Mark Cuban (July 31, 1958) was a businessman, investor, and owner of the Dallas Mavericks NBA basketball team. In addition, he is the owner of Landmark Theaters, and Magnolia Pictures and president of the HDTV cable network AXS TV. Cuban was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. And he enjoyed certain comforts as a member of a working-class Jewish family. His original family name was Chabenisky but was changed due to racial pressure. His father Norton Cuban worked as an automotive upholsterer and his mother Shirley Cuban dedicated herself to housework. Cuban began to learn everything about the business world from the age of 12, he sold garbage bags, although his only purpose was to acquire his luxurious basketball shoes .

Cuban attended Mount Lebanon High School. While in high school he took on various part-time and weekend jobs such as: bartender, disco dance instructor, and party entertainer. Upon leaving school, Cuban enrolled as a full-time student at the University of Pittsburgh where he joined the international Pi Lambda Phi fraternity. It is a social fraternity that was founded in 1895 at Yale University. After a year, he transferred to Indiana University Bloomington, graduating from the Kelley School of Business in 1981 with a bachelor’