In Search Of Excellence - Mark Cuban: Think Like A Shark | E19

Episode Date: May 10, 2022

Mark Cuban was born a serial entrepreneur.  At age 12, he sold trash bags door to door.  By age 16, he had a business selling stamps.  During college at Indiana University, he taught disco lessons at sorority houses and opened a popular bar before he turned 21.  So how does an average kid growing up in Pittsburgh go on to become a self-made billionaire? For some of us, it may be hard to imagine the person that we know today as Mark Cuban quit a job, was fired from another, had a business that closed down because somebody who worked there was on probation for prostitution, and slept on the floor of an apartment for many months after moving to Dallas. But it was these experiences that made Mark the businessman, investor, philanthropist, and billionaire that he is today.  Mark’s journey is one of incredibly hard work, determination and perseverance, adapting to change, and learning from failure.In this episode, Randall and Mark talk about challenges on Mark’s path to excellence, the role Mark played in the early days of the internet with MicroSolutions, the story behind AudioNet/ Broadcast.com, taking it public, selling it to Yahoo for $5.7 billion, and how he sold his stock in what is considered one of the most brilliant business decisions of all-time.  Randall and Mark also discuss Mark’s latest company The Mark Cuban Cost-Plus Drug Company, and his very sage advice for young entrepreneurs.Topics Include:- How his college experience prepared him for success- The lessons about sales Mark learned as a 12-year-old selling trash bags door to door- Why you can learn just as much from the bad companies as the good ones - The interview answer that got him a job with no experience - Mark’s brief career as an actor and reading for Stephen Spielberg - Why owning a sports team is unique from owning a business- Mark’s powerful Shark Tank episode with Tania Speaks Organic Skincare- The importance of preparation and learning from failure - Mark’s thoughts on parenting - How his work-life balance has changed over time- Mark’s charitable work through the Mark Cuban Foundation and Fallen Patriots Fund- And other topics…Mark Cuban is a serial entrepreneur, investor, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, and a host of Shark Tank on NBC.  Mark made his initial fortune through the sales of his startups MicroSolutions and Broadcast.com in the 1990s, and he was was ranked #177 on the 2020 Forbes 400 list of the wealthiest residents in the United States.Mark is also the best-selling author of How to Win at the Sport of Business.  Among many ventures, Cuban is also involved in the world of film and television and occasionally appears on popular television shows including Entourage, Dancing with the Stars, and The League. Mark graduated from the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University with a degree in management.  He lives with his wife and children in Dallas, Texas.Resources Mentioned: The Fountainhead by Ayn RandSponsors:Sandee | Bliss: BeachesWant to Connect? Reach out to us online!Website | Instagram | LinkedIn

There's nothing wrong with having a nine-to-five job. There's nothing wrong with driving an Uber or whatever it may be, because there's other things you want to do. You want to be a composer. You want to just spend time with your kids. That's all wonderful, but you get to make that choice. And if your choice is to be an entrepreneur,

if your choice is to, at some point, have enough to control your own time, you're gonna have to make a commitment because no one's handing you any of that. Welcome to In Search of Excellence, which is about our quest for greatness and our desire to be the very best we can be, to learn, educate, and motivate ourselves to live up to our highest potential. It's about planning for excellence and how we achieve excellence through incredibly hard work, dedication, and perseverance. It's about believing in ourselves and the ability

to overcome the many obstacles we all face on our way there. Achieving excellence is our goal, and it's never easy to do. We all have different backgrounds, personalities, and surroundings, and we all have different routes on how we hope and want to get there. My guest today is Mark Cuban. Mark is a serial entrepreneur, phenomenal investor, sports fanatic, and incredibly generous philanthropist. He is the owner of the Dallas Mavericks NBA basketball team, has been a host on the amazing TV show Shark Tank for the last 12 years, and is the author of the bestselling book, How to Win at the Sport of Business. If I can do it, you can do it. Mark is a member of the Forbes 400 and has a reported net worth of $4.3 billion. Among many other exciting ventures, Mark launched his most recent company,

the Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Pharmacy, two months ago. Mark, it's an incredible pleasure to have you on my show. Welcome to In Search of Excellence. Thanks for having me, Randy. I always start my podcast with our family because from the moment we're born, our families help shape our personalities, our value, and the preparation for our future. You were born in Pittsburgh into a Jewish working-class family in the suburb of Mount Lamadon. Your dad, Norton, was an automobile upholsterer, and you have described your mother as someone who had a different job or a different career goal every other week. What kind of values did they instill in you, and what kind of influence did your neighborhood have on you both growing up and as an adult? Well, in terms of values, I guess self-reliance, being able to take care of yourself, taking responsibility for your actions, always education and trying to live a better life than my parents led.

Those were pretty much the values that they educated my brothers and I on. At some point, did they tell you, I want you to be the best you can be and reach your highest potential? Or did that come innately to you? No, they did. My dad worked at a company called Regency Products, where they did upholstery on cars. And he would have me come in there on weekends and sweep the floor, not because he wanted me to earn the $5 I earned for the day, but more because he wanted me to see what backbreaking work was all about and how he wanted me to not like it and to want to strive

to achieve more. We're going to talk about your early entrepreneurial endeavors in a minute. But before we do, I want to talk about your early childhood. Can you tell us what you were like as a kid? Were you popular? Were you a leader? And outside of business, what did you do for fun? I guess my childhood childhood had three segments. I was born in a part of Pittsburgh called Squirrel Hill.

And we lived there until I was five and moved to a suburb called Scott Township in an area called Birdland because all the streets were named after birds and lived there till I was 12. And so that was a completely different neighborhood than Mount Lebanon. And growing up there, everything was about sports. It was one of the neighborhoods where you knew all your neighbors. And my friends were the guys that, even if they didn't go to the same school as me, we would play wiffle ball or basketball or football down at the park that was at the bottom of this huge hill I lived in the middle of. And some of those guys I'm still friends with, one I heard from just the other day. And so that was kind of

all sports driven. There really wasn't, other than my friend Danny, whose dad was an engineer and who would put us in front of a chalkboard trying to do math questions and race to answer math questions. That was one segment. And then my dad, I'll never forget, took me out of school. I was 12 and said, okay, you're old enough to be part of this process. We're moving less than a mile away to Mount Lebanon because he felt that it had a better school, and it did, than the high school I otherwise would have gone to. And so Mount Lebanon was a completely different world or environment, Jefferson Junior High to start, and that's where I made lifelong friends that were more geared

towards education. I mean, when Nixon Elementary School and John Dewey Junior High in Scott Township, I was the only Jewish kid. I stood out a lot and people didn't understand that. And then I moved to Mount Lebanon and most of my friends were Jewish. And it wasn't a predominant Jewish school, but the six or seven guys who to this very day are some of my best friends were Jewish. And there was just more of an emphasis on education. And that created a big change for me. You said you played hoops when you were younger.

Were you good? Up until about the sixth grade, seventh grade, maybe. But then when I got to high school, I got cut a couple of times trying out for the team. I thought I was good, but the coaches obviously didn't think so. But up until sixth grade was probably the peak of my athletic career until I got to college. Let's talk about the incredible entrepreneurial spirit you showed at a young age. Most of the people around you thought you'd go to work in a steel mill like many of the other kids. But your mother wanted you to learn how to install carpeting, but that wasn't

part of your plan. You started your first business when you were 12 years old, and you did it in a pretty unique way. Your dad was playing poker with his buddies, drinking and whooping it up, and you went into the room, grabbed a donut, and told them you wanted a new pair of expensive Chuck Taylor Converse basketball shoes. Your dad said the shoes on your feet were working fine and that when you got a job, you could buy whatever you wanted. At that point, one of his

buddies who was drunk said, hey, I can get you a job. I have all these trash bags. You can sell them door to door. And you said, done. You charge $6. They cost you $3. So you made $3 per bunch. Then when you were 16, you started a stamp company. You went to stamp shows and trade shows. You would trade up from one stamp to the next. You knew what you were doing because you'd stay up until 3 a.m. or 4 a.m. reading Lynn's Stamp News and Scott's Stamp Journals and then have them all memorized to give yourself an edge. You also earned money by selling baseball cards and rare coins. When you were 16, you took advantage of a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette strike by driving 130 miles to the plant in Cleveland where the newspapers

were printed. You found a truck coming out of the plant. You convinced the driver to sell you his papers so he wouldn't have to drive around and do his rounds. Then you drove back to Pittsburgh and sold the papers for five times the cost. To make money, you also worked at a grocery store stocking shelves and at a deli where you sliced off a piece of your finger. You had the entrepreneur gene. You were born with it. Can you tell us about the lessons you learned going door to door as a 12-year-old and the importance of hustle and cold calling on our path to excellence? And can you also tell us about persistence and how telling potential garbage bag customers

that you knew their daughter helped you succeed? I think what I learned most was how to sell and that selling wasn't something to be afraid of because it wasn't convincing anybody. I mean, it wasn't trying to change people's minds. It was trying to help them. So when you're 12 years old going door to door, it's, Hi, my name is Mark. I live down the street. Do you use garbage bags?

