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You will discover things about yourself that you never even knew existed in you when you go through a process of love, pain, and suffering.
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0:06
And so that's something I do every day. Number one, I love it.
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It's my greatest obsession in life.
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But I do go through pain and I do go suffering every single day because it's a part of this warrior mindset.
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I mean, you spent time in Japan.
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You know the whole Bushido, the whole samurai spirit. Yeah. Yamato Damashii. Yes, you nailed it. Chatri, nice to see you.
0:23
Thanks for making the time. Thanks a lot, Tim. Glad to be on your show.
0:28
And greetings from the other side of the planet. Where are you right now? Where do we find you?
0:33
I just landed back in Singapore where I live, but you know, I'm always on a plane every week in different parts of the world.
0:40
Yeah, you seem like a man of intensity and endurance, which we're going to get into in in some measure, but I wanted to start at the beginning and that is your birth name. What is your birth name?
0:52
My birth name is Chatri Sityodtong on my passport.
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It's what my parents gave me.
0:59
But I use my martial arts name, which my grand master, Kru Yodtong Senanan, gave me.
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So in Thailand, when you train and compete for a given gym, the master of that gym will eventually bestow upon you your last name, and it's usually the fight name is the last name is the name of the gym.
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It's just a custom, historical custom in Thailand.
1:24
So my first name is Chatri, which is my birth name, and my last name in the martial arts world is Sityodtong, which my grand master gave to me.
1:35
Actually, he gave me the the fight name of Yodchatri Sityodtong, which means extraordinary warrior, and Sityodtong is student of Yodtong. Mhm.
1:47
Long-winded thing, but I identify with and maybe in part cuz of my complicated history with my own father that I feel so much closer to my grandmaster and and and use the name that he you know bestowed upon me and yeah, it's just one of these things that kind of funny but it evolved but it's you know, but if you go ask any old school fighter from Thailand all over the world they're still using their fight name.
2:11
It's just part of the culture of Thailand. All right. So off to a good start.
2:14
We're going to come back to Muay Thai but the last name bestowing is something I imagine a lot of listeners will not be familiar with. Yeah.
2:25
But I remember ages and ages and ages ago training at the Fairtex gym in San Francisco. Yes.
2:32
And then actually going to Bangplee in Thailand Wow.
2:37
to visit the Fairtex camp. Crazy. Oh my god.
2:39
You are hardcore old school martial arts man. That that's amazing. That's amazing.
2:43
So you must have known Bunkerd Fairtex Oh, absolutely. Francisco and yeah. And Fairtex Jongsanan. Yes, Jongsanan exactly.
2:52
And a number of people I remember at the time who are outside of Muay Thai were like, "Wow, what do they feed people in that family?"
2:57
And I was like, "That's not really how it works." Exactly. There you go.
3:00
The two biggest gyms I guess in history in longevity in Thailand have been Fairtex and Sitthiyodtong. And so yeah, exactly.
3:09
Bunkerd Fairtex Jongsanan Fairtex.
3:12
Everyone adopts the last name or rather takes a gym name as your last name as you well know now.
3:17
I didn't realize you also did a lot of Muay Thai. Amazing. Yeah.
3:21
That was my favorite striking art.
3:25
Not that I was exceptionally good but in part because coming from wrestling I had effectively zero head movement. So I tried boxing.
3:33
It was very very hard for me to get accustomed to head movement.
3:36
And in Muay Thai certainly there is head movement but it's just a different species of head movement.
3:41
And I was like, "I think this is going to fit my programming a little bit better than other options." Nice. Nice.
3:49
We'll come back to that but could you paint a picture for us of your childhood and then also just describe what happened if if the internet research serves me correctly in 1997 or so.
4:03
I grew up in in a well-to-do family in Thailand.
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So, I was a bit of an anomaly in that sense.
4:09
You know, Muay Thai, as you probably know, Tim, is a very poor person's sport in Thailand.
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But yet, when I was about 9 years old, my father took me to Lumpinee Stadium, which is a mecca of Muay Thai.
4:21
And you know, I just got bit by the bug.
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And of course, you know, Muay Thai's on TV 7 days a week in Thailand.
4:26
And I I got the bug early and I started training.
4:29
And then one day, I asked my father, "Can you take me to Sit Yodtong camp?"
4:33
which was the number one gym at the time in the country.
4:36
And that's where I began my training under Kru Yodtong.
4:37
And you know, 6-hour days and it was incredible training.
4:42
But later in life, in the early '90s, my father's business started to falter and then eventually went bankrupt and abandoned the family. What was the business?
4:49
What type of business was he involved with? He was in real estate.
4:53
And what caused that collapse?
4:55
I think, you know, real estate goes through cycles and my father was caught on the wrong end of the cycle with a lot of debt.
4:59
And he just over-invested and I never actually spoke to him about it.
5:04
That's what I kind of surmised, put the pieces together to this day because one minute my father was doing well and the next minute the bank repossessed the car, the house, and he had literally nothing.
5:13
And then, when he abandoned the family, it was a really rough time and I had a lot of anger with and I didn't see my father for I don't know how many decades, but I eventually reached out to him.
5:26
Maybe around 10 years ago. I went to go find him.
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And I found him in Pattaya, which is where I spent a lot of my childhood in Thailand.
5:34
And you know, he was dirt dirt poor.
5:37
And of course, how you remember your father when you're younger versus you know, he was a frail and old and wasn't what I had imagined my reunion to be.
5:50
And I reached out to him because, you know, I carried so much anger with me for so long.
5:56
And I really wanted to know why after my father went back to work, why would he just throw his family away?
6:04
And just abandoned, you know, basically disappear.
6:05
And I remember, I don't know if I've ever said this story before, but I remember that night when I saw him and we went to go out eat dinner.
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And it was weird cuz he's so old and so frail and I asked dad, you know, this first time I had ever asked him, you know, why why would you just disappear?
6:23
And he was a man of very few words.
6:26
And in his own way explained that as a Thai man growing up, he felt so ashamed of himself that he could not no longer provide food for his family.
6:40
And it's just the way society works.
6:41
Maybe it's Asian society, maybe it's Thai society, but in in many ways it was just easier for him to just I guess disappear rather than face every day looking at his kids and and his wife.
6:56
You know, I try to be empathetic about it, you know, and I thought we had time to rekindle the relationship.
7:02
But unfortunately yeah, shortly after, a couple years later, you know, he he ended up crazy story, he ended up getting a stroke about a year after that.
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And it's worst kind of thing.
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I I didn't even know this kind of thing existed, but he became completely paralyzed except his brain was 100% working and his eyes were working.
7:25
So, he could hear you, he could see you, but I mean, it's like I guess you're locked in your body.
7:28
And that was very rough for me to see.
7:30
And about a year and a half after that he passed away. Wow. I mean, what timing.
7:35
And I don't know I don't know if this is the right way to put it, but what luck that you reached out to him a year or a year and a half prior to have that conversation.
7:44
Did having the conversation offer the catharsis that you had hoped for or have contribute in a way that has really stuck with you?
7:57
It took my anger away or maybe I my anger dissolved over time.
7:59
It was bittersweet because I thought that you know, I I had this kind of like I'm going to go find my father and we can talk it out and then and then we're going to be closer than ever and there's going to be a real relationship.
8:15
So, in that regard, it didn't happen that way.
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And then the crazy thing is at his funeral in in Thailand Buddhism funeral, you cremate the body.
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And I was giving obviously giving the eulogy to all family members.
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And again, I didn't have a lot of emotional attachment to my father cuz I hadn't seen him in so many years and very very distant.
8:37
I had memories of him but we weren't close by any means.
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But I ended up not being able to keep it together. I was bawling.
8:43
So, there's a lot of weird things.
8:45
In some weird way I I finally understood my father.
8:48
So, life came full circle.
8:48
But in a weird way you know, I I wish I had looked for him earlier.
8:56
When I had managed to bring the family out of poverty, you know, I could have easily, if I wasn't so angry, if I wasn't so stuck to my pride, maybe I would have had had that quote unquote fairy tale ending.
9:07
One thing I learned about life, man, Tim, is like you never know what is good luck or bad luck until many years later Yeah.
9:14
when you discover what the lessons were of that experience, right?
9:17
So, anyways, I at his eulogy, you know, we we creamed his body and I guess maybe in a typical Asian household or Thai household, my father was larger than life and that and that's how I remember him as a kid cuz he was the one who introduced me to Muay Thai.
9:29
He took me to Lumpinee Stadium.
9:29
He took me to SitYodtong camp.
9:31
And when someone gets cremated, I've gone to funerals, of course, you know, when I lived in America where you bury people.
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This is the first time I'd actually other than my grandmother watching someone get cremated.
9:40
And the next day you actually come back and pick up the the ashes and the bones.
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And they asked me, "What do you want to do with the bones and the ashes?"
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And I thought, you know, I'm going to go to the beach where my father brought me and I took a boat out and then we sprinkled his ashes everywhere.
9:56
But that's also kind of crazy because that's where you realize, you know, everything we have in life, at the end of the day, my father, like this great man when I was a kid, just ashes in the ocean.
10:10
And that's what all of us are going to end up.
10:12
I remember going back that night on the on the plane and thinking to myself, all the things that my father did wrong in life, and all the anger I had to him, I started to write down the things that I was grateful for.
10:28
He gave me my name, which crazy enough ended up being symbolic of what what my life's work would end up being, right? Mhm.
10:35
He's the guy who interested me in Muay Thai.
10:38
He's the guy who took me to the beach for the first time. So many things.
10:42
So I prefer to remember my father for the good all the good that he did than focus on the big mistakes he did in life.
10:49
And I think that's something I learned from him.
10:53
Ju- just through his life.
10:55
Going through his life and watching it from afar and being a part of it and in the end the things that he did wrong, I don't want to live my life that way.
11:04
But at the same time, I wouldn't be here running the world's largest martial arts organization if it weren't for him taking me to Muay Thai. Mhm.
11:16
Thank you for that story.
11:16
I have a complicated relationship with my father, to put it mildly, and that's actually very, very helpful for me to hear.
11:28
So, once we're done recording, I'm going to go back and and listen to it again because I think it underscores perhaps some things that I need to do, frankly.
11:39
So, I really appreciate that. A lot.
11:42
And from here, I want to hop to your mom.
11:45
We might come back to your dad, certainly.
11:47
I recall very distinctly.
11:49
Well, let me back up and give you a little bit of context on how I got my first exposure to One.
11:52
So, I have a private group chat on my phone as a lot of people do.
12:03
Now, my friends created this and they named it fight porn.
12:05
That's the name of the chat.
12:07
And the reason it's called fight porn is that I'd say my four or five closest friends are all former competitive fighters.
12:14
And effectively, this chat is video clips, discussions about fights, not really betting on fights, but kind of putting your reputation on the line to try to predict who's going to who's going to win, who's going to lose, what round, etc.
12:32
And one of my friends, Doug, I'll give him credit, said, "Have you guys seen One?"
12:38
And I was like, "What the hell is One?"
12:41
And he pointed me to One on Amazon Prime and I thought to myself, "How on earth have I not seen this before?"
12:50
And I have to say, it brought back so many memories of Pride, and hopefully you take this as a as a compliment, Pride, K-1, all of these incredibly powerful memories, these nostalgic experiences that I had. And blew my mind. Completely blew my mind.
13:12
So, I just I'm flashing forward a little bit, but that's a way of setting the table for a video that I watched because I was tracking Takeru, I'm going to say it with the kind of American pronunciation, Segawa. Yep.
13:28
And at one point I saw a video of you giving him a pep talk.
13:31
It wasn't really a pep talk, it was more like a a rallying support, not really a lecture, but like a pat on the back, a smack in the ass.
13:43
And it wasn't in English.
13:46
What language was that that you were speaking?
13:48
So, I was speaking Japanese.
13:48
My mother's Japanese, my father's Thai.
13:52
And that was after he had got knocked out by Rodtang. Mhm.
13:55
So, that was the biggest fight of his career.
13:57
That was March of this year in Tokyo, Saitama Super Arena.
14:01
It was literally where Pride and K-1 Yeah.
14:05
Saitama Super Arena, the legendary stadium in Tokyo.
14:07
And Takeru versus Rodtang, arguably two greatest pound-for-pound strikers on the planet.
14:14
And Takeru got knocked out in the first round.
14:16
Like, I think in 80 seconds.
14:18
And I went backstage to congratulate the winners and and etc.
14:24
And I went to go see Takeru, and you know, he he was heartbroken and crying.
14:28
And yeah, I went backstage and I gave him a pep talk.
14:30
I said, "Hey, these things happen.
14:32
It doesn't take away from your legacy, your body of work.
14:38
You know, split millisecond here, split millisecond there.
14:41
And the outcome could have been very different.
14:43
And I said, "The only thing you can do is go back and review what you did wrong and level up."
14:52
And that's one thing I think I have amongst the fight community, amongst our fighters.
14:58
You know, I have a very close bond with our fighters because, you know, I'm a lifelong martial artist.
15:02
I'm Muay Thai all of my life, and jiu-jitsu black belt.
15:07
So, when I give these one-on-one talks, or actually before every big event, I go backstage and have all the fighters who are going to compete that night and give an inspirational talk about what this night means and and how they can carve their legacy, right?
15:23
And unleash the greatness upon the world.
15:26
So, I feel very deeply when I see something like that. And Yutaka was crying.
15:29
He was He was man, broken. Broken.
15:32
His team happened to be there filming it. It wasn't our team.
15:35
They They, you know, they filmed it and they put it out.
15:37
It ended up going viral in Japan.
15:40
I don't think people knew that I could speak Japanese.
15:41
The Japanese fans know that I'm half Japanese, but I don't really use it that much. Yeah.
15:47
This is a way to segue to your mom because and I have to say, I've never been to Saitama Super Arena.
15:53
Someday I hope to actually check it out.
15:57
I was though in Japan about 2 weeks ago. 2 or 3 weeks ago.
16:01
And I was at the All Japan Judo Championships at the Budokan. Yes. Wow. Which was awesome. Which was fantastic.
16:10
You've never seen so many cauliflowers in your entire life. It was just fantastic.
16:13
It was also my first time setting foot in Budokan, which was absolutely spectacular. Yeah. It's legendary historic.
16:21
Just absolutely iconic location.
16:21
In a beautiful beautiful spot where by the way it's impossible to get any rideshare because you're right next to the Imperial Palace. So, I realized that.
16:31
Ended up having some nice walks as a result.
16:33
But coming back to your mom, it seems like your mom and your dad informed your life in very different ways.
16:41
And your your dad may have been in some respects like a men kyoshi, right?
16:45
Like he he was like the opposite teacher. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.
16:50
I don't want to make some of those same mistakes. Oh, that's right. I forgot.
16:52
You spent a year in Japan or something like that, right? Or exchange program.
16:54
That's why your accent is I was like, "What the" I was like, "Oh man, Tim Tim."
16:59
We're like kindred spirits here, you know? Yeah.
17:04
You Yeah, you majored in East Asian Studies.
17:05
That's what it was, right? Yeah.
17:06
There's a lot of overlap. Yeah.
17:08
And so, it's like you came to the US to study. I went to Tokyo. Yes. Yes. Exactly.
17:15
And actually I'm still very close with my host family.
17:17
I went out to have dinner with them. Amazing. From when I was 15.
17:20
So, it's been 30 plus years. Wow, crazy. Still close with them.
17:24
So, I want to paint a picture for folks, and then you can fill in some of the gaps, but it seems like at some point your mom moved in with you in your dorm room. Yes.
17:37
Could you explain what some of that journey looked like and how that happened?
17:43
When my father abandoned us and went bankrupt, you know what I mean?
17:47
It was my mom's crazy idea to say, "You know, Chutur, you're the oldest son, and and given that you live in Japan, the hierarchical nature of family structures in Asian society, and now that my father was gone, it was my duty to take care of my younger brother, my mother, and and their well-being, but we had
18:08
literally no money, and I had one suitcase, and my mom had borrowed money from all all the people who were remaining to be our friends, cuz obviously, when something scandalous like that happens in at the time in Thailand, you know, nobody get divorced, nobody ever went bankrupt, you know, it's just these things didn't happen. But, scrounged around about a thousand
18:25
But, scrounged around about a thousand dollars, and you know, one suitcase with all all of my life's belongings, and I had to figure it out once I got to America.
18:36
And it was her idea for me to, you know, apply and eventually immigrate. That was the game plan.
18:41
And it got so bad for her that she ended up moving in with me in my dorm.
18:47
Obviously, the school administration didn't know in college, and actually in grad school, and it was a tiny little single dorm room in Morris Hall at Harvard, and I slept on the floor, and she slept in the bed, and it was just barely enough room.
19:00
And yeah, they had one of these key cards where you open the dormitory door from the outside, and in between classes, you know, just time it with her, and give her her my key card, and you know, living on $4 a day.
19:12
And of course, you know, I didn't tell everybody this.
19:16
Of course, my closest friends knew, but I was not proud of my family background or the fact that I was poor.
19:24
Actually, I was deeply ashamed and I didn't want to talk about it.
19:26
And so, you know, when people went to parties or people went out to dinners, I didn't get to do any of that stuff because I couldn't afford it.
19:31
So, I had to make some excuse every time.
19:33
It's like, "Hey, Chachi, let's go out.
19:35
You know, let's go to a club tonight.
19:37
You know, there's going to be our friend is going to be there."
19:40
And I knew I I can't go and afford a beer.
19:42
I can't afford the entrance fee of a nightclub.
19:44
So, my mom was very much a part of my graduate experience at Harvard.
19:48
But amazingly, some of the my best memories or most powerful memories.
19:52
And obviously now today, I view them in a very positive light because of how circumstances we're very blessed in life.
19:58
And I remember lying there with my mom.
