ONE Championship founder and chairman Chatri Sityodtong (L) talks to reporters during the Asia MMA Summit 2016 in Singapore on Sept 22, 2016. (ROSLAN RAHMAN / AFP)
A man is not what he owns. A man is what he loves, says Chatri Sityodtong, founder and chief executive officer of ONE Championship, Asia’s largest sports property media company with a footprint in more than 150 countries and 2.7 billion potential viewers.
For Chatri, martial arts is what he loves, and who he is.
“For as long as I can remember, martial arts has been my greatest passion in life. And I will be doing martial arts until my last day on earth,” says former hedge fund manager Chatri, 48, who is of Thai and Japanese ethnicity. He is also the latest host of The Apprentice.
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It has always been Chatri’s unwavering belief that martial arts has the incredible ability to change lives, turn weakness into strength and transform the ordinary into the extraordinary.
For as long as I can remember, martial arts has been my greatest passion in life. And I will be doing martial arts until my last day on earth
Chatri Sityodtong, CEO, ONE Championship
Armed with this conviction and also identifying a gap that there was no Asian sports media property in the market, he took the audacious step of launching ONE Championship, a Singapore-based mixed martial arts organization back in July 14, 2011.
Almost nine years down the road, and that judgement has paid off.
ONE today has a valuation of US$1 biliion, thanks to backing by A-star institutions such as Sequoia Capital, Temasek Holdings, GIC, Iconiq Capital, Mission Holdings, and Greenoaks Capital.
It has so far raised capital of US$275 million since inception.
ONE has grown exponentially. From a mere 450,000 viewers per event in 2015, ONE has grown to a staggering average 29 million viewers per event as of end 2019 with a high of 87 million viewers for its events in October 2019.
Its social media video views have grown 13,461 times to 4.2 billion as of end 2019 from 312,000 in 2014.
More importantly, ONE’s viewership has now reached the levels of the biggest global sports properties in the world.
For instance, the NFL (National Football League in America) has an average 17 million viewers per event while the NBA (National Basketball Association in America) gets an average 4 million viewers per event.
ONE had a staggering average 29 million viewers per event in 2019.
In terms of size, viewership numbers, social media, and digital metrics, ONE is already larger than Formula One (F1).
The difference is, F1 started in 1950, while ONE only came about in 2011.
Chatri admits that the first few years of building ONE were extremely brutal.
“I got rejected from every broadcaster, advertiser and sponsor. No athlete wanted to join us, and governments didn’t want to hold our event. I failed everyday for three years.
“If I didn’t love martial arts or believe in our mission to inspire the world and that Asia needed its own sports property, I would have given up.”
With the hardship that he has gone through, Chatri has a message not just for the young, but all who are looking to grow.
“Don’t chase after social status, material things, paper credentials, and other meaningless stuff. The world needs more original souls who are truly alive, with passion and grit, to help make this world a better place,” he says.
Chatri’s idea of a rockstar is someone who wants to achieve the extraordinary, someone who is ready to climb the biggest mountains to unleash his potential and someone who dares to be an original.
“Age is a mindset. It’s the perspective in how you see things,” he says.
Still at the dawn
Despite the extraordinary growth over the last few years, Chatri feels ONE is still at the beginning stages of its actual addressable market.
His goal is to make ONE the largest global sports media company in the world.
“I believe that we are at low single-digit penetration levels, in terms of where we are. If there are four billion people in Asia, maybe only a few hundred million people are fans of ONE. This is the reason our blue chip investors sees potential in us,” says Chatri.
With a US$20 trillion economy compared with Asia’s US$23.5 trillion, the United States has a US$200 billion advertizing market.
Asia has a US$165 billion ad market.
“If America can produce the NFL with a US$91 billion market valuation, which is only played in one country, I don’t see why ONE cannot surpass the NFL in the long run,” says Chatri.
ONE Championship founder and chairman Chatri Sityodtong talks to reporters during the Asia MMA Summit 2016 in Singapore on Sept 22, 2016. (ROSLAN RAHMAN / AFP)
For now, ONE has some 550 fighters in its roster, with 140 of them being world champions across various martial arts. ONE Championship has the largest roster of world champions in the world of any organization.
