We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - TIP208: Billionaire Mark Cuban Lessons (Business Podcast)

Starting point is 00:00:00 You're listening to TIP. Hey, how's everyone doing out there? On today's show, we're going to be covering billionaire Mark Cuban. Mark is a fellow Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania guy, and after attending college in Western PA, Mark moved to Texas and became a bartender and then started working in sales at a software company. But after being fired from his job in a short amount of time, Mark started his own company called Micro Solutions.

Starting point is 00:00:26 After selling the business for $6 million in under a decade, Mark started a new business that streamed college sports over the internet. Within another decade, Mark sold broadcast.com for $5.7 billion to Yahoo. During our show, we play some interesting questions that Mark has been asked about his time as an entrepreneur and building this billion dollar enterprise. So without further delay, we hope you enjoy our coverage of billionaire Mark Cuban. You are listening to The Investors Podcast, where we study the first. financial markets and read the books that influence self-made billionaires the most. We keep you

Starting point is 00:01:06 informed and prepared for the unexpected. All right, welcome to the Investors podcast. Stig and I are so excited to have you here. And like we said in the introduction, we're going to be talking about Mark Cuban. So without any hesitation, we're going to cover the first question. This was whenever Mark was asked, let's talk about your first tech business micro solutions. And this was his response. I got a job working at a software store in Dallas, Texas selling computer software. And I didn't know a lot about computer software. So what I would do is I would come in early, stay late, come in weekends, and sit there, teaching myself all the different software.

Starting point is 00:01:49 I mean, I literally would sit there and read software manuals. I taught myself out of a program. I would go out and sell software to businesses or anybody really who wanted it. One day I had a big sale, and it was at a company called Your Business Software. I worked for a guy named Michael Hugh Mecky. I went in and I said, Michael, I've got this big deal I'm going to close. I'm going to go pick up a $15,000 check. My commission was going to be $1,500.

Starting point is 00:02:13 And mind you, I'm living in a three-bedroom apartment, six guys, I'm sleeping on the floor. I have towels that stand up on their own, you know? It is just the grossest ever. So I'm thinking, yeah, I get to move. We called it the hotel. I get to move out of the hotel into a real apartment. And he says, no, there's a retail store. You have to make sure the windows are clean.

Starting point is 00:02:34 and you have to make sure the floor is swept and the displays are all. I said, Michael, I'm going to go close this deal. And he goes, no. And I'm like, I promised him to him, I go, I got to go. I come back, he fires me. I take my check back, put it in my pocket and take that customer and go start a company called Micro Solutions. I really like his response.

Starting point is 00:02:56 I think for anyone who has been following Mike Cuban, you know how big he is on sales. So that's really my key takeaway here. At the end of the day, everything comes down to sales. We have this idea that sales is the least prestigious job you can have. I don't see sales anywhere like that. For me, sales is the most refined art and the most important skill you can have in many, many ways in business. If you're applying for a job, you're a salesperson.

Starting point is 00:03:25 If you're attracting an employee to a company, you're also a salesperson. If you want to persuade your boss or your colleagues that the company should be you should run with your idea, you're on sales too. It just seems different whenever you're not knocking on doors trying to sell your product. I think in this day and age where everything is about automation and AI, one skill I don't see go away anytime soon. That is the ability to sell. It's really the primary driver for everything in business when you think about it. And whenever I listen to what Cuban said, I also came to think of. have other billionaires, Bill Gates, also a great salesperson. He sold his first piece of software

Starting point is 00:04:09 before it was procre-rimed. You could say the same thing about Warren Buffett, the way he got started, who was selling his partnership. I like that too, and the same with Mike Cuban. He got his validation of the concept whenever he received that check. It all comes down to sales at the end of the day. I completely agree with your point there, Stig. We'll go on to the next question. For people that don't know, Mark Cuban went on past this. He ended up buying a internet domain called Broadcast.com. If you actually type in broadcast.com today into your web browser, it'll take you to Yahoo. That's because Mark sold it to Yahoo, just so people understand what broadcast.com was, he was going around and basically syndicating radio announcements of various sporting events.

Starting point is 00:04:55 So if you wanted to listen to a certain football game or you wanted to listen to a baseball game, It was all being syndicated through broadcast.com early on when the internet was just being stood up before any of this kind of stuff was possible. So this was a question in reference to that sale to Yahoo. You sell and they pay you in stock. Yeah. And post sale, Yahoo struggles with the acquisition. They don't really know how to do it. No, no.