It was easy. It was just like, hey, for $6, I'll bring you a box of 100. Whenever you need them, all you got to do is call my house and then I'll bring them down to you. And it was that easy. And, you know, from there, once I got that confidence, it started to get easy, whether I was selling stamps, whether I was selling magazines door to door. It'd be like, hi, my name is Mark. If I could show you how 75 cents a week can improve the education and entertainment of your family and put your kids in a better position at school, would 75 cents a week be worth it?

Yeah. Things that I remember to this day and dealing with objections, those are all things that became core for me and really built my confidence. I think education is one of the most important ingredients to our future success. You skipped school your senior year of high school and enrolled as a full-time student

at the University of Pittsburgh, selling your stamp collection to help pay for college. After a year there, you transferred to Indiana University, where you eventually graduated from the Kelley School of Business with a Bachelor of Science degree in management. You had applied to the school without even visiting the campus because it had the cheapest tuition of all the business schools on the top 10 list. During college, you had a variety of ventures. You gave disco lessons to sorority girls for $25 an hour, which you called the best job ever, and which led to you hosting lavish disco parties at the

Bloomington National Guard Armory. You set up a chain letter that asked people to submit a small amount of money with the prospect that they could make more than $1,000. That venture paid for one semester of tuition. In September of your senior year, you opened a popular bar called Motley's Pub. Six months later, it was shut down because pictures from a wet t-shirt contest made it in the newspaper and a probation officer recognized a picture of one of her parolees who happened to be a 16-year-old on probation for prostitution. You said you checked her ID and it was good. I remember to this day doing so.

I still have t-shirts in college. I stuffed envelopes for three cents each. And like you, I managed to have a lot of fun at the great University of Michigan. There you go. How important was your college experience to your future success? And is what you learn outside of the classroom as important or more important than what you learn inside of the classroom? Yeah, I mean, at IU, what I learned there and the impact it had on me was unquantifiable. That's how significant it was. I said the greatest skill in the classroom I learned was learning how to learn.

That from the time I was a freshman and what I expected to the time I was a senior, just so much changed and my expectations changed, but I just learned so much. And to this day, my ability to absorb things and my excitement to learn new things emanated from Indiana. I mean, I can tell you stories. My freshman year, I never really knew how smart I was, but I wanted to challenge myself. I went to class at Pitt, like you said, instead of my senior year of high school. And when I got to Indiana, this was before everything was computerized, I decided to register for an advanced, for a graduate level, literally an MBA class in statistics, K501. And they let me in. I was shocked. And I'm like, okay, if I can pass

an MBA level statistics class, all right, I might not be dumb. Not only did I pass it, I got an A in it. Not only did I get an A in it, but the professor, Wayne Winson, and I connected 20 years later, plus when I saw him in Indianapolis when the Mavs were playing the Pacers. He came to work for me at the Mavericks and became one of the very first, if not the very first, analytics employee for an NBA team, all because I snuck into a class at Indiana. But that led me to think, okay, I can do this.

I can challenge myself. So not only did I find myself being excited to learn, but I found myself being really excited to learn, but I found myself being really excited to be challenged. And so I was taking other graduate level classes until my junior year when one day I'm walking on campus and the head of the graduate school, the MBA program, stopped me on campus and literally was poking me in the chest saying, I don't know how you did it, but you are no longer in the MBA program. You can go into the honors program or you can go undergrad, but you're not an MBA.

And I had over a year of my MBA done at that point. But again, going back to your question, learning to challenge myself, not being afraid of challenges, learning to get excited about learning were skills that I got in the classroom and outside the classroom. And then just the social aspect of it, just learning to network, making friends, creating close friends. Everybody, every kid goes through ups and downs during their period of college. And having close friends, Ben and Tim and Tom, guys who are still some of my best friends today, was also critically important. I took Stat 401 as a freshman, too. Senior level class. Ed Rothman, who was a fixture at Michigan,

I thought I was going to fail out of the class. But luckily, I also got an A. And look where it got you. That's the key, man, right? That's the key. Taking a high-level stats class your freshman year. It worked. I was very nervous right up until the end, but a high-level stats class your freshman year. It worked. I was very nervous right up until the end, but I did get an A. You graduated college in 1981, then moved back to Pittsburgh. You took a job with Mellon Bank. Back then, a lot of the smaller regional banks still did everything on paper, but Mellon had a department that went in and converted a lot of them to computerized systems, which is what you worked on. A lot of your peers were just happy to have a job, but you weren't. You want to be more

entrepreneurial. So you took some initiative. Can you tell us about the notes you sent to their CEO, David Barnes, the magazine story about social security payments, the rookie club, your newsletter, and the awesome reception you received from doing all this? Yeah, you did your homework. Where to start? So in my mind, the number one job of any employee was to maximize earnings for the company that you worked for, period, end of story. That was non-negotiable. So I was reading a copy of Venture Magazine, doesn't even exist anymore, and I still have it in the back in my big stack of old stuff. And there was an article about how you can cut your costs by doing some specific things with your Social Security payments for big companies.

And so I got a copy of the magazine and I sent it dogmark for him with a note to him. And he sent me a thank you, but my boss did not like that at all. He thought I was stepping on his toes, but I didn't stop there. So part of what I did at Mellon Bank, and I didn't do a great job, but part of what I did was helping them convert from paper-based systems to electronic, digital-based systems, or as digital as they were at the time. And we would go to these small banks in the middle of Michigan or West Virginia, wherever, just small, small banks and convert them. And it got to be very, very tedious. So I created this thing called the Remote Micr

Newsletter because micro is effectively what we did. And it would just be funny, you know, so-and-so did such-and-such and such-and-such did so-and-so. And then on top of that, I created something called the Rookie Club, where we would get senior level executives to meet us at a bar and talk to us. And I'm organizing all these things. And then my boss, Ed Whitman, called me into his office and just starts screaming at me, who the hell do you think you are doing all this thing without going through me and this and that. And that was pretty much the end of my career at Mellon Bank. They didn't fire me, but it was time for me to go. We're going to talk about what came next in a minute. But before we do, what's your advice

to the millions of people who are working in a job, they don't like their boss, and they're thinking about leaving? Should they stay and tough it out? Or should they leave and risk that they may not like their next boss and also risk becoming a job hopper, which may prevent them from getting their next job after that? Well, two things. One, always realize you're a free agent and you're allowed to look for your next job while you're in your current job. But more importantly, and this particularly as it applies to your first job, Coming in college, you paid to learn. But now that you've graduated or you're starting your career or getting your first job, you're getting paid to learn. And take advantage of the to learn part of it.

Because I think that's where people who are in jobs they don't like make a mistake. They're just so miserable. They just can't wait to get out. And they don't realize that you can learn more from the jobs you don't like than from the jobs you do like. Learning what not to do is just as critically as important as learning what to do, particularly if you have any aspirations to go into management or to start your own company. And literally from that mail and bank experience, from the jobs that didn't work out for me, the companies that didn't work out. I learned as much, if not more, from the failures of mine, myself, and others as I did from the good things that happened. I mentor a lot of college students. I have an intern program, 36 kids every summer. We've got

about 1,000 applications now. It's sort of a thing. And one of the first things I tell them, stay in your first job for two years no matter what. It may not be fun. You may not like your boss. It's work. You have to be fun. You may not like your boss. It's work. You have to learn how to get along with others and succeed. There's going to be very difficult people wherever you are. I had a scholarship student, Kristen Muzon. Hi, Kristen, who worked at Pricewaterhouse.

In the consulting division, they sent her to Decatur, Illinois. She had a boyfriend back in New York. She didn't like her boss. She was miserable. Nothing against Decatur, but there's had a boyfriend back in New York. She didn't like her boss. She was miserable. Nothing against Decatur, but there's not a lot to do there. There's no social life. And I told her to stick it out. And I think at the end of the day, she did. After two years, she went to the head of the firm and she moved. And she didn't like her boss either. And that was a very tricky thing to go on to try to figure that out. Yeah, of course. But again, you're getting paid to learn. And if you look at it that way,

look, we don't like every class we took in college. And it may have only been a semester, but that's a good four months or whatever it is where you may not be happy, plus all the studying you're having to do to deal with this class that you don't like. Your job is no different. If you really make an effort to learn, not just I'm an accountant and I'm counting rolls of carpet for an audit, but how's the company run? How are managers managing? If I don't like my boss, why don't I like my boss? And is there a way that I can communicate with that boss that makes me better at communicating or learn from what they're doing so I don't do the same things when I become a boss?

It's just when you're 22 years old or 23 years old, it's hard to have that perspective. And you're doing it, obviously, with your students. And that's what I try to convey as well, that look at your ultimate goal. And within context of that ultimate goal, what can you learn from your current set of circumstances? You left Mellon after about a year and worked for a TV repair franchise called Tronics 2000, but that job did not work out either. So you left for Dallas on July 7th, 1982. You moved in with five friends in a three-bedroom apartment. You slept on the floor.

