Mark Cuban only had $60 to his name and had to move into his friend's apartment when he graduated college. So, how did he turn that into 5 billion in 17 years? It's mostly three things: luck, hard work, and an obsession with hearing his Indiana Hoosiers play basketball. Here's how it all happened.
Cuban always had an entrepreneurial spirit ever since he was a kid. He sold garbage bags when he was 12 years old, shifted to selling stamps and coins, and when he was 16, ran his own little newspaper business in Pittsburgh during the strike. It was no surprise that by the time he was in college, he'd be studying for a management degree.
You'd think that after all of Mark Cuban's early business ventures and management degree, he should have no problem finding success when he started working in the real world, right? Wrong! As it turns out, Cuban was fired from his first three jobs. However, his last job working at ‘Your Business Software' would end up changing his life forever. He actually did a pretty good job early on, but then he encountered a huge dilemma. Option A was to open the store. Meanwhile, option B was to meet up with a client and close a sale. Cuban chose option B and closed the deal, but when he came back to the store, he was fired on the spot.
“I figured when I came back, he’d be thrilled to death, right? Fired me on the spot,” says Mark Cuban to NBC News.
He might've lost a job that he loved, but it did allow him to learn more about technology and the software industry. He'd start his own software reselling company called MicroSolutions and sold the company for $6,000,000 eight years later.
Mark Cuban's big break
When Cuban made the sale, even he said he was satisfied with the money he made. He just had one big problem:
Cuban had a hard time getting updates on his school's basketball team, the Indiana Hoosiers. So Cuban, along with business partner Todd Wagner, invested $10,000 in AudioNet, an audio streaming service that played out-of-town sporting events. AudioNet turned into Broadcast.com and by 1999, sold the business to Yahoo for 5.6 billion in stocks. Mark Cuban could've easily let his money double while waiting for Yahoo's stocks to rise, but he sold his share immediately. This turned out to be the best decision he ever made. The dotcom bubble came and to this day, Yahoo's acquisition of broadcast.com ranks as one of the worst acquisitions of all time.
Since then, Cuban used his money to buy the Dallas Mavericks, a private jet, and a pharmacy that sells different drugs for half the price. Not too bad for a guy who only had $60 coming out of college