Starting point is 00:05:18 Okay. So let's put it in context here, right? We sell the company and I don't remember the exact price of Yahoo stock. It was like $250. From my perspective, this was April of 2000 when it closed, and I don't see the stock market just going up forever. I mean, literally the NASDAQ just passed 5,000, which is where it was back then in 2000. You know, like I said, I traded stocks, and started and sold a hedge fund.

Starting point is 00:05:43 I understood what happens in the market and gravy trains don't last forever. And so I'm like, look, this is crazy. It's always been a little crazy, but it's getting even too heated. I had to wait six months before I had to wait. could hedge my stock, meaning buy an offset in case it went down. So I literally took every penny I had, $20 some million in cash. And I put on an index against the entire market. And that put was for six months. But if the market crashed, prior to that, I was as good as I could be. The market didn't crash. I lost every penny. But the minute I was allowed to, I hedged.

Starting point is 00:06:25 everything, everything, right? Everybody thought I was an idiot. There's literally a CNBC interview where he said, Mark, don't you feel stupid? Yahoo stock is up another $100. And by this time I'd already sold the Mavs. And I remember sitting on the team bus talking to our then coach and one of our coaches, Del Harris. And he goes, look at all that money you left on the table. And I'm like, literally in one day the stocks were jumping so crazily one day I paid for the entire Mavericks in the stock move of one day and they're like but you left all this on the table and I'm like patience patience I did an interview on CNBC and he goes don't you feel horrible that you left you know billion plus dollars on on the table and

Starting point is 00:07:15 it's on tape he goes I said yeah I feel really bad flying around in my G5 you know just Horrible. But everybody thought I was an idiot. Even people who worked for me, I told everybody. And Todd listened, some people did, some people didn't. Because every single person who had worked for us for more than a couple months was at least on paper a millionaire. And that was 300 plus people.

Starting point is 00:07:37 So we had a lot of smiley faces around the office. And I'm like, look. And they're like, oh, see you were wrong. The stock's going up. And then the bubble burst. And I went, it's unfortunate. A lot of people got crushed because I had hedged everything. actually benefited in some respects and came out further ahead. From there, the problem with Yahoo

Starting point is 00:07:56 and what happened afterwards wasn't so much what we were doing. It's once Yahoo stock went from $3007 to $5 to something crazy, they freaked out. So this is a really interesting comment on many levels. The thing that I liked about it was he was really talking about this idea of getting the trade perfect versus getting the trade good enough. Although he talked about there, the first six months with the stock not going the way that he thought. He had a much bigger idea of how to position himself for safety. This wasn't a position for making a ton of money. This was a position to protect himself when everyone was being greedy in the market. And we all know the Buffett saying when everybody in the market was being greedy in 2000, Mark Cuban was trying to

Starting point is 00:08:44 be very conservative, play it safe, protect his investment. Really interesting. how he was thinking about this. So many people, the people on CNBC asking him questions, you left money on the table, you left money on. Of course you're going to leave money on the table. To predict the top of the market or to predict anything of when it's exactly going to happen is a fool's errand. And you're going to get yourself in a lot of trouble trying to do stuff like that. It just has to be good enough. And I think that's what he was really saying. Stick, I'm curious what you've got on this one. I would like to talk a bit more about the strategy of buying food options.

Starting point is 00:09:21 But MacCubon is really doing here, just to be sure, like we're all on the same page, is he was paid in Yahoo stock. So if that dropped, he would basically just lose all that money. So he wanted to hedge that by buying a so-called put option. The way this works is very simple. If you buy a put option with a strike price of $20 and the underlying stock, say it's trading at 19, then you will have $1 in profit. That was really what he was thinking here.