20:01
I was I'd be lying on the floor and my mom was on the bed and she would ask me these crazy questions. We had no money.
20:10
And she'd be like, "Chachi, one day, you know, I want us to go live in New York City."
20:17
And I'd be like, "Man, Mom, my stress was how am I going to get money for next month?"
20:21
And I could like I was teaching Muay Thai. I was a tutor at Kaplan.
20:25
I did all sorts of odd jobs.
20:25
But my biggest worry was, you know, "Do I have enough money to even pay for the school tuition fees?"
20:34
And on an Excel spreadsheet, I budgeted $4 a day.
20:36
If I went on the subway, that's a dollar.
20:39
I'm like, "Man, you know, like these are the things that consumed me when I was going through Harvard."
20:47
But you know, I always say that without the love of my mother, I would never have been there in the first place.
20:52
It was my mom who when we had nothing, she really believed in me and I think the saying is that when someone loves you, it gives you strength.
21:04
When you love someone, it gives you courage. Mhm.
21:07
And I think that's a very true statement when it comes to my relationship with my mother, she gave me both, right?
21:12
I mean, in that I could feel her unconditional love, hence it gave me strength to do things when I was full of fear, doubts, and insecurity.
21:19
I wasn't some academically gifted guy.
21:21
I remember that first week, first month, I was dirt poor, I didn't feel like I belonged, I thought everyone was better than me, smarter than me, and I I didn't have money for the full ride, had to go find loans, and it was just like a time of massive uncertainty in my life, and I had to keep it to myself.
21:39
I had to enter a new school.
21:39
But again, looking back on everything, the fact that I had my mother's love, that gave me strength every day to fight more.
21:49
And I always say too that if you're fighting for yourself, like you're fighting because you want a a six-figure salary, you're fighting because you want to buy a nice car, it's very easy to quit.
22:02
But when you're fighting for something bigger than yourself, it's impossible to quit.
22:05
So, in that moment, I was fighting for my family, fighting for my younger brother, fighting for my mother.
22:10
Of course, down the road as I was blessed with a lot of good luck in life, these are the things that I always remember, is like, you know, when you're fighting for something much bigger than yourself, you become unbreakable. Mhm.
22:19
There's so many precious lessons that I learned from that journey.
22:24
And And crazy enough, when I made my first little bit of money, I think I was around 30-something, maybe 31, I bought a a condominium, you know, in New York City, to surprise my mom, because I remembered what she told me in the dorm room.
22:43
And brought her to New York and gave her the keys, and and it was overlooking the Hudson River, and it's one of my most favorite memories with my mom, is, you know, surprising her with her own house, because she'd suffered for so long, for so long, that just to be able to see her face and knowing that little crazy dream was was born in the dark of midnight when we're going to sleep and she wanted to talk about our dreams.
23:13
So in that sense, you know, she also gave me that.
23:14
I'm a little bit of a crazy dreamer.
23:15
My friends think I'm a little bit of a crazy guy and I think I got that from my mom. Go mom. That's incredible. All right.
23:24
Well, we could spend the next 2 hours just unpacking what it was like to actually hand over the keys and how your mom responded, but I have a million questions I want to ask you.
23:32
So I would say let me mention a few things and then we can add in any sort of seminal moments as needed.
23:40
But my understanding is you leave grad school, you try your hand in the world of startups.
23:50
You do pretty well in startup world.
23:53
Then end up going to finance and do pretty well on Wall Street.
23:59
And my two questions are, I know that's a major major condensation, but number one, what was it like and what was the moment cuz I remember for myself the moment where you're like, "Oh my god, I actually have some money." Right?
24:14
Like when was that moment when you were like, "Oh, this is a little different. This is a lot different.
24:21
I actually have some money."
24:22
It doesn't need to be a lot of money, but like what was that like?
24:23
And then why didn't you stay in finance?
24:28
Why didn't you stay on Wall Street?
24:30
So you know, it's kind of funny like when I was a kid, there's a few things I was truly obsessed with, okay?
24:36
I was obsessed with martial arts and that anyone from my childhood would tell you, "Chatch is a He's the martial arts guy.
24:42
He's crazy about martial arts."
24:45
But I was also crazy about for Christmas somebody gave me the book One Up On Wall Street by Peter Lynch. It's a great book.
24:53
And I just got completely fascinated with I think I was like a teenager, but I was completely fascinated with wow, people can actually make money doing that.
25:00
And so I got obsessed with Warren Buffett and you know, Ben Graham and intelligent investor.
25:05
And this was like when I was again a teenager and I just voraciously consumed it, but I never thought I would ever do something along those lines, right?
25:13
And it wasn't like I was investing or anything.
25:14
It was just like a hobby curiosity, but it was almost borderline obsession cuz I was reading I mean tons and tons of finance books and investing books just for like for fun.
25:24
And so I always had kind of that in the back of my mind. I don't know.
25:27
It's just like external kind of stuff when you're younger as a kid.
25:29
Oh, it would be so glamorous to be, you know, a hedge fund manager on Wall Street, that kind of stuff.
25:33
When I graduated from Harvard, I was dirt poor. Dirt poor.
25:38
I went to Silicon Valley and with my mom.
25:42
We slept in a tiny little apartment, okay?
25:44
And I couldn't even afford beds or furniture.
25:47
So we had two sleeping bags. We talk about that.
25:49
We had two sleeping bags on the floor and that was how I started my journey in Silicon Valley cuz I again I just had this crazy dream.
25:55
One of my classmates, Sue and Lu, said Chacha, let's let's go to Silicon Valley. Let's just try our luck.
26:00
And you know, both of us were poor and we had maybe a few months of of cash left if at all.
26:09
But by pure luck, we went to this angel investor day at Harvard and this guy named Richard Armstrong, literally one hour meeting, he's like, okay, I'll I'll cut you a $500,000 check. It's a good meeting. Yeah. We were like blown away.
26:22
Sue and I were blown away.
26:24
And out of that small little apartment where my mom and I slept slept on the floor, we started hiring people.
26:29
And so I think I at our peak we had like six people or seven people in that little apartment.
26:36
And what was the business? Just in brief for folks.
26:39
It was a company called Nextdoor Networks.
26:40
Basically it was enterprise resource software.
26:42
It started off as a as a marketplace, but eventually morphed to enterprise optimization.
26:46
So basically Jiffy Lube was our largest customer at the time where you could come in with dynamic pricing and the software would how many bays there were, how many cars were coming in, and you know, what we see dynamic pricing today with airlines and stuff, right? Or hotels.
27:01
That kind of software, but it was more enterprise.
27:04
We rode the internet boom all the way up and we came partially down and we're lucky to have sold the company.
27:08
We grew from like six, seven people and then within about a year, we'd raised $40 million and had, I don't know, 200 people, you know, real offices and all that stuff, and it was just a crazy ride.
27:22
This was in early 2000 or yeah, around 1999, 2000 time frame.
27:29
And that was a crazy ride and when I look through old photos, and it's kind of crazy.
27:34
So soon, Lou, my classmate from Harvard who started the company with me in Silicon Valley, he actually lives in Singapore now. So we hang out here.
27:41
We have obviously our collection of pictures and whatnot, and and we go back and like, man, that was that was some crazy times.
27:46
And and my mom would be there in front of the microwave because we were so poor at the time we would get a dollar, I remember $1.
27:53
25 microwave frozen food.
27:56
And you know, these little meals.
27:56
And that would be our lunch or dinner or whatever it is.
28:00
And my mom would be in front of the in front of the microwave, and you know, we have photos of that, and we're in our little startup.
28:04
And again, these crazy days.
28:06
But after we sold the company, I said to myself, okay, I didn't make a a ton where I could retire for life, but I had a good little bit of a nest egg.
28:13
I thought deeply, what do I want to do?
28:15
Am I a software entrepreneur or what am I?
28:18
You know, I started going into this kind of deep reflection.
28:22
And actually And if I can just interrupt for a second, I'm sorry, but just that initial nest egg, whether it was from savings from salary or the eventual exit.
28:29
Like was there a moment and if if not, that's totally fine.
28:36
I'm just so curious having been poor for so long and scrapped so hard and having to track everything in an Excel spreadsheet to make sure you don't exceed your $4 daily budget, etc.
28:50
Throughout school, was there a time when it's like you went to the ATM to take out a little cash and you saw the balance and you're like, "Okay, like things might actually now start to be different."
29:01
So, you know what's crazy, Tim, because I grew up in a well-to-do home when I was a kid and and saw it get wiped out like I mean, it was like that, okay? Mhm.
29:12
That I even to this day, I don't have that sense of like look at my bank account or look at what I have as a sense of security. Yeah.
29:23
So, I never had that moment of ah, I could exhale. Exhaling, yeah. Exhaling. No.
29:29
What we did though was we went with I think about like 13 or 14 employees and we rented two RV vans and we did a cross-country trip across America.
29:44
And that took like I forget like a couple weeks.
29:47
That was me moving from Silicon Valley to to New York.
29:50
I didn't know at the time that I was going to move to New York and I I was going to do the whole investing thing.
29:53
That ride I remember and I remember one night, it was in Albuquerque and we were in an RV park and I went up to the roof.
30:02
I was lying down on the roof of the RV and looking at the night sky.
30:06
You know, it's completely beautiful stars and and it was just clear sky.
30:09
I mean, it was night, but it was clear in the sense of all the stars.
30:15
And that was the only moment I felt like, "Man, like I can actually do anything from this point on.
30:19
I don't have to scrape by."
30:21
But it was just a momentary fleeing sensation of like the universe is so big, I can do anything.
30:27
Like, you know, and it wasn't I can do anything in an arrogant way.
30:28
It was more like whatever happened in the past with my family and and my father, you know, I I didn't have to be burdened by it or trapped by it.
30:39
So, it was a feeling of not exhale, but a feeling of almost like my past you know, I'm not going to be shackled by my past. Mhm.
30:51
But it's weird, you know, Tim, even to this day, I don't have this feeling of like I had this feeling of, man, you know, life can throw you curveballs and all of a sudden I could be on the street.
31:01
You know, it's crazy, but I I still have this fear or not fear, I don't know what it is.
31:05
Maybe it what it is is I never want to be so poor again.
31:12
Cuz what really broke me, and this one I remember very poignantly, I'd never seen my mother cry up until my father abandoned us.
31:22
And it was one night and she tried to be this really strong, brave woman and I saw her cry.
31:32
And that that broke my heart in a million pieces.
31:36
And then one other time I saw was in my dorm room, you know, at Harvard. And that was my fuel.
31:44
I said to myself, I never want to see my mother cry ever again.
31:46
I'm going to work my ass off. I'm going to be rich.
31:48
I'm going to do things for, you know, And so I naively thought, genuinely, that when I was poor that, man, if I just make a crap load of money, all my problems will be gone because like I will be able to provide for my mother, she'll have no more worries and this that the other.
32:09
I didn't fully understand the meaning of life.
32:14
I kind of like accepted society as you make a lot of money and that's just, you know, you buy things.
32:20
It wasn't later in life until I was like maybe my mid-30s when I had my hedge fund, you know, we had a record year, I made a lot of money.
32:31
And of course you're very happy cuz you made a lot of money.
32:32
But then I went down to the sushi bar, sushi restaurant down in the office building and I sat at the sushi bar for lunch, and I remember but I was by myself, and I remember all adrenaline and happy, but then over the course of that lunch, I don't know what happened.
32:47
I just started thinking about is this what life is about?
32:50
Okay, so I'm going to go now and buy more material things.
32:51
I'm going to go buy a house, another house, whatever.
32:55
You know, I just it just hit me hard.
32:57
I'm like, man, what's going to happen with my life is I'm going to keep just living this thing where okay, yeah, I I can make a lot of money, but I had a deep sense of emptiness.
33:06
And yeah, my mom was taking care of I was happy, of course, all that stuff, but it was almost just like, oh my gosh, and I I remember cold sweat thinking, I'm going to roll forward another 50 years or whatever till the end of my life, and [ __ ] all I have done really is buy and sell companies and short companies, and my clients were all either multi-billion dollar institutions or multi-billion dollar families.
33:33
So, then I'm like, what was I here on Earth for, and what was I doing with my life? Mhm.
33:41
And I remember so well when I was 5 years old, my mom would repeat this all the time throughout my elementary and middle school years and all that.
33:46
She would always say, Chatri, you're going to grow up to help people.
33:52
And you know, I was like, mom's gibberish.
33:53
You know, cuz she's like, you're so special, Chatri.
33:55
And of course, I know every mother says that to their child, to their you know, but it was weird when I was at that sushi restaurant, those words came to me.
34:04
It was like, Chatri, you're going to help people when you grow up.
34:09
And I was sitting there, and I'm like, right now I'm helping nobody.
34:15
Because if I'm helping wealthy people get wealthier, okay, what is the point of that?
34:20
And if I'm making you know, multi-billion dollar institutions get wealthier, what is the point of that, right?
34:26
I remember being very restless for several weeks. I couldn't sleep.
34:32
And yeah, eventually I said I I have to do something and and it was again pure pure luck, but also a lot of introspection.
34:41
At the time I was training at Henzo Gracie's school, jujitsu, training every day.
34:46
And you know what's crazy this whole journey from being wealthy to do family to being poor to escaping poverty and making it, I trained religiously either Muay Thai or jujitsu every single day.
34:57
This is just part of my my DNA.
34:59
And actually even to this day, I just came back from training earlier today.
35:03
It's my foundation to every single day.
35:05
Tim, you know, you've competed as a wrestler and done Sanshou and stuff like that.
35:09
When you're in the moment of training or sparring, there is nothing else you can think of.
35:13
You are in the moment, right?
35:17
Yeah, if you think of something else, you get reminded very quickly. Very quickly. Exactly.
35:20
So, it's almost like you can escape whatever, good or bad in your life, for those couple hours and not think about anything.
35:30
You see, if you go for a run, you'll still think about work, family, your relationship issues, your dad, whatever it is, you'll still think, okay?
35:39
So, or if you go lift weights, your mind is still active on whatever you haven't left your life.
35:45
But, you know, Tim, when you go train and and you're sparring against someone who's really good, Yeah.
35:50
all that stuff evaporates.
35:50
And so, that's what I love.
35:52
I own a chain of martial arts schools here in Singapore.
35:56
And I train every day with Muay Thai world champions.
36:00
Is that Evolve or Yeah, Evolve, yes.
36:02
Or jujitsu world champions.
36:04
And I truly believe my grandmaster Kru Yo Tong Senanan used to always tell me, I never really understood it until much later in life, to unleash your greatness, you must be surrounded by greatness.
36:17
And so, every day I go to Evolve, these guys are the best in the world what they do.
36:22
You know, I'm a high-level martial arts for sure, but not against the world champion, right?
36:25
I mean, you train with John Danaher and Bunkerd, you know how badass those guys are. Best in the world.
36:31
Yeah, it's a different level.
36:31
There are levels and then there are levels. Exactly. Exactly.
36:34
Same thing for a black belt.
36:36
I mean, I'm a black belt, but there are levels to being a jiu-jitsu black belt.
36:40
And for the most part, when I train with them, I I get my ass kicked, but I relish that.
36:45
Obviously, it's a 2-hour break from my from anything I'm dealing with in the world, but I love it because it's a daily and constant reminder of how I should live my life.
36:57
You see, if I have ego, you know, I'm the owner, I walk in, and this guy beats the crap out of me.
37:05
In another world, if I didn't have martial arts in my whole life, I'd be like, blah blah blah blah, you know, I'm the boss.
37:10
But what I actually tell tell to my training partners, "Bro, whatever it is, don't go easy.
37:14
If you can't submit me, you suck.
37:19
You better submit me, or you better hurt me.
37:21
If we're sparring, you better get the best of me because, you know, you're a world champion.
37:25
Don't hold back because that's not what I want.
37:27
I want you to help me improve."
37:30
And so, you have to, you know, let your ego completely disappear.
37:35
In society, I'm a CEO, but when I'm in training, I'm a nobody. Yeah.
37:40
And these guys beat on me, but it levels me up, and it it's a daily reminder for me that I'm here to learn, grow, and evolve, and be the very best martial arts I can be.
37:54
And the only way to do it is by surrounding yourself with greatness, because diamonds are created under heat and pressure, and that's how I think all of us, how we all can unleash our greatness in life is it's kind of sad, but it's through love, pain, and suffering.
38:10
That combination can work magic in terms of unleashing human potential, and you will discover things about yourself that you never even knew existed in you when you go through a process of love, pain, and suffering.
38:23
And so that's something I do everyday. Number one, I love it.
38:25
It's my greatest obsession in life, but I do go through pain and I do go suffering every single day because it's a part of this warrior mindset.
38:32
I mean, you spent time in Japan, you know, the whole bushido, the whole samurai spirit. Yeah. Yamato damashii. Yes. Yes, you nailed it.
38:38
What Tim is talking about, guys, is this Japanese warrior spirit that every Japanese person has in their heart that makes Japan Actually, that's why it's the birthplace of mixed martial arts.
38:49
It's the birthplace of kickboxing.
38:50
Obviously, birthplace of karate and aikido and judo and kendo.
38:55
It's a magical country and I'm not saying that cuz I'm half Japanese, but the more I understand about Japan, the more I truly appreciate the culture.
39:00
And so one of that is this sense of unbreakable warrior spirit.
39:05
Like Japanese fighters are some of the toughest.
39:10
And I don't mean technically.
39:12
I mean, I'm talking about you cannot break a high-level Japanese fighter.
39:13
You just you know, and if you went to the Budokan to watch the judo championships, if these guys they don't break. They don't break.
39:22
Yeah, they'll go until they can't go. Yeah.
39:25
I still remember to this day a fight way back in the day cuz I was in Japan for this, way back, which was Pancrase.
39:32
So Pancrase had just launched. Yes.
