Learning from Mark Cuban

January 5, 2013

As a first-time entrepreneur, I love reading about successful business people. There’s always something to learn. You can be inspired and hopefully avoid mistakes as you start up your own business.

One of my inspirations is Mark Cuban. He made his fortune by selling his company to Yahoo! for $5.7 billion in 1999. If you follow sports, you’ll know him as the owner of the Dallas Mavericks. You may also recognize him from the Shark Tank TV show.

Recently, Mark hosted an AMA (ask me anything) on reddit. Here are my favorite snippets from the Q&A:

On buying stuff online… he says: “I always look at the prices. And I belong to Prime to get better rates.”
When someone mentioned that he had tipped 200%: “I worked as a bartender and waiter. I always try to tip well.”
He also says there is a bubble on Series A valuations for tech startups.

Cuban has written an e-book filled with advice for entrepreneurs. I found a summary here: http://www.bradaronson.com/mark-cuban-business-lessons/. One of the best quotes is about perseverance in business:

It doesn’t matter how many times you have failed, you only have to be right once.

If you are interested in his back story, you can check out the Success & Motivation posts on his blog (here and here). It’s a long but interesting read, with nuggets like:

I remember driving down to pick up some hard drives that I was going to put into my customers PCs….[The vendor] had just moved from the owner’s dorm room into a little office/warehouse space. I was so impressed by this young kid (I was a wise old 25 at the time), that I actually wrote a letter thanking him for the great job he was doing, and…I’m embarassed to say now, I told him that if he kept up what he was doing he was destined for far bigger and better things. I kept on doing business with PCs Limited, and Michael Dell kept on doing what he was doing.
Long story short, I went to the bar to get some drinks for all us, I come back, they aren’t there. Come to find out the next day, Bill [Gates] stole my girls. As I would learn later in life, money does make you extremely handsome.
It doesn’t matter how many times you strike out. In business, to be a success, you only have to be right once.

And one of the best comments on his post was from an early acquaintance of his:

I remember asking you to come with us to drink some beer and play water volleyball on a Sat Summer afternoon. You were in your bedroom reading some of those computer books you talked about – you just looked up and said “the sun will shine another day” I will never forget that. True story – I bet I have told that to 100 people who know nothing about you.