Starting point is 00:09:49 you were dealing with options, whenever you were buying, you cannot actually also be selling, but if you are buying in this situation a put option, you can still make multiples of what you put into it. So he put $20 million into it. But that is the premium. So you would pay a premium for the right to exercise an option at a given strike price. That was what he was doing. So if he was right, he would be making a lot of money, or you might say he would still be losing money on the Yahoo bet, but he would be gaining a lot of money on the premium. And also, whenever you talk about options, it's always about the market's expectation. So if everyone expects the HOO stock to continue to go up in price, then the strike prices he could get as an investor would be really

Starting point is 00:10:32 attractive if he had the feeling that would go in another direction. The other thing I really like about this example is that a lot of people has been talking about McCuban being lucky and just selling up the right time. And why wouldn't you, who bought Broadcast.com just before the crash, almost before the crash. Of course, I'd say that there's an element of luck to all billionaires, or at least most of them. You know, I think this example shows a lot about Mark Cuban's financial literacy. He knows what he was doing. He was not trying to, well, he was actually trying to predict exactly when a crash would happen. But just that he was thinking in terms of hedging himself like that and being so active in the financial

Starting point is 00:11:12 the markets, I think this was a very interesting conversation to have. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. All right. I want you guys to imagine spending three days in Oslo at the height of the summer. You got long days of daylight, incredible food, floating saunas on the Oslo Fjord, and every conversation you have is with people who are actually shaping the future. That's what the Oslo Freedom Forum is. From June 1st through the 3rd, 2026, the Oslo Freedom Forum is entering its 18th year bringing together activists, technologists, journalists, investors, and builders from all over the world, many of them operating on the front lines of history. This is where you hear firsthand stories from people using Bitcoin to survive currency collapse,

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Starting point is 00:15:19 That's Shopify. com slash WSB. All right, back to the show. If I was going to say he got anything wrong, I'd just say that the duration on the options is what he got wrong by doing six months. I've personally just had bad luck with short-term options, like anything under six months. Today, if I buy an option, it's always a two-year option. I'm sure there's a lot of financial people out there that could tell you why that's maybe not the best approach or whatever. But for me, I've just been so bad at forecasting time frame when

Starting point is 00:15:52 something's going to happen that if I do feel pretty good about, hey, something's going to happen here pretty soon. Like in the next six months, I usually give myself a two-year runway to see if that's true or not true. That's just my personal opinion on options. And I don't do put options on individual stocks at all. I refuse to go short on individual stocks. Now, I will short like an index using maybe like an inverse ETF or something, but I don't short individual companies simply because you have no idea who's going to maybe buy them out or what's going to come up. that could drastically change whatever narrative you got on a specific company. And for me right now, Tesla would be a perfect example.

Starting point is 00:16:32 I'm not a fan. I don't think Tesla should be capitalized where it's at. So I think the price should go down. But I would never short that company. We've been running this show for like four years now. And we've probably been talking about Tesla being overvalued for what? Three years or so. Exactly.

Starting point is 00:16:47 We might have been right in the fundamentals, but we've been wrong about the timing if we kept buying six months' puts, right? Absolutely. And you're right about the use by Mark Cuban here to protect all those shares he was receiving was an absolute smart decision. I just think maybe he should have done maybe a two-year kind of deal. And I'm sure he would tell you the same today. It's easy to look back in time and call that one. President, I don't know if he was because he couldn't sell stock after six months or after the acquisition was made or that's why. I was just thinking it was something like that

Starting point is 00:17:19 because it seems like a short period of time for something like that. Well, I bet you that's probably what it was, is he probably was protecting himself until he got to the point where he could just sell the whole position. Who knows? The next question that we're going to cover is when Mark was approached to do Shark Tank, all the opportunities that he was given with entrepreneurs and all that kind of stuff, this was his response. Mark Burnett put together in the United States. It actually is a concept that started in Japan and then went to the United Kingdom called Dragons Dan, and then Mark Burnett brought it to the U.S. and turned it into Shark Tank. I originally talked to him about it the first season, and they didn't cast me, and then I came

Starting point is 00:18:00 back in the second season as a guest. And honestly, when I went on the show, they had bounced it around to different nights, and I'm thinking, this business show has got no chance of surviving. And so I go on there, do my three episodes as a guest, and I'm just buying every company no matter what. Because I'm thinking this thing's gone. And I'm like, I want to make my mark in this TV show because this is ABC. It's network television. And Kevin and Damon and Barbara and Robert, they're looking at me like, I'm crazy. It's just like when I went to the NBA, right? They're like, what the hell are you doing? I'm like, you know, let's just have some fun. And the next thing you know, the show starts taking off. And it really starts getting a base of viewers. And now we start

