You Might Also Like: Smart Talks with IBM

**Malcolm Gladwell** (0:02)
I'm Malcolm Gladwell, and you're listening to Smart Talks with IBM.
Most of what happens in a UFC fight is too fast to see. A fighter drops their shoulder for a split second. Did you catch it? A shift in position that looks insignificant but changes everything. Were you watching? Alon Cohen is the head of R&D for UFC. His job is to help people see those moments. Not by slowing things down, but by knowing what to point to after it happens. By the time you realize something mattered, his data systems have already figured out why. It's taken 15 years to get here, first with paper scorecards and a TiVo, now in partnership with IBM. And along the way, Alon's learned something that applies far beyond fighting. The best technology is the kind you don't notice at all. It just helps you see.
I thought you were going to be like tattoos, muscle shirt.
I thought you were going to represent the brand in that respect. That you yourself would be a mixed martial arts type. You were not in fact a mixed martial arts type.

**Alon Cohen** (1:17)
I did a little Taekwondo in my past.
I am not, in the way that you put that, not a mixed martial arts type. I think if you come through the building in Vegas, if you come through the building when we do a show, you're going to see a lot of the mixed martial arts type. It even surprised me. I came out of the tech world, the young tech world in the 2000s, and everybody was talking about we have to have a mix of viewpoints and a mix of people from all walks of life and all of these other things that evolved into something else. But yeah, that didn't happen to me until I went to work for UFC, which is like a weird way to get there.

**Malcolm Gladwell** (1:54)
Where were you in the tech world before? What were you doing?

**Alon Cohen** (1:57)
When I left school, I went to a startup that today we would call a big data company, and it was there at a moment where everybody was doing relational databases and relational databases from MicroStrategy and from Cognos and from whoever. So we did that.
2001 hits after I graduate, 9-11 and the dot-com bust and all of that kind of stuff. And we all looked at each other and we said, no one of these institutions that needs this kind of information is going to take a risk on a small company right now. They're going to retrench. And I went to law school.

**Malcolm Gladwell** (2:31)
Oh, I see. You started tech. You briefly have a foot in the 21st century and then you decide, no, I'm going to go get a law degree.

**Alon Cohen** (2:39)
I did. People said, you feel like somebody who would benefit from this.
And I wanted to want it. And the first attorney I worked for out of law school, he looked at me and goes, you need to go be in business. Like you're not an attorney.

**Malcolm Gladwell** (2:55)
Yeah. So you're a failed lawyer. They kick you out.
Where do you go next?

**Alon Cohen** (3:02)
So in 2008, there were a bunch of lawyers who were doing just fine, but the bottom has fallen out of the legal market. I was helping a friend off the side of my desk who had come to me with an anchors box of paper and said, I have been watching The Ultimate Fighter, the reality show where they pick new entrance to the UFC. And I had been watching, he was a sports writer before, and he very much, this gentleman's name is Rami Gnower. Rami comes to me and he says, there's no stats for this stuff. I'm used to writing about baseball. So I did a full regression analysis after watching 100 hours of fight time. And now we're at closer to 200 hours of fight time. And I've been scoring these fights. And the UFC's talent have been reading my blog, and they want me to do analysis for them and I can't be doing it on paper. And so he came to a technologist and said, what do I do? And we talked about double keying the data in Indonesia and building a database and APIs. Year later, we were making small salaries and we had gotten this thing up off the ground and going.
And the UFC was starting to use our statistics and we had turned it into a real data product. And we were able to score electronically at that point.
And the rest is, at this point, 17 or 18 years of history.