When was tapout founded

Razak: I was the founder of TapouT Films. I was with the company from the very beginning. One of my first deals with Charles was I sponsored him. So when he died, I realized I had this amazing body of work. I really wanted to show what kind of man Charles Lewis was, and how complicated he was. How did you tie him into the world outside of MMA?

Razak: Charles Lewis was a black man from San Bernardino, and he created a massive business empire. But it shows aspects of MMA and what he loved. Charles did everything himself. He raised the money for the beginning, created the clothing, he was the business brain behind the company. I think anybody who watches this film will be fascinated by this guy from San Bernardino created this company that was worth multi, multi-millions.

Razak: It makes me sick to my stomach. First of all, Charles never liked WWE. He was so against wrestling and he considered it very fake. When Charles died, without him, the company was ruined. I believe 13 months after he died, the company became bankrupt. There were a lot of tenured employees working who just got fired when ABG purchased it. Razak: No, not yet. I thought it would be, but no. Sometimes when you forget about someone, you continue your life.

We created these characters. Mine, if you ever saw, I had like a bandanna and of course all tattooed up and always wore black. Charles would wear the makeup and he was more militant.

Andrew : I saw the three of you. When I saw it, it just looked so cool because it felt like it was a thing, not a t-shirt company, but like a movement, just like WWE feels like something bigger than life, not like a bunch of guys in tights wrestling. It feels something bigger because of the attitude, because of the costumes. So, I get why it works. But I know at the time when you started, did it feel a little bit weird? Did it feel goofy that you guys were getting dressed up and you were questioning yourselves?

We probably would have stepped up to anybody who said anything to our face. There were some keyboard haters that we would run up against on different message boards.

We would get a little bit of hate. People would yell stuff every once in a while. I remember we got into at the MGM. But eventually, we got our own TV show and people kind of understood who we were and what we were doing. It really became a big movement. Hundreds and hundreds of tattoos people would send us. It was really crazy and exciting for us how far that went.

They had a lot of smaller events that would feed the UFC. It was still illegal in California. So, I got arrested at an event before because it was totally illegal to have a mixed martial arts event or back then a no-holes-barred event out in California until maybe or something like that, where it got legal.

So, you were going there to fight. Dan : No, we were going there to sell. Andrew : To sell t-shirts. Dan : We would setup our table. Andrew : How did you get permission to sell? What was your deal there? It was just for him to bring in more money. I remember an event in like—there was an event in Huntington Beach where it was totally underground. You had to give a password to get in. One time, actually, they had set it up. They got smart. It was the one in Compton, I believe.

So, we were like all extras and they had this whole movie set and these big cameras. The police left and they continued the fight. Andrew : How much money could you make at one of those events selling t-shirts? Dan : It depends on the event, how big it is. You wanted to be both online and events, no stores, no nothing. But really, I just followed the instructions to get connected to you.

As a non-technical guy who was the business side of the partnership, how did you setup a website? How did you get yourselves online? How did you sell? Andrew : Around , late We were just pushing. We were kind of a dotcom company in away because we were providing this service. When we first jumped on, we had an internet site. We just had a phone number and you would have an number.

I would forward that number—it rang my house and then I forward that number to my cell phone and I had to keep ordering forms in my back pocket. So, when I was at work or wherever I was, I would take an order on the spot. Andrew : And you would write it down? Dan : That was before we had commerce. We just wanted to create this 24 hour ordering, you could call any time of the day and then I had an answering service too. So, if I got tired and I knew—I was working two jobs at the time. I would just forward the phone number.

It was forwarded from the house to my cell phone. I would forward my cell phone to the answering service. They would go online. They were really just doing what the customer would be doing, but they would just go on our website and take the order over the phone from the customer and—. Andrew : And type it in. Dan : But we had hour ordering back in It was good for us. It worked well.

Andrew : How did people find you online at the time? Dan : So, starting in , we started sponsoring fighters in the UFC. We kind of considered ourselves the first people to do these huge logos on t-shirts. So, before, back when we were creating t-shirts, most t-shirts just had a simple small logo here on the pocket. And we knew that we were paying all this money to sponsor fighters in the UFC and they were going to be walking in.

Well, nobody is going to see this little tiny logo here. So, we started printing these huge logos on the front of the shirt. Before that, no one had done that. No one was printing big logos on t-shirts. Andrew : Well, Everlast was doing it for boxing?

Dan : No, not on the front. Nobody would do it on the front. They did it on the back, but they would do a little tiny logo up here. So, you had a big back logo and a small front logo.

So, over that next seven years or something, they stopped doing back logos all together and everything became on the front. We felt like we contributed to that a little bit. This was before we actually had TapouT. So, we put InYaFace. Hopefully people saw it when they were watching the UFC and they would write it down or something.

