Mark Cuban is an American entrepreneur. He is best known for his ownership of the Dallas Mavericks, an NBA franchise;and Chairman of HDNet, an HDTV cable network.
Mark Cuban grew up in Mt. Lebanon, Pennsylvania; a suburb of Pittsburgh in a working class family; his father worked as an automobile upholsterer. Cuban's first step in the business world occurred at age 12, when he sold garbage bags in quantities of 100 for $6, in order to pay for a pair of expensive basketball shoes. While in school, he held a variety of jobs, including bartending, giving disco dancing lessons, and party promotion. He earned his way to college by collecting and selling stamps, and once gained about $1,100 from starting a chain letter.
In his early 20's, Cuban started a new company, MicroSolutions. MicroSolutions was initially a system integrator and software reseller. The company was an early proponent of technologies such as Carbon Copy, Lotus Notes, and CompuServe. One of the company's largest clients was Perot Systems. In July 1990, Cuban sold MicroSolutions to Compuserve then a subsidiary of H&R Block for $6 million. "After taxes, I walked away with about $2 million," Cuban said.
Cuban and fellow Indiana University alum Todd Wagner still eagerly followed college basketball and were interested in the development of the early Internet.
In 1995, Audionet was conceived with the idea of broadcasting live games and events through the Internet. With a single server and ISDN line, Audionet became Broadcast.com in 1998. By 1999, Broadcast.com had grown to 330 employees and annual revenues close to $100 million. With the stock market in the midst of the Dot-com boom, Broadcast.com was acquired by Yahoo!, and Cuban received about $5.04 billion in Yahoo! stock. After the sale, Cuban diversified his wealth to avoid exposure to a market crash. The strategy proved successful when the dot-com bubble ended, with stock prices rapidly falling, Cuban retained much more wealth than fellow dot-com entrepreneurs.
On January 14, 2000, Cuban purchased a majority stake in the NBA Dallas Mavericks basketball team for $285 million from H. Ross Perot, Jr.
In the 20 years before Cuban bought the team (and counting the year he closed the deal), the Mavs had a total W-L record of 644-964 (40.0%). In the six years following, the team has gone 340-152 (69.1%). His first season, the Mavs improved 13 games from the year before.
The Dallas Mavericks won the 2010-2011 NBA Championship beating the Miami Heat. If your company is looking for a motivational speaker who can speak from the heart about building a winning team, leadership skills, sales success, and how to overcome business challenges, Mark Cuban would be the ideal keynote speaker.
