Mark Cuban – A Serial Disrupter

Mark Cuban was an entrepreneur from birth. As a boy, he drove newspapers from one city to another during a pressman’s strike. For a short period of time he was a bartender in Dallas, a salesman for a business software company, founded MicroSolutions, a software company from scratch to $30 million in sales, sold it for $2 million

Although he had done very well, Mark Cuban made his first gagillion on a transaction for Broadcast.com which live casted University of Indiana Hoosier basketball. He built it and sold it to Yahoo for $5.7 billion just before the dot com bubble burst.

From then on he became a venture capitalist and investor in start ups at a dizzying pace. Trying to list them all looks like an exercise in schizophrenia. He bought the Dallas Mavericks NBA basketball team(a lot of irony in the name) and helped take them to the NBA championship. He has been fined repeatedly for yelling at the refs and opposing players which disrupted the NBA status quo. Cuban pioneered live reality television like Shark Tank, acquired Magnolia Pictures and Landmark Theaters, two chains of movie houses, invested in cryptocurrency companies, threatened to run for president, endorsed Hillary Clinton, and tried to buy several baseball and hockey teams.

Mark is now trying to disrupt the pharmaceutical industry by launching Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drugs using online to drive down the cost of medicine and sooner or later health insurance. He described that market as a herd of elephants so you better be quick or you’ll be dead.

Whew. This short description of his career has deliberately skipped a ton because A) I’d run out of room and B) its confusing.

I actually am a fan of Cuban although not all the time. I have heard him speak. He is articulate, relatively low key, speaks without notes, doesn’t have a PR handler and answers emails. He once served Blizzards at the drive thru window at a Dairy Queen taking a dare from the company. The line of cars extended from Coppell, Texas to Uranus.

Since he has infinite energy and is not frightened of anybody, won’t get pushed around and seems like he could be a good friend.

Stay tuned, there is more to come.