UFC's $2M to $4B

A story about how Dana White and the Fertitta brothers turned UFC from a struggling business into a multi-billion dollar company through persistence and understanding human psychology.

"The founding story of UFC is pretty wild. Dana White, who's currently the president of UFC, convinced his two childhood friends, the Fertitas who owned casinos, to buy UFC for about $2 million. They ended up pouring in like $50-60 million at a loss to keep it alive and promote the thing. They kept believing and pouring millions of dollars in when it looked like it wasn't going to work. It has since turned around as a public company and they sold it for over $4 billion.

When they asked Dana what gave him faith that this business would work when all evidence showed the previous owner failed and nobody else had done this in America, he said 'Because I get people. I understand humans.'

He explained: 'Let's say we're out on a playground. There's a football game going on over there, soccer game over here, basketball court over there with people shooting hoops, and I said oh my god that Russian guy is fighting that Chinese guy - guess where everybody's attention goes? Everybody looks and runs over to watch the fight. That's how humans are wired. You can't help but turn and look when a fight breaks out.'

He added that this is a sport that transcends every country. While football's huge in America, go to the UK and nobody cares. But UFC has fighters who are the pride of the UK, Australia, Africa, China. This can get bigger than any other sport because fighting is universally understood - you don't need to know complex rules like in cricket or baseball. When two people are fighting, you understand the premise."