And we had a little tiny ad in Blackbelt Magazine. So, those were the two ways that they could find us. Andrew : You told our producer that you would start getting calls from all over the world.

People from Japan would start dialing in to get the shirts. It was so crazy. You must have got the wrong number. But I would take the order at night. Andrew : Was it InYourFace. Andrew : InYaFace.

Dan : InYaFace. If you can see flash animation—great, I can. I like how for a long time, all the navigation had chokeholds over it. Dan : Oh yeah. Andrew : This was even back when you switched over to Tapout. Dan : Yeah, the choke was our logo at the time.

So, eventually we came up with this other logo right here. But that was kind of our swoosh. So, we had this choke logo until we had this whole lawsuit with it. You just did it. Once you start making money, everybody comes out of the woodwork and starts suing you. It was ridiculous. There you go. Now what? Andrew : At what point does it start to make—actually, before we even get into that, what did it cost to sponsor a fighter?

I heard this. This was shocking to me. I interviewed the founder of HeadBlade, the razor that you use to shave your head, he did that too. He started sponsoring UFC fighters. He told me the prices. The sponsor is Toptal. Dan, is there like a development project that you wish you would do, that if you had your ideal developer, is there one that you would do that you would jump on right now?

Dan : Yes. Andrew : What is it? Andrew : Not describing it in detail, just broad strokes. I tried to find somebody who was doing this idea. We should do this app. Andrew : Time really is the issue. A lot of people who are listening to me have full developer teams, some have none. They work through Toptal. Toptal vets them. Every company, every cultural fit has their own quirks.

Their prices are reasonable. Where they really excel is in the insane quality of their developers. I had dinner at my house with entrepreneurs, two of them before they started their businesses said they tried to work with Toptal as developers and Toptal turned them both down.

One worked for a company that I interviewed here, one of the best funded companies in Silicon Valley. He was one of their top engineers. They want to get the highest quality people. If you want to work with Toptal, I urge you to go to Toptal. Shoot me an email. It looks like they created an email address for me, Andrew Toptal.

Think about it, 80 free hours. Go to Top—like top of the heap—Toptal—Tal as in talent—Toptal. I love new companies. Hopefully someone is fixing a problem when they start a new company. Andrew : I do feel like Toptal outside of the development world is not very well known, even though they got money by Andreessen Horowitz. What was the thing that let you really take off? What did you do? They put some rules behind it. They brought it into Vegas.

They got it legalized in California. That really started changing the landscape of the overall sport, which were attached to. The UFC really worked with us too. They knew we were this real guerilla marketing force that everybody related to and everybody knew. Andrew : Why? Dan : I think they would have if they could have at the time. But the sport still had this stigma. It was just coming out of the dark ages where it had pretty much hardly any rules.

We were one of those companies that were willing to do it. We were already in the space. We had grown with the sport at that time.

So, as much as the sport was growing, we were growing too. And it allowed us to just be—in a lot of ways, we were in the right place at the right time. We just kept growing with the sport. Andrew : So, they come out. The show comes out. You get your logos on the mat, which means that people see you throughout the fight. You get your logos on the flag banners. They did that twice during the event.

This was their highest watched event in the history of the UFC. There were some 10 million people watching it at one point, watching what is still one of the top ten fights in the UFC ever in the history of the UFC, Stephan Bonnar versus Forrest Griffin.

It literally shut down our website. My web developer called me in the middle of the night. It was probably our time, so it may have been in the morning his time. He said at one point we were getting 3, orders an hour. It was insane. We were coming from doing maybe 10 orders a day. Andrew : That was a huge turnaround. Dan : It was huge for us. Andrew : Were you working a full-time job up until then?

Dan : At that time, no. I had already quit my job. Andrew : What was the deal that allowed you to get so much promotion from UFC? So, you were giving them credibility just as much as they were giving you credibility.

People now are getting to see the shirt that I bought and where it comes from. Was it like the ice cream cones where every time you sold an ice cream cone back at the rave days you had to pay? Did you have to pay them per shirt? At the beginning, there were a couple times—the very first time we had logos on the mat, the UFC just gave it to us. We got to the event center. I remember him taking us into the event center before the show, maybe a couple of days before the show or a day before the show and he walked us in there.

Oh my gosh. To have our logos on the mat—they just gave it to us pretty much. It was the first time we met with them and worked with them. Do you feel he was also trying to showcase for other sponsors what their ads could look like on the map or was he just trying to cultivate you, have you grow with them so you guys would work together? Dan : You know, Lorenzo was a fan of the sport too. So, he actually got into the sport because he was training in the sport. He was working with one of the top guys in Vegas and he still trains today.

I just think that he loved the sport. It was a lot of work for them to turn that company around. I think he really loved working with us, loved us, loved what we had brought to the sport. So, all he had ever seen was all these fighters walking in with TapouT clothing.