Starting point is 00:18:42 next week, a week from today, we start shooting season 10. But along, that was just cool. Could you imagine, for me, eight seasons of Mr. Wonderful? It's brutal. Brutal. But the good part about it is that so many companies have come on there and we've picked some and miss them. And I've invested, as you said, in 85, but I think now we're up to seven of those that

Starting point is 00:19:08 have sold. We just sold a company out of Atlanta that went on Shark Tank, a cyclo-o-ramic. They had the iPhone that used the buzzer and you ran this app on it and it just turned around and took panoramic pictures. Well, they changed the format of the iPhone, which is great. This is a great lesson for entrepreneurs. So this guy came in with this really cool app, worked with an iPhone 5, and it just turned around and take panoramic pictures. And then stitch them together and it was a cool picture. So I give them $250,000, I think, for 20% of the company or 25% of the company.

Starting point is 00:19:40 not four months later Apple changes the iPhone and it's got this like rounded thing underneath and we're like oh what's what are we going to do but the guy was smart and one of the things I always look for for companies coming in is what's your unique advantage what is the one thing you have that differentiates you from other companies and for this guy the product was interesting but you know as I said on the show the ability to program video and use what became computer vision was a unique skill that was hard to find. And so we worked with him and actually worked with him to bring in another CEO. And they used that same technology to be able to scan cars. So now if you go to websites like Carvana to buy a car and you see how you can

Starting point is 00:20:28 turn the car around just right there, that started with their software. And the guy's name was Bruno. So Bruno, we just sold his company for $22.5 million a couple weeks ago. And so I walked away, with, you know, 25% of that, so I was like, yeah, Shark Tank. Bring me some more shark. But the point of it is, all these companies come on, and there's some rules of thumb that I thought were smart going in, but I've really turned out to be true moving forward. One is sales cures all. Lots of companies come in and say, I have a great idea, or I have a company, and we've got

Starting point is 00:21:04 some sales, but we only need to do this and we only need to do that. And you talk to the entrepreneur, and I'm like, why aren't you, say? selling. This is your whole company. There's never been a company in the history of companies to survive without sales. Now as more and more people watch Shark Tank, they're seeing it. But if you can't sell, if it's your company and you can't sell, you're not going to be in business long, particularly when you're starting up and it's just you. And so there are principles like that, you know. The other thing is when people get some momentum, they want to all of a sudden go big, right? Particularly that's kind of a dot-com thing. That's buyer customers raise a ton of money.

Starting point is 00:21:39 one of my buddies, Howard Tallman, says it best. He goes, you got to nail it before you scale it. If your company doesn't work, making it big won't solve your problems. They'll just add to your problems. Another thing that we try to convey, or I've learned and tried to convey to our shark tank companies, is that raising money always seems to be like the big thing to entrepreneurs coming in. Well, if I can only raise this money, raising money isn't an accomplishment.

Starting point is 00:22:05 It's an obligation. The best equity is sweat equity. You know, what you can do and what you, seriously, if you're putting in the sweat and you're putting in the time and you're not out there to raising money and you're grinding and out and you're hustling, so many companies, I mean, and to me, that's part of the problem of Silicon Valley. They're so all about raising money, raising money, and they forget. That just creates an obligation. And when I give you my money in Shark Tank, what is this just like, okay, here's your $100,000, call me when you're, you know, you're not so busy. No, I gave it to you for a reason, right? And I have expectations, and I want you to communicate with me.

Starting point is 00:22:44 It follows a normal distribution. I've had some really great companies, and I've had just some pure out idiots. Just, and it's almost like drafting, you know, in the second round of the NBA. Athletes will come in and just give you the best song and dance and you think they've got it together. I had this one company, and they did these. I try to get people to paint their faces that come to Mavs games. And, you know, kids will put on paint, you know, but when you're done with it, It's a mess.

Starting point is 00:23:10 And so this company, Game Face, they had these things. They got surgical tape, and they had them reformatted so that you could just cut it up, color whatever colors are pre-buy the colors you like, and just poke the holes and cut them and put them on your face. And when you're done, you know, you look all Mavs, colors, whatever, you just peel it off and you're done. It was great. All of a sudden one day I'm getting a report.