You had no money, no car. You did have a towel, but you'd stolen it from a hotel and it had holes in it. Then you landed a job as a bartender at a Greenville Avenue bar called Elan. You tried to start a business selling powdered milk. It was cheaper by the gallon and you thought it tasted good enough, but that didn't work. While you're working as a bartender, an employment agency put an ad in a newspaper for a job selling software at a store. So you purchased two pinstripe polyester suits for $99 to get ready for the interview. The company was called Your Business Software, and the store was the first software store in Dallas.

You were 24 years old at the time. You had zero experience. You were scared because you had never worked with a PC before. Two guys tagged him during the interview and asked you a bunch of questions. You didn't really know the answers to them, but you finally nailed one that got you the job. What was the question and what are the lessons here and their importance at the beginning of someone's career and throughout their entire career? So he asked me, what do you do if you don't know the answer to a question, a technical question? I was like, I'll pick up the manual and I'll read the answer and I'll take as many hours

as it takes to learn the answer so I have a solution. And he goes, right answer. And he goes, I got one more question for you. Will you not tell the employment agency that put the ad in the paper that we hired you so we don't have to pay the fee? And I was like, conflicted a little bit, but I needed the job. I was tired of working at three in the morning for the bar. So I said, yes, and that's what got me the job.

How important is that later in your career as well? Always finding solutions to what you're doing. I have a lot of people over the years that worked with me and for some of our portfolio companies. You give them something, they come back and say, it's not possible. It takes two or three emails to get them to go find the answer, be resourceful.

What's your advice to people who may stop at A and you want them to go to F or G or even Z before they can figure it out? First advice is don't apply for a job with me. The reality is either there's an answer somewhere or the answer is you've done all the work to find out that there is no answer and have a great explanation why. But what's not acceptable is not putting in the effort to try to find it. And that's what a lot of people do. I say this

all the time. There's some people, employees, that if you tell them to do A, B, and C, they'll do A, B, and C and not know that D, E, and F exist. And there's others who aren't very good at details, where if you tell them to do A, B, and C, all they want to do is talk about D, E, and F or G, H, and I. And so it helps to know what type of employee you are and how you approach problem solving. And as an employer or a manager, it helps to know the type of people that you're dealing with as well. But for me personally, as an entrepreneur, knowing how to solve problems like that, being willing to put in the time to solve problems. I say all the time, the one thing in life you can control is your effort. And being willing to do so is a huge competitive

advantage because most people don't. We're going to talk about effort a little later in the broadcast, something I'm very excited and a big believer in. So let's go back to your business software. They hire you. You're making $18,000 a year as part of your job. You had to be at work and sweep the floors and be there when the store opened at 9.30 in the morning. You're there for about nine months and you're doing well as a salesperson and as a software consultant. After nine months there, you had a sales prospect who asked you if you could come to his office at 9 a.m. to close the deal, which created a conflict because you had opened the store at that time. You could have rescheduled the appointment, but you followed your first instinct to close the sale. So you call one of your coworkers to come in and open the store for

you and you did in fact close the deal. The next day, you came to work with a $15,000 check in your hand and your boss, Michael Humackey, fired you. Sounds like a wonderful guy. We're going to talk about microsolutions in a minute, but before we do, can you tell us if you were expecting that and what exactly did you do or say when he fired you? And can you tell us how you went from not knowing anything about PCs to being a very successful salesperson shortly after you got the job and adjusted for the inflation over 31 years? That $15,000 sale today is the equivalent of $45,000. Not a small sale. No, not a small sale at all. So when he fired me, I didn't expect him to fire me, obviously. I thought,

okay, this is good for both of us, right? He's got a fledgling software store, and it's a win. But I also knew I was the only one in the store that had any technology knowledge at all, and it was all self-taught. And so when he fired me, my first thought was he can't do the deal. And so I was going to have an opportunity at some point. The guy's name was Kevin. I'll never forget to go back to Kevin, not right off the bat, because I didn't have everything I needed. I needed the store for some things to go close that deal at some point in the future.

And so I was like, OK, I've got the edge here. And so to answer your question, I was surprised because he needed it. But I'm like, okay, this is my chance to go start my own company. It was time. I was a lousy employee. This is my fourth job, effectively, fifth job, maybe, depending on how you count. And it was time to start my own thing. And I knew at some point in their future, if I started my own, Kevin was going to be

a customer. So I thought I'd have a good start. What do you think the reason was he fired you? It's a huge sale. It's a new store. It's a lot of money. It's probably more money than that store made in a month, I would guess, a month or two. Yeah.

And they closed quickly, shortly after. Genius. And the girl, Barbara DePue, that swept the floor for me and cleaned everything up, ended up working for me at Micro Solutions. But I think what I learned from that, and again, you learn as much from the bad companies as the good ones. I remember I had my two for $99 suits. And Michael would tell me that I needed to have better suits and to go to this place or that place. And I'll never forget him telling me that if I ever decided that I needed glasses, because I was wearing contacts at the time, that this place called Peeps was a great place to buy

really nice glasses. And when it came to selling, he was never like, okay, let's get out there and sell. Let's get out there and sell. It was more, I'm the CEO. And that was the same thing that happened at Tronics 2000. It was the same thing I'd seen in other places where there was a CEO who was more excited about being the CEO than doing the things necessary to close sales. And I learned very quickly from both of those companies that no business will ever succeed without sales.

And if the CEO wasn't so excited about their product and so in love with their product or service that they wanted to learn everything about it and share it with potential customers, that it wasn't going to work. So it was a great experience for me. And that's what led me to be able to start MicroSolutions. So we'll get into that now. At this point, you're 25 years old, you get fired. So what do you do? You start MicroSolutions with the help of your previous customers from your business software. MicroSolutions was initially a systems integrator and software reseller and was an early proponent of technologies such as Carbon Copy, Lotus Notes, and CompuServe. And one of your biggest customers was Perot Systems. At one

point early on, you had $84,000 in your bank account and had a receptionist steal more than $82,000 from you by writing forged checks. But you persevered and seven years after you started the company, it was earning more than $30 million in revenue. And in 1990, you sold the company to CompuServe for $6 million. After taxes, you made approximately $2 million. I have a saying that sometimes our biggest disappointments lead to our best opportunities. Can you describe those seven years building a company? How hard was it? Can you tell us what you were thinking after you sold the company and became a multimillionaire

at 32 years old? In your mind, had you made it? And were you saying to yourself, this is only the beginning on our path to excellence? How important is it not to rest on our laurels in whatever we're doing? When I first got started, it was more about how long can I stay in business? I wasn't able to do a deal with Kevin right off the bat. So I had to find another company and realize I'm broke. I saved a tiny bit, but not much. And I'm sleeping on the floor still, and I'm fired. And so I remember driving to Galveston because another buddy of mine had gotten fired at about the same time, Greg Schipper. And we were driving down to Galveston. And the whole time, I had a yellow pad that I still have, trying to come up with a name, writing my initial documentation on, once I came up with MicroSolutions, because it to come up with a name, writing my initial documentation on,

once I came up with MicroSolutions, because it was a one-inch name, right? MicroComputer Solutions, MicroSolution. And writing out our goal was to create productivity and profitability and create competitive advantages for all of our customers. And then coming back and saying, okay, who's going to be my first customer? And connecting to a company called Architectural Lighting and going to them and saying, look, the software that you wanted when I was at your business software was going to cost me $250 to buy. And I told you I would sell it to you for $500. I don't have $250 to buy it. If you'll

front me the $500 effectively, if it doesn't work, I'll wash your car. I'll walk your dog. I don't care what it takes. I'll do it. And that started my path with micro solutions. And I can remember vividly each and every month I'm in business two months. I'm in business three months being excited because I had $15,000 in receivables, and I was able to pay myself $1,000, just growing this one step at a time and then getting to a customer. And then we talked earlier about loving to learn and paying attention. I think the smartest move, I made two smart moves. I ended up partnering with a man named Martin Woodall, who ended up becoming a very significant partner of mine. And he had some tech background,

right? He had graduated in MS from West Virginia University. And so we connected because I was trying to get him to be a customer. And so he helped fill in the blanks that I didn't have from a technology perspective. But he didn't know how to sell. He didn't know how to deal with customers. He didn't understand the applications on microcomputers. And so I was able to continuously learn. Andemed to make perfect sense, but to everybody else, that was a foreign concept. And that just opened the door for us to just focus and specialize in local area networks and then writing software for local area networks. And I taught myself how to use these database languages, Dbase2 and others and C++ and this and that over the years and went the next seven years without taking a vacation.

