That was a signal, not just a launch.

Hey, it's Adam.

I was at the Ki MMA reveal in New York on Monday night. Thank you to Rich Chou for the invite. Congrats to Scott Coker and the team on the event; a lot of work went into that day, and it showed.

I walked in this amazing venue, saw the ring and the branding, and read K1 MMA. Then I saw Fedor there, and it reminded me of M-1. I thought, okay, K1 MMA, that is a twist I was not ready for.

Then I got to my friend Rich, their VP of talent and head matchmaker, and he told me I had it wrong. It is Ki. The Japanese ki. Pronounced kee. Spirit, energy, the force inside the fighter, from kiai, the first thing you are taught to do in a dojo.

Credit where it is due. It is finally not another three-letter acronym, which is what every UFC junior has been doing for a decade. It means something, it is short, and it is theirs.

Thirty seconds in, the branding already had my wheels spinning. That is what the whole evening was doing.

There were no fights, no date, and no roster. What there was was signaling. Four signals, each pointed at a different audience.

The venue was the signal to Wall Street.

They did it at the Cipriani venue, about a hundred feet from the charging bull. That is not a fight venue. It is where you announce big money moves.

If you only saw the coverage, you got the headline version. $60M raised, the name, the logo, the format. What the coverage does not tell you is where it happened, and the where was half the message.

That is not aimed at fans and it should not be. It says we are not a small league; we are not doing this out of a regional ballroom; we are announcing two blocks from the money.

We ran the same play at Karate Combat in 2018. Second event, 102nd floor of the new World Trade Center. The fights mattered, but the room was the product. The aim was to get investors into a place they couldn't ignore and to get media that doesn't normally cover this sport to pay attention. Not MMA media. Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Vice, HBO. You do that once, correctly, and the next twelve conversations start differently.

So I knew what Monday was for before anyone spoke, and on that job it worked.

The star power was the signal to the sport.

You have seen the photos by now. Fedor, Royce, Renzo, Randy, Cyborg, Nate, Woodley. Here is the part the photos don't say out loud: no fighter was announced, and none of those names are fighting in this 145 lbs tournament.

Randy Couture opened the night before the fireside chat. That is the clearest version of what those names were doing there.

They were not there as talent. They were there as proof of the respect and relationships Coker and his team have built over twenty-plus years, which matters to the two audiences that decide whether this thing lives. Free agents deciding whether to take the call, and managers deciding whether to send their guy.

The three men on stage were a signal too.

Everything came from three people. Peter Levin, Scott Coker, Rich Chou. Money, operator, matchmaker. The capital, the CEO, and the guy who talks to fighters and managers.

It also made me think about how promotions tend to start now, which is what's changed most in ten years.

The order is reversed. The audience comes first, and the promotion comes second. Jake Paul, KSI, Adin Ross, Craig Jones all did it that way. They are not fighters in that equation; they are the founders and promoters, and they showed up with the distribution already in hand. Even in the traditional lane, the promoter is a draw. There is a real argument that Dana White and Eddie Hearn are bigger than most of the people they promote.

We did this deliberately at Dirty Boxing too. We launched with Mike Perry at the front, an authentic personality who arrived with his own audience and his own voice, and that is what put the promotion on the map before anybody had seen a single fight.

The structural part matters more than the name. These people have to be co-founders, not ambassadors. An ambassador posts when the contract says to. Fans can tell the difference instantly, and so can the person you are hiring.

I am not saying that seat has to be filled. Plenty of good businesses have been built without it. But it is the one variable where this group looks least like the promotions that have grown fastest in the last five years, and it is worth naming.

Coker is more of a silent builder, well respected, with two promotions behind him that people who know the business point to as proof. The tools to build an audience are sitting right there and he has been in this game longer than almost anyone, so he understands the shift better than most people writing about it. The question is whether it gets treated as a priority or as something the marketing department handles later.

You could see the gap on the night. The announcement streamed on somebody else's YouTube channel. That was the right call, because that is where the viewers are. It also tells you exactly where they stand, which is that the audience still belongs to someone else and they have to build from scratch.

The format was the signal that they would try things.

A ring instead of a cage, and a tournament instead of a matchmaking treadmill.

Let me be honest about what that is. Neither is new. The ring is how MMA looked in Japan for years. What is true is that in the US the cage is what tells a casual viewer this is MMA, and that is the cost of the choice. I think it is worth paying as long as they know they are paying it.

On the tournament, the finale is right. Same night, two fights, one crown. If it were me I would go further and run the whole eight-man bracket in one night. Three fights, one evening, the way the format was built to work. The real character of a fighter shows up in the second walk and the third, and nobody else in this market is offering that.

Respect was the signal that they are martial artists.

Coker closed the presentation on bringing martial arts back to MMA.

I am one hundred percent for this one, and I am not going to pretend to be neutral about it. A couple of weeks ago I wrote that this sport has an identity and integrity problem.

A promotion standing up in front of Wall Street and saying martial arts values are the product is the opposite of that, and we need it. I have been in a dojo since I was nine.