Starting point is 00:23:34 So the way I like to do is I like to get weekly, depending on how good the company is, weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, or quarterly, you know, the better of the company, the longer you can wait. But I always want bad news first. Because I invested in you because I expect good news. But when there's a problem, I want to know about it because I want to be able to help you and get it through it. And so with Gameface, I got my reports,

Starting point is 00:23:55 and all of a sudden the money was gone. I'm like, what did you spend all this money on? It's gone. And he decided we needed for the surgical tape mask, he decided we needed patents all around the world to protect it. I'm like, dude, you've barely sold anything. What are you protecting? There's no good reason to patent something that sucks. But if you can't sell it, right, then you know it sucks. If you can sell it, then you can talk about it, right? But so in this case, it wasn't that it sucked. It was actually a good product,

Starting point is 00:24:33 but the guy went through all of the money. I'm like, so, What are you going to do now? I don't know. We'll start small. I'm like, look, we've got them together, sitting there drinking ice tea. I'm like, I'm going to do you a favor. I own 33% of the company. I'm going to take over and run it.

Starting point is 00:24:51 All you have to, you can go get another job. You can hang out with your kids. I'm not going to, you don't have to do anything, and please don't do anything. I've got my 33%. I think this can be big enough. Just seeing what I can see was going to sporting events and the world. cup was coming and things we could do there and selling sponsors, just chill, right? Here's the beer, I'll send you beer, whatever you need, just chill.

Starting point is 00:25:20 So we shake on it. And so we're grinding and out, right, and sales are going, and chchchchchch, and I'm going, okay, this is working. Six months later, I get an email from one of my guys. You're not going to believe what he did. I'm like, what did he do? He created his own new gameface.com or whatever it was to compete with me. I'm like, you know, look, as an entrepreneur, you guys are entrepreneurs, you've got to have a screw loose, you've got to be a little freaky somewhere along the line. That's just the nature of the beast because it's so competitive and there's so much at stake.

Starting point is 00:26:02 But, come on, man. It was just like, so they run the game. So obviously a hilarious exchange here on some of his stories dealing with Shark Tank. The last one doesn't surprise me. How many, everyone who's listening to this has stories of people like this that just do not get it. They come up with a great idea. Just don't understand the business part of it at all whatsoever. I liked his comments about the patent stuff.

Starting point is 00:26:31 There's so often people think they've just got to file a patent for everything. and they're not cheap. They're really expensive, tens of thousands of dollars in most cases with patents. I've got a real quick tip on patents. If you ever have a really great idea and you want to license something, read this book called One Simple Idea. It'll save you a ton of money. It's basically how to file a PPA, a provisional patent for like a couple hundred bucks and then to go float the idea without having to spend all the money. And then once you get somebody to bite on the idea, you're able to have them pay for the patent and then you collect a royalty off of it. It's a great book, but not to deviate too far off of this. Really fun conversation. I didn't realize that about

Starting point is 00:27:15 the beginning of Shark Tank with his first season where he was just basically trying to make as many deals as possible because he didn't think the show was going to make it. That's pretty surprising. I didn't realize that. Yeah, I absolutely love this exchange. Anyone who's been raising capital, they've been speaking to people who are just like, just don't get it. And don't get it. And don't get really what it's all about. I was doing this consulting for this guy. It was probably a few years ago and he was trying to raise a few million dollars. It was about sponsorship for football clubs or something like that. I was going over his case at this point in time and he was just standing up. He still had a job on the side. So I asked him, so what is the money for? And he said,

Starting point is 00:27:56 well, if I raise, I think it was $2 million, I can quit my job and hire a salesperson. That would be so nice. And I was like, what? Yeah, it would be nice if you could quit your job and hire a salesperson. But it's not a business. You are the salesperson. You are the business. What are you going to do? And just really just to tie this back to what Mark Cuban was saying, this was in one of the other audio clips that we didn't do here today. He was talking about how he met up at 1 a.m. at night, and whenever it was convenient for the buyer. It's not convenient whenever you try to raise capital. You don't raise capital because it's convenient for you. You do it because it's convenient for the investor.

Starting point is 00:28:37 So if you raise $100 million, you have $100 million obligations. And the thing is really as simple as that. We started multiple billionaires here on the show who's been raising capital and who deeply regretted it, even though they had enough money already. Perhaps why, you know, Ted Turner started CNN whenever he was doing the merger with Time Warner. He regretted it, Boone Piggins. And just here lately, Elon Musk, sure, there are a ton of things you can't do if you don't raise capital, but most people go into entrepreneurship because they do not want a boss. That is exactly what you're getting whenever you are raising capital.