I'll never forget because my buddies, every Thanksgiving, they were going to Mexico and tearing it up and going here and there. And the only real week I ever took off was the week between Christmas Day and New Year's Day for those seven years. But along the way, yeah, I'd get tired and yeah, I'd get stressed. But I was just on a mission. I was loving what I was doing because every company that I dealt with, I did something different and unique for them. And when you talk about stress, you mentioned what happened with Rene Hardy. It was crazy.

We were maybe two years in and for us to have $84,000 in the bank was significant. And we thought we were doing everything right. I thought I took everything I learned from business school. I separated having, you know, who approved the payables, me, who created the checks, Martin, who took them to the bank, Renee. And one day I got a call from the bank saying, son, sir, we just had this woman, Renee Hardy, drive through our drive-through and cash these checks where the payee was whited out and her name was written in. I'm like, you didn't cash them, did you? You just let me know. Well, of course we cashed them. We're a bank. That's what we do. $82,000 of our $84,000 that was being sent out for payables was gone. And to Martin's credit, he did a lot of this heavy lifting. He dealt a lot with our

vendors. And so he talked to each and every one of them and convinced them that we were worth it to stick with us and to buy us more time. And it took us a few years, but we were able to pay them all back, and we just continued to grow. Again, the same lessons I learned as a 12-year-old, that selling wasn't about convincing, it was about helping and spending nights programming, teaching myself, whatever it took. Literally, I remember writing software. I did a bucket of riffs. It was disgusting now in hindsight. And start coding whatever it was, whatever project I was working on, and look up thinking it was three or four hours later, and it'd be 18, 20, 24 hours later.

Going to bed and dreaming about work, putting relationships on hold. I was just so consumed by it, but not in a negative way because I loved it. I was growing a business. I was taking the lead. It was my decision-making that was getting this there. It was what I thought would work and trialing it as any entrepreneur does and typically having success. Then when CompuServe came along and offered to buy us, it was like, okay, I busted my ass and gave up a lot of time so I could get back my time. And when I sold the company, my goal was to retire. We sold it for $6 million, as you said, $1 million went to employees, $2 million went to me after taxes, and the rest went to Martin, my partner. With that $2 million, I remember hooking up with a guy named Raleigh Rawls who worked for Goldman Sachs and saying, I want you to invest this just like I was a 65-year-old man. I want to be a retiree because that's what I'm going to do.

I'm going to retire. At the time, it was interesting because that was 1990 and that was right about the time technology stocks were really starting to explode. And because I was right in the middle of this technology boom, local networks, wide area networks, multi-user software, enterprise software. And the fact that I would literally install this stuff and write software for it, I knew it cold. And I was starting to talk. my broker connected me at Goldman to the Rick Sherlins of the world, all these big time analysts who were driving the price of stocks.

And I knew more about it than they did. And so they would talk to me about these stocks, these public companies. And my broker was like, you can't pretend you're an old man and just invest in bonds. And you need to invest in these things because you know it more than our people do. And that's what I did. And so over the next few years, I just crushed it in the stock market, literally just 80% a year, so much so that one of the folks that Raleigh and then Charlie worked with created a hedge fund that used my track record. And within months, I think it was in nine months, we didn't even have to raise money. We just sold the whole concept of the hedge fund to somebody else and made me even more money. And with that, I bought a lifetime pass on American Airlines,

partied like a rock star. That was the goal. And literally, it goes back to my dad, who always said that the one thing in life you can't give back is time. And I'd given up a lot of time, seven years without a vacation, and it was my turn to get it back. Don't rest on your laurels, even when you've had success. Yeah, and then from there, every entrepreneur who's had success will tell you somebody's questioned them.

And you were lucky. Oh yeah, I can't tell you in the 80s, how many times people told, oh, you're so lucky. You started doing this right when PCs exploded. Oh, you're so lucky. You started doing this right when local networks and wide area networks exploded. Oh, you're so lucky. You started doing this right when the internet started.

Oh, you're so lucky. You started doing all the way through. And no entrepreneur wants to say, hey, that one deal 20 years ago. You want to show yourself that you do it. And as an entrepreneur, that's just who I was. I took some time off, but I wasn't just going to stop there. Traded tech stocks. Yep. You moved to LA to live on the beach.

You took some acting classes and auditioned for some commercial movie. You landed your first acting role in a 1994 movie called Talking About Sex. I'm going to forget about that. Then you're cast in the role as a nameless villain in the action movie Lost at Sea. And you also auditioned for the film Twister, which was produced by Steven Spielberg and was released in 1996. The film grossed $494 million and you lost out to Philip Seymour Hoffman. So maybe he's a little better actor than you were. I got a callback, which was a big thing for me back then, but it wasn't like it was me versus Philip, and we were both having reads with Steven Spielberg. No. Now let's talk about Bobby

Knight, Isaiah Thomas, and Michael Jordan, and the beginning of a big one, the big one, for our viewers and listeners who don't know, Indiana basketball was a huge thing back then. The legendary coach Bobby Knight was the coach all four years. And in the 19, all four years you were there, in the 1981 season, your senior year, Indiana won the national championship with Isaiah Thomas, who played for the Pistons. I'm from Detroit as their leader, beating North Carolina, who are led by none other than Michael Jordan. You're a huge sports fan. And back then, you could only hear about Indiana basketball games after they were over. So for four years after you graduated from college, four years after you graduated, you

and your former classmate Todd Wagner did something to try to solve that problem. You joined a six-year-old company called Audion, and we're going to talk about the progress you made there after joining the company in a minute. But can you tell us what the company did? Why did it appeal to you in your deal with Cameron Jebb when you joined? And can you also explain what an ISDN line is and how many of those you had when you joined? And then I just got to show you something here, Mark. Were you still wearing the jean jacket back then? Or have you changed up the wardrobe a little bit? No, that's still the same jean jacket that I still have. Let me correct Wikipedia there, because some of that's probably from Wikipedia. So in 1995, late 94, maybe early 95,

Todd and I got together at California Pizza Kitchen, not far from here. And we would get together all the time. And he said he had met a guy named Chris J, who wanted to put sports on the beepers that people had, right? And I'm like, that's not going to work. But let me think about it. So we got back together again. And I said, look, you're right. There's got to be a way we can listen to Indiana basketball using this new thing called the internet." And this was by then, early 1995. And so we told Chris Jave that, look, his idea is not going to work, but we really liked the idea. And I was going to put some money up to explore it.

And I was just going to help them. I was going to be an advisor and they were going to do all the work. It was obvious very quickly that Chris wasn't a worker at that time. And Todd didn't have a technical background. He was a lawyer. So I knew networking and I knew software. So I decided to go all in. So in 1995, Cameron Audio was really gone and done.

And we created something called AudioNet. And Chris was part of it. Todd and I, Chris ended up not investing any money, but we gave him a portion of the company anyways. And Todd and I split the balance. And we went to work. And I'll never forget because we started with a Packard Bell computer in the second bedroom of my house and started figuring out how we can take audio. And literally, I figured out how to work with an eight hour VCR, we would go down to a station we got to work with us, KLIF in Dallas, and I would connect an eight hour VCR

with those tapes to their board. I would take the tapes, I would go down there, pick up the tapes at the end of the day, take them to the second bedroom of my house, go through this process to put them onto this site we called AudioNet. Then I would spend the whole night going to CompuServe forums, AOL forums, websites, forums on the early days of the net and tell people, if you want to hear about Dallas sports or

Dallas news, come to this site called AudioNet. And you had to go through all these, jump through all these hoops. You had to download a TCPI client. You had to download a player client. You had to have a modem. You had to do all these things. And people did it. We didn't know what to expect. But within weeks, we had thousands of people going to audionet.com, listening to these tape-delayed, literally, radio shows that we had encoded. And the ISDN line that you're referring to is how we connected the PC that was in the

second bedroom of my house to the internet so we could move a little bit faster. So instead of it being 56K, it was 128K. Which was a big deal back then. It was as fast as you can get back then. Robert Leonardus It's crazy to think about. Three years later, the company changes its name to Broadcast.com. At that point, the company was streaming live broadcasts from 345 radio stations and 17 TV stations and cable networks, including producing live coverage of the Super Bowl

and backstage interviews with the Academy Awards. It had lost about $12.5 million since it was founded, but it had grown to 330 employees. It earned $13.5 million for the second quarter of that year. And at that point, you're making $120,000 a year as president and owned 4,724,940 shares or 27.8% of the company. And on July 17th that year, Broadcast.com went public on NASDAQ with Morgan Stanley as your lead underwriter. The shares were priced at $18 and closed that day at $62.75 a share, a nearly 250% gain, giving it a market cap of more than a billion dollars. At that point, your IPO had the largest first day jump of any IPO in the history of the stock market. Close that day, your stake was worth about $300 million. Can you describe the feeling that you had that night and where you went to celebrate? And can

you tell us the meaning of the tail number of the $40 million Gulfstream 5 that you bought online shortly after the IPO, which was then the largest e-commerce transaction in history. Let's start with the second. So the tail number is 718 Mike Charlie, MC Mark Cuban, Mike Charlie. And 718 is... So the IPO was set up July 17th, but actually started trading on July 18th. And so that's the 718. 718 Mike Charlie was why we picked that. In terms of how I felt, I don't really remember. All I know is the market closed at 430. We went to Harry's, I think it was, like the biggest, hottest bar. And every time we were watching all the news shows and everything, and every time they mentioned broadcast.com, we did a shot. And it went downhill from there very, very, very quickly. It was a mess, but it was amazing. It was the most surreal experience ever. Your dream had come true at that point?

