Mark Cuban – Entrepreneur’s Profile

Net worth : North the $4 Billion, according to his forbes profile (check updated figures). Probably not including his Crypto assets.

• Mark Cuban is one of the multi-disciplinary entrepreneurs. He have been involved in many different types of companies.
• Mark have invested in many companies including more than 100 tech focused startups according to crunchbase profile.
• Best known for his appearance as an investor on ABC’s entrepreneurship TV show “Shark Tank”.
• Mark started his first company MicroSolutions a system integrator and software reseller. He later sold it in 1990 for for $6 million.
• Mark co-founded audio streaming portal Broadcast.com with fellow Indiana University alum Todd Wagner in 1995 and sold it in 1999 to Yahoo for $5.7 billion in stocks.
• Mr. Cuban purchased the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks basketball franchise for $285 million on January 14, 2000. He lead this organization to reach the NBA Finals in 2006 for the first time in franchise history.
• Mark owned the theater chain Landmark Theaters (sold in 2018 to Cohen Media group), owns private messaging app Cyber Dust and an apparel company called Three Commas. In addition to 2929 Entertainment which include Magnolia Pictures movie distribution, HDNet movies, and other divisions.

Mark Cuban Origins Story:

Early Life and Background:

Born in July 1958 in Pittsburgh, to Russian and Romanian immigrants, Cuban, along with his two younger brothers Brian and Jeff, grew up in a Jewish middle-class household in Mount Lebanon, Pennsylvania. His family, of Eastern European origin, was originally named Chabenisky.
Mark chose to skip his senior year in high school and instead enrolled in the University of Pittsburgh. After a year there, he transferred to Indiana University where he studied business. Cuban graduated in 1981 with a degree in Business Administration.

Entrepreneurship and starting up:

– At 12 years old, Mark asked his dad for a pair of expensive sneakers.
His dad replied “Those shoes on your feet look like they’re working pretty well. If you want a new pair of sneakers, you need a job and you can go buy them.”
A friend of his dad’s offered him to sell garbage bags that he had bought (source). Determined to get the shoes he wanted, he began to sell packs of garbage bags to families in his neighborhood. He bought each pack of 100 bag for $3 from his dad’s friend, and sold them for $6 apiece, thus doubling his money every time someone bought from him. A natural salesperson, Cuban started his pitches by asking, “Hi, does your family use garbage bags?” He’d follow that with, “Of course you use garbage bags. And I bet you pay more than six cents apiece.”

– At 16 years old, when the local newspaper company workers were on strike, Mark bought newspapers from another city and sold them in his area until the strike was over.

– In university, in order to pay for his tuition, Mark offered dance classes on campus for $25 an hour. He and his friends then started to rent space from a bar near the college to put on disco parties. They ultimately ended up buying the bar from the owner.

– At 24 years old, Mark was struggling, living with 5 friends in a 3 bedroom apartment. He later found a job as a as a computer software salesman, got fired within the first year, which pushed him to launch his first company MicroSolutions.

Some of Mark Cuban’s quotes:

[on the one thing he would want to hang on to if he should lose all his money and possessions] Diapers. I have little kids. Everything else I could figure out, but I would need those diapers.

[on success] I used to drive around, look at the big houses and imagine what it would be like to live there, and use that as motivation. But I never imagined that would happen to me. I try not to take any of it for granted, and make sure that no one ever pinches me so I wake up.

[A 2007 prediction about what the next big money-maker might be] The one thing I know is the next opportunity won’t be on the Internet. It will be a technology that is somewhere else. Some ten-year-old little girl will come up with it, and we’ll all wonder how we missed it.

[on being approached to fund potential business projects] The list is long, from hair implants to braces, to breast implants. I always get ‘I hear that you’re worth X amount of dollars, so one tenth of one-percent – you’re not going to miss it. Would you just write me a check?’ It’s fun. It’s a good problem to have.

It doesn’t matter how many times you fail. All it takes is one and everybody can call you an overnight success, so don’t quit because we’ve all been laughed at. I know I’ve been laughed at, and my biggest hits have been the ones people thought were most likely to fail.

I’ve had girlfriends where it was like “it’s me or your business, and I was like “what was your name again?”.

I try to look at every situation differently. I try to be objective. And I try to be informed. And if I’m informed, hopefully I can come to a conclusion that I believe in and am willing to back and do something about.

The one thing in life you can control is your effort.

More details can be found in the 2004 Mark Cuban podcast for Bloomberg’s “Masters in Business”
Website where you can find his official biography.
Find him on twitter.