Starting point is 00:29:13 Nothing wrong with raising capital. It's not a freebie as I guess some people might mistake it for. I absolutely love this point that you just made stick because people become entrepreneurs because they don't want to have a boss. Then as they're in the grind and they're doing their thing, they're like, we got to raise money. We got to do a funding round because that's what everyone does it with this entrepreneur stuff. They raise money. They go out and get a million dollars.

Starting point is 00:29:40 And I think they get caught up in that idea. And so they go out and they raise the money only to find out now not only are they working for somebody else, but they're working for somebody else and probably the highest stress environment you could possibly create, all of a sudden it isn't their baby anymore, depending on how much equity you give up during the funding rounds. But you go out and grab a million bucks from somebody. Typically, they want to have control. There's just some thoughts. You know, if you are starting your business and you're talking that kind of stuff, we totally get it. We understand why you want to raise money because you want to move fast. But this is what I'll tell you.

Starting point is 00:30:18 If you're trying to move fast, just to move fast, you're setting yourself up for failure. If you're trying to move fast because you literally have people breathing down your throat that are trying to steal your market share, that's a whole other thing. And it's probably something that you do need to do to stay alive. If your business is highly dependent on network effects, say you're in some type of software or something like that, if it's highly dependent on network effects and you've got to be first to market and take the majority of the market share to really make it, then you do it. But if you're just going fast to go fast, you're going to be working for the man.

Starting point is 00:30:56 And it's not going to be fun. So I'd just tell you those are some important things to think about if you are in the startup plan. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. No, it's not your imagination. Risk and regulation are ramping up. And customers now expect proof of security just to do business. That's why VANTA is a game changer.

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Starting point is 00:34:45 selling is helping. You know, as tech entrepreneurs here, if you're going to a customer, whether it's a consumer or you're in B2B, you know, either you're making your customer's life easier, either you're reducing your stress, or you're making it harder, and you're increasing their stress. I mean, over the years, I think some of the things I've come to learn, particularly dealing with some of these shark tank companies, is one of the greatest skill sets that an entrepreneur, employee, salesperson can have is reducing stress. If you find that when you go to work, stress increases the minute you walk in the door, you've got a problem.

Starting point is 00:35:23 If you have an employee and the minute they walk in the door, you have a problem and they have a problem. And what I found is the best companies, the best employees that I have, the best investments that I have, are the people who reduce stress because those are the people we don't want to give up. They don't make the most noise. They don't always get the biggest. paychecks, they always close the biggest deals, but when there's problems that need to be solved, they're already working on them before you're even aware of them. If you set in your mind goals as an entrepreneur for your company, one, selling and keeping your customers very happy,

Starting point is 00:36:04 two, staying ahead of the curve with your competitors, and three, reducing stress of everybody around you, all your stakeholders, you're going to be successful. Because if you think about all your personal experiences, would you rather do business with somebody who creates stress or do you want to do business with the person who reduces stress? It's easy answer, but you'd be amazed at how many people don't follow through in that. And then part two to that is nice is way undervalued. You know, particularly in this day and age, you know, if you turn on the news, everything seems like it's going to get blown up, right? Being nice, just makes life so much easier. And look, I learned the hard way. I had to have my partner, Todd, came to me.

Starting point is 00:36:44 me one day and he goes, I like to curse. He goes, I don't care about cursing, but you curse too much. Not everybody's as accepting as cursing as you are. Calm the f*** down. And I took that to heart, not so much the cursing part, but it became apparent to me that the nicer I got, the more effective people around me got, the more productive they got, the more sales we had. I was undervaluing nice. I started my first company after I got fired from a job, and I was 24, just turned 24. I was always go, go, go, go, go.

