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People and Pop Culture

Minding My Business With UFC VP/Technical Operations Clint Cox

Name: Clint Cox

Position: UFC VP/Technical Operations

Age: 33

Where I’m from: Waco, Texas

Where I call home: Las Vegas

Cox sometimes is able to unwind by going on a run
with his wife
Focusing on right now: Content protection and approach to online piracy.

Best advice: To know the goals of not just yourself, but your entire department, your stakeholders, your customers, as many people as you can that directly interact with you. It’s important to know their goals, especially when it comes to tying it to the bottom line, the revenue of the company, because that will motivate conversations if you’re directing your actions toward impacting those goals positively. 

A must for a new hire: I’m in a technical area, so you do have a bar to clear on your technical prowess and your background in some areas. But fundamentally, you look for people who are hungry to learn, who have solved problems creatively, who have made due with perhaps less resources than they probably should, but can deliver on projects despite that and solve challenges in creative ways. 

Exec I admire most: My first internship, years ago, was at NBC Universal, and I worked for a guy named GLENN REITMEIER there. He’s the Senior VP/Advanced Technology at NBC. He’s probably one of the smartest guys I’ve ever known. He took a lot of time with me when I was a young kid working with him, trying to keep up with him and his department, and not doing a great job of it at the time. But he was an incredible guy to work with. 

Best book I’ve read this year: "Who Owns The Future," by JARON LANIER. It’s a book about digital disruption. He has a concept of siren servers, which I found really fascinating about how it affects economies, and it is very applicable to current tech trends.

First thing in the morning: I have a variety of different sites I check normally: Techdirt, Ars Technica, Yahoo. It’s really a variety of news sources to see what’s trending on more of the digital side or the business side. But my goal is to first get coffee, and then start hitting the news sites.

Talking tech: One of the things that’s different for me now, versus where I’ve worked historically, is that we are a relatively smaller company. Here, we do get by with fewer people, but we still do a lot. So one of the things I’ve been able to do successfully recently is roll up my sleeves and start getting into actual code development and writing code. So that’s been a bit of a game-changer for me because historically, that was something we always outsourced to third parties.

Must have music: It’s the fall, and for whatever reason, I tend to trend toward jazz music in the fall. So right now, I am listening to a band called THE BAD PLUS a lot in my office. It’s very easy to stay focused with that.

Food for thought: I’m a bit of a foodie, but I’m more of a breakfast kind of guy for better or worse. You can get away with more with breakfast than perhaps later in the day. There are two great breakfast places I recommend in Las Vegas: one is The Griddle, it’s an L.A. chain that opened up here recently; and the other places is called Hash House, which is more of a local place that has unbelievable food. We tend to go there too much.

How I unwind: Ideally, I would be exercising, going for a run. My wife ran track, which means that I am now effectively a runner, even though I’ve always hated it. But I never really regret it after the fact.

Day in the life: During a fight week, I’m dedicating a lot of my time to make sure the systems are functioning the right way, that we’re looking at the right targets for the event and that we protect it as best we can. In this context, it would be the live streams of the pay-per-view event itself. Prior to the event, you kind of scour the known channels for sites that are suggesting they’re going to have the event or even linking to sites that will phish and cause problems for end users, even that causes frustrations for our fans. During the fight itself, it’s about ongoing aggressive searching for infringing links

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