The Nobel Economist: Great Tech Entrepreneurs: Mark Cuban

Great Tech Entrepreneurs:

Mark Cuban

Mark Cuban[1] (born July 31, 1958) is an entrepreneur and investor. He is the owner of the National Basketball Association's Dallas Mavericks, Landmark Theatres, and Magnolia Pictures, and is the chairman of the HDTV cable network AXS TV. He is also one of the main "shark" investors on the ABC reality television series, Shark Tank. He graduated from the Kelley School of Business in 1981 with a B.Sc. in Business Administration. At college he had a variety of jobs including bartender, disco dancing instructor, and a party promoter. He also had various business ventures, including a bar, disco lessons, and a chain letter.

In 1982, Cuban moved to Dallas, Texas, where he first found work as a bartender, and then as a salesperson for Your Business Software, one of the earliest PC software retailers in Dallas. He was fired less than a year later, after meeting with a client to procure new business instead of opening the store. Cuban started a company, MicroSolutions, with support from his previous customers from Your Business Software. MicroSolutions was initially a system integrator and software reseller. In 1990, Cuban sold MicroSolutions to CompuServe for $6 million USD. Mark retired for a few years, where he traveled the world and partied as much as he could.

In 1995, he was back in business. A man called Chris Jaeb took his business plan for Audionet.com to Mark Cuban, to made it his own. Cuban brought Jaeb out and together with his partner Todd Wagner and turned the concept into Broadcast.com[2] in 1998. By 1999, Broadcast.com had grown to 330 employees and $13.5 million in revenue for the second quarter. In 1999, Broadcast.com helped launch the first live-streamed Victoria's Secret Fashion Show, which became the most viewed event on the web at the time. That year, during the dot.com boom, Broadcast.com was acquired by Yahoo! for $5.7 billion in Yahoo! stock. For Yahoo!, it was bad business. They had paid overprice and it was difficult to integrate to the core business, not to mention Yahoo! lost focus on it's Search business giving room for Google to blossom.

In January 2000, Mark Cuban buys majority participation in the Dallas Mavericks, a team that had one of the worst performances in the league. He would reorganize everything to print the team a winning mentality. In 2001, he launched a high definition TV Network called HDNet[3], which reached 350.000 homes in it's first year. In 2003 and together with Todd Wagner, he invested into the movie industry, giving him the leverage to release in theaters, DVD and TV simultaneously. In 2011, the Mavericks finally won the Basketball Championship. He then rebranded HDNet, calling it AXS.tv. He achieved major popularity by participating as Investor in the TV Shark Tank[4], where self made millionaires invest their own money in Start-Ups.

Cristian Bøhnsdalen

CMO/CFO & Co-Founder @ITRevolusjonen