39:36
And it was a fight between Bas Rutten and Funaki. Wow.
39:40
And Funaki got beaten into He looked like a tomato that had been kicked around a room by 12 kids for an hour.
39:46
I mean, he was so destroyed and he just kept getting up.
39:53
And I mean, there's a point where I remember Bas was just like, "What is this? What are we doing here?" Yeah, exactly.
40:00
And to this day from 15, I remember watching that and thinking, "Good lord, this is just a different species of experience."
40:11
And just to come back to the the mixed martial arts in Japan for a second, so when I was there, the way I initially got exposed to all this was through through Shooto. Yes.
40:24
Satoru First generation Tiger Mask. Yes. Yeah. Unbelievable.
40:29
He was at the event in March in Saitama. Oh, really? He was my guest.
40:31
He was my personal guest. Yeah, Satoru Sensei.
40:34
He is a tough tough tough tough human and a very very tough coach.
40:38
He used to take a shinai, like a a bamboo kendo sword, cut off the tip, and then if his fighters were misbehaving or not doing what he wanted, he would hit them in the back of the legs, hit them on the back. He was tough and Yeah. nasty fighter also. Yeah.
40:59
And from there then ended up wanting to figure out where to train.
41:03
I went to this place called Kikuchi Dojo and Kikuchi Sensei was a former Olympic wrestler and like Rumina Sato and all these guys trained there. Rumina is a friend.
41:14
All these guys are telling me it's crazy cuz I was literally just in Japan a couple weeks ago with Sakamoto, who's the CEO of Shooto.
41:21
I just was hanging out with the CEO of Pancrase and we're talking about all these old crazy stories.
41:26
A wild And again, yeah, Satoru Sensei.
41:26
So, everything you're saying is crazy. It's super small world.
41:29
I'll give you two more small world.
41:31
So, I have a bone jutting out of the side of my ankle from Rumina who put on the nastiest heel hook in practice.
41:40
I'm still a little annoyed about that.
41:41
It was so it was so aggressive. Oh, man.
41:45
I ended up doing well after that.
41:47
Probably should have tapped much earlier, which also leads to NYC.
41:48
We're going to talk more about Renzo, but I actually spent a little bit of time at Renzo's gym way way back in the day.
41:58
Only went a handful of times, but I actually and it wasn't really his fault.
42:03
It was an accident, but Rodrigo actually popped my right elbow and I'm getting surgery probably in the next few weeks cuz I want to get back into training and the extensors have been torn for like 20 years. Oh my gosh. Oh my god.
42:16
But that gym is phenomenal and it also ties into actually just to loop a few things together.
42:21
So from Wall Street, at least I have written down here.
42:25
Correct me if I get any of this wrong, but in 2008, you start Evolve, right?
42:30
I moved to Singapore in 2007. Yeah. Yeah. Around there, yeah. I got it.
42:37
But I'm still a hedge fund manager at that point. So it was crazy.
42:38
So I I get to Singapore to open up the Singapore office for my hedge fund.
42:44
So we have offices in New York and Singapore.
42:46
And there's no place to train cuz Singapore is not like a Mecca of martial arts.
42:50
So I'm like, "You know what?
42:50
I'm going to start a martial arts school."
42:56
And it was really just selfishly for me to be able to train with, you know, and all my Evolve brothers were in Thailand and it's an hour and a half flight from Thailand and they're all the baddest world champions on the planet and and that's how Evolve started.
43:08
It was kind of like scratching your own itch.
43:13
I don't want to say side hustle. It's my obsession.
43:14
I mean martial arts is my obsession.
43:15
So the fact that I didn't have any high-level place to train when I was used to training at Renzo's, right, when I was in New York, that was kind of the the accidental birth. Murderer's Row.
43:25
Yeah, so many good people there.
43:28
Yeah, but that whole time period was cuz when I reached Singapore, it was already after I had that lunch, that sushi lunch, you know, I'd already had this like sense of, you know, I have to do something bigger with my life.
43:40
I have to And it's not about making money, it's about helping others or making an impact.
43:43
I think you had also said that's right, Tim, like when you retired from angel investing was like angel investing was fun, but you didn't have that impact that you had when you came out with your books.
43:54
And that's when you had millions of people reading your books and their lives changed by your lessons and learnings about life.
43:59
And so when we work our asses off for something much bigger than ourselves and we know we're impacting, you know, if you're lucky, your country and if you're even luckier, your continent and maybe the world, right?
44:14
There's a sense of like, oh, my my life has meaning. Mhm.
44:19
And it's not about money.
44:19
It's that somehow Tim Ferriss is on this planet and he's actually helping people, millions of people all over the planet through his books. Mhm.
44:28
Same thing I get with now the joy of one that the hearing about you having, you know, this WhatsApp group with your buddies and all you guys are competitive former martial arts or fighters and then you discover one and that to me I get excited or like, you know, when I was in Japan and you know, the entire stadium of Saitama completely sold out.
44:43
We were in the US in September in Denver, the Denver Nuggets Stadium completely sold out. Yeah.
44:49
And I was sitting there in Denver and I was just like, this is the Denver Nuggets.
44:54
This is the NBA World Champion Stadium and it's completely sold out.
45:00
And this company I started here in Singapore never in a million years did I think we would sell out.
45:05
And then literally months later we sold out in Thailand, Impact Arena, a massive stadium and then in Qatar, Doha the next month, also another massive stadium and then Saitama Super Arena.
45:16
So, it was just like this last several months has just been just a reminder, you know, in some ways like as I travel around the world this thing has just gone viral and you know, our viewership numbers are just massive, massive around the world.
45:30
But you see that is the same I feel whatever about you them is, you know, that same drive or or that same sense of meaning in your life or purpose. It's the same thing.
45:40
Well, I really get excited when someone's like, man, hey, I saw that fight or I was there or you know, or whatever. Oh, yeah.
45:45
I mean, I still we're going to definitely get back to this through line in a second, but vividly remember watching one for the first time and it brought back all of those memories from Japan because it's it's very elegantly produced in the sense that it's not like being trapped in a video game with a thousand distractions, which a lot of spectator sports have kind of turned into.
46:12
It's like you have the lights on the fighters.
46:15
The crowd is often darkened. Yes. Yes.
46:19
And there's this I'll paint with a broad brush here, but it depends on where the fights are, right?
46:23
There's either there's In Japan, you know, the audience is very reverent. Yep. And it's very quiet. Yes.
46:30
There might still be like a fighto, you know, like something like that. Yeah.
46:33
And they'll clap for certain things and shout for sure, but otherwise it's quiet.
46:37
It's very different from the US. Yeah.
46:39
So, I've been to Lumpinee before and I've been to Rajadamnern before. Yep.
46:43
And that's like you know, it's like it's like Yes. High energy. Crazy energy.
46:48
With the music and the betting and the hey hey with the every low kick or whatever is coming out.
46:54
And it's as a viewer, as a spectator, it really allows you to kind of savor the main course without distraction, which is the fights. And let's hop to one. Sure.
47:06
It looks like around 2011, that's the birth of ONE Championship. Yep.
47:12
Was not an overnight success. No.
47:14
We're going to get eventually because I did not expect to find Mike Moritz and Doug Leone in this story, which is Yeah. [ __ ] wild. Yes. Yes.
47:25
We're definitely going to come to that cuz that seems like a really important moment.
47:29
But before I want to read one of my one of my friend's questions.
47:34
Because there have been different fight promotions in say pan-Asia before, right? Yeah.
47:42
For instance, in China, there's something called Sanda Wang, which is like King of Sanda, which actually has some great fights, but they never hopped. Yep.
47:52
They never really hit the mainstream globally. Yep.
47:56
And for the people who are wondering, Sanda is like it's like shoot boxing.
48:00
It's like kickboxing plus throws. Yeah.
48:02
It's actually very entertaining to watch, but they never crossed the chasm, at least as far as I know.
48:05
And my friend's question is this, you know, I want to know about the economics starting out.
48:11
What was the thesis about why they would succeed?
48:15
And what did they learn from prior fight leagues, whether successes or failures?
48:19
And then his his other question, which is also one of my questions, is most importantly, how the [ __ ] do they have such consistently high-quality fights?
48:27
Because I don't know what what savant quad you have in the basement who's money balled the match-ups, but like I'm accustomed to watching fight cards where it's like, "Yeah, okay, great.
48:41
Like two out of the six fights are good."
48:44
And all of my friends have no idea We've watched a lot of fights. Yeah.
48:51
In every possible discipline, how you guys consistently have such absurdly good fights.
48:55
But just starting out, I also want to know, like what were the kind of original thesis and what did you learn from prior fight leagues as well?
49:08
It's been over 13 years, and to be sitting where I'm sitting is honestly less than 1% of 1%. Yeah. Okay, odds.
49:17
If you told me to do this again, I definitely would not have.
49:19
I would have just rolled out a chain of martial arts academies that I have a few hundred locations by now. Why?
49:27
The first 3 years, I thought I really thought, you know, I love martial arts.
49:30
Asia is the home of martial arts, 5,000-year history.
49:33
There's 4 billion people here on the planet.
49:36
Surely it's going to be easy to create a global sports property. And naively, okay? I did this high-level.
49:41
I was like, "Well, you know, America has NFL, MLB, NASCAR.
49:46
Europe has F1, Champions League, EPL, Bundesliga.
49:48
These are all multi-billion dollar properties.
49:51
You know, the the market cap of NFL's you know, north of 120 billion, okay?
49:55
NBA is 70 billion dollars in the you know, it's valuation.
50:02
And I thought, man, I'm a martial artist. I know martial arts.
50:09
I'll be able to somehow aggregate four four billion fans here and then export this around the world and be easy.
50:13
The first three years, Tim, complete disaster, okay?
50:17
My buddy from Harvard and I, we made a little bit of money so we invested.
50:23
Thinking that, you know, within a year we'd get institutional investors to back us given our credentials and our expertise and the the market opportunity, zero.
50:33
First first three years, we couldn't land We met with 150 institutional investors, zero.
50:39
Broadcasters across continent, zero. Brands, forget about it.
50:42
Governments, forget about it.
50:45
Most governments banned martial arts content actually on TV, live martial arts content. Why?
50:49
Because of the violent nature, okay?
50:51
First three years, literally like no fandom, no metrics what to speak of, just losing money hand over fist.
51:02
What were the main objections of the investors or broadcasters?
51:06
Maybe we focus on let's just say the investor side.
51:11
What were their main the most common patterns of objections or refutations?
51:19
There was this billion-dollar property and you're way too late. I got it. You're way too late. Late to the game. Late to the game.
51:24
You want to create a global property?
51:26
I think at that time UFC was about a couple billion, right?
51:31
And their metrics were already substantially larger than ours because we were just a startup.
51:37
I remember when we first started our Facebook page, they had some like 20 million fans on Facebook or something like that. We started with zero.
51:43
Today, and it's all organic, today we have 50 million and they have 50 million on Facebook as an example.
51:49
But I'll tell you how we got very lucky.
51:51
It was at the end of year three and I called my mom, my Japanese mom, and who was completely against me starting this, okay?
52:00
Because in Japan, as you know, Tim, martial arts promotions, combat sports is run by Yakuza, the mafia in Japan, okay?
52:08
Mobbed up, yeah, it's super mobbed up.
52:10
is this conservative, tiny little Japanese lady and she's like, "There's no way my son is going to quit Wall Street become a mobster."
52:21
She's the typical Japanese lady where she was like, "My son went to Harvard and he's on Wall Street and he has his hedge fund."
52:26
She loved the check boxes, the checklist of credentials.
52:29
As you know, Japanese culture is very much this way, Japanese society.
52:32
If you went to Todai in Japan, you're viewed as a god, right?
52:34
Like, you know, it's very hierarchical.
52:38
And I said, "Mom, I want to do what I love and you know, Mom, you told me as a young kid I got to go help people and I want to live my life with my greatest obsession and somehow help people, you know?
52:47
Whether it's our athletes, our fans, etc."
52:50
And you know what's crazy, Tim?
52:52
In writing the business plan, there was no such line of like, "We want to have the biggest pay-per-view.
52:55
We want to have the best fights or this type."
52:57
It was literally the mission of the company over many, many, many days and weeks, literally came and it's still true to this day, is to unleash real-life superheroes who can affect the world with hope, strength, dreams, and inspiration. Mhm.
53:11
And of course, we put on the best fights.
53:12
I agree with your friends and I'll explain how we put on fights.
53:17
But the first three years, complete disaster. There was no TAM. It was all theoretical.
53:22
It's all this business school mumbo jumbo and nobody was interested.
53:27
Yeah, for folks, total addressable market. Exactly.
53:31
And if I didn't love martial arts as much as I did, 1,000% I would have quit.
53:35
So I called my mom, "Mom, end of year three, lost a crap load of my money, my friends' money, and I think we're done. We got no traction.
53:42
And I thought my mom was going to tell me I should stick with it because, you know, Chatri since you're a kid, martial arts, blah blah blah, you love it.
53:48
And she said, "Oh, great.
53:51
Why don't you just quit then?"
53:54
Before you get double sleeves of tattoos and can't go to the onsen with me. Yeah, she said, "Great."
53:58
And then the conversation ended shortly after that.
54:01
And I remember thinking to myself, my mom just said, "Just quit."
54:02
And then I said, "Okay, if I just quit, let's say I quit today."
54:07
And then it goes back to like, "Well, why did I even start this thing in the first place?"
54:10
When you really put yourself to say, "I'm going to quit."
54:14
You start to think about why did I start this thing? And And what is it?
54:18
And I said, "Well, martial arts is my greatest obsession.
54:20
If I want to make an impact on the world, and I have the opportunity to inspire millions and one day hopefully billions of lives through our heroes' values and stories."
54:31
Those are the three pillars of of what we call our formula of success at ONE Championship, values, heroes, and stories.
54:38
If we can unleash these real-life superheroes and tell their stories of overcoming adversity, tragedy, poverty, impossible odds, those stories are going to be incredible.
54:49
And of course, the values that we exhibit, which you know very well, is that a true bushido values of, you know, integrity, honor, respect, courage, discipline, compassion, etc.
54:58
That martial arts teaches us.
55:02
And I thought, there has to be a place in this world, one promotion, one promotion that has true authentic martial arts at its core.
55:13
And so, from that day I said, "I will never quit.
55:15
Come hell or high water, I'm going to put everything into it.
55:16
If I lose all my money, screw it."
55:18
And you know, we got so lucky.
55:20
Facebook, you know, so a big shout-out to Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook started taking off in Asia at that round that time, as smart mobile devices were as well.
55:35
If you chart Facebook's user growth and just engagement levels, okay, in Asia with the history of ONE Championship, it is like mirror.
55:45
So, what happened was we saw a couple of videos start going viral around the world when we posted and we were again we're small platform at the time, very small page.
55:55
But, we could see that something was happening.
55:58
So, we used that hockey stick data, even though it was small, we collected this data and we showed broadcasters, "Hey, take a look. Hey, take a look.
56:06
This is something that's happening in your country.
56:11
Numbers have just gone 10x.
56:11
Yes, they're small, but they're gone 10x in the span of 3 months."
56:17
And then I remember we had a few months left of cash and I I bet the whole firm and I put everything into video.
56:20
I said, "We are going to be the world's best viral video makers along the lines of value shares and stories, but we want to ride the algo, not pollute it by bastardizing martial arts, but really showcasing the very best.
56:34
So, whether there's a knockout, that's great.
56:37
Spinning back kick, all that stuff, but in the context of How can I say I didn't want to cheapen martial arts.
56:42
I didn't want to to bastardize it and cheapen it and make it look like two thugs cussing at each other out, cuz that's not my experience in martial arts.
56:50
My martial arts experience has been about pain, love, pain and suffering, right?
56:54
And then as a result of that, of thousands of hours of training, you inherit these incredible values, right?
57:01
And something I'm sure you relate to, Tim.
57:03
I mean, for you to get heel hooked by Rumina Sato and then somebody else in Henzel Rodrigo popping your arm and you know, like this is part of the journey, love, pain and suffering.
57:11
And yet somehow you want to get back into it, right?
57:14
So, that to me is what martial arts is about, the unbreakable warrior spirit.
57:19
The beauty of authentic martial arts.
57:21
So, anyways, long story cut short, the combination of us making the bet on Facebook literally saved the company.
57:26
This is something that Facebook confirmed with us.
57:29
I actually I ended up getting invited by Zuck to go to Facebook headquarters a couple years ago.
57:36
And because out of 5,000 sports properties Mhm.
57:40
on Facebook, the number one producer of organic video views in the world is ONE Championship. Yeah.
57:48
We produced 30 billion organic video views last year, and this year we're on pace already for 40 billion. 40 billion, not million.
57:55
And I remember how fast we went from 100,000 organic video views for the whole year, and suddenly the next year it was like, you know, 5 million.
58:01
And the next year 100 million.
58:03
Like it just went ballistic. Yeah.
58:05
And without that, I don't think we would have been able to convince broadcasters and investors and brands and sponsors and athletes.
58:12
And now, as you know, Jim, as a business expert, once you've built a platform business, every global sports property is a platform business, where Mhm.
58:25
there are multiple stakeholders who derive economic benefit or social benefit or some level of benefit from the platform, and hence the platform becomes, quote unquote, monopolistic, right?
58:34
NBA, there's no way you can break NBA.
58:36
There's no way you can break NFL.
58:39
It's truly a platform business.
58:39
And so, we have achieved that status.
58:44
And like I said, if you'd asked me to start this business again, no way.
58:47
And it's less than 1% of 1% that we're standing here.
58:51
And there are many, many inflection points of luck. Yeah. Just blessing.
58:57
Yes, my team and I work our asses off, and we made the right bets when it came.
59:02
But, if you told me 13 years later, you're top 10 according to Nielsen, top 10 largest global sports media property, there's no way I would have thought that would have happened. It's crazy.