So, I think he was probably partially a fan too. Dan : I think it was a good business move. It was a good move personally for them and then a way for them to cultivate us as a company and make money from us in the future, which we did. We eventually paid full shebang. We were taking out ads on Spike. We were spending millions and millions of dollars with them. You get all this influx of sales, though, and you credit card processor, instead of being happy, is feeling what?

Dan : So, after that reality show, they had the finale and they put our logos on the mat. At that time, we traded out clothing. It may have been some cash. But it was like a trade of clothing that they could sell at the event and they put our logos on the mat for that trade. So, when they did that and it crashed our site, all we could do was capture the credit card service. I felt horrible. We still had to manually enter a bunch.

We make more money. You guys make more money. Why are you doing this to us? Andrew : Oh, they do understand it. Dan : I lost—after two weeks of talking to them, I literally lost it. I could not—. Andrew : What did you do? How did you react to that? Dan : I threw every piece of furniture in the office out in the parking lot. This was just…. Andrew : I heard you punched a tree.

Dan : I punched everything. I punched a tree. I cried. I sat down on a curb and just thought our business was over. I thought the success crippled us. Andrew : And so how do you resolve something like that? Dan : I know I made a bunch of calls.

I had called the guy who early on was going to invest in us. He gave us some money and then backed out at the last minute and we had to pay it back.

So, I called him and he turned us down and I had no clue. This is a good problem for us to be having. I talked to the credit card companies. I tried to get them to funnel us just a few dollars to get our product made. He was in the infomercial business. He had made hundreds of millions of dollars in the disco era back in the 70s. He had produced guys like Phil Collins and Diana Ross. Andrew : Who is the guy? Dan : His name is Marc Kreiner. He owned this infomercial business.

So, he was doing like a Girls Gone Wild type one and he had the workout-type one and he had a food one and all these different infomercials that he put online. One of them was a fighting one. So, he had all these fighting videos and he wanted to include a skull cap with it. So, we were doing some business with him. I poured my heart out to him and told him exactly what was going on. He understood. Andrew : So, he got the money. But he signed for your debt. We had to figure it out.

He just knew when we went into his office that first time and the passion we had behind our business. We want to be a part of your company. So, he did all that for us. Andrew : You eventually did get that TV show that you told him about. You told our producer at Mixergy that that was maybe your biggest day together when you heard that you and Charles, your cofounder, were going to get a TV show together.

I think probably the day I remember most about our business obviously besides the tragedy of my partner being killed was us, we were halfway through filming our TV show and we were coming out on what is now like NBC Sports but back then it was called Versus and we were at the Hard Rock.

We were showing right after one of the WC events, which was a company bought by the UFC, which was like where all the lighter weights would fight. So, they had this WC event at the Hard Rock. Right after the show, we went into the bar and they put our show on all the televisions in the bar.

I remember sitting in there watching our show for the first time, the very first episode. It was like even if you had no money, just to know that you had your own TV show. Andrew : How did you make that happen? That helped escalate the brand. It helped humanize it. It helped grow sales. Dan : It originally started because when we saw their show, we thought there were a lot of holes in their format. We liked the idea that it was set in this house and they kept all these people in the house. Now they do a lot of backstory with the fighters.

The Fortittas knew or Dana White knew that they had to give some backstory on these fighters. We thought we wanted to take it one step further and really go back into their neighborhood and see who they were and then follow them to this fight and then eventually they would fight and we would decide if we were going to sponsor them or not.

Andrew : What did you do to show that you were a showman, that you personally were a showman? You needed to look good on camera. You needed to pull this off. Jeffrey David Kirby, is lead in handcuffs from Superior Court in Santa Ana, Friday morning after being sentenced to 9 years in state prison in the high-speed, street racing crash in Newport Beach that killed Charles Lewis, Jr.

In this photo from Dec. The executive office of Charles "Mask" Lewis Jr. An urn with his remains sits on the desk in the middle of the room, April 8, An urn with the remains of Charles "Mask" Lewis Jr. Charles "Mask" Lewis Jr. TapouT released the following statement on their website shortly after his death.

We are currently in the process of setting up a memorial service in his honor and will release more details as they become available. Dan Caldwell, friend and business partner of Charles Lewis, Jr. Kirby was sentenced to nine years in state prison in the high-speed, street racing crash in Newport Beach that killed Charles Lewis, Jr. Waiting for court to begin, Jeffrey David Kirby, sits in Superior Court in Santa Ana, Friday morning just prior to being sentenced to 9 years in state prison in the high-speed, street racing crash in Newport Beach that killed Charles Lewis, Jr.

A bicycle rider tales a moment to look at the memorial that has been setup at the scene of Charles "Mask" Lewis', founder of TapouT clothing, crash on Jamboree Road, near Eastbluff Drive in Newport Beach, Thursday morning, March 12,