From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Working with the world's best athletes forced us to build the most accurate technology, and not to cut any accuracy or performance corners. Pro athletes helped to remove the stigma around health monitoring and make it something aspirational instead.
On the court, there was no prejudice, just your contribution to the team. Off the court, teamwork seemed like a parody of what we did. So, the lesson I eventually learned was to distinguish between which teams are sincere in promoting true teamwork, and which are jingoistic self-serving pretenders.
With 650 million global fans, MMA has the third biggest worldwide fanbase (after soccer and basketball). However, those MMA fans are very under-served and very under-monetized.
In our sport, we're constantly wrestling, punching, kicking, often ending up with black eyes. It's this constant, intense physical contact that sets our sport apart, making the mental toughness required quite unique compared to others.
When you're training in the martial arts, you always want to be getting beaten in the practice room. That signifies you're fighting good people. When you're getting beaten, you're getting better, you're learning.
My approach is always to redirect their focus from this nebulous concept of confidence to the concrete tasks at hand. These are tasks they have successfully completed numerous times. Whether they feel confident or not is irrelevant; the real key is maintaining focus in the moment.
As the great baseball star Earl Weaver once said, 'Nobody likes to hear it, because it's dull, but the reason you win or lose is darn near always the same – pitching.'
I fell in love with the process first – they sometimes call it the grind. I fell in love with movement, with training, with everything between the competitions – and falling in love with that was instrumental to me because now, when things don't go right, and I feel vulnerable or emotional, I can dip into that state.
When you're angry, you're in a frantic state of mind, you are not the best version of yourself. When you're fighting the very best martial artists on the planet, you cannot react out of emotion. You have to be cool, calm, collected and in the moment.
If you're not an action sport athlete, and you spend all your time chasing action sport athletes around mountains and across oceans, you're going to break things… I broke 82 bones and realized that if I didn't take my obsession beyond action sports that I would kill myself.
Sports are the most valuable content and intellectual property in the world. MMA is the fastest growing sport and has the best business model in sports.
I realised that athletes were my customers- they were the people I wanted to sell too. We wrote to them with a 15% discount offer, and the chance to become an agent to help fund their club. I must have got 200 agents signed-up and the business started to grow.