59:15
We're broadcasting live in 190 countries every single week. Yeah.
59:21
With the largest broadcasters, like it's Amazon on America, but it's Sky Sports in Europe.
59:26
In Japan it's U-Next, and in Thailand it's Channel 7, in Middle East it's BeIN Sports.
59:32
It boggles my mind what has happened.
59:32
A lot of hard work, a lot of love, pain, and suffering, but I have to be 100% honest, it's a lot of luck, a lot of luck.
59:42
But, putting on great fights, like your friend said, is not luck.
59:44
We have a chemistry lab, if you will, Yeah.
59:49
where we slice and dice qualitatively and quantitatively. Mhm.
59:53
It's a team of about 13 or 14 folks.
59:57
And we slice quantitatively and qualitatively, and you know, and all that.
1:00:00
And of course, one huge benefit is all of us on the matchmaking team, we're all martial artists. Mhm. So, it's like Matt Hume. Mhm.
1:00:09
You know legendary Matt Hume.
1:00:09
Folks like Rich Franklin, legendary martial artist himself.
1:00:13
And and so, got very lucky that these happen to be all my friends, right?
1:00:17
My martial arts buddies, and we're all working together, and we get to cook up the best fights.
1:00:24
And another advantage we have is, because we're not only doing MMA, right?
1:00:28
We're the world's largest martial arts organization, right?
1:00:30
We showcase everything from kickboxing, Muay Thai, submission grappling, boxing, MMA, and everything.
1:00:36
And the most important thing for us is signing the very best of the best athletes, the very best of the best martial artists.
1:00:42
But, very equally important is finishing ability.
1:00:47
So, this is something that's I don't know if other organizations look at it.
1:00:51
I'm sure they look at it collectively, but I don't know if they look at it when they sign athletes.
1:00:55
ONE Championship has a 70% finish rate. Yeah. That means it's absurd.
1:00:58
Of all our fights, 70% people get knocked out or tapped out or choked out. It's absurd. It's so high.
1:01:07
It's a global duopoly now, right?
1:01:07
UFC dominates in the West, we dominate in the East.
1:01:10
We're roughly the same size.
1:01:13
They have a 38% finish rate. And why is that?
1:01:16
Because in America, there's predominantly American wrestlers, like yourself.
1:01:19
And American wrestling is not necessarily geared towards finishing.
1:01:23
It's an unbelievable martial art that controls.
1:01:26
You can take the fight fighter down, pin him up against the cage, you can hold him, you can ground and pound him, but it's not necessarily a finishing finishing, right?
1:01:35
Versus out here we got a Rodtang.
1:01:36
It depends on the discipline where we sign the rule. Tole brothers, yeah. Those guys are killers.
1:01:41
We look for the best of the best, but we try to find athletes who come to kill.
1:01:45
And again, I don't mean kill in a bad way.
1:01:46
What I mean is the true origins of martial arts is self-defense.
1:01:53
Self-defense is not about dancing for points.
1:01:55
It's not about taking someone down and waiting and letting the judges score.
1:01:59
It's about finishing a robber coming to your house, somebody coming to harm your family.
1:02:07
Martial arts is about finishing a dangerous situation, right?
1:02:09
So that you live for another day.
1:02:13
That spirit, that Bushido, that samurai warrior spirit lives in one and lives in our athletes.
1:02:19
And that's why we have a 70% finish rate. All right.
1:02:21
So I have so many more questions to ask about that.
1:02:22
So we're going to come back to that, but I want to mention just a few things for folks.
1:02:28
So initially all that pushback, the 100-plus investors, the broadcasters, sorry, UFC is already taken this game and won it. You're too late.
1:02:39
And when I started this podcast in 2014, the vast majority of people I asked who were involved in the game told me I was too late. In 2000 14.
1:02:51
And now you're the number one business podcast in the world. Amazing.
1:02:53
And sometimes that's true, but it's not as true as often as people say it, right?
1:02:58
And some of the things I wrote down here, which were like, "My god, these seem like really important things."
1:03:05
Were I mean, there are tons, right?
1:03:07
But leaving finance, fight card construction, right?
1:03:11
Matchmaking, how to get Amazon Prime and Sky Sports.
1:03:13
We're going to get to that. Like that kind of stuff.
1:03:16
Sequoia and then social media {slash} non-event engagement because I've watched what you guys have done on social very, very closely and correct me if I'm wrong, it also seems like by diversifying outside of MMA and having Muay Thai, having pure submission the only way you make pure submission, well, I should say combat grappling interesting is if you have people finish, right? Yep.
1:03:45
You have to prioritize that for a general audience.
1:03:48
Muay Thai by itself is action-packed, right?
1:03:52
Particularly if you incentivize fighters and also I'd be so interested to hear like what are some of the other ingredients that you consider for putting on good fights.
1:04:02
So, you talked about finish rate, but by the virtue of having these other disciplines like Muay Thai also, you increase the likelihood of having clips that will get shared a lot, right? Because Yes.
1:04:13
man, you add elbows in Yes. Oh, man. Do you things change?
1:04:17
And there there are a few things and I might be misremembering, but I looked at it and I thought also in at least a lot of the fights that I saw, okay, rounds are short. That's smart.
1:04:27
It makes me think of K-1 where people put it all on the line.
1:04:33
And they weren't trying to conserve energy for round 10, right? Yep. Or something like that.
1:04:38
What are some of the other elements that go into constructing these these fight cards?
1:04:45
You mentioned the quantitative and the qualitative.
1:04:46
So, finishing rate would be one and that's not just matchmaking, but actually signing fighters in the first place.
1:04:55
What else goes into that?
1:04:55
Because it is incredibly consistent.
1:04:58
It is just I've never seen anything like it. Thank you, Tim.
1:05:03
I'm truly grateful that you can see that because we try our best to have the You'll see a typical one one championship card.
1:05:09
And tomorrow night we have one Friday fights, right? That's every week. We have 12 fights.
1:05:12
You'll see like eight, 10 of them will be finishes and all 12 will be barn burners, okay?
1:05:17
We don't have one championship where in other organizations may they may have a 12 fight card but eight fights are a little bit of a snooze fest or decisions and then the main co-main is amazing and it lights up the stadium.
1:05:32
It's literally from the go, first fight all the way to 12 fight, it's as if they're fighting for their lives.
1:05:37
So, I think first it's our scouts around the world scouted 10,000 of the very best martial arts on the planet.
1:05:45
We give out 50 offers a year.
1:05:47
And we have a criteria for what we look for, okay?
1:05:49
So, let's say you're the best in the world but you are a a decision, a points person.
1:05:56
It's very unlikely you'll be signed by one.
1:05:57
Doesn't matter if you are like 15 and 0 like Floyd Mayweather and but if you're there to like play a game, yeah, score points, that's not real martial arts.
1:06:06
And there's guys without a perfect record, as you know, some of the Thai world champions have 400 professional fights and they have lost 100 times. That's real fighting.
1:06:13
If you have fought 400 times and your record is 300 wins and 100 losses, that is an average world championship record in Thailand, okay, as an example of a of an elite fighter.
1:06:27
Because there are no like padded records.
1:06:28
Like if someone's 50 and 0, it's highly suspect that they were given easy opponents or they chose their opponents at the right time or there's a little bit of this kind of manufacturing and you see that a lot actually in the west, okay?
1:06:41
In the west there's a lot of 20 and 0, 15 and 0, 30 and 0, like whether it's in different combat sports.
1:06:46
It seems like the west really puts a priority.
1:06:49
But the problem with that is the longer you go with an 0, the more defensive you become as a fighter because you're protecting that 0. Yeah, totally.
1:06:59
So, when we sign athletes we look for the best of the best in the world, doesn't matter what discipline, but we look for that killer instinct and the finishing rate.
1:07:06
And we we really spend a lot of time looking at that.
1:07:10
So that when you get two pit bulls who are there to finish and they're both the very best in the world. So that's one layer.
1:07:22
You got to get the ingredients right.
1:07:24
But then as you said the incentives, so we pay the highest in the world for the win purse but also the bonuses, especially knockout, you know, finish bonuses.
1:07:33
And so that that's the quantitative side of things.
1:07:35
But then also backstage again before every big event I line up the entire card and I literally give and I think some of it's on social media already but some of my speeches, but I literally give like a two-minute Rocky Balboa type of speech.
1:07:50
And I don't do it for drama.
1:07:53
I do it because I really want to inspire every single athlete to give their very very best performance.
1:07:59
And so I talk about or I ask them about why are they here?
1:08:05
They spent typically 10, 15 years training 6 hours a day, 6 days a week to reach the pinnacle of martial arts, the highest level in the world in one championship.
1:08:16
And I ask them to think about all the sacrifices all the heartbreaks they suffered through, the injuries they've gone through, how many birthdays have they missed, how many friends, parties, how many cousins or nephews or nieces' birthdays have they missed, how many times have they had to sacrifice to get to this point.
1:08:33
And then I ask them is this your greatest love?
1:08:36
Is this what you are put on the planet for?
1:08:40
And I make them really go deep.
1:08:44
And if you're able to tap into a person's why, the deepest why and you're able to then also tap into everything they had to suffer.
1:08:54
And I tell them tonight it's broadcast live to 190 countries around the world with the biggest broadcasters.
1:09:00
Our last show in Tokyo at Saitama in March, our last big show.
1:09:10
We broke viewership record. We did 2.
1:09:10
3 billion organic video views on digital and social. Okay, 2.
1:09:15
3 billion on a single show.
1:09:17
I didn't know that at the time it was going to be that big at the time.
1:09:20
And that's excluding our TV broadcast, right?
1:09:21
So, our TV broadcast around the world.
1:09:22
So, and then we end up trending at number 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10, but trending in US and UK and France and Australia, Thailand, Japan.
1:09:31
It was just trending all over the world. China.
1:09:36
And I tell them, "How do you want the world to remember you tonight?
1:09:43
You have a chance to unleash your greatness upon the world in a way that you will make magical memories for your fans.
1:09:52
You will create something extraordinary."
1:09:56
And I've had fighters cry in those in those huddles I have. And then I walk away.
1:10:03
And the reason why I can give this kind of speech is because I have walked it I mean, maybe not at the elite level that they're at, but I have walked in their shoes in training and competing and injuries or whatever it is.
1:10:13
So, there's a a real bond that I have with our athletes.
1:10:22
And the fact that I train every day and I train with them.
1:10:23
I mean, that doesn't I don't want to name names, but I I train with different athletes that come by and you know, or I'm flying to Tokyo or I fly to Denver.
1:10:30
I go wherever I cuz I'm always training no matter where I am, I always train.
1:10:34
How do you produce a six sigma performance?
1:10:37
It's not because you train and you're I'm going to fight.
1:10:40
No, it's there has to be something bigger.
1:10:42
You have to be fighting for something bigger. It's almost an emotion.
1:10:44
It's almost an emotive state Mhm. of this is it.
1:10:48
This is my moment in time and I'm going to deliver everything I can and I'm going to be unbreakable.
1:10:52
And what Chatri told me in that locker room, all the sacrifices I went through, my parents going through, and if I win, of course the purse is big and blah blah blah all the other stuff.
1:11:06
If you're fighting for something bigger than yourself, you're unbreakable.
1:11:07
And so, that is what I at the end of the day try to remind our athletes that they are fighting for something much bigger than themselves.
1:11:16
Well, it certainly translates to a phenomenal viewer experience.
1:11:19
For folks who have not seen one, check it out.
1:11:22
You will not be disappointed. You can thank me later.
1:11:27
I do want to double click on two things.
1:11:30
So, the first is pushing all your chips in on Facebook and social media.
1:11:38
Because a lot of people, I'm just trying to time this out.
1:11:40
Maybe this is like 2014, 2015. Yeah, around there. Around there? Yeah. Okay.
1:11:49
So, a lot of people were pushing their chips in on social.
1:11:50
Maybe not in as aggressive and all-in fashion, but a lot of people were trying to make it work.
1:11:59
And a lot of people didn't figure it out. Right?
1:12:00
So, what I'm super curious about is what were the guiding tenets or the principles or the lessons learned where you zigged and zagged that allowed you to actually make it work?
1:12:13
That's kind of question number one.
1:12:15
And then I definitely have to get to this Sequoia meeting cuz I I want to know how the hell that happened and what happened in that meeting.
1:12:26
I really did not expect to see this in my research and I'm so happy I was surprised by it.
1:12:30
But, first on the social media because a lot of people to this day try to make it work and never figure it out.
1:12:37
So, what allowed you to translate pushing the chips in into success on social?
1:12:44
Again, there's a lot of element of good luck.
1:12:46
I don't want my team or I have to be so arrogant to think and to say and have the world believe that that it was just hard work and our and our genius. Yeah.
1:12:54
You know, I'm going to be an [ __ ] I'm sorry.
1:12:55
I'm going to jump in though.
1:12:57
I want to give credit where credit is due also because when I first saw you guys on Amazon Prime, I was like, oh, this is really interesting.
1:13:05
And then I followed you on social and then I was looking at the videos and I was like, okay, this is very smart.
1:13:08
I was like, number one, they are not stingy with highlights.
1:13:14
Like you share basically, as far as I can tell, all the best highlights. Yeah.
1:13:21
Which doesn't mean you shouldn't watch the full fights.
1:13:22
Like I I want to watch the full fights cuz it's like Rock'em Sock'em Robots the whole time.
1:13:25
But you share highlights and you also tell really, really good stories.
1:13:30
And I remember Stamp Fairtex, who doesn't hurt that she's pretty cute and does her dances and so on. But what a killer also. She's a beast. She's a beast. Oh my god.
1:13:43
Like when the opponent's backing away and she throws the liver kick.
1:13:47
I mean, it's just a brutal.
1:13:47
But But the way that you tell the story and also because you have such privileged access and focus on Muay Thai as well.
1:13:55
And as you mentioned, poor person's sport.
1:13:57
That's how a lot of people hope to get out of poverty.
1:13:59
They start fighting when they're really young.
1:14:00
And you have this incredible human interest story.
1:14:06
And you guys do a masterful job of combining that with spectacular fight footage.
1:14:13
But yes, there's always some luck involved.
1:14:15
I think you hit the nail on the head in terms of the controllable factors.
1:14:18
So, the controllable factors, obviously, you have to know what the combat sports fan wants, okay?
1:14:23
But at the same time, if you're only appealing to the combat sports fan, it's a smaller market. Mhm.
1:14:29
But if you're able to tell a story and make it more mainstream, again, about abject poverty or tragedy or adversity or whatever it may be, that can transcend beyond combat sports fan and go viral around the world to human interest stories.
1:14:44
So, of course, one is my team and I and I was literally the first social media manager and I understood that you have to crack the algorithm.
1:14:53
But if you just blindly follow the algorithm, you'll put out junk because you're just chasing endlessly.
1:14:57
You have to be very clear about who do you want to be, what are you trying to communicate, and what are you trying to do by giving this video to your fans?
1:15:06
We always say we want to evoke emotion, strong emotion.
1:15:10
Laughter, sadness, inspiration, awe.
1:15:14
Something very like oh MY GOD, OH WHAT?
1:15:15
SOMETHING that's going to be surprise and delight you in your day so you're going to hang out with us and watch 10 times a day when you go whenever you go TikToks, Instagram, wherever or Douyin Kuaishou Weibo in China, etc.
1:15:29
But at the same time, you have to be true to why we started this company.
1:15:33
You have to be true to real martial arts. Finishes.
1:15:37
Real bushido, the warrior way.
1:15:41
Not bastardizing or cheapening it into some sort of street fight thug by having your athletes create fake drama about hating each other or whatever it is.
1:15:50
That's just not what I think will transcend and become truly mainstream.
1:15:54
I think at the end of the day, people want to watch all over the world the very best of the best go at it.
1:16:01
But they want to know the stories behind why this person is what they're doing and and why he or she is where they're at and what are the stakes of this fight.
1:16:11
And of course, we have to be very sharp about every single platform has a specific algorithm that it's looking for and marry that.
1:16:18
That's all the skills aspect of what we can control.
1:16:19
But what I mean by luck is you look at the mobile device, okay?
1:16:23
Millennial Gen Z's, which make up 80% of our audience today. What do they do?
1:16:28
Their first window of media consumption is their mobile device.
1:16:31
They wake up in the morning, they look at TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, whatever it is.
1:16:33
They look at it 10, 20 times a day before they go to bed, that's the last point of media consumption. What does that mean?
1:16:38
You need to dominate the mobile device.
1:16:39
And that was what we did in 2014.
1:16:43
We said to ourselves, we are going to dominate the mobile device. And guess what? Why is this lucky?
1:16:50
Cuz mobile device took off, Facebook took off, all the social took off, but the ping pong ball, the tennis ball, the soccer ball, the basketball, the football, you cannot see clearly on a mobile device.
1:17:04
And I'll give you a great example.
1:17:04
When Naomi Osaka won the US Open for the first time, and I remember cuz she's half Japanese, right?
1:17:09
So I was like, "Oh my god, a half Japanese person won, like me, blah blah."
1:17:12
So I looked at Facebook and I could see there were highlights of her of her match.
1:17:18
And I looked at it and I I couldn't see the ball.
1:17:20
Two seconds later, I just scrolled past cuz I'm like, I couldn't consume it.
1:17:25
That's what I mean by luck.
1:17:25
Combat sports is the perfect content for mobile devices.
1:17:30
And that's why you have the two giants, UFC and ONE, today dominating in that sphere and why we have millennial and Gen Z audience and why other sports are struggling and trying to catch up, but they they have the wrong content genre for mobile device because you cannot see the soccer ball, the football, the ping pong ball, the tennis ball.
1:17:47
You can barely see the basketball.
1:17:49
It is very hard to consume.
