Dana White, UFC

**David Senra** (0:02)
I was telling you, dude, I watch your press conferences. I was telling, I was having dinner with a founder of a $150 billion company a couple of days ago. And they're like, hey, can you help us hire or find somebody to be a chief storyteller? It's like, no, that's the founder's job. And they asked, do you have any good examples? I go, watch Dana White's press conferences after the fights.
There's a perfect example. It's like, he's the biggest fan of his own product. Is that how you describe the way you approach the company you've built? 100%.

**Dana White** (0:33)
And I grew up in the 70s and 80s where I used to see CEOs reading canned statements from lawyers and things like that and just fake phony bullshit that I was never into.
So yeah, I've been pretty, and I'm a huge fan, huge fan. Still today, not only of the UFC, but now I've been a boxing fan my whole life too. And now I actually get to make the fights that I want to see.

**David Senra** (1:04)
The UFC was close to bankruptcy. You bought it for like $2 million with your partners.
I want to talk about the fact that you guys went. I was like, oh, a $2 million company into maybe a $20 million company. It's like, hey, you missed the part where they went in the hole by tens of millions. I want to go talk about that. But you brought up something like we bought it. We had never done live events. We didn't do production. We didn't do anything. And then I heard you say, but we were just fans. We were just trying to build the fights that we want to see in the way that we want to see them.

**Dana White** (1:29)
Exactly right.
We were huge fans. We bought the company. And I can't remember, ballparkish. We had like two and a half, three weeks to put on an event. And never knew anything about production, but knew what I wanted to see.
And the production people that were in place, I didn't get along well with. So I ended up wiping them all out and bringing in a whole new crew. And, you know, just started building. And you learn as you go.

**David Senra** (2:01)
Talk about like the first few events, because how many events you guys put on a year now?

**Dana White** (2:05)
We do like 43, 44 events a year. When we bought the company, we were doing five, which seemed like a lot.

**David Senra** (2:12)
The fact that you were doing less means that you were learning slower too? Are you just, there's just no way you could do more than five?

**Dana White** (2:18)
Oh yeah, yeah, we needed those gaps in between, especially after our first event, to really start to dial it in. And we made a lot of, it's trial and error. We made a lot of mistakes, things that we, we did some goofy WWE shit for a minute there, and fireworks and pyro and all that stuff.
And then we ended up finding that perfect sweet spot, which is where we are now. Now it's all about technology. When new technology comes out, we always try to be first or one of the first to use it. But the show is dialed now.

**David Senra** (2:51)
So one of my favorite maxims from the history of entrepreneurship is that excellence is the capacity to take pain. I want to talk about your, when you bought, after you bought the UFC, but before, I think it takes you, what, five, six years before you guys get back in the black and you're actually making money.

**Dana White** (3:05)
Right.

**David Senra** (3:06)
Take us through like that, that like trough.

**Dana White** (3:08)
We bought the company for $2M. We're doing five events a year, you know.
In the beginning, the events are way more expensive. We don't have all the proper equipment. We don't know what the hell we're doing. So events are costing us a support of $2M bucks a pop, times five, you know, times five years.
It gets expensive. And we started building the roster of fighters, signing more guys, paying them more money. It got to the point where one night I was driving home and Lorenzo says, I can't keep doing this. I can't keep putting this kind of money in my brother.

**David Senra** (3:43)
So they put up the $2M.

**Dana White** (3:44)
Yeah.

**David Senra** (3:45)
I think you got like 10 or 20% of the company and then your job is to run it, right?

**Dana White** (3:48)