Starting point is 00:37:22 All consumed, right, live it, eat, it, sleep, and breathe it. And I knew people couldn't keep up or work as hard as many hours as me, but I wanted them to. And we were successful, and we didn't have much turnover, but I could have done a better job if I were nicer. Broadcast.com, I got a little bit nicer, right? But then once I got to the Mavs and some of these other companies, and Todd reminded me nice works. And so when you find yourself going to work, when you're finding yourself dealing with customers,

Starting point is 00:37:50 when you're finding yourself making decisions, we all get that adjeda, right, that feeling in her stomach, that tenseness, that stress at various points of times that we all have to go through. But sometimes you just need to calm down, right? Take a deep breath and be nice. if you reduce the stress to people and you're nice, you're going to have such a huge advantage. No matter what your technology is, no matter how it compares,

Starting point is 00:38:16 even if it's a download for an app, people will still have to deal with you. Your culture will come through. Being nice, being supportive, reducing stress that all comes through even in an app. This was such an awesome exchange. This idea of a person walking through the door and stress level going up versus going down,

Starting point is 00:38:37 I wish you could have taken a screen capture of my face when he was talking this because the look on my face was, thank you. Thank you for saying this because I've never been able to describe that idea in such a concise and accurate way. But I know from my own work experience sitting in an office and a person walks in and it's just like, oh, thank God this person's here. they can pretty much solve anything and they're amazing. Or the feeling like, oh my God, this person just walked through the door. What drama is about to be created right now? And what issue are they going to bring me with no solution? We all know who these people are.

Starting point is 00:39:22 The thing that I think is really important for us isn't necessarily identifying who those people are in an organization, but how are we being perceived when we walk through a door. If you think it's because you're the low-stress person, I would tell you just not to jump to the conclusion so quickly. And I really think hard about that because maybe you aren't. Myself included, I think it's super important to really test that idea and to think about that idea because he's hitting on something that's way deeper than just stress. He's hitting on effective teaming. He's just hitting on a whole range of topics there. And I love how he put that. One thing that was real subtle there at the beginning, he mentioned it briefly, was this idea of convincing people in sales versus finding a win-win and really kind of tailoring the solution to the person that is the potential buyer.

Starting point is 00:40:17 anyone who is a great salesperson is doing the latter and not the former. I've received so many sales pitches from people over the years that they come in and you can just tell it's canned. They're just spewing the routine, if you will. They're not necessarily trying to understand what it is that I need as the customer first and then trying to tailor their pitch to those needs and those desires that I personally have. They've never even taken the time to try to understand what those things are.

Starting point is 00:40:49 If you want to be effective at sales, that's where you always start and you really do your market research and try to understand who your customer is at a very fundamental level. And then you adjust your sales pitch to that. The thing that I really took away was the thing about stress. I guess, as you said, I never been able to pinpoint it like that. It sounds so simple whenever he said that, apparently not simple enough for me to grasp before. The way that I often look at working with other people is, are they problem identifier or problem solvers?

Starting point is 00:41:22 Oh my God. I mean, there are 100 to one of people who are problem identifiers. I mean, this is wrong. And then that is wrong. And yeah, you know, there are so many things in life that's wrong. And that's just the way it is. What is the solution? If I have a person on the team that will come to me and say, this is the problem, I have

Starting point is 00:41:40 identified two different solutions. which one do you prefer? Here's the pros and here on the cons. That's a person who I would like to work with because it reduces stress, giving me the bad news first, as my Cuban is saying, and then two options to choose from, or even better if that person just took care of it, that you don't really pay attention to that.

Starting point is 00:41:59 Oh my God, I love that. Unfortunately, I didn't have too many things to add. I just really wanted to play this question. In case people were as oblivious as me in terms of increasing or alleviating stress and how that works in the workplace and whenever you are aiming to create win-win with the people around you. Well, we enjoyed covering some of this Mark Cuban stuff. I could play a lot of his stuff all day long.

Starting point is 00:42:22 I'm a big fan of his work. At this point, what we're going to do is we're going to transition to a question from our audience. This question comes from Colin, and here we go. Hi, Preston and Stig. So before I asked my question, I just want to say thank you to you guys for putting on the podcast. I listen to your show every Monday morning on my drive.

Starting point is 00:42:41 to work, and it's really helped me learn more about the world of investing and also the world of business as a whole. One of the common themes from your show is that many billionaires and business people believe the best way to create wealth and success is creating value for society and entering into win-win situations in terms of negotiating. Your podcast is an excellent way for the two of you to create value for society while focusing on what you love, which is investing in finance. On the other hand, investing in the stock market is a zero-sum game. So every time we make a good decision as investors, someone else has to be making a bad one and vice versa. My question is how do you think about the stock market and investing in public equities as creating value for society?