1:17:51
And no one's going to watch a 200-lap car race on your mobile, right? You're just not.
1:17:55
That's what I mean about luck.
1:17:56
But yes, everything you described about our content and how we explain a stand fair tax or yes, she's the best in the world, but does she twerk? Does she dance? Does she sing? Is she cute?
1:18:04
Is her personality larger than life?
1:18:06
And that's her real personality.
1:18:09
That's another thing about us.
1:18:10
Everything we do is about authenticity.
1:18:13
There's no manufacturing.
1:18:13
There's no like, "Oh, well, let that person be a bad guy, that person be a good guy.
1:18:17
Let's create drama between them. They hate each other.
1:18:19
Let's stage a camera backstage so they bump into each other." We don't do any of that.
1:18:23
We just let them be who they really are.
1:18:24
We tell their real stories.
1:18:27
And again, but the one important thread for all of our content and everything we do is that it's real martial arts.
1:18:37
I want to give you and your team some additional credit, too.
1:18:38
In addition to the human interest, in addition to the highlights, you guys also are very clever.
1:18:43
You mentioned strong emotions, right? So, laughter.
1:18:48
I've seen quite a lot of funny stuff Yeah. Yes. Yes.
1:18:53
that is organic as a product of the personalities.
1:18:55
Sort of outtakes where like somebody's actually kicking their boyfriend in the head as trying to demonstrate a technique. It's like, "Oh, shit."
1:19:01
And then you see them doing damage control or whatever. Yeah.
1:19:04
And might make me sound like a bad person to find that funny, but it is pretty funny when you watch it.
1:19:08
And also, I remember very specific segments where for instance, you had some absolute Muay Thai heavies.
1:19:15
And by heavies, I don't mean big.
1:19:18
I just mean killers kicking a device.
1:19:21
People may have seen these in arcades and so on where you might punch what looks like a speed ball and then it shows you your power output.
1:19:29
And you had a number of them kicking a device that was similar showing like pounds per square inch or kilograms per square inch of Yeah. impact.
1:19:36
And I mean, that is pretty fight sports specific, but I'd never seen something like that done before.
1:19:42
And I'm like, "Okay, that's very, very clever. Like, that is clever.
1:19:45
I'm going to share that with my friends." And Yeah.
1:19:48
even though it might be within the fight porn WhatsApp channel, they'll share that with their five other friends who aren't on it and it'll perpetuate it.
1:19:58
I have to give credit and I tell our team this, we have the very best social media team on the planet.
1:20:02
And many of my teammates have been on this journey for a long time with me.
1:20:05
But, I do believe I'm not trying to toot my own horn, but it's the fact that I actually built the first page and I I was actually a social media manager.
1:20:15
Like, and something about my personality is probably very similar to your Tim is like, when you do something, you're all in. Yeah.
1:20:23
So, when I decided that Facebook was going to be it, I I said to myself, "I want to be the best Facebook manager on the planet." So, I was obsessed.
1:20:30
Not about reading, I was obsessed about experimenting, learning every little trick.
1:20:35
And of course, I was reading in in variations, but I would look at all these other pages that were doing very well.
1:20:41
And you know, and and I would just steal ideas and think about concepts and just being completely consumed by it.
1:20:49
And of course, it helped a lot that I myself, because I'm a lifelong martial arts, I know what the fight fan wants. I know. I know exactly, right?
1:20:55
At the same time, I wanted to build a property that transcended fight fans.
1:21:01
I wanted to be truly mainstream, right?
1:21:03
Again, that's something that NFL has done incredibly well in America that when it's Super Bowl, the entire country watches.
1:21:11
And that is something that one day I do want when we have a major world championship fight that the whole world stops to watch like Olympics.
1:21:19
I think when there's a gold medal like Olympic swimming final or 100-meter dash final, I think it's it's something like a billion billion five people watch, right?
1:21:30
I can see that happening with ONE.
1:21:30
I can genuinely see that having a billion billion five concurrent viewers watching.
1:21:35
Or World Cup Soccer finals, I think they did a couple billion concurrent viewers.
1:21:40
I can see ONE doing it cuz we've already broken our previous high by 300 or 400%. in our last event.
1:21:47
So, can you imagine on these big numbers of 30 and 40 billion organic video views, we are still breaking our records on a single individual event by 3x.
1:21:54
So, we're just scratching the surface of what ONE can be.
1:22:00
Let me take you back to the pain and suffering for a second.
1:22:03
So, you're struggling struggling. Mom, I want to quit.
1:22:10
Yeah, that sounds like a great idea. You should quit.
1:22:11
And then you're like, wait a [ __ ] second. And it's not working. It's not working.
1:22:17
Suddenly, you have some graphs to show from social media.
1:22:20
Hey broadcaster in country X, this is what's happening in your backyard.
1:22:26
And yes, these numbers are small, but take a look at the growth rate.
1:22:27
And so the the tide starts to shift.
1:22:33
And then you seem to hit an inflection point.
1:22:36
And I've had Roelof Botha on on this show before from Sequoia.
1:22:39
How important or unimportant was that meeting that you had with Michael Moritz and Douglas Leone?
1:22:48
And for people who don't know who they are, these guys are kingmakers.
1:22:54
I mean, they are the top of the top.
1:22:59
Wizard of Oz venture capitalists behind so many successes.
1:23:01
We could spend the next 30 minutes listing them all off.
1:23:03
I mean, these guys are absolute icons.
1:23:07
Was that meeting important?
1:23:09
And then, assuming it was, how on earth did it happen?
1:23:14
And what did you do in that meeting that made the impression it made?
1:23:18
I called the $100 million breakfast because Sequoia Asia orchestrated it.
1:23:24
They thought we were onto something very big.
1:23:28
And they said, "Mike Moritz and Douglas Leone are coming, and we're only booking a handful of meetings for them because of their very busy schedule."
1:23:35
What was the organization that that helped book it for you? Sequoia Capital Asia. Oh, Sequoia Asia.
1:23:40
It was the managing director Sequoia Asia run by Shailendra Singh, okay? Yep.
1:23:45
And he was the managing partner.
1:23:47
How did you connect with them in the first place?
1:23:50
So, this is This is what I mean about serendipity.
1:23:51
Long story cut short, it was April around April 2016.
1:23:58
We had hired a small investment bank.
1:24:01
And we said, "We want to now go raise institutional funding."
1:24:04
And we didn't have any institutions at the time.
1:24:06
We were still bootstrapping.
1:24:09
But we think we had enough to go raise institutional funding.
1:24:13
We had a slide with our metric, a couple slides with our metrics, all these hockey stick charts.
1:24:17
And that was I think 4:00.
1:24:19
The meeting ended with our bank.
1:24:23
We out and now we didn't think anything of it.
1:24:25
2 hours later the investment banker calls us and says, "Sequoia Asia wants to meet you."
1:24:29
And we're like, "How did you What?"
1:24:33
This investment banker, he walked in to the elevator and Shailendra Singh, the managing partner of Sequoia Asia, was in the elevator.
1:24:44
He happened to be carrying the ONE Championship slides, the the hockey stick charts.
1:24:47
And Shailendra said to our investment bank, Ripple dot his name the thing, and our investment banker was a guy named Atul Kukreja.
1:24:56
He He turns and says, "What company is that?"
1:24:58
Well, it's hockey and he goes, "Oh, it's a It's a sports company called ONE Championship." "What is that?"
1:25:01
And on the elevator ride, Shailendra decided, "I want a meeting with these guys. I'm going to fund them." Off of the magic. That's bananas.
1:25:12
This little would happen.
1:25:12
So, on Sunday, it was a Sunday cuz Sequoia Asia demanded to meet us, to meet me. Meet me. Yeah.
1:25:21
So, on Sunday I had breakfast.
1:25:24
Me and my partner had breakfast with Sequoia.
1:25:26
And they told us, I mean, Shailendra said, "We want you to drop the investment bank.
1:25:31
We want you not to go on the roadshow. We will fund it."
1:25:37
This is the first institutional funding.
1:25:40
And they funded and it was a small check.
1:25:42
I think it was like 15 million.
1:25:44
But about a year later, I think, is when Mike Moritz and Douglas Leone were in town only for a couple days cuz they're doing a thing doing a Asia-wide tour.
1:25:55
So, only a couple days in Singapore.
1:25:56
And Shailendra said, "Hey, I want them to meet you.
1:26:02
They want to meet you, whatever it is. We want to meet."
1:26:03
Of course I know who they are. They're legendary.
1:26:04
As Tim said, Mike Moritz and Douglas Leone are probably the greatest investors in Silicon Valley has ever seen, you know, amongst the greatest.
1:26:11
Sequoia Capital obviously one of the greatest, if not the greatest venture capital firm in history.
1:26:19
I go to breakfast and it's Mike Moritz and it's Doug and Shailendra. So, it's the four of us.
1:26:25
And I'm sitting there and they're asking all sorts of questions and Mike Moritz is asking all these questions and I will never forget it at the end of the breakfast Mike says, "HRT."
1:26:40
There are founders who their entire reason for being born on this planet and he named I think it was like you think he named Bill Gates or whatever it is, you know, for Microsoft that were put on this earth for that one reason to go after something gargantuan and you are that guy for this opportunity.
1:26:58
And there he said, "Most founders are there for a business opportunity.
1:26:59
They see a pain problem a pain point in the market and they solve the solution and they go IPO or they sell the company and then they move on to the next thing."
1:27:08
And he just looked me in the eye and says, "This is going to be a home run no matter cuz they grilled me all different kind of questions and the funding actually came out a hundred million dollar funding came out of Silicon Valley.
1:27:20
So, this is the first sports investment in the history of Sequoia in Silicon Valley.
1:27:23
So, it didn't even come out of the Asia fund.
1:27:25
It came out of the main fund to invest into One.
1:27:28
I might be getting the years wrong but around 2017. Mhm.
1:27:32
And if my memory serves me right, I think that was a hundred million dollars for at a billion dollar valuation around there. Mhm.
1:27:42
And man, I was in shock because after the breakfast which I thought went okay and it only went it was an hour.
1:27:47
Literally two hours later Shailendra says, "We want to cut you a check for a hundred million dollars."
1:27:51
Two hours after the breakfast.
1:27:52
So, we had the breakfast at 8:00 in the morning.
1:27:53
I remember 10:00 11:00 in the morning I'm walking and he Shailendra calls me and says, "We want to put a check for a hundred million bucks."
1:28:00
They think you're onto something special.
1:28:04
And man, I'm eternally grateful to this day.
1:28:06
I mean, eternally grateful to to Mike Moritz and Douglas Leone. They're unbelievable.
1:28:09
I mean, in that one hour they slice and dice in the business completely and even me as a person.
1:28:16
I'm telling this whole journey have been moments of serendipity, moments of just good blessings for us to get this far.
1:28:22
It's mind-blowing to me and I would never have done it.
1:28:26
If you told me do it again, I would never I just this luck. Yeah. Of course, the elevator.
1:28:30
I hope that investment banker gets a box of chocolates too every once in a while.
1:28:36
Atin Kukreja, I'm giving a shoutout to Atin Kukreja. Ripple.
1:28:37
dot He is the best TMT investment bank out here in Asia.
1:28:43
You know, just incredible shop. What is TMT?
1:28:48
TMT is technology, media, and telecom investment bank. Got it.
1:28:51
So, you did have a lot of luck with that amazing encounter in the elevator.
1:28:55
You also had to perform in the breakfast.
1:29:00
And those can both be true, right?
1:29:02
So, there there's definitely a skill element needed to capitalize on the luck.
1:29:07
And what I'd love to hear about you mentioned them asking a lot of questions, slicing and dicing the business as well as you personally.
1:29:15
I guess two things that may be too long ago, but to whatever degree you you recollect, even an impression, what types of questions made them different from perhaps other investors in other meetings?
1:29:31
What types of questions did they ask?
1:29:33
And number two, what were the main pitch points from your perspective that you think made the difference?
1:29:42
It was very interesting cuz I remember Mike Moritz asking very qualitative human questions about me, about my motivation, about how I hire people.
1:29:54
It was just very qualitative.
1:29:56
And so, I didn't think the breakfast would result in investment.
1:30:00
I thought it would just be another prolonged process that I'd have to go to Silicon Valley and it'd be just a long prolonged process.
1:30:07
And he quickly sussed out very quickly he said, "This thing is so big, this project is so big, but it's going to require a founder with unbelievable resilience.
1:30:17
And that's why you got to find the guy who this is his life's calling."
1:30:23
He said, "It also requires a founder who can attract and retain the very best people in the planet.
1:30:29
And not every business plan needs that."
1:30:30
He said, "But in this case, it requires a founder that can attract and retain the very best."
1:30:38
And he just looked me in the in the eye and goes, "I I think you're the guy.
1:30:39
I think you're going to be able to convince broadcasters, athletes, investors, group presidents, chief commercial officers, internal and external stakeholders to build this whole thing."
1:30:53
Man, I'm like, in 1 hour, how how could he have guessed that about me?
1:30:57
And I didn't even have that impression of myself, right?
1:31:00
I just thought, "Hey, I'm a guy who loves martial arts, and I'm a little bit crazy, so I have a high tolerance for risk, and I guess, you know, even though I did almost quit in 2014, I guess I do have a little bit of resilience, but I didn't think of myself in the terms way Mike Moritz was saying.
1:31:22
And Doug, his questions were about the business.
1:31:23
And he educated me in that 1 hour that what I'm sitting on in the sports property is a platform business.
1:31:30
He's the ultimate platform business, actually.
1:31:32
He said, "Most tech companies, SaaS or platform this that and the other, they can get broken."
1:31:37
And he gave a great example.
1:31:37
I don't want to name names of a tech company, but it was a relatively well-known tech company.
1:31:41
It is a relatively well-known tech name, but he but he gave that example and said, "Three PhD engineers in Stanford, if they come up with the right solution, can dismantle this, you know, at the time it was a $10 billion company."
1:31:54
They they can dismantle like that.
1:31:54
I think I know which one now.
1:31:55
I just He said, "There are no three engineers in this world that can dismantle what you've created right up at this point."
1:32:02
Cuz at that point I we had had a few billion organic video views and at that point maybe we're in 117, 120 countries broadcast.
1:32:12
There was clearly momentum being built and clearly we'd broken through a lot of barriers.
1:32:17
There's government starting to get interested in us.
1:32:19
So he could see that different stakeholders were going to derive economic value from from the platform we've built.
1:32:25
But he could also and he he literally said this to me and I remember it.
1:32:28
He said there's no engineering team in this world that can dismantle you. Mhm.
1:32:34
And that was very powerful.
1:32:34
Most companies, okay, tech companies, software companies can be dismantled by a great team that does it better, faster, cheaper, or whatever, right?
1:32:49
But no sports property, no global sports property can get dismantled in a heartbeat.
1:32:55
Like we now have about 500 million fans, a little over 500 million fans, okay? Globally.
1:33:02
If I left ONE and I said you you have to now compete with ONE Championship.
1:33:06
I'm going to look at ONE Championship is going to do about 40 billion organic video views this year.
1:33:11
They have 500 million fans.
1:33:12
They're in 190 countries broadcast live every single week.
1:33:15
They have the best athletes across every single discipline. Like where do I begin?
1:33:22
Do I fly it to Amazon and say, "Hey, it's Chatri. Do you remember me?"
1:33:27
Or do I go to our our world champions and say, "Hey, your contract's going to end."
1:33:29
I would not be able to replicate this or at least Tim, you'd have to give me, you know, you and I would have to go raise 10 billion dollars together and you have to give me at least another 10 years to gather that many fans, to put out that many videos.
1:33:41
We put out about 20,000 videos a year right now, right? All produced in house.
1:33:46
And again, Douglas Leone, Doug just nailed it.
1:33:50
On one hand, Doug is this like business model genius that's slicing and dicing.
1:33:54
On On hand, Mike was slicing and dicing the the human characteristics.
1:33:57
If I was right founder, if I was right entrepreneur, did I have the right skills?
1:34:02
And he really narrowed it down to the number one skill for this thing to work is a founder whose greatest strength is to attract and retain resources or attract and retain talent, internal talent, the very best people, but the very best athletes, the very best governments, investors, and etc. etc.
1:34:22
Again, I didn't think of myself that way.
1:34:24
It's very humbling to think of that, right?
1:34:25
But in the end, Mike and Doug both, and I don't know how they saw it, but are dead right.
1:34:30
If you ask me, what is the necessary skill required even to this day, Yeah.
1:34:36
it would be exactly what Mike said, and it's exactly what Doug said about the business.
1:34:38
In 1 hour, I don't know if they prepared a plan, I don't know, but they slice and dice and then And again, like 2 hours later, literally, Shondra calls me and says, "We want to cut you a check for 100 million."
1:34:50
And I think it was about a billion-dollar valuation around there.
1:34:54
Did you give a presentation at the beginning of the breakfast, or was it just conversation?
1:34:59
No, I just sat down, and it was like breakfast with your uncles.
1:35:04
It was so informal and so casual.
1:35:04
I had a presentation prepared.
1:35:07
I have my laptop, but it ended up just being like, "How do you like your eggs?"
1:35:12
And da da da da da, and like it just Yeah, it just flowed as a conversation. Yeah.
1:35:15
Obviously, they're legends in the business, and they've earned their reputation that way.
1:35:18
They The experience base must be so vast in sussing out business models and founders and and entrepreneurs and whatnot, that they can You know, it's pattern recognition.
1:35:30
They have a very well-developed water feel Oh, yes. for these things.
1:35:33
Was there anything that you learned in all of the 100-plus prior pitch meetings that you brought to bear on that conversation in terms of knowing which points to hit?
1:35:43
I imagine they also, by that point, were very much a warm audience in the sense that regional Sequoia had invested.