It was a step in the right direction, for sure. I say it's a step in the right direction because the reality was the stock closed at $62.75, but it top ticked at like $72. And literally, I got an email from a woman the next day saying she had bought at $72. Was she okay? And I couldn't really reply other than to say, we're going to bust our asses to make sure it's worthwhile to you. And that was the message because we flew back early the next morning. Early, I mean, just a mess because we had to go to work. Because going public, raising money is never an accomplishment. It's an obligation. Whoever you're raising that money from didn't give it to you because they like you. They give it to you because they really want

the organization, including you, to succeed to you because they really want the organization, including you, to succeed. It was a celebration of the moment, but also a realization that we had to go to work. Let's talk about what happened after your IPO. We'll start with the Victoria's Secret fashion show, which first aired on TV in 1995. On February 3rd, 1999, it went online for the first time. Only two months after Victoria's Secret as a company launched an online division, they didn't know what they were doing. It was promoted heavily during the Super Bowl that year and featured supermodels like Tyra Banks and Stephanie Seymour.

It aired in 90 countries and drew a million and a half users, which was then a record. But most people couldn't see a thing. The picture was jerky. The audio cut in and out. The event lasted 21 minutes. And despite its poor quality and frustrated viewers, it was considered the first major successful webcast at scale. It showed that webcasts could be successful. And it was groundbreaking because it had brought in a new age of viewing. Let's think about that for a moment. We take it for granted today that

we can watch any event or TV show around the world on our phone or our watch in perfect clarity. You were the first company in the world to broadcast a major event of that scale online. At that point, you're competing against Akamai, who actually rescued the Victoria's Secret fashion show the following year after its website crashed. But going back to the first show, did you know at the time how groundbreaking this really was and that the future of the net would never again be the same? No. We just knew we were going to have our hands full. Because back then, cloud computing wasn't the same.

It was just barely existing, if at all. And we had our own server farms. And so we had to figure out not only a way to aggregate enough servers, but a way to distribute the bandwidth so that we could support the number of users. The difficulty we had was that the software wasn't designed to handle that number of users, and we created this cascading problem. I remember it vividly. But at the same time, we knew that this was the start of... Well, we already knew that, right? The Victoria's Secret show was more a question of where are we in terms of scaling? It was never an issue. I mean, we had, like you said, 400 radio stations, but we had

hundreds more internet radio stations where we created everything where it'd be the middle of July and we had Christmas music playing. We had police scanners. We had fire scanners. Anything that we could put into audio or video, we did. I would go and buy public domain movies and create our own TV stations. We took an interest in Lionsgate. It was called Trimark, a predecessor of Lionsgate. So we bought 10% of Trimark Studios to give ourselves a full complement of movies that we could put up. We did deals with a variety of different networks just so we would have content. And so everything that you see today in terms of investing in content, aggregating content. We were doing that on a... Back then, it was a huge scale, but relative today, it's much smaller, just trying to prove out the concept.

Where could we take it? What did we have to do to continue to scale it? The other thing that we did, while we were doing it on the entertainment side to try to do proof of scale to see where we could take it. In the meantime, you mentioned we had $13 million in a quarter in sales and then $18 million before we sold. We were doing business services where we were going to companies like Intel and they would do a product introduction in five languages to their entire employee and customer base around the world. And that really was the seminal change that really made us because we had sources of revenue. We weren't dependent on advertising and having those multiple stools and opportunities really made a huge difference for us.

And even when we sold, our cumulative losses were there, but we were cashflow break even in our last quarter. So we really geared ourselves not towards, okay, let's just push the technology to see where we can take it, but to run it as a real business. I want to talk about a few topics post-IPO, competition and how quickly it can crush a company, greed, protecting your downside and hedging your risk, and luck. Yep. Two months after the Victoria's Secret fashion show, you did something brilliant. On April 1st, 1999, only nine months after your IPO, Yahoo bought Broadcast.com for $5.7 billion in Yahoo

stock. You're 41 years old, and as part of the deal, you had what's known as a lockup. You had to hold your 14.6 billion shares of Yahoo stock for a period of six months. Yahoo stock at the time was trading around $95 per share. During the first part of the lockup, you bought puts on an index to hedge your Yahoo shares in case they fell in price. The stock went up, so the hedge failed. You lost $20 million on paper. But soon after that, you weren't so mad because by then you were working with Goldman Sachs again on something called the collar trade, who had bought puts at $85 and sold calls at $205. And when Yahoo's share price started tanking, your puts were worth $1.4 billion. It's considered one of the most brilliant and best business decisions of all time. Over the next year and a half, Yahoo's stock fell 95%. And only three years

after that, Yahoo shut down broadcast.com completely. On the flip side, Yahoo's purchase of broadcast.com is regarded as one of the worst internet acquisitions of all time. I live part of the craziness. We filed for our IPO in Akamai a year after we incorporated, which is some kind of a record. It is a record. A year, we went public on October 29th, 1999. We had only $3.2 million in gap revenues. Our IPO was priced at $28 a share. The first trade was at $110 a share, and it closed that day at $145.19 per share, a 458% first day gain. Two months later, on the last trading day of the year, we had a $35 billion market cap, more than the combined value of Chrysler Ford and General

Motors at the time. I mean, I can't help but laugh right now. I knew a lot of founders back then who were young and had huge IPOs, who were crazy rich on paper, but didn't sell a single share of stock. Guys like Toby Lank and eToys, who at one point was worth $850 million on paper. Why would you sell when the price of your stock kept going up and up and up? But many of these companies crashed and burned and they went BK. You've described yourself as lucky to have sold your company and then to also hedge your shares in Yahoo before the dot-com bubble burst. Can you tell us about all of that, what you were thinking at the time? How did you have the maturity to do this? And on a related note, you've also said

that you have to be lucky to be a billionaire. Is that really true? 100% true. Yeah, because timing related to opportunity is everything. I could do the exact same things, but if I was a year later and the stock market had already cratered, I wouldn't be a billionaire. I'd still be wealthy, but I wouldn't be at the level I am today. And it's interesting, you haven't been in Akamai because we considered Akamai to be our competition. That was it, right? We didn't look at anybody else who was streaming because the streaming part became, and we knew it would become more of a utility. It was all about the network underneath.

And you guys were doing distributed, and we were doing home run streaming. And so we would compete for a lot of different reasons. So when we sold to Yahoo, a big part of what I would sell them on was, look, we've got to compete with Akamai. You guys have got the consumer side that allows us to draw an audience, which is huge, which allows us to compete with cable, television, and others. But in order to fulfill that, we've got to compete with Akamai. And once the stock cratered, then they just rolled up the sidewalks. It was like, we're just not going to do it. People say buying broadcast was the mistake. No, the dumbest business mistake ever was turning their back on the opportunity

because some of your market cap would have come to Yahoo's way. YouTube would not exist. There'd be no reason for YouTube to exist at all if they would have kept on running broadcast.com. The whole thing was we would have meetings, this thing called Breakfast with Dell, where Michael Dell would do a live stream where he would meet with customers, and then we'd upload it and make it available immediately on the site. We'd have people doing original TV shows and streaming shows in 1999, all these things that didn't become prevalent until years later. And so while I get a lot of crap about, oh, it's not there anymore, the reality is it was the greatest squelched opportunity ever. And so in any event, but in terms of my personal decisions,

how much money do you need? That was the foundation for the decision, period, end of story. I had a B next to my name. I mean, that was the most insane thing I could ever possibly imagine that I would be a billionaire. And the idea of thinking, okay, well, the stock price could go up and I might get more. What was I going to do with it? What was the value of having that much more money that I still had the same house, the same car, the same friends, the same everything? And so my goal was to protect it. You think back to what I said about micro solutions, where I said my initial reaction after selling my company was to invest it like an old man and put it in bonds and coupon

it. That was my same attitude. So when we hedged and everything cratered, that choice actually made me more money because the puts ended up being worth more than the value that was lost in the calls. And by the way, I got a grief because I remember going on CNBC even and saying, you know, I did this caller and they're like, don't you feel silly now that the price of Yahoo has gone up from the 95 or whatever it was to $300. And my response was, yeah, I feel really silly in my G5 flying around everywhere in my own jet.