Starting point is 00:43:27 As a young person considering a career in space, I would love to hear your thoughts on this. I'm not sure if I could pursue a career where I'm the only one winning. Thanks again, Colin. Colin, I really like your question. I guess I look at it a little bit differently than the zero-sum game kind of thing. I think if you're trying to strategically do something from like a quant standpoint, I guess I can see how people would maybe go in that direction. I look at it just like this. If I was going to go out and buy a business on Main Street, if I held that business for five years and I owned the entire thing and then I sold it to somebody else, I don't really necessarily see that as a zero-sum game. I see that as just me having a business. interest, owning that business, selling it off to somebody else, and then me taking the capital and employing it any other way that I want, if I want to own another business or whatever. The stock market's the exact same thing, only it's done on a micro level. And what's great is it allows people to take ownership in businesses that they could never

Starting point is 00:44:23 afford if they weren't divided up into tiny little shares. Like, you want to own Nike or you want to own Under Armour, you want to own whatever, you can own those businesses. You don't have to be a multi-billionaire to own those kinds. companies. If you want to buy that and hold it for 30 years, as if Buffett would tell you to buy something and hold it forever with a punch card of 20 picks, if you're investing that way, which we highly recommend that people invest this way, that's going to be beneficial. I think when the market starts to be treated as if you're not owning businesses, you're just doing

Starting point is 00:44:57 things to trade pieces of paper that don't mean anything to try to turn a profit. That's whenever I think you turn from using the market what it was really intended for to something that's different, maybe what you're describing as a zero-sum game. I would encourage people to think about the market in that regard, that you're owning a fractional piece of a business, that you really have a belief or passion behind that you think is doing good for the world. And I think that you're going to find that your yields return when you start investing in companies that you really believe in and that you think are adding to society's benefit. I don't know. Colin, if you refer to that being a zero-sum game, like the market will yield 7% for someone

Starting point is 00:45:41 to gain 8%. Another person would have 6%. I don't know if that's how you look at it. And there's definitely some truth to that and then you also have to pay commissions and other fees. But in terms of a zero-sum game as it's not making profit, you would still be better off as an investor even if you unperformed the market by 1% instead of holding cash. simply because the stock market yield in the long run, that is all the listed companies, all the profits that's distributed back to the owners. And look at the public market as playing an important role for society. Think about saving off for retirement.

Starting point is 00:46:22 Your parents might have invested in stock and had done so, say, 30 years ago, and now they're looking to retire, so they would sell off their stock and then buy a fixed income. And it might be some of the same stock that you want to buy being a new investment. to the market because you have another risk profile. So I think the stock market is really good at distributing utility across society. And then you just have some of the other important factors like raising capital for companies to increase production, create employment, generate tax income for society. Definitely, whenever you watch CNBC or whatnot, there's definitely dark sides to the stock market.

Starting point is 00:47:00 But in general, I think it's a very good thing for any country to have. in terms of creating wealth. Colin, I like this question. This is a really good question, and it forces people to really take a look at what is actually fundamentally happening. As a token of our appreciation for asking such a great question, we're going to give you access to one of our paid courses on the TIP Academy. It's going to be our intrinsic value course where you can determine the value of a business.

Starting point is 00:47:27 You can access this course at TIP intrinsic value.com. That's TIP intrinsic value.com. we just really appreciate you calling in and leaving such a great question for anybody else out there. If you want to get your question played on our show, go to AsktheInvesters.com. There's a little button there where you can just hit record. It's the fastest thing ever. It's really easy to do. But just go to Ask TheInvesters.com. You can record your question. And if it gets played on the show, you can win a free course on our website. All right, guys. That was all that Preston and I had for this week's episode of The Investors

Starting point is 00:47:59 podcast. We see each other again next week. Thanks for listening to TIP. To access the show notes, courses or forums, go to theinvestorspodcast.com. To get your questions played on the show, go to Asktheinvestors.com and win a free subscription to any of our courses on TIP Academy. This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making investment decisions, consult a professional. This show is copyrighted by the TIP Network.

Starting point is 00:48:28 Written permission must be granted before syndication or rebroadcasting. P-R-P-R-P-D. T-R-P!

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