1:35:50
they were probably pre-sold on the metrics or their analysts or associates at Sequoia had combed over all the numbers and everything ahead of time.
1:36:02
But was there anything after all of your pitch meeting experiences that you felt you brought to bear on that meeting?
1:36:10
I remember that breakfast like yesterday.
1:36:12
I just remember walking away feeling like everything was so laid-back almost disarming. Mhm.
1:36:23
I don't know that maybe their line of questioning or how they did it is just like there was no gamesmanship, there's nothing I was just like plump.
1:36:27
Whatever they asked, the way they asked it, I felt comfortable enough to just say like just give them the good, bad, and ugly of the business. Mhm.
1:36:35
Versus in the earlier days, I might have tried to paint the most positive light possible, right? Mhm.
1:36:41
I'm sure that if it was my very, very first time meeting Sequoia and I was that way, it maybe not have worked, but I just went with the flow.
1:36:46
I remember that morning I just went with the flow and that's why after the breakfast I thought, man, there's going to be a lot more meetings because there's no way there's going to invest.
1:36:54
And and I actually they didn't tell me that this meeting was one one and done.
1:36:56
They I had no expectations.
1:36:59
They just said, "Hey, come to breakfast." That was literally it.
1:37:02
And they didn't tell me anything, okay? Yeah.
1:37:05
And it was again 2 hours later that they called and said, "Hey, we want to put 100 million."
1:37:08
And I was shocked cuz I'm like but Doug and Michael only met me for 1 hour.
1:37:14
But they're legends for a reason, right? I I don't know.
1:37:16
I mean, they're a lot smarter than than I am, so what do I know?
1:37:20
Well, I think you know a thing or two, it would seem.
1:37:24
Or you're doing a great job of faking it.
1:37:25
Either way, it seems to be working out for you.
1:37:28
I know a lot about martial arts, how about that?
1:37:29
I know a lot about fighting.
1:37:31
Yeah, that's true and I don't want you to over short sell yourself in some other departments.
1:37:37
So, let me ask you a a little bit more about the business side. Sure.
1:37:41
Whether it was before the Sequoia meeting or afterwards, what were of most important broadcaster {slash} platform deals.
1:37:50
Of course, I'm based in the US, so Amazon Prime leaps to my mind, but maybe that wasn't the most important because sometimes, as you know, to grease the path for all of your future larger customers, you need one marquee customer.
1:38:05
And maybe the marquee customer was not in the US, it was somewhere else that kind of de-risked the proposition for other folks like Amazon Prime. I have no idea.
1:38:13
So, I'm just curious what some of the most important initial dominoes were in that kind of broadcaster Yeah.
1:38:22
ecosystem and how they happen.
1:38:24
I don't know where I read this, but I read this saying of like go chase your dream and the path will appear, okay? Mhm.
1:38:34
And the people will appear.
1:38:34
Something along that lines, okay?
1:38:37
I'm screwing up the quote, but when I started this thing, it is crazy how much luck.
1:38:42
Again, just like that breakfast I said, right?
1:38:48
But around that same time, a guy named Fabian Stechel from CAA, which CAA is the second largest agency business, right?
1:38:56
They do all media rights for all the major sports properties.
1:38:57
They have all the major Hollywood stars and you know, It's huge, huge talent agency. Yeah, exactly.
1:39:02
Very proper but they do all the sports media rights properties and you know, negotiations.
1:39:08
Literally, in 2016, 2017, around that same time period, Fabian and I, we met over video call because one of the divisions within CAA was looking at and potentially investing in us. Mhm.
1:39:24
And Fabian and I just hit it off.
1:39:26
And he's based in New York.
1:39:28
What is his job or what was his job there? Oh, he's still there.
1:39:30
He's He's a very senior person.
1:39:32
He's basically in charge of selling media rights for properties, for the biggest sports properties. I got you. I think he did NASCAR.
1:39:38
I forget which ones, but the very big ones, MLB, etc.
1:39:43
And again, like almost 10 years ago, he spotted us who's in this meeting where the investment arm of CA was looking at invest at an early stage company like ours.
1:39:55
And Fabian was from the media right side and Fabian and I hit it off and he actually was one that helped orchestrate this Amazon deal.
1:40:04
But that's what I mean, Tim, along the way, so many incredible people appeared and just suddenly believed in what we were doing, believed in in that the world needed a major global sports property out of the continent of Asia.
1:40:18
Cuz if you think about it, all the big sports properties around the world, global sports property, only came from the west.
1:40:23
We're literally the first and only global sports property coming out of the east sending content around the world, okay?
1:40:30
Maybe they saw that the addressable market was huge, maybe they saw the brand.
1:40:33
It's hard for me to know exactly.
1:40:36
How did you initially connect with was it Fabian? Yeah. CAA.
1:40:41
Did you just get a cold email one day?
1:40:44
So, I might be getting the dates wrong, but I think when Sequoia announced they invested in us, that came with a lot of interest. Yeah, for sure. Right?
1:40:53
Michael Ovitz, Douglas Roland investing in one.
1:40:55
Again, CAA's division that invests contacted us and we did a call.
1:41:00
But what transpired from there was a friendship with Fabian and again, he was instrumental in helping us crack the US market.
1:41:08
And CAA was also instrumental in getting us Sky Sports in the UK.
1:41:10
You know, that's the biggest sports broadcaster, it's the ESPN of whatever it is, of UK, of Europe. Mhm. It's huge.
1:41:18
It's literally one thing after another.
1:41:20
I'll give you a great example, okay? Another great example.
1:41:23
I am on this panel for Milken Institute.
1:41:27
It's a conference, a business conference.
1:41:29
I'm on this sports panel.
1:41:33
And literally next to me is a name now a very close brother, a friend, named Hassan Al-Thawadi, who at the time was chairman of FIFA Qatar, Mhm. the World Cup Qatar.
1:41:44
And this was also like 8 years ago.
1:41:48
So, we're sitting on a panel, and then there's NBA, and then it's F1.
1:41:53
And they just sat us next to each other.
1:41:56
And Hassan turns me and says, "Chatri, I want to meet you afterwards."
1:41:57
I said, "Oh, yeah, of course."
1:42:00
We have this meeting, and he's like, "Chatri, I've been doing Muay Thai for like 5 years.
1:42:04
I love Demetrious Johnson. I love Rodtang."
1:42:07
And we had this 1-hour powwow, and I'm like thinking, "This is the chairman of Qatar World Cup, which is going to be happening in I think I don't know, 4 or 5 years from now, right?"
1:42:15
And he's like, "Chatri, hey, why don't you come to Qatar?
1:42:18
Just I want to show you around, Hassan."
1:42:19
And we became very fast friends, and I flew to Qatar for the first time during COVID in 2020.
1:42:26
Everything was shut down.
1:42:26
I got some special visa to leave the country Singapore, and got some special visa to be allowed to enter Qatar.
1:42:33
I go there, and now I've been to Qatar, and Qatar's literally like a second home to me now.
1:42:39
Qatar Investment Authority, the government of Qatar invested in ONE.
1:42:40
As a result of this, me sitting in Milken next to Hassan Al-Thawadi, who is literally like a brother now, who's a martial artist like you, Tim, okay?
1:42:52
Time-wise, just to put it on the timeline, was that after or before the the Sequoia investment? That was after. After?
1:43:00
That was around the same time, maybe 2017, 2018.
1:43:01
Sequoia was around 2017, so maybe a year after that. Yeah.
1:43:05
What happened was after the word got out in Asia, but around the world that Mike and Doug personally, or GGF, it's called the Sequoia Global Growth Fund, which is managed by them, by Doug and Mike, invested in ONE.
1:43:19
That's when we got invited to speak at Milken, you know, World Economic Forum, like it just suddenly all the pieces started coming coming together, but at each of these things was somebody who loved martial arts, or saw the purity of what ONE he was doing and how different it was from anything else that existed on the on the planet.
1:43:35
Yeah, it was one thing after another and again like when you opened this talk, you said, "Hey, I have this this WhatsApp group with my buddies who are all and your friend Doug introduced you to this one."
1:43:44
That is literally how all the dots have connected is like somebody saw that and then you said, "Chatri, I don't mean to offend you, but it reminds me of Pride and K-1."
1:43:52
And of course I know your background having lived in Japan.
1:43:56
I'm sure we're going to end up training together, okay?
1:43:58
Like Just weird Just go easy on my right elbow. Yeah.
1:44:03
The weirdest coincidences, I'm telling you, man.
1:44:06
I really believe that sometimes when you chase a dream that's aligned fully with your passion and your purpose in life.
1:44:13
My purpose, my mom told me from when I was a five that I'm here to help the world or help people.
1:44:19
And how do I help people today?
1:44:19
You say, "Well, our athletes we change our lives and through the stories of our athletes we inspire all of our fans to live their greatest life."
1:44:29
Every week we give magical memories to families with their fathers and sons or daughters watching in front of the TV.
1:44:36
Like I'll give you some in Thailand again which you're very familiar with.
1:44:39
In Thailand, ONE Championship is like as big if not bigger than NFL or NBA's in America.
1:44:46
The number of fans have come up to me and said, "I spent time with my father more than I've ever spent because of ONE Championship because every Friday as a family we sit down in front of the TV and we watch ONE Championship."
1:44:57
Man, like that is exactly how I got introduced to Muay Thai. Yeah.
1:45:01
My father took me to Lumpinee Stadium, which you have been, when I was nine years old and despite all the, you know, I had a complicated relation with my father, didn't see him for decades.
1:45:11
A lot of anger, a lot of hatred, but in the end I'm full of gratitude for all the good he did for me and without him I would never have found my greatest love, which is martial arts.
1:45:23
When I was nine years old and the fact that that's my most poignant memory of my father to this day.
1:45:28
And that magical memory is happening all over the country of 70 million people in Thailand where I grew up.
1:45:34
I just came back from Thailand and it still doesn't register. It's wild.
1:45:38
I land in the country and it's like imagine Tim if you would started NFL and it became popular in your lifetime, let's just say in America and everyone knew Tim started NFL. It's like that. Yeah, it's wild.
1:45:49
It's the most surreal experience as a kid growing up in Thailand and to see what's happened now.
1:45:53
But now I I really do believe that my mom's words about helping others somehow it all it all feels almost like destiny, you know?
1:46:03
My father named me warrior. He took me to Muay Thai.
1:46:10
I was so obsessed with it and I am still obsessed with it that it became my life and I could have had a very comfortable life in the investment world as a hedge fund manager or entrepreneur other business or whatever.
1:46:23
You know, I could have done real estate or whatever it is.
1:46:24
But somehow it's weirdest thing.
1:46:28
I just feel like my destiny is to be here, right here, right at this moment.
1:46:34
And everything that came with it and all the the good, bad, and ugly that happened in my life somehow have led me to this moment, right?
1:46:41
Sorry to be so a little bit cornball with you.
1:46:42
You know, I'm a very philosophical guy.
1:46:44
I think deeply about the meaning of life and I think deeply about what is it that I want to do?
1:46:50
Do meaning that I don't own a lot of fast cars. I own a Toyota.
1:46:55
I don't have any material desires. It's kind of weird.
1:46:57
I don't have You know, this is a G-Shock watch.
1:47:00
I don't have many material things. I I own almost nothing.
1:47:03
And it's because I just learned a long time ago being poor that all that kind of stuff is attaching yourself to material things versus attaching yourself to a purpose or meaning of life, right? I don't know.
1:47:19
I found much more deeper fulfillment and happiness having found and aligned my passion and my purpose than I ever did buying any anything material.
1:47:30
Well, I also imagine given your background and experiences that attaching yourself to material goods or just subconsciously becoming attached to them as you accumulate them and value them more and more highly feels like skating on very thin ice compared to purpose which is much much harder to take away.
1:47:51
Just seems like psychologically it makes all the sense in the world and I'd love to ask uh I I have a lot of questions remaining.
1:48:00
I am definitely going to ask you.
1:48:02
I'll plant the seed about Henzo.
1:48:04
I want to hear more about Henzo and his role in your life. Yeah.
1:48:08
Before we get to that though I want to ask a few specific questions.
1:48:14
You mentioned philosophy.
1:48:17
I also recall the One Up On Wall Street the Lynch book.
1:48:21
And I'm wondering if if there any books that you have either reread quite a bit on your own or gifted to other people.
1:48:32
And this comes to mind because we you're attracting talent, right?
1:48:37
You're cultivating talent and stakeholders.
1:48:39
And I've been involved with quite a lot of companies since 2007, 2008 and I remember you know, visiting the Shopify offices for the first time cuz I was the their first advisor in like 2008 or 9. Crazy.
1:48:54
What an incredible story.
1:48:56
Yeah, those guys are incredible and they have at least at the time that I visited, they had for instance Andy Grove, High Output Management and a few other books that they would give to everyone when they became an employee or at least someone in a management position at Shopify.
1:49:11
So for all these reasons, I'm just curious if there any books that stand out to you that you've reread or that you've gifted or recommended to other people.
1:49:22
I don't have one book that I go to, but I would say a few books that I think are very interesting.
1:49:29
One is a book that recently came out called 32 Principles by a friend of mine, Henry Gracie.
1:49:35
So, he's part of the Gracie family, the jiu-jitsu family.
1:49:37
And the 32 Principles relates to jiu-jitsu, but it's a double meaning.
1:49:43
Each principle is also relating to how to live life, okay?
1:49:47
And I found that to be a very powerful almost like Bible of what martial arts has been for me, but also how I also have been here from jiu-jitsu I've been doing for about 20 years, and all the life lessons that applies. It's very simple things.
1:50:06
It's, you know, like in jiu-jitsu, if you force something it often doesn't come to you.
1:50:13
If you align and connect and you go with the flow you'll be able to catch that submission. Mhm.
1:50:21
You'll be able to choke somebody out or get an armbar, whatever.
1:50:24
But often times when you go for something directly and you force it, it's a very good analogy for life.
1:50:27
You know, certain things that you can't force passion or purpose.
1:50:32
It's either that's your true self or you're faking it.
1:50:38
If you're faking it to yourself, you only get so far and you're faking it to the world.
1:50:40
That's one book that I think I would recommend anybody to read, whether you do jiu-jitsu or not.
1:50:43
There's a lot of powerful lessons in that.
1:50:48
And sorry, it's you know, very martial arts cuz I'm always martial arts obsessed.
1:50:53
Another person that I think books and there's a lot of books on Bruce Lee.
1:50:59
Bruce Lee is someone and people may think of may not truly understand.
1:51:01
Bruce Lee was, yes, he was a world-class martial artist, but he was a a very deep person and how he thought about life and meaning of life.
1:51:11
And so, reading his philosophies has always had a major impact.
1:51:14
The Tao of Jeet Kune Do, his first martial arts book, but there's a lot of stuff on Bruce Lee about how he lived life and all that.
1:51:19
And one quote that comes to mind is he says he said many, many, many years ago, right, when he was alive, "Don't pray for an easy life.
1:51:31
Pray for the strength to endure a hard one." Mhm.
1:51:35
And the meaning of that, why would you want to do that?
1:51:37
You pray for the strength for a hard one because a hard life is often a meaningful life.
1:51:44
Love, pain, suffering, you're going because you're pursuing something often times bigger than yourself that there involves love, pain, and suffering such that the path is going to be hard.
1:51:55
Praying for an easy life means you wasted your potential as a human being.
1:52:01
I have an easy life meaning I never was given a challenge.
1:52:03
I was in the lap of luxury my whole life or whatever it is. I had food on my plate.
1:52:08
I never went through any adversity.
1:52:10
So, Bruce Lee is someone I talk a lot about. I I quote a lot.
1:52:17
But, I also look at even modern-day heroes including our athletes and their stories in terms of whenever like we'll have a company meeting.
1:52:24
And it's completely unrelated to martial arts, but every month we have a an award called Be Like Nick.
1:52:32
Goes to the employees our teammates who go above and beyond the call of duty in their work and do the extraordinary.
1:52:42
And then we tell the story of it.
1:52:42
And why is it called like Be Like Nick?
1:52:45
Because it's about Nick Vujicic.
1:52:46
So, there's this motivational speaker who was born with no arms and no legs.
1:52:51
I don't know if you know Nick Vujicic.
1:52:54
Yeah, I think I've shared his videos in my newsletter actually years ago.
1:52:58
I think he's from Australia.
1:52:59
He's born with no arms and legs.
1:52:59
Tried to commit suicide when he was nine by drowning himself in the bathtub because he was endlessly bullied and had no future and his mom saved him. Incredible life.
1:53:08
Incredible life story and incredible optimism and sense of if he can make it and become one of the world's greatest motivational speakers, he has a beautiful wife.
1:53:18
I think he has three kids. Incredible life.
1:53:20
And we started this Be Like Nick award several years ago.
1:53:22
And those are my tools for how to teach because I just feel like sometimes for me as a leader, if you hand people books, they may or may not read them, but they may or may not be That's not how they learn. Mhm.
1:53:36
I find storytelling to be the most powerful way to live and exemplify the values of of your company, of your organization by like Be Like Nick these stories rather than say everyone be good, don't lie, don't cheat, or whatever it is the values, right?
1:53:52
It's better to tell stories of real-life heroes within your own company that exemplify your values, that exemplify what it means to do extraordinary things, and hence Be Like Nick.
1:54:04
And I know I'm not answering a question directly about books.
1:54:05
There's so many books I would, you know, So if you want to know about investing, Bridging to the storytelling but it's it's more a metaphor for teaching, right?
1:54:18
In this particular case, learning/teaching.
1:54:19
So, I think the the storytelling maps into that.
1:54:21
Are there any any people who you have looked up to or who you admire for their storytelling ability?
1:54:31
It could be within the world of business.
1:54:32
I remember one of my most nerve-racking interviews very, very early on that I had was with Ed Catmull, who at the time was president of Pixar, and he wrote a book called Creativity Inc.