Our stock went from $3.45 to $0.49 a share, delisted from NASDAQ. I was very lucky to leave the company right before we went public. So I was no longer an insider, had no inside information, was able to sell a lot of my stock. I'm truly grateful and was extremely lucky as well. Timing and luck, right? Right there. Perfect example. Let's talk about Shark Tank, which started in 2009. When the producers asked you to be on the show in 2011, you were excited about the opportunity to find unique companies. You were excited about being able to inspire young people to become entrepreneurs for both financial and moral reasons, which is one of the goals of my podcast. During an interview last year, you said that your favorite part of being on Shark Tank is being able

to meet the young child who reminds you of yourself and hearing how you inspire them to start their own businesses. You made a name for yourself for being very truthful with aspiring entrepreneurs. You're very quick to tell some of them that you don't believe they're going to be able to run a business properly or their products are going to fail. You made some great investments on Shark Tank, including Tower Paddleboards, Nuts & More, and Simple Sugars, which was founded by a 19-year-old woman who took a year off from high school to focus on our company before appearing on Shark Tank. But I want to talk about episode 12 from the season, which aired on January 21st. A 19-year-old teenager named Tanya Speaks pitched

her eyebrow gel company, Tanya Speaks Organic Skincare, to which at that point had earned $1.4 million in revenue since she started it. You told her that skincare wasn't your specialty, and you passed on the deal. And surprisingly, despite her being incredibly talented and having all of these revenues, the four other sharks also passed on it. And then what happened is you said, wait, wait, wait. And you told her that you thought someone was going to make her an offer. You told her this wasn't in your wheelhouse, but your wheelhouse was helping guide amazing entrepreneurs like her and helping them deal with the many legal landmines that come along when you start a company. And you also told her

maybe you couldn't help her with eyebrow cream, but you could give her guidance that would help her avoid a lot of the pitfalls in growing a company. So you made her an offer, $400,000 for 20% of the company, but it came with two contingencies. You wanted her to meet your 14-year-old daughter, Alyssa, and your 17-year-old daughter, Alexis, because you wanted your daughters to learn from her. And you said that maybe she would learn from them. And then you paused. And then you started to tear up. And I teared up when I watched it.

I tear up now because I have my kids. Sorry. That's okay. But then you guys reached a deal. 400,000 for 15% of the company. She said, thank you. I'm honored to meet your daughters. I'd really love that. She cried. And when she did, he told her that she'd be sitting in one of your chairs and be a shark one day, which she said was the highest compliment

she'd ever had. Can you tell us about that touching moment and your aspirations for your kids and how to motivate your kids who grew up in privilege? At the time, there's investing and then there's Shark Tank investing. And when I'm doing the show, I'm not just thinking about how much money can I make from a deal. I'm thinking about what's the return on my time based off of what I think people in the audience will gain. Because it is a TV show and it's going to air over and over and stream for decades. And it's important to me where somebody who comes in who's young, who represents a lot of people who don't have the same level of opportunity as my kids have

or others have, that we set a good example and inspire people to realize you don't have to have everything in order to have a chance. And Tanya really is a great example of somebody who really just worked hard to create something. And I thought that was an example that really was important to people watching. And as far as my kids, as you know, it's the scariest thing ever. After their health, they're not going to go through the same trials and tribulations that you and I did. They're not going to tell stories about sleeping on the side of the road and I could tell it had been abandoned because I'd had bill collectors chasing me. So I knew exactly what they were doing. And I called, there was paperwork on the car seat and I called the bank and asked them if I could take over the payment. They're not going to experience that. And it scares the hell out of me. And I tried to, like my parents did, to get them to take responsibility for themselves. But they're not dumb. They ride on private jets. Their friends say stuff. Their dad owns a basketball team. We're

not poor. And I just try to have honest conversations with them. And whether it was Tanya or I've done it with other companies of mine in the past where I try to connect them. And it's not the same because they don't have the same wide-eyed wonderment that I did about possibilities because they've seen a lot of those possibilities in their own lives already. And it's scary, but it's the most important job I have. And I'm proud of my kids. And I'm excited for them. And sometimes I just got to get out of the way, get out of my own head. But it's something my wife and I just focus on all day, every day. I have five kids.

I have two in college, Wisconsin, Cornell, senior in high school, five-year-old and one-and-a-half-year-old. And we live very nicely. Oh, that's a big old range. It's a lot. Like you, I love my kids more than anything in the world. I would take a bullet for my kids. And it's one of the hardest things to do is you want to coach them. And it's also hard to keep them humble, frankly. We live in Brentwood. A third of the kids at their school have private jets. I grew up without things, and I want to make sure they have things. I get my girls nice purses from time to time. It's hard. And when someone does something nice for my kids, it's so emotional for me because I would do whatever I could for my

kids. But what was the emotion that you were feeling? I mean, I was tearful. Kevin O'Leary, who was on my show, who's known as a hard ass, and he's not really, by the way, he's not. But you could see there being tears in his eyes when the camera caught to him. What were you feeling? I have goosebumps now thinking of my own kids. So I got emotional on your show. And I talked to some of my friends at the time too, with kids, they said, holy shit, did you see Mark Cuban? I said, yeah, we were, we had tears too. I mean, honestly, I was just thinking, can I help this girl? Can I really help her? Right. I was thinking more about my responsibility than anything else, because it is a responsibility that to help her. And Tanya better or worse has decided she doesn't need a lot of help she's doing her own thing and she had a great airing of the show and she's created a ton

of business for herself so I'm excited for her but that's what I was thinking I was like there's something I want from her but how much will I really be able to help her because it was like the going public thing it's not an an accomplishment. It's an obligation. And it wasn't about the money. It wasn't about the percentages. It was, all right, I don't know anything about this company or this product. Can I help her? And we'll see where it goes.

Let's talk about loving what you do. You grew up in Pittsburgh. We're a huge Steelers fan. You love basketball. When you bought Broadcast.com, you were a Maverick season ticket holder. On June 4th, 2000, when you were a month away from turning 42 years old, you purchased the majority stake in the Dallas Mavericks for $285 million from Ross Perot, which ironically was one of your biggest clients, Perot Systems at Micro Solutions.

In the 20 years before you bought the team, the Mavericks had won only 40% of their games. They had a playoff record of 22 and 27. In the 16 years after you bought the team, you won 66% of your regular season games and reached the playoffs in each of those seasons except for one. 2011, you won the NBA championship against the Miami Heat. That year, 22 of the 30 teams in the NBA were losing money and the average operating income per team was $6 million. The Mavericks did make a profit until 2013. But fast forward to 2020 and every team in the league was profitable with an average operating income of $62 million. You bought the team for $300 million. And according to Forbes, the Mavericks are the ninth most valuable team in the league and are worth $2.7

billion. If you're doing the math, the Mavs have increased the value by $2.4 billion or a 9x, which brings you to a compounded IRR of 10.69%. Numbers aside, how important have the Mavericks been to the city of Dallas and in all of the amazing accomplishments in your career? Where does owning the team rank for you? Sports is a completely different business. When Google or Apple has a record-breaking quarter, there are no parades. There are nobody asking for, or rarely are people asking for the autographs of standing in line to get autographs for people who work there. With sports, I learned very early on, I might be in charge of the financials, but Mavs fans around the world truly own the Mavericks because there's such a personal connection between the teams we root for and ourselves.

It connects families. The experiences we talk about of going to a game and who we were with and the feelings that we had, that to me has been the most rewarding part, for better and worse, because when you're losing, it goes the exact opposite way and you get all the grief, or even when you don't win enough. And so the Mavericks have not been about economics to me at all. It's really been about the competitive side of me wanting to win, wanting to win for Mavs fans. And just the challenge. If it was easy, everybody would win a championship every year.

And there's only a limited number of teams. There's still teams that have never won one. And so it's more the emotional connection to fans, I think, that stands out to me over this period than anything else. We've talked a lot about your failures and your challenges. And all of us have them on our path to excellence. You talked about Motley's Pub shutting down a college, Mellon Bank and quitting, Tronics 2000, powdered milk business, when you moved to Dallas, sleeping on the floor, cut credit cards, the stolen towel with holes in it, your lights turned off, couldn't pay your electricity bill. And you've said that you remember waking up some days thinking, oh my God, is this going to happen? And questioning if you

would ever achieve success. You were laughed at for some of your failures and things that you did. I was too. People laughed at me when I left a great job working for Eli Broad at Sun America. I left $2 million in in-the-money stock options on the table to help start a company in Boston that had no CEO, no funding. We're at a commute to work every day from Los Angeles without a salary. And they really laughed when he sold the company for $18 billion three months after I left, which was a full vesting event for all employees, which meant with the takeover premium, I lost out on nearly $2.5 million. I was 30 years old, engaged to be married and paying for my own wedding.

But through all of our failures, you said that it doesn't matter how many times we fail and that we should not quit because all it takes is one. And it's interesting because our biggest hits are often the ones that people thought were the most likely to fail. How important is experiencing failure on our path to excellence? And what advice do you have for those who have failed once, twice, or even 10 times and want to give up? Well, it doesn't matter how many times you fail.

