Garbage Bags for Basketball Shoes
Mark Cuban, one of the main sharks on the ABC reality series "Shark Tank", owner of the NBA Dallas Mavericks, and Broadcast.com, the service that live-streamed the first ever Victoria's Secret Fashion show on the planet, sold garbage bags, stamps and coins to pay for a pair of basketball shoes when he was 12. By age 16, Cuban made money by taking advantage of a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette strike by selling newspapers from Cleveland to Pittsburgh. Cuban went to Indiana's Kelley School of Business for College without even visiting the campus because it had the least expensive tuition of the business schools in the top 10 list. Mark Cuban has been an entrepreneur since he was 12, with an astounding work ethic and grit to ensure he succeeds in life.
From Bartending to Yahoo!
Cuban first worked as a bartender in Dallas and a salesperson at the same time, for one of the earliest PC software retailers in Texas in 1982, when he was 24. A few months later, Cuban quit both jobs to start his own company, MicroSolutions, a system integrator and software reseller, and was an early proponent of technologies such as Carbon copy, Lotus Notes, and CompuServe. From 1982 until 1989, the company grew to more than $30 million in revenue, and was bought by CompuServe in 1990 for $6 million, $2 million of which went to Cuban as profit after taxes. Five years later, Cuban and fellow Indiana University Todd Wagner, took over Audionet.com renamed Broadcast.com, which was acquired by Yahoo in 1998 for $5.7 billion in stock. The Guinness Book of Records credits Mark Cuban with the largest single e-commerce transaction of $40 million for a Gulfstream V jet over the internet, after Broadcast.com was acquired by Yahoo.
Startups and the Dallas Mavericks
On January 4, 2000, Cuban bought a majority stake in the NBA's Dallas Mavericks for $285 million from Henry Ross Perot Jr. Before helping small businesses in the reality series "Shark Tank", Cuban had already assisted multiple ventures in the social software and distributed networking industries in the early 2000s, investing in a total of over 412 startups up to present. After the acquisition of Broadcast.com to Yahoo, Cuban hedged against the risk of a decline in the value of Yahoo shares he received, and described himself vey lucky to have sold the company before the dot-com bubble burst. Mark Cuban made his first millions in 1990 when he was 32, after selling MicroSultions to CompuServe for $6 million. He was 40 years old when he made his first billion dollars, after his company Broadcast.com was purchased by Yahoo for $5.7 billion dollars in 1998.
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