1:54:43
, and it talks about storytelling quite a lot.
1:54:45
The reason that was so nerve-racking is the first person I did not know who I interviewed on the podcast.
1:54:52
I was really, really nervous.
1:54:54
But are there any folks you look up to as storytellers in the way you describe it or otherwise.
1:55:02
Outside of my family, my greatest role model is Kru Yodtong Senanan, who is the founder of Sit Yodtong camp, Sit Yodtong gym, which is where I cut my teeth for Muay Thai.
1:55:16
He was a very philosophical man, and he died penniless.
1:55:21
But he didn't die penniless because he was materialistic, or he wasted money, or he was into gambling or anything. No.
1:55:30
He died penniless because all of his money, all the time every year, was given to those less fortunate.
1:55:37
His whole mission in life was when he built Sit Yodtong gym, it was the number one in the entire world at one point in Muay Thai producing most number one world champions, the most fierce fighting gym in the world.
1:55:46
And his whole philosophy was giving to orphans and underprivileged kids, and he wanted to share the art of Muay Thai, and he would fund their food, their education, and etc.
1:55:58
And a few years before he died, I think five or six years before he died, he won 56 million baht, which is about a million, almost 2 million dollars, in the lottery. In the lottery. Wow. Yes, okay.
1:56:11
The crazy thing, he got the money the next day, literally, he announced on in the media, "Anyone who wants me to give you money, just come to the gym, tell me your story, and I'll give you what I believe is appropriate."
1:56:27
And I'm not kidding, thousands of people showed up. Thousands.
1:56:28
And people would say, "My mom is dying of cancer," and he would give 10,000 baht, what whatever, until it was all gone. This is a true story.
1:56:35
You can even Google it, and it's there.
1:56:37
He was somebody, again, had the most big impact in my life, and he was an incredible storyteller.
1:56:43
He would tell us stories of of legendary fighters, and why they became great, and how they lived their life.
1:56:51
And he taught, he was someone never smoked, never drank.
1:56:54
And he had there's bunch of other tenants, and to this day, his words are in my in my head.
1:57:00
His lessons are in my head.
1:57:03
A powerful storyteller for me is someone who tells a story, but embedded in it is a deep lesson, because that's how I think knowledge and experience gets passed on.
1:57:16
So, I don't have anybody in the modern era I'm thinking about who tells good stories.
1:57:19
I mean, of course I have friends who tell good stories, funny stories, but I don't There's nobody I look up to per se, but storytelling is definitely a very big part of my leadership, as it is a very big part of the One Championship brand.
1:57:32
In terms of if you look at our broadcast on Amazon, you'll see these storytelling videos before they fight, right?
1:57:36
It's why they're fighting, what is at stake, is it because the mom is dying of cancer they got to pay the hospital bills, is it because they want to be the greatest in the world and the belt is everything they've ever dreamed of, what is at stake, and what is the story?
1:57:50
Because that's what we believe, okay?
1:57:53
Yes, it is me a fantastic knockout, and you and your buddies will appreciate because it's it's martial arts at the highest levels.
1:57:57
By the way, Tim, we haven't announced it yet, but we have a a major event in Tokyo later this year. Oh, man. I haven't announced it.
1:58:03
I won't give the date yet, but I would like to invite you as my personal guest to come to Tokyo.
1:58:08
We sit cage side together, okay?
1:58:10
And Sayama sensei will be there. Oh, man.
1:58:14
Just because of your background, and I'm telling you Thank you. That's amazing.
1:58:17
When you sit there and you watch all the videos, all the live stories, you'll walk away, Tim Ferriss, with a magical memory and some powerful lesson.
1:58:25
You're in the incredible of meeting so many different incredible human beings, and you have extraordinary meals your whole career, that it might not be that special, but I'm promise you, given your background of loving Japan, speaking Japanese, loving martial arts, and being who you are, you will love sitting there, and then I'll take you backstage, you'll see the speech, you go meet the guys.
1:58:43
That for me is storytelling.
1:58:43
You'll walk away with some powerful memories and lessons, and I'm inviting you for real.
1:58:50
So, Yes, I would absolutely love to do that.
1:58:53
So, you can let me know the dates on the Bat-Phone.
1:58:55
That sounds amazing and you know, I think I actually bumped into Sayama Satoru once when I was like 15 or 16 cuz I saved up all my money and I went to one Shooto match. Amazing.
1:59:07
And then the announcers were like, "Sayama Satoru Shodai Tiger Mask."
1:59:12
And then he came out and did the whole thing and I just remember being so in awe.
1:59:20
Also of the guy's thighs, the size of his legs and his head kicks. Yeah.
1:59:27
Just unbelievable, but that sounds like an amazing experience.
1:59:29
So, thank you for the invitation.
1:59:32
I would I would love to talk about that. Yes.
1:59:35
So, Chatri, I'd love to ask you just some real quick kind of paint-by-the-numbers one questions.
1:59:40
On a broadcast and online level, from a distribution perspective, what are your biggest countries?
1:59:52
You mean in terms of viewership or in terms of revenue? In terms of viewership.
1:59:56
In terms of viewership, well, obviously, you know, the continent of Asia for us is quite large.
2:00:01
If you thin slice it within Asia, there any For instance, when I'm looking at the podcast, I can go into Spotify or whatever the platform analytics might be and say like, "Okay, looks like you know, US within the US these these particular states or cities, then you have this this this this this."
2:00:17
So, one way to think about it is when we throw events and it doesn't matter what time of day we throw events, where do we trend around the world is also a very important metric we look at because yeah, I can list our top 10 countries, but surprisingly, they don't always correlate.
2:00:33
So, for example, again, I'll give you an example in in March when we're in Tokyo, it's Asia prime time show on a Sunday.
2:00:41
We trended number two or three in America.
2:00:45
America is not a large market for us, but we have a rapid fan base and a very growing fan base.
2:00:50
And there's obviously a lot of local promotions in the US.
2:00:55
But for sure Asia, like countries like China, Japan, Thailand, these are obviously big countries, you know, India.
2:01:04
But what I say to the team is our 500 million fans are are scattered all around the world.
2:01:12
So in any given one country might be small, right?
2:01:13
Maybe a million fans, but in another country, okay, like Thailand, definitely one of our top markets, 70 million people population, 70 million people are fans.
2:01:24
And like there's no question, right?
2:01:24
So that might be one country that over indexes, but Philippines is the same way.
2:01:29
Philippines were top two or top three sports property.
2:01:33
I have an assistant in the Philippines who went to one of your shows live in Manila, actually.
2:01:37
And it depends on who's world champion at the time.
2:01:38
So this is another funny thing is when we have a world champion from XYZ country, okay, I'll I'll give you an example.
2:01:45
Actually, it's it's on my Instagram.
2:01:46
Although I'm not very social media, that's funny.
2:01:48
As a social media expert, I'm not very social media engaged.
2:01:52
active Yeah, engaged on my own personal ones because I just find it to be very laborious and I'd rather focus on the on the on the business. Yeah.
2:02:00
But I do have one clip up there where when China won its first world champion, okay, Tang Kai, first MMA world champion.
2:02:11
The CCTV 5, which is the central government of China, came out on TV and online and on print. Jiayou, which means yay. Jiayou, yeah.
2:02:20
China won its first world championship in One Championship. Mhm. It was all over.
2:02:24
He came back home and he this is the clip to 10,000 people.
2:02:30
The government threw a thing at 10,000 fans and they're all holding their phone.
2:02:33
His welcome home was crazy.
2:02:33
We did like a billion organic video views on that single fight.
2:02:36
It's not that big given that China is a billion three, but the point is that every time he fights the numbers in China.
2:02:45
So what what I'm saying is this blob of 500 million is growing.
2:02:50
But what we have seen is that the pockets of popularity depends on you know who's the most popular world champions at the time. Where they fighting? What country? Right?
2:03:02
So like in recently in Japan our numbers just blew up, right?
2:03:04
And in March as I mentioned cuz of the Saitama event.
2:03:07
But previously to that Takeru had fought but he blew up the cuz he unfortunately got knocked out in the first round.
2:03:12
I mean the best way to think about it is a blob and the blob around the world abs and flows based on where the events are, what time zones cuz sometimes we have US prime time events, sometimes is Asia prime time and sometimes we're in throwing events in like in Denver or sometimes we're in Doha, Qatar.
2:03:28
So I think that's the best way to describe it.
2:03:31
But every metric we look at depending on country.
2:03:33
I think almost every country I look at cuz I get these stats across the world. 2x, 3x, 4x.
2:03:41
If it's 4x is you know obviously you have usually a small base.
2:03:44
These are the kind of numbers we have hockey stick charts like almost every week.
2:03:47
I don't know of a country that is down. Yeah.
2:03:50
I just off the top of my head.
2:03:50
Combat sports is growing so fast. Yeah, totally.
2:03:55
That's a long-winded answer I know but it's because I I'm telling you like last year 100% it was Thailand was our number one but this year not necessarily like it depends on the year. Mhm.
2:04:07
On what is popular, right? Yeah.
2:04:09
Four years ago it was China for sure, right? So or three years ago. Mhm. Two follow-up questions.
2:04:14
Actually a comment and follow-up questions.
2:04:15
The comment is and I I started thinking this around 20 20 2021 during COVID.
2:04:19
But particularly I'm tracking and I you know invest in some of these companies too but I'm tracking AI development really really closely and recently dealt with a deep fake video of me promoting stocks and some a scam, which was 99% convincing.
2:04:39
I mean, this is fake video.
2:04:44
Background, clothing, facial hair, everything except for a few glitches was convincing.
2:04:48
And I think as more and more is CGI or AI produced, that man, oh man, one of the last places of refuge for pure authenticity is going to be live sports.
2:05:04
So, I just I'd be shocked if the growth doesn't continue and if it might even accelerate as people are looking for some type of a oasis where they can separate fact from fiction.
2:05:15
That's a very fascinating thing.
2:05:15
I've had deep fake videos of me done as well and it's kind of disturbing, actually. Yeah.
2:05:22
And this deep fake video, it was just last week, my social media team took it down.
2:05:25
It was me promoting gambling.
2:05:25
You know, I don't gamble, but we're moving more and more into a world where you don't know what is the truth, what's real news and what's fake news.
2:05:36
There's so much manipulation of the media and then on top of it, now you have AI.
2:05:41
It's a scary world that we're going to be living in, you know, in the next few years.
2:05:46
Yeah, it's pretty spooky.
2:05:48
Let me follow up on the offices where you have important broadcast relationships cuz I'd love to hear more about that because I guess as an outsider who knows nothing about the broadcast world, I think, well, once you sign the deal or maybe if like Fabian helps put together a deal and you agree on the X year term and when things are going to be broadcast, like what is there to do with an office on the ground?
2:06:16
I mean, is it just taking people out to nice lunches and making sure they're happy?
2:06:21
When we did our first broadcast deals many years ago, I thought that, oh, you just sign the contract and it's done.
2:06:27
But actually, what happens is every broadcaster has tons of content.
2:06:33
In in Amazon's case it's they have NFL, they have NASCAR, they have WNBA, and of course there's one and of course there's a programming schedule, but humans are humans.
2:06:41
We have these teams and I I give you a great example of our Japanese broadcaster.
2:06:44
We have weekly meetings with cross-departmental.
2:06:47
So programming, marketing, sales, blah blah blah blah, check in every single week in Japan on ground and it's to make sure that the broadcaster and and the content is at the right hour, the right hour for promos, the highlights.
2:07:01
What else can we be doing to grow the viewership?
2:07:04
Actually, there's a lot of work that goes behind the scenes to make sure that it's it's a rating success and that it continues.
2:07:11
The types of athletes, I'll give you examples.
2:07:13
So our broadcast partner in Japan, Eunice asked me to sign some Japanese superstars as an example.
2:07:19
So having a deep and strong partnership is very very important, but also usually we have a team, of course with broadcast partnership, but we'll have a team of social media experts as well and athlete ecosystem scouts, okay?
2:07:35
So there's kind of three pillars that once you establish a very strong partnership with the broadcast partner, you have a broadcast team that manages everything from marketing and sponsorship sales and promos and highlights and different time slots and shoulder content.
2:07:48
And then of course social media, you want to make sure you're blowing up social media so that you're culturally relevant in that country with the athletes and there's content you're always making and and of course the athletes are competing so you can also do that.
2:08:02
And then the third leg is obviously athlete ecosystem.
2:08:04
I'd say those are the three prongs the or three pillars rather that whether China or the US or Japan or Thailand or whatever or Philippines where we have folks, it's it's it's usually those three pillars that are at work.
2:08:19
I'd love to just drop a quick comparison of say physical retailers cuz I've been learning a lot more about this outside of books.
2:08:26
I learned about it within the realm of books and book distribution, but have learned more and more about truly mass retail, which is I mean, it's just wild how much of an impact mass retail has.
2:08:39
Online, yes, like Amazon is a big deal, but predominantly physical retails is still just enormous.
2:08:47
Also, just for food security in the US, which is kind of wild to think about, but the reason I'm bringing it up is that I'm wondering and different broadcasters must vary widely, but in the say retail space, you go into a large retailer in the US.
2:09:01
It's like, "Okay, if you want an end cap instead of placement down at the knee, then chances are you might have to pay for it, right?
2:09:11
You want better placement or you want them to sell internally to store managers or or people who make buying decisions, well, you may have to pay for that, like co-op advertising fees and so on."
2:09:24
They're also going to want to know in many cases what you're doing to drive consumers to them as a retailer / distributor, right?
2:09:34
And I'm wondering if there are similar types of asks of one from broadcasters. 100%.
2:09:41
So, in the media industry, you're either the it content or you're not. Mhm.
2:09:48
And if you look at the history of the 13 years of One, there were partnerships in the early days where I just had to give the content for free.
2:09:52
I'm like, "Hey, here are the metrics on social. Please put it on TV." Mhm.
2:09:58
And Asia at the time was predominantly still free-to-air TV.
2:10:02
It's slowly transitioned to digital, but the vast majority I'd say like maybe 2/3 of the continent is still free-to-air TV.
2:10:07
But as we became more and more popular and you know, like again, a champion in China or wherever, and the popularity rises, then of course, the ecosystem where there's B2B, B2G, it all comes it What's B to G?
2:10:23
I haven't heard that before. What is that? Government. Oh, got it. Okay. Yeah, governments, yeah.
2:10:27
Because just like F1, we're traveling circus and our events in different countries are funded by governments because they want to attract the eyeballs and and the tourism, It's like hosting the World Expo or something.
2:10:40
It's good for the local economy.
2:10:42
A great example is Qatar.
2:10:44
They did World Cup and what was the after?
2:10:46
Okay, so it's actually one chapter.
2:10:48
F1, they have a few big global sports properties that the governments, the tourism bodies have have funded, right?
2:10:54
So we're different countries.
2:10:55
So in Qatar's case, World Cup was their big bet in terms of introducing themselves to the world, but also building economic and political bridges for Qatar's economic and political system, but also again, an introduction, here's Qatar, right?
2:11:12
What better way to do it than with the Qatar World Cup where a few billion people watch for the whole World Cup.
2:11:19
Ended up being the best World Cup in history, right?
2:11:21
In terms of games and and and viewership and whatnot.
2:11:25
But how many CEOs flew in and politicians and how many deals were done and it has been a major catalyst for Qatar's economy and political landscape. It just has.
2:11:35
And since then there's been momentum been built with Qatar.
2:11:39
Sports has that power because sports properties when done right, win the hearts and minds of an entire country or entire region or in Olympics case, the entire world, right?
2:11:50
And that is what I mean about you're either it or you're not.
2:11:56
So some sports properties and I don't want to name names, but they just are never going to be it. Mhm.
2:12:04
They're in a genre that the sport is a snooze fest or the sport is long form or it's just uncool or production value is bad, whatever, right? Right.
2:12:12
And not being the it thing means you don't have leverage.
2:12:14
You're not in a good position. Right.
2:12:17
And in the case of One, again, it's shades of gray just as it is for NBA.
2:12:22
NBA is very strong in America, very strong in Philippines, but Thailand?
2:12:30
No one cares about basketball.
2:12:30
So, every sports global sports property has this like shades of gray and zones where they're very, very popular and they're it and you can command a very big price for media rights.
2:12:42
So, it's exactly like retail.
2:12:44
If you have a hot it product that regularly sells out with a very, very fast inventory turns, the shelf space they're going to give you is premium and the retailer will probably give you a rebate back because it's such a great product and pulls consumers into the stores. Same thing.
2:13:00
So, a broadcaster will have 30 different types of programming, news, sports, this, that, da da da da da, but of course, the crown jewels is the ones that drive viewership, drive cultural relevance.
2:13:13
These are the ones that broadcasters will pay premium dollars for, right?
2:13:17
So, it really, really depends on market by market what the economics are, but in the early days of One, literally, we gave the content for free to everybody.
2:13:25
We just want to be on air.
2:13:27
And then, they would be on air on a delayed base at 2:00 in the morning.
2:13:31
Then, we slowly would persuade them to do it at 11:00 p. m.
2:13:34
, you know, and eventually live and the numbers would blow up and then they're like, "Oh, this is a hit."
2:13:37
And then, they start investing in the property and then, yeah.
2:13:41
How much funding have you guys raised at this point? In total?
2:13:45
We've raised a little over 600 million dollars. Mhm.
2:13:50
But, the beauty of the sports business, even NBA, NBA has about a thousand employees globally, total, full stop. It's a $70 property.
2:14:04
Because it's an asset-light business that's a platform business that at the end of the day rests on the brand and the media rights, okay? Of course, athletes.
2:14:15
But, it's not like you have to build to scale globally, okay?
2:14:17
Again, we're broadcasting 199 90 countries around the world every week, okay? Live.
