Episode 182: Brian Quinn from AppsFlyer on the Billion Dollar Investment from Google and Meta

**Ari Paparo** (0:01)
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**Ari Paparo** (1:15)
Welcome to the Marketecture Podcast. This is Ari Paparo. I'm here with Eric Franchi, and our guest this week is Brian Quinn, the president and GM of AppsFlyer, who's been on the show before.
We're excited to talk to him because they just raised a billion dollars. Eric, do you raise a billion dollars very often? Your portfolio company's thrown around the bees?

**Eric Franchi** (1:35)
That is rarefied air in ad tech, as we know.
There were two announcements that caught everybody off by surprise and had everybody talking again. The first was Vibes Acquisition by Walmart Connect. The second was this. So I can't wait to talk about this one.

**Ari Paparo** (1:51)
Yeah. And the fact that they raised it from effectively strategics, so Google, Meta. How often do Google and Meta co-invest? It might be the first time that's ever happened. Plus throw in Unity and Moloco while you're at it. You know, this has been the year of mobile, right? You know, basically, you know, basically you got liftoff IPO, you have AppLovin just killing it. Rippin.
You, there's, I'm missing someone. Like, you know, there's been more than that. So it's really exciting time for the mobile market.
So I spent yesterday in my house. It was really hot in New York, 95 degrees. And I decided to do a little a little vibe coding, right, as I tend to do. Right. So the end result of my semi-retirement is that we, we now have a MCP server for Marketecture. So what does that mean? So my pet project has been Maddb, is the URL is maddb.ai.
And that is a directory of, I think we have like 150,000 news articles and 5,000 ad tech companies and another, you know, 7,000 ad tech people in this directory. And it gets updated with AI every day. So now there's an MCP server. So what does that mean? Eric, are you MCP-ing much? Are you into it? Yeah. What's your favorite? What services do you use MCPs with?

**Eric Franchi** (3:19)
So at Appurium, so on a professional level, we connect some of the needed parts to run a fund to Claude.
So we connect Affinity, which is like a purpose-built CRM for investors, to Claude. We connect Carta, which is our backend for all fund administration and company data, to Claude via MCP. And it is like, it's unbelievable, right?

**Ari Paparo** (3:45)
It blows you away. You can ask questions about your own data. Well, so I just built this yesterday. It's got like literally two people have ever used it. It's pretty cool.
So I used it to I said, I said to Claude, using Maddb, tell me how I should ask Brian Quinn from AppsFlyer. What question should I ask him? And it came back. Did you see this at the bottom of our show notes?
It's like, you know, the $1 billion bet from your own frenemies. You required $1 billion for platforms that are also channels for AppsFlyer. Ask why the Wild Gardens are suddenly funding independent measurement and how he manages the conflict of being paid by the platforms he's supposed to objectively grade. So that's the first question that Claude wants me to ask. That's a better question than I come up with. Also, it's got one of the things is it's got links to all the articles because the source material is publications that we want to drive traffic to. We're not claiming the copyright on any of this content. We're just linking out to the articles.
So you could ask it about a company. You could ask about a person. You could ask it about a trend. You could just say what's been trending in ad tech and retail media for the last two weeks. And it gives you answers. I would highly recommend. You have to register at Maddb, which is free. And then you connect your MCP server. And then you just ask it questions and you get very in-depth ad tech answers. It's kind of like having me in a little box in your computer.