You only got to be right once, right? Then everybody's going to tell you how lucky you are. I don't wish failure on anybody. I don't think a failure is a necessity, but it's inevitable for the most part, right? Unless you're really, really fortunate. And if you're smart, you're going to learn from it. We've talked about a lot of those failures, and I learned from each and every one of them and solid lessons that made me

smarter in everything I've done since then. I want to talk about the famous author and philosopher Ayn Rand, who wrote an incredible book called The Fountainhead. For those of you who haven't read it, it's about a young architect who fights against conventional standards and refuses to compromise with an establishment that's unwilling to accept change and innovation. You said you've loved the book. It was incredibly motivating to you and encouraged you to think as an individual, to take risks and reach your goals, and is partly responsible for both your successes and failures. You've given a lot of advice on how to achieve excellence in business, to focus on sales, to just get the fuck up off your ass and do it instead of asking for help, and among other things, to be prepared. When I look at my own career and some of the

ingredients of my own success, the most important one is that I was always and am always the most prepared person in the room. I got my job working for Eli Broad by writing a very unique and detailed letter. It took five hours to write. Then I spent another 40 hours, 40, preparing for the interview. That was my goal, to be the most prepared person in the room he'd ever met for a job interview. And I succeeded. It's exactly what he said when I walked out the door and he hired me six months later for a job I was completely unqualified for. There's a famous music composer who once said we should practice until we can't get it wrong. How important is work ethic and preparation of all the elements of success and being the

most prepared person in the room? And can you tell us how being the most prepared person in the room played a role in your success? I mean, it's everything. I've got all these stupid sayings, but one of them is practice till you can't get it wrong. The one thing in life you can control is effort. Everybody's got the will to win, but it's only those with the will to prepare that do win. How you do anything is how you do everything. These are the things that I repeat in my own mind all the time to keep me focused because there's always somebody competing with you. Business is the ultimate sport. In the NBA, I've said this to our players,

we play 48 minutes on the clock and then there's another game. You practice two hours, but after the season's over, you get some time off and then you prepare for the next season. In business, that's not the case. You're working 24 by 7 by 365 and there's always somebody there trying to kick your ass. When I was the youngest in the room, it was like, okay, that's not the case. You're working 24 by seven by 365. And there's always somebody there trying to kick your ass. When I was the youngest in the room, it was like, okay, they're not taking me seriously. When I was the oldest in the room, okay, they're not taking me seriously because I'm either too young or too old or whatever. But I do the motherfucking work. It doesn't matter in whatever it takes. And you know, the interesting thing is that technology in particular is kind of

like a ball of yarn. Creating the beginning of that ball is really hard, right, because there's nothing. You've got to use your finger and da-da-da-da-da. But once you have a foundation, just rolling the yarn around and making it bigger and bigger gets easier and easier and easier because you learn how to learn. You learn how to understand the underlying principles and how to pick up on things and what's the signal and what's the noise. But you don't get to that point unless you go the extra mile. Another one of my work like someone's working 24 hours a day to take it all away because it's true. But not everybody's cut out to commit themselves like that.

Not everybody's cut out for what you have to give up to do it. I went through relationships. I went that seven years without a vacation. I was on a mission, right? I wanted to be in a position where I could retire. I wanted to be in a position where my time was my own. I wanted to be in a position by the time I got married and have kids, I wouldn't have to worry about all those things because I knew what it could do to our relationship. And so if you want to be successful, you have to decide what you're willing to do. I'm not saying one way is right and one way is wrong. If you have to make your choices on how you want to live your life, you have to make your choices on what's most important to you. There's nothing wrong with having a nine to five job. There's nothing wrong with driving an Uber or whatever

it may be because there's other things you want to do. You want to be a composer. You want to just spend time with your kids. That's all wonderful. But you get to make that choice. And if your choice is to be an entrepreneur, if your choice is to make as much money as possible, if your choice is to at some point have enough to control your own time, you're

going to have to make a commitment because no one's handing you any of that. In your search for excellence, people always ask me, what do I have to do? Everybody's got something that they're great at. The hard part is finding it. And then when you find it, being honest with yourself to make sure it truly is something you can be great at, and then doing it so you're the best at it or as close to being the best as you can. Because you don't always have to be the absolute best. Neither one of us is the absolute best at business, but we're going to outwork 99% of the people that are out there. And that's going to put us in a position to have more success. And so not lying to yourself is probably the most fundamental underpinning of success that there is because we all do. Our idea is the best.

I really, I have what it takes. I'm a winner. I know I'm a winner. We all are winners. We all have what it takes. But unless you find out what that one thing is you can be great at or pretty damn good at and bust your ass to get there, you're just a statistic. You're just one more person that tried. You may not fail, but you may not be, you won't get to, you're just a statistic. You're just one more person that tried. You may not fail, but you won't get to where you really want to go unless you're lucky. It's great advice. Let's talk about your awesome new company, which is making huge news. It's called Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company, which launched two months ago on January 19th. It's an online pharmacy based in Dallas that offers over 100 generic

drugs to treat a variety of illnesses, including diabetes, asthma, and heart conditions. And it provides consumers with incredibly low prices by charging only a 15% markup and a pharmacist's fee. As two examples, you sell a 30-count of imatinib, which is used to treat leukemia and other cancers for $17.10, while other pharmacies charge $2,502.60, or more than 146 times what you're charging. You sell a 30-day supply of the diabetes drugs metformin for $3.90 compared to a retail price of $20 or five times more. It's cash only. You don't accept health insurance. And for now, the drugs you're selling are made by other generic manufacturers. But you are currently building your own manufacturing facility, which is about halfway finished through construction. Can you tell us about this? What motivated you to start it? And what are your goals with it? Yeah, I was fortunate in that my partner,

Alex Oshmayansky, who's a doctor, a radiologist, and a mathematician, and just one of the smartest people I've ever met. The guy's incredibly, he puts the term rocket scientist to shame. Came to me with some ideas on starting a compounding pharmacy, and I kind of evolved it to the idea of going after the pharmacy benefit manager and cost-to-patient pharmacy business. And, you know, if anybody who understands how drugs are priced in this country, they understand that it's very convoluted and upside down in a lot of respects because of the relationships between manufacturers and pharmacy benefit managers and insurance companies and hospitals. It's just very insensuous and just not necessarily in the best interest of patients. And so we started talking, it's more than three years ago now, and started creating the costplusdrugs.com

company and finally got to the point where this past January 19th, we were able to finally release it. And the reason was very simple. I mean, it's just an obvious solution was needed. And the reason was very simple. I mean, it's just an obvious solution was needed. And the impetus, shockingly enough, was, and I asked him about Martin Shkreli and how he was just able to jack up prices for Daraprim. And if he could jack them up, why couldn't we cut them out, right? And why couldn't we reduce them? Literally, we looked at buying a one-year supply of Daraprin just to try to put him out of business, but somebody had already bought the supply and you're not allowed to give

drugs away. And so we decided to take this cost-plus approach where we felt like because the drug industry and the pharmacy side of it in particular, when it came to working with insurance companies, was so convoluted that transparency would be the key to changing the game and disrupting it. And by not only being transparent, but having a markup of only 15% that we could really take the industry by storm. And that's exactly what we've done. How's it going so far? Beyond our wildest dreams. We're already at six-month and 12-month projections for different KPIs less than a month in. It's insane. It really, really is insane.

I love it. Congratulations. Yeah. And it also goes to understanding business. And we talked about preparation. It took three-plus years to develop the relationship before we released. But we knew what our core competency was going to be and will remain to be, and that's being the lowest cost provider of drugs, period, end of story. If we can't be the low cost providers,

we won't do it. And getting it to the point where we can, even if someone has insurance that we don't take, we very often are going to be under the copay that they have. And even better, unlike most companies where we get a reduction in our costs, we'll pass them through immediately. Yesterday, we announced our first four price cuts, and we've only been shipping for less than a month, and we hope to do that every week. And as you know, Randy, when you're at the antithesis of a way an entire industry does business, where your customers and their experiences have expected price increase after price increase or uncertainty, it may be cheap one day and expensive the next day, and you don't know how it's going to impact you. The idea of not only having the lowest price to start, but those prices going down and are adding new drugs,

hopefully on a monthly basis, that is a game changer in a lot of respects. Having your name has certainly helped. I mean, I think I read a hundred things online. It was blasted everywhere. It was on my Apple News. And when I got it, I went online right away. I'm sure you had a massive amount of traffic that day. But hopefully, I'm sure the site didn't crash. But I sent it to maybe 20 people I knew. I sent it to my entire family. You guys got to check this thing out. So not surprising that you're doing so well. Congratulations on that. Thank you. I want to talk about work-life balance. We're getting toward the end of the podcast. You said you didn't take a vacation

