the way that I would, I would compare it to the Universal Music Group, right? [38:58](https://realalpha.app/v/IdvsD61Rmmk/?t=2338) Like we had the distribution, we'd go find talented game developers and like bring their games to the masses. And by the way, we drove over 20 games to number one, over 3 billion downloads. Like this was an incredible business. And we were one of the biggest at the time. I'd gotten to the business to a point where I was no longer mission critical. And at that same time, I started like reflecting on myself and I was like, okay, so like the business no longer needs you to succeed. [39:19](https://realalpha.app/v/IdvsD61Rmmk/?t=2359) Right. And we'd also done other acquisitions that I helped lead up of other game studios. So like, what do I really want to focus on? And for me, like making a family was really important to me. Right. Like I was 28 when I took a step away from the business and I was like, I need to start thinking about like having children. This was something that was always really important to me. I always knew I wanted to be a father. [39:38](https://realalpha.app/v/IdvsD61Rmmk/?t=2378) And so I took some time off from the business. It was funny. You say a year, but I wasn't really good at taking time off because three months in, I started going crazy and just started building products for fun. But yeah, I moved to Miami at the time because San Francisco was so depressing. COVID, everything was shut down. I went to Miami it was supposed to be just like a vacation for like a weekend and I was like oh my god COVID does doesn't exist here. Like everything's open. And then, you know, I ended up planning my roots there and meeting the world with my life and having a family. Yeah. I was there during that time too. I remember because one of my favorite pizza spots is Lucali in Sunset Harbor. And at the time you used to go up, first of all, there would be like never wait. And then there started [40:17](https://realalpha.app/v/IdvsD61Rmmk/?t=2417) being wait during COVID and you would put your phone number. And I kept seeing all these like 415 and 212 area because everybody from San Francisco and New York came to Miami at that point so wait you take a sabbatical like how did you frame this with adam was a sabbatical like what do you say i'm fucking done forever yeah so this was uh i'm really good at breaking the news to him right this is like you know adam's like a bigger brother a big brother to me and so i waited for my birthday you know i'd actually been like diarying it for a while of kind of like what indirectly i was actually just kind of i kind of knew i wanted to take time off i'd say about a year before i was just writing about like what are the things that the business Like, where am I the bottleneck? [40:58](https://realalpha.app/v/IdvsD61Rmmk/?t=2458) And where does the business need to be in a place where I don't exist, but here for it? So I kind of just started marking things off the list. And before I knew it, like, everything had been accomplished. And like, you know, I could not be around and new games were being released and revenue was growing. And so I called Adam and I was like, hey, like, you know, it's my birthday. It was a happy birthday, of course. [41:20](https://realalpha.app/v/IdvsD61Rmmk/?t=2480) And I was like, hey, I want to take some time off in the business. And Adam is not a very emotional guy. He's just like, are you sure? I was like, yeah. He was like, well, I respect whatever you want to do. And then we kind of like ended the conversation. And then what happened after that was like a lot of people calling me being like, what the hell are you thinking? What are you doing? My brother, this guy, Harold Chen, all these guys, they're trying to convince me to stay. [41:44](https://realalpha.app/v/IdvsD61Rmmk/?t=2504) They're trying to offer me all these different packages. And I was like, it has nothing to do about the money. It's like the business isn't immediately succeeding. There's other things in my life I want to go and accomplish. And so I took a step away from the business. I would say like from that conversation, probably it was supposed to be like a six month transition, but within three months, I was kind of out. [42:00](https://realalpha.app/v/IdvsD61Rmmk/?t=2520) At the time though, did you think I'm out of app loving for good? Oh yeah, I thought I was going to go off to the sunset and enjoy my life and chill on a beach and never work again. But you realize very quickly that it's a very fucking depressing life. Like there's no purpose. We should have a fucking ad in every one of our episodes about this. It's like go, these post exit founders that have never found something else to work on is like the most miserable souls to be around. [42:25](https://realalpha.app/v/IdvsD61Rmmk/?t=2545) Yeah, and to double click on it, you know, so I like, yeah, you know. You know, I love playing video games, which you realize that like on a Wednesday afternoon, you have no one to play games with. None of your friends are all fucking productive. They're doing things, right? So you have no one to hang out with, it gets lonely. But then I started, you know, I started working on these businesses and actually this double clicks into like, what drives me? [42:44](https://realalpha.app/v/IdvsD61Rmmk/?t=2564) What I realized is like, you know, I found this great tech team and we were working together and working on these products. One, I didn't care about the products we were building with, I had no connection with them. For me, it was just like- You're talking about the ones you're doing in your sabbatical? Yeah, my sabbatical was like, oh, I just like opportunistically like, Like, hey, I think this vertical's right. [43:01](https://realalpha.app/v/IdvsD61Rmmk/?t=2581) The KPIs look good. Let's go and build into it. So that was like one thing. One funny thing is I ran a dating show for a little bit. Don't recommend that. You ran a dating show? Yeah, it was love or fame. The idea was that you come and you, it was on a mobile phone, and you would compete for love or fame. But imagine watching 12 hours a day of dating shows if you want to jump out of a window. So that wasn't for me. [43:26](https://realalpha.app/v/IdvsD61Rmmk/?t=2606) And then the second thing is like. You take time off to go on a beach, you're not even on a beach. Yeah, not on a beach. Just like low quality work. Yeah, which was horrible. And then the second thing was I did not truly care about the people I was working with when I started the second company. So I would say like one of the things that's kept me here at Apple for so long outside of helping our customers succeed is like I really deeply care about the success of Adam and the rest of our team. [43:56](https://realalpha.app/v/IdvsD61Rmmk/?t=2636) For me, if they don't do well, it doesn't set well with me. I will die. I will run myself into the ground to make those around me succeed.