2:14:24
It's not like we have to build a factory in 190 countries.
2:14:27
We don't need to raise $10 billion.
2:14:30
We don't need 20,000 people. Mhm.
2:14:32
I think, if I'm not mistaken, very mature sports properties might have 2,000 people maximum.
2:14:37
WWE, I think, has that's not sports, but it's you know, pseudo sports, that's about 2,000 employees. Mhm.
2:14:42
I think it's around there.
2:14:42
And that's the beauty of this business.
2:14:44
So, $600 million is a lot of money, but it's not a lot of money when you think about the viewership that we have, how big we are, right?
2:14:54
How popular we are in the world.
2:14:56
When you think about our status as a top 10 global sports property. Yeah.
2:15:01
I think that's also why people love software companies.
2:15:04
Although, I would argue that for what Doug Leone was saying, you know, sports properties are far more enduring than a typical SaaS company is.
2:15:14
Or typical tech startup is. Yeah. No, exactly.
2:15:16
I mean, it's like I've been involved with companies and seen companies that have raised multiple billions of dollars in their seed series or their series A, right? Yeah.
2:15:27
And yes, on one hand, you have the potential for a 100X return, or if you're lucky, a 1,000X return.
2:15:32
Like, that is possible, but also a few PhDs in a lab could design something that completely destroys that company.
2:15:41
And there's a certain rapid escape velocity that can be achieved if you're the 1% of the 1%, but very, very hard to defend, typically, right? To develop a moat.
2:15:54
Whereas, your business has been on a lot of levels, okay, [ __ ] to build, Yeah.
2:16:02
but once you've hit that critical mass, now you have a beautiful thing to defend.
2:16:08
That's why I said it It's less than 1% of 1% that I'm actually standing here with my team.
2:16:12
That ONE Championship actually survived the 13 years.
2:16:15
And the fact that our metrics are just continue to explode is mind-boggling to me, but we've hit that point now like any competitor to ONE would have to invest a minimum minimum I think of a few billion dollars and at least a decade to be able to catch up with us, but by then our own metrics will be you know multiples of what it is today, right?
2:16:37
Yeah, if people are looking for business opportunities, they'll choose something else, rather than try to scale Everest backwards.
2:16:46
We didn't get to say much about Renzo Gracie, but I want to at least give a shout-out to Renzo Yes.
2:16:52
because I've only met him very briefly, but what a sweet guy, also an incredible technician and teacher.
2:16:59
And I still remember also some of his finishes from back in the day like Oleg Taktarov my god, like from the back, heel to the face, basically kick up to run across the ring and it's just incredible. You're right.
2:17:13
It's Oleg Taktarov and he was called the Russian Bear was his nickname. Yeah.
2:17:17
Renzo was on his back and then Oleg came in and then he got up kicked, boom, he falls down.
2:17:21
Renzo gets hands up and throws a right hook and knocks him out.
2:17:25
I mean, I'll tell you Renzo is someone who has had a profound influence.
2:17:30
Not only did I train under the Renzo Gracie banner and and he gave me my black belt, but we joke with brother from another mother.
2:17:38
We're always talking at different time zones, all hours of the night.
2:17:40
I always say he is the candle that lights up all other candles around the world.
2:17:47
The number of students like myself that he has all over the world, okay?
2:17:52
That are carrying the torch of Renzo Gracie jiu-jitsu, but equally important carrying his values as a human being of he's genuinely genuinely the most generous person I've ever met.
2:18:08
Ever met in my whole life.
2:18:11
Generous of his time, of his heart, anything he can do.
2:18:13
He's just genuinely and you know I've been in close friends for 20 years plus now.
2:18:17
Or almost 20 years rather.
2:18:21
And actually he came to the very first One Championship show.
2:18:25
He flew from New York all the way here just to attend the first one and at that time we were just a start up, a tiny little show.
2:18:32
But that's the kind of guy he is.
2:18:32
And I don't know if you know, he had his last professional MMA fight in One Championship. He was 50 two years old.
2:18:42
Came back and fought Pride legend Yuki Kondo in Philippines.
2:18:46
20,000 people sitting there, it was crazy and he wins by the most unbelievable beautiful submission.
2:18:52
And then he's on his corner men's shoulders and he's out there and the fans go crazy and that is that's Renzo.
2:18:58
I mean, and he gave this incredible speech about age is just a number and whatever you set your mind and your dreams are, go with and live your dreams and have the guts to be who you really are and that's his last fight.
2:19:14
Yeah, I did not know that. That's incredible. Wow.
2:19:17
He gave that to me as a gift.
2:19:17
I mean, I'm telling you like of course we paid him, but I'm saying he did not have to fight at 52 years old cuz I said, "Hey Renzo, can you fight?
2:19:26
I'd love you to have your last fight in One."
2:19:28
And again, he's 50 but he's just epic.
2:19:30
He's such a friend and he did it because he wanted to help grow One Championship.
2:19:34
He wanted to grow our popularity.
2:19:35
He knew that if he fought in it, he'd bring the Gracie family name with it, you know, and and people be intrigued about this is his last fight of his career, right?
2:19:42
So, it's a lot of crazy epic stories, you know, it's just he was actually in Qatar in February at our show.
2:19:50
He he was in Abu Dhabi for something but then he came over to Qatar.
2:19:53
But he's given me so much about jiu-jitsu knowledge but he's given much more about how to live life.
2:20:02
And it goes back to what my mother said, you have to help others.
2:20:04
And that's Renzo's to the core.
2:20:06
Yes, he is the legendary He's, in my opinion, the most complete Gracie out of the Gracie family, and that's saying a lot cuz there are a lot of monsters and killers from the Gracie family.
2:20:18
Legendary life, legendary career, left Brazil nothing but the shirt on his back, came to America, went to New York City, got cheated by his first partner who took his passport. Incredible story.
2:20:32
And then now I'm built the most successful jujitsu academies in America, and fought in Pride, fought in One, fought in all the epic promotions, and what a life, what a life.
2:20:40
And but people don't know this about him is that he is the nicest, the most generous, the most loving human being, and that's why I said he's a candle that lights up the world. He's one of a kind. So, deep bow to Renzo.
2:20:53
And for people who want to look him up, Renzo, that is Brazilian Portuguese with an R, R E N Z O. Gracie.
2:21:00
I'm actually wearing his shirt to represent. Represent. I can see that. I recognized it.
2:21:03
So, if you could bring back, in their prime, a few fighters from the olden days, and these have to be professional competitors. So, not Bruce Lee, Yep.
2:21:18
but you know, Sakuraba, fair game, you know.
2:21:22
Ernesto Hoost, fair game.
2:21:22
Like you can pick from any time, really.
2:21:24
You know, Senchai, whatever you want to pick.
2:21:27
But if you were to bring people back in their prime to fight in One in any discipline, Oh my god, that's crazy.
2:21:35
Who would you bring back?
2:21:36
So, for MMA, I would get a prime Fedor Emelianenko. Yes. The Emperor.
2:21:42
I mean, he's definitely has to go down as one of the greatest in history.
2:21:44
I'd bring a prime Renzo Gracie.
2:21:48
And maybe even against each other cuz Renzo would often give 50 lb of weight, you know.
2:21:54
He'd be fighting at 170 and his opponents would be at 220.
2:21:58
But, I would love to have Ramon Dekkers. Oh, so good. Right? The rainbow shorts. Yes. Yeah. And his left hook.
2:22:07
He's one of the greatest Muay Thai Oh, I'm sorry. You know what?
2:22:08
I was thinking of a different Dutchman.
2:22:09
No, I was thinking of a different guy. Rob Kaman. Rob Kaman.
2:22:13
Rob Kaman is who I was thinking of. Yes. Yes.
2:22:15
Yeah, Ramon Dekkers is a left hook. He had Yes. He had what was it?
2:22:18
Like seven or eight fights against Coban? Yes. Yes. Oh my god, you crazy.
2:22:21
Tim, I had no idea that you you knew martial arts this deeply.
2:22:26
It's a wonder that we have not met before.
2:22:28
I'm telling you, I know everybody in martial arts.
2:22:29
You you know it cold, man. You're an expert. It's crazy.
2:22:34
But yeah, so I would bring back the greats like Ramon Dekkers and and Rob Kaman who were the two kind of first foreigners who came to Thailand, went to Thailand, went to the fight in the toughest arenas, and fought the best Thais at a time, and this was when I was training.
2:22:50
In the '80s and and '90s where there were very few foreigners who could even hold a candle to an average Thai. few.
2:22:58
Today, you know, it's become a global truly global sport.
2:23:00
You have the likes of a a Jonathan Haggerty or Liam Harrison or from all over the world the greats, right?
2:23:05
Even though there's a sensation in Japan at Nattawut who's broken all records already at the lighter weight divisions. He's a killer.
2:23:12
He just joined ONE actually two days ago.
2:23:14
But, I'd love to bring a prime Mike Tyson and a prime Muhammad Ali and do a boxing fight in ONE Championship.
2:23:19
That would have been unbelievable.
2:23:23
I'd bring back a prime Who else?
2:23:28
Wanderlei Silva was somebody who was an absolute killer.
2:23:31
Axe murderer from back in the day. The axe murderer. Yeah.
2:23:33
Rampage Jackson and Wanderlei Silva.
2:23:37
I was just going to say Quinton Rampage Jackson.
2:23:40
When they fought in Pride. In Pride. Yeah. Yeah.
2:23:42
That to me was one of the I mean, these guys uh Just the guard slams alone from Rampage Jackson. Oh my god.
2:23:48
Come out with the chance. That was so fun. One even grappling.
2:23:52
I want to do So one of the greatest of all time arguably is Marcelo Garcia. Yeah.
2:23:59
My friend co-founded the school with him in New York City. Josh Waitzkin.
2:24:04
Marcelo signed to One, you know, he had his debut in January.
2:24:05
He wants to fight Ty Ruotolo, who's the current welterweight champion.
2:24:11
Yeah, Ruotolo brothers are nuts to watch. They're crazy nuts.
2:24:15
So getting those two guys, Marcelo versus Ty, I think would probably be the biggest jiu-jitsu match. How old is Marcelo now? 41. Yeah. Yeah.
2:24:25
But he's in prime prime condition.
2:24:25
Of course, the last couple years he's battling cancer, but he's cancer-free now, and that's why he wanted one last big run. Yeah.
2:24:34
And then if he wins a world title One, he will retire as arguably the greatest of all time. Yeah.
2:24:41
Can I just say a quick thing about Marcelo? Yeah.
2:24:43
So people can look up Marcelo.
2:24:43
He's famous for the I guess the Marcelotine as he calls a variation of the guillotine where he kind of levers up Yes.
2:24:53
one of his arm on the shoulder of the person in his guard.
2:24:55
But Marcelo number one absolutely one of the sweetest human beings I've ever met in my life. Yes.
2:25:04
So soft-spoken and just a deeply deeply kind human. Yes.
2:25:08
Secondly, as my friend described it is able to turn himself on and off better than almost any athlete I've seen where he would literally they'd have to find him before his world championship bout let's just say in a in a tournament or a finals match for the world championships because he would be taking a nap under a bleacher. Yeah.
2:25:30
And they would be like, "Marcelo, you're up. You're up." And he'd go, "Okay."
2:25:33
Wake up, kind of like shake his head, and then just go from zero to 10. Yeah. And get out there.
2:25:38
And similarly would would compete against folks.
2:25:40
And I guess this is true in like ADCC absolute division and it's true in All Japan Judo Championships, but he'd compete against guys who were like 50, 80, 100 lb heavier than he was. Yeah.
2:25:53
Just an incredible athlete.
2:25:54
So, Marcelo will be competing again in one later this year, but his debut was in January in Thailand.
2:26:03
And he was very nervous backstage because it's a huge production and obviously you know, it was a major event.
2:26:09
He fought Imanari, you know, leg lock specialist from Japan. Mhm.
2:26:12
Legendary leg lock specialist.
2:26:12
And because Marcelo had not competed in 13 years, but also went through cancer the last few years, he didn't know how he was going to come back.
2:26:23
And he just he put on a flawless, unbelievable, just crushed Imanari, made him look like honestly like a blue belt.
2:26:29
And that's no disrespect to Imanari. Imanari is a Yeah.
2:26:32
high level world class black black belt, unbelievable leg lock specialist.
2:26:35
But Marcelo just there are levels, right?
2:26:40
And Marcelo is just on another level.
2:26:41
So, I do want to do Marcelo Garcia versus Tye Ruotolo.
2:26:44
I think that will be the most watched jiu-jitsu match in history. Yeah.
2:26:49
Because of the the epic story lines.
2:26:51
Stylistically so different, too. Yes. Yes. Yes.
2:26:54
Couldn't be more different. Yeah.
2:26:56
So, man, this has been such a fun interview because I've said a lot of things or told a lot of different stories just unexpectedly because of the way the flow has been and and at the same time had no idea how deep how deep deep you are cuz obviously, you know, I did do my work on you and and I knew you did martial arts, but I didn't know how deep. But that's crazy.
2:27:17
It's crazy how much you know and and all the little nuances, too.
2:27:20
I mean, down to Renzo's up kick on Oleg Taktarov.
2:27:23
I think that event was called Extreme Fighting Championship or something like that. Yeah, it was an oldie.
2:27:28
This is way back in the day.
2:27:30
This is way back in the day when I just came back from Japan.
2:27:32
It's It's a few years after I came back from Japan.
2:27:36
and and in Japan I would always go to the bookstore after school after Judo practice. I did Judo.
2:27:40
And I would try to find Kakutogi Tsushin which was this magazine that was all martial arts to see the latest K-1 photos and so on to see what had happened.
2:27:49
And that's basically how I forced myself to learn to read was Judo textbooks and Kakutogi Tsushin. Wow.
2:27:56
How long did you study it cuz your accent is flawless.
2:27:58
It's like literally a Japanese accent.
2:28:02
I was there for 11 months.
2:28:04
I studied for maybe 5 months before I got there and lived with a Japanese host family, went to a Japanese school, wore the like seifuku uniform every day.
2:28:15
And did basically next to no English for the entire almost year that I was there.
2:28:22
Then I came back and I studied a bit more, went to Middlebury language school.
2:28:26
But really it was that 11 months and just going like 100% gatti beng like Amazing.
2:28:32
get the kanji in a poster and it's like I don't care how tired you are, if your senpai made you drink or clean the Judo floor until you were dizzy, you like you have to do 20 characters.
2:28:42
Like it doesn't matter what condition Wow.
2:28:45
you have to do 20 characters a day and that was that was the deal. Amazing.
2:28:49
Yeah, that's how it happened.
2:28:49
Before we wrap up I just wanted to ask is there anything that you're particularly excited about coming up or anything you want to point people to?
2:28:58
And of course we'll link to everything in the in the show notes and elsewhere, but anything coming up that you'd like to highlight for people?
2:29:06
Unfortunately I can't announce any of our big news.
2:29:07
We're right in that kind of like quiet period but about to announce in the next few weeks.
2:29:12
So people can find all things One Championship at onefc. com.
2:29:14
Is that the best place to point people? Yes. Yes. Great.
2:29:19
For social is there anywhere in particular you'd like to point people?
2:29:23
Facebook or or Instagram or TikTok.
2:29:23
It's a hashtag is just One Championship. Okay.
2:29:29
On Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, whatever the you know the usual YouTube, the usual.
2:29:33
All right, guys, check it out.
2:29:35
You won't be disappointed.
2:29:35
The highlights are ridiculous, as are the stories and everything else that we've discussed.
2:29:41
Very last question, if you could put anything on a billboard, could be anything, just to get a message out to, metaphorically speaking, many millions or billions of people, could be a quote, could be anything at all.
2:29:55
Dude, I was thinking about the love, pain, suffering.
2:29:57
Of course, the Bruce Lee quote comes to mind, but it could be anything.
2:30:02
Is there anything that you would put up?
2:30:04
Suffering is a path to our greatness.
2:30:08
And I say this to all my friends, to my relatives, to and I truly believe this from the bottom of my heart, that suffering is a path to greatness, that often times God or the universe puts us on a path where we when we're going through it, we suffer.
2:30:28
But in hindsight, when you look back on it, it's probably the most beautiful part of the journey.
2:30:34
I'm sure, for example, Tim, when you were in Japan not being able to speak English, it was suffering for quite a bit.
2:30:40
Six of the 11 months were brutal, absolute brutality.
2:30:43
Suffering is a path to our greatness because it brings out the best in us, and it's just it's a hard thing to understand when you haven't suffered, but when you do suffer, be grateful for the suffering.
2:30:57
That's what I always say to myself.
2:30:58
When I'm suffering, anything is because as long as I have a very powerful reason, a why, then you can almost suffer through anything.
2:31:08
So, I think suffering is a path to greatness.
2:31:11
All right, excellent place to wrap up.
2:31:13
Chatri, thank you so much for the time.
2:31:15
This has been so much fun for me.
2:31:15
I've really looked forward to this.
2:31:19
Can't wait to get back in front of a screen or in front of an actual ring to engage with one.
2:31:29
So, let's definitely keep in touch and I I really appreciate you making the time today for for a very very wide-ranging and uh super rich conversation for me. I took a ton of notes.
2:31:38
So, I I deeply appreciate it.
2:31:41
Thank you so much, too, Tim.
2:31:41
You know, I had a wonderful time, incredible questions, incredible conversation, and uh I look forward to seeing you in Japan together. Oh, I'll be there. I'll be there.
2:31:48
And for everybody listening, Awesome.
2:31:52
we'll link to everything in the show notes as usual at tim. blog/ podcast.
2:31:56
Just search Chatri or One Championship and it will pop right up.
2:32:01
And until next time, remember be just a bit kinder than is necessary to others, but also to yourself.
2:32:06
And as always, thanks for tuning in.