Mark Zuckerberg had Dana White as a potential Meta board member for quite some time.
The Meta CEO, and huge UFC fan, recently announced that White was joining the board earlier this month. While appearing as a guest on The Joe Rogan Experience, Zuckerberg explained how it was an easy decision to put White in that position.
“Oh, he’s awesome, I’ve been talking to him for a while about that,” Zuckerberg said. “Talk about an amazing entrepreneur. … It’s like, who are the people I want [on the board]? I just want the best entrepreneurs and people who have created different things.
“Dana’s like this guy who basically took the sport from being viewed as this pretty marginal thing when he got started. John McCain was trying to outlaw it, and now it’s like… I think it and F-1 are the fastest growing sports in the world. It’s got hundreds of millions of people viewing it.”
White and Zuckerberg have had a great relationship for years, and the latter has attended multiple UFC events — including walking out Alexander Volkanovski ahead of his UFC 298 title defense against Ilia Topuria this past February.
Seeing what White has built over the years with the UFC, turning it into the brand that it is today, Zuckerberg admits he needed somebody with White’s gusto and attitude to go to bat for the company if need be.
“What Dana’s done with the UFC is like one of the most legendary business stories and the brand is beloved,” Zuckerberg said. “I think he’s a world-class entrepreneur and he’s got a strong backbone. I think part of the conversation I had with him around joining our board was, OK, we have a lot of governments and folks around the world putting a lot of pressure on our company, and we need some strong people who are going to basically help advise us on how to handle some of these situations.
“Running this company is not for the faint of heart. There’s definitely a lot of pressure from all these different governments. … I just want to spend my time building things. But, yeah, I think Dana’s going to be great.”