for seven years. You've got a lot on your plate, the Maverick, Shark Tank, your investments, the new online pharmacy, your philanthropy, which we're going to talk about next. You have three kids. Many ultra successful people I know are workaholics, are not around for their kids because they're always working. What's the right balance for you? And what's your advice to others on this front? I had no balance. Had no balance, have no balance. My balance changed completely, if you will. I waited to get married. I knew I had no balance. And I knew that if I tried to have a family while I was really pushing the envelope and trying to make all these things happen, that I would fail. And then after broadcast and after, you know, many of my financial side of

things, I was in a position to be able to do it. And what really changes the most in terms of the balance is now, given the position I'm in, whether it's running a company or the financial circumstances, people work to my schedule. You know, when you're up and coming, you work to anybody's schedule. You want me there at 3 a.m., I'm there at 3 a.m. You want me there at 9 p.m.? I'm there at 9 p.m. But now I can say, okay, let's do this via email because if it's halftime at a Mavs game, I can deal with it then. Or I have a Mavs game that night. I can't do it. Let's do it the next day. Now people work to my schedule and I'm able to put my family first and kids first. And honestly, the pandemic had played

a big role too because it forced us all to come together and really learn to adjust to each other's schedules even more. Because the kids were home, we were home, my wife and I were home. And so it cemented that even further. You have a reputation, by the way. I heard this two years ago that can email you, your email address is public and you'd write back. So I've got this podcast. You're on the list. I had one with Kevin, which went amazingly well. And I sent you an email. It took you four minutes to respond back to me saying you'll do it. So I'm grateful to you on that. And I just want to say it's amazing you make time for not only things on your plate, but people you don't know. So thank you for doing that. Thank you for reaching out.

I want to talk about philanthropy. You've done so many incredible things to give back, and there are too many to name, but I want to talk about a couple of them and share them with our viewers and listeners. When COVID closed sports stadiums around the country, you paid the hourly workers at American Airlines Arena out of your own pocket for a month when you started the whole thing, and some others followed you as well. Awesome. Then there's Delonte West, who played in the NBA 13 years, only one year for the Mavericks. He struggled with bipolar disorder. Drug addiction has been arrested several times. He was banned from the NBA because of the drug use and the arrests. A few years after he stopped

playing, he was homeless. And 18 months ago, a Mavericks fan saw and posted a video online of him panhandling on the side of a road at a gas station. At that point, you didn't know what he was doing. You knew the gas station. It was a few miles from your house. You got in your Tesla. You raced over. You picked him up. You paid for a hotel room for him. And then you've tried to help him since as he continues to struggle. I mean, that's insane, incredible. He only played for you for a year and you did all this. And I don't think there's another owner in the NBA or any league who would have done any of that. And it says tremendous amount about you and what you're like as a person. Can you tell us what inspires you to

help people? Can you tell us more about the Fallen Patriot Fund, the Mark Cuban Foundation, and what your goals are for philanthropy? Honestly, I don't have specific goals for philanthropy. I try to be entrepreneurial because the challenge with philanthropy is when you write a check, then you don't really solve a problem, right? You put a bandaid on it. You know, it's the old give a man a fish and he eats for a day, teach a man to fish, right? I've really evolved towards more types of cost plus type thing, right? Where it could be self-sufficient. And that's what I look for, for the most part. But at the same time, if money can help somebody, it's only money. I know how to make money. I've got more than I can ever spend. And if I can help somebody, and it doesn't always work. Look, Delonte has been in and out.

He's walked out of rehab facilities that I've paid for. I've given him a job and he's walked off. And it's been challenging to say the least. It hasn't been the success story we all hoped it would be. It's not over, but it's not where we hoped it would be. And so whether it's paying for a transplant or something, I just try to either make it so I'm solving a problem immediately. The one thing I don't do is just give to big organizations and say, okay, big organization, I'll show up your charity gala that you spent millions of dollars on and let me write you a big check so you can put together your next charity gala. That just pisses me off to no end. I really try to focus where I can have a direct impact or do something that is self-sustaining

so that it creates a scenario where it takes care of itself. Can you tell us more about the Fallen Patriot Fund? When we invaded Iraq in 2002, I knew that there would be soldiers who weren't coming home and their families would be impacted significantly. And so there weren't always programs to take care of the families that were in need. And so that's how it started. And just families of the military who were hurt or lost in Operation Iraqi Freedom, we helped cover their bills. And once that ended, we expanded that to first responders, whether it was there were officers in LA that were shot point blank

in their police cars and giving them a grant, other first responders, whatever it may be, just trying to be there to help. Amazing. Before we finish today, I want to go ahead and ask some very simple open-ended questions. I call this part of my podcast, Fill in the Blank to Excellence. Are you ready to play? Let's go. When I started my career, I wish I had known. Not to drink so much. The biggest lesson I've learned in my life is? Be nice. I wasn't always nice at the beginning. And really that probably is, you know, I should have learned first. I was one of those guys who was just like, go, go, go, go, go. And I didn't have a lot of patience for people I thought weren't using, in my mind, common sense. And that was a mistake

in hindsight. I should have been nice. And I've learned that since. The one person in the world that I admire the most is? My dad. Yeah, it's not even close. He just, almost everything I learned, I learned from him. Is he still around? No, we lost him about three years ago. How proud was he of all your success? I remember when I told him that I made $100,000 in a year and he couldn't stop crying. But it still took until his 70s. He died at 92. He worked until his 70s, despite me trying to get him to quit. And still, until the day he died, he was trying to use his credit card, even though I paid for it, his credit card to pay for everything, because that's what the dad does.

My grandmother is the person I admire the most. She's 103 years old now. And right before we went public, I bought a house that was wood-framed, and she was in town. And I took her by the house. It's a very nice house. I'm going to stay here forever, hopefully. And she was looking around. She said nothing. And then we went in the car, and then we're going to dinner in my Acura Integra.

And she said, hey, Randy, that house is kind of big. Are you sure you can afford it? And it's been great to have her see my own success. And I've been supporting her since. So it's been one of the highlights of my life. If you could be one person in the world, who would it be? My daughter's boyfriend right now. You haven't met him yet? No, she broke up with Juan. And now, Ethan, I haven't, I've met him briefly, but haven't really met him. I don't know that there's one

person. Probably, I mean, I admire Elon Musk. I've talked to him, but I've never really spent time with him. So I think Elon would be fun to spend some time with. On a scale of one to 10,000, how great is Luka Doncic? 10,001. He's that good. He's a good kid. He's an amazing basketball player. And he's still learning. And he's still working.

He's a good, good kid, man. I like Luka. Do you socialize with some of your players? I know that there's often a tough relationship when the Los Angeles Kings had a different owner before Bruce McNall bought the team. And once he went to prison and the team was owned by someone else, I knew a lot of the players and I knew Bruce and just a whole different thing. It can be very corporate or it can be personal.

When I was younger, I was hanging out with the guys all the time. Now it's a little bit different because the age gap is a lot more. But yeah, I still hang out with them. We went out the other night, actually. And so I have no problem and I enjoy it. It's fun to spend time with them. It's not business, right? It's just relationships.

And people don't realize it. Well, you know, because you just mentioned you dealt with professional athletes. They're just regular people just trying to live a regular life that just happen to have an amazing skill. I love sports. It's fun for me to spend time. We have a place up in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, and I'm friends with a pro golfer and there's a bunch of athletes up there.

So we had a hockey player, all-star, and I had the pro golfer and the three of us went golfing. I'm a horrible golfer, but it was so fun for them to talk about their sports, which I really knew nothing about. And the question that really seared into my mind was, at what age did you know you were better than everybody else and that all the people you were competing with weren't going to make it and you were going to make it? I mean, just fascinating stuff. What'd they say? Hockey player was 12th. Bobby Ryan, who played 13 seasons most recently for the Red Wings, crazy thing there. His dad tried to kill his mom when he was 10 years old, shot her, got back together. They ran from the law. Bobby lived, that isn't his

real name. It's his real name now. Lived in El Segundo. He was a hockey phenom and they were just waiting for the marshals to bash down their door one day, which they did when he was 14 years old. Second pick in the draft behind Sidney Crosby. That's crazy. Crazy story. Yeah, I mean, that was fun for me. And the golfer was, I think, 17. He won the national championship in college.

There you go. Good stuff. The one question you wish I had asked you is... Oh my God. You did a good job, Randy. Thank you. What can I play on the piano? Nothing. Changes by David Bowie and Stairway to Heaven. Those are my two songs.

Do you have any last advice for those listening today? Play at 1.5x speed. You'll get it all. That way, you'll be able to listen to it all the way through because you asked me some great questions and I really enjoyed it. Thank you. Mark, you've been someone I've admired for a very long time. You've been a phenomenal role model. I've inspired many millions of people with your success, your humility, and your philanthropy. I'm very grateful for your time today.

Thank you so much for sharing your story with us. Randy, I got to tell you, you crushed it on preparation. You knew stuff that I had forgotten when you asked me and the Akamai connection and talking about everything, but the things I'm used to talking about, I really appreciate it. Thanks for having me on.