For 2020, ONE is targeting a minimum schedule of over 50 live events spanning the organization’s entire martial arts and esports gamut. It had 42 live shows in 2019.
ONE is aiming to hold 100 events over the next three years. This means holding an event every Friday and Saturday throughout the year.
By then, it hopes to have an average viewership of 100 million from 29 million presently, and be in 194 countries from its current 150 plus countries.
ONE also plans to further expand into the US, Japan, India, South Korea and Australia in the coming years.
Meanwhile, the rise of ONE’s branding has allowed it to pursue other related ventures.
In Nov 2018, ONE officially launched ONE Esports, Asia’s largest global esports Championship Series.
This is a joint venture between ONE and Dentsu Inc., Japan’s largest global advertising agency.
“We intend to invest up to US$50 million alongside other key partners to create Asia’s largest global esports Championship Series,” says Chatri who rarely does dinner meetings because he trains Muay Thai and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, six days a week.
At 48, he still has an impressive resting heart rate of 53 beats per minute.
From Hedge Fund Manager to Entrepreneur
Harvard-educated Chatri was already a successful hedge fund manager with his own fund - Izara Capital Management, a US$500 million New York hedge fund.
He specialized in long short global equities and was making more money than he could dream of.
Nonetheless, Chatri felt an emptiness and lack of purpose. With a lifelong passion in martial arts, Chatri felt that his life couldn’t just revolve around the stock market.
At the same time, Chatri noticed a gap in the market. Every region besides Asia has its own sports media property - in America there is the NFL, NBA and MLB (Major League Baseball). In Europe, there is the English Premier League, Formula One, and the Bundesliga among others.
“All these were worth billions of dollars each. But there was absolutely nothing like that on a pan-Asian basis,” says Chatri.
Together with his partner Saurabh Mittal coughed out US$50 million of their own capital and started ONE.
“I wrote down our mission for the company then which was to unleash real life superheroes into the world. This is what inspires and motivates me and my team,” he says.
The Apprentice
Another coup for ONE will be Chatri hosting the next edition of The Apprentice, One Championship Edition later this year.
First and foremost, I care about a heart full of compassion and kindness. I believe compassion is the most important trait of a good leader
Chatri
Billed as the ‘Ultimate Job Interview’, The Apprentice has become a global phenomenon thanks to Donald Trump, who produced and hosted the show for the first 14 seasons.
Targeted to air across Asia later this year, 16 contestants from around the world will compete in a high-stakes game of business competitions and physical challenges designed to test their limits. The winner will receive a US$250,000 job offer and get the opportunity to work directly for Chatri in Singapore as one of his proteges in business at the Global Headquarters of ONE.
Chatri guarantees that his edition of The Apprentice will be the toughest in history, but it will also be the most entertaining and most meaningful for its contestants.
“I plan to bring my CEO friends as guest judges as well as our World Champions in ONE Championship onto the show. I will share real knowledge, real stories, real emotions on the show. Above all, fans will get to see the real me and an inside peek into ONE Championship,” says Chatri.
And what are some of the attributes that Chatri will be looking out for among the candidates?
“First and foremost, I care about a heart full of compassion and kindness. I believe compassion is the most important trait of a good leader.
I am also looking for people who are original dreamers and achievers. I only hire PHDs - I love people who are Poor, Hungry, and Determined in attitude and spirit. Lastly, I am looking for people who I can mentor that will do great things for the world,” says Chatri.
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He emphasized that as a CEO, he does not care about paper qualifications, education, experience, CVs, race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, social status, nationality, color, or any of society's typical stuff.
“As your mentor, I am going to teach you how to do good in the world by following your heart and how to make more money than you ever imagined possible through my win-win philosophy. I am also going to share the lessons on how I built a US$1 billion startup from scratch. Above all though, I am going to show you how you can achieve the life of your dreams too,” says Chatri.