But as Uncle Chael would say, respect doesn't sell. He is not wrong about the mechanics. Animosity sells, politeness does not, and anyone who has tried to move tickets on sportsmanship alone knows it.

What could work in Ki MMA's favor is timing. People are worn out by the always-on drama. Every face-off has to be a shoving match, every presser has to produce a clip, and it has become so constant that it stopped meaning anything. When everyone is screaming, quiet stands out

So both things are true, and how you hold them together is where most promotions get it wrong. Keep respect in how the company behaves and not in how the fighters are allowed to talk. Fighters hide behind it, stop performing, become boring, and then nobody cares who wins.

The two things that were not in the room.

No brand partners and no distribution.

Those are the two biggest elements of the fight business, and neither was announced. That doesn't mean they weren't in the room. A night like this is exactly how you get those people shopping. It is early, and nothing gets announced before you have something to sell.

Signaling is the right move right now. You have to be talked about while you are building; otherwise, you spend a year being invisible and then ask people to care on a Saturday night. Good call on their part.

But that is the scoreboard from here. The next announcement that counts is who carries it and who pays for it.

No owned talent, no polished product.

One more thing I would be thinking about early, and these guys are smart enough that they probably already are. What separates the UFC is not just the fighters.

It is the on-camera talent, and it is exclusive. The announcers, the analysts, the personalities, the people whose voices you associate with the product before a single fighter walks out.

Go back to that photo of the legends. Almost every one of them works across the space. You see the same faces at other promotions, on other broadcasts, in other corners, because that is the job now. They are freelancers. It does not say anyone belongs to Ki MMA.

So if it were me, I would be building on-camera talent with the same urgency as fighter talent, and signing it exclusively. It is cheaper than a roster, it compounds faster, and it is the layer that makes a broadcast feel like a place rather than a card.

The retro play is the real opportunity, if they do it right.

The audience is hungry for the PRIDE and K-1 era. You can feel it every time a grainy clip goes around. Leaning into that is the correct instinct.

But most of the people who need to buy in never saw it. They were not born. Nostalgia on its own does not work, because you cannot be nostalgic for something you never experienced.

Look at how this works everywhere else. New Balance and Asics are old, boring, dad shoes, and right now they are the coolest thing a twenty-two-year-old can wear. Nobody sold those kids on the 1990s. The shape stayed, everything around it got rebuilt.

That is the version I want here. Not just a tribute to PRIDE. The ring, the tournament, the walk, the ceremony, all of it rebuilt for how people watch now. Old bones, new everything else.

One thing I would watch out for.

This group has done it twice, and that's why any of this is credible.

It is also the risk. What worked at Strikeforce and at Bellator was executed in a market with cable, fewer promotions, and a fraction of the competition for attention. The playbook was right. The conditions are gone. Acquiring an audience today has almost nothing in common with how it was acquired then, and experience is only an asset until it turns into certainty.

The part nobody talks about until it is a problem.

One thing they said at the event stuck with me. They framed it as only two people having ever built a global MMA platform and made it profitable, and they pointed at Dana and Scott.

That is a promotional line, but it lands because it kind of checks out, and it shows how hard this business is. Combat sports promotion is one of the toughest businesses in sports to make money in. It has its fair share of bad actors, unpaid vendors or fighters, and promotions that ran three shows and vanished. The scarcity of people who have done it is the whole argument for backing this one.

Coker also said something on Ariel's show on Tuesday that I found interesting. His other MMA ventures turned into a business over time. This one starts as one.

That is a different job, and he is the first to say so. The capital-led model in this sport does not have a clean track record, and ONE and PFL are the examples everyone will reach for. When money is on the table from day one, the operator stops being the decision-maker and starts being the explainer. The raise sets timelines instead of the sport. Someone eventually wants to see a name signed to justify the last cheque.

How that power dynamic settles between the personalities, and whose instinct wins when the money and the matchmaking disagree, will tell you more about this promotion's ceiling than any roster announcement.

Where I land.

The signaling was strong, and the potential is obviously there. What I would not want to see is capital going to names somebody else built. That is the most common way money gets burned in this business. A fighter with a big following looks like a shortcut; the post does numbers, but then the event doesn't move, because attention on a feed isn't the same as intent to watch.

The lane is open, though, and the UFC is the reason. They are more corporate than they have ever been, and the brand now sits above the fighters and their stories. People feel it. That is a real gap for anybody willing to build the other way.

So build a platform, not a card. Take what worked before, learn from what is working right now, and stay honest about where this is heading. Superfans before casual reach, community before scale. That compounds. Rented audiences do not.

People are tired of the trash talk circuit and there is a lane open for exactly what these guys say they want to build. The money is there. The operator is there.

All the power to them. I hope they get it right, because this sport is better with them in it.

Talk soon,

Adam

P.S. If you are building something in this space and want to think through the business side, that is what SKOVAX does. Reach out.

P.P.S. If you have capital to deploy in combat sports, that is a different conversation and I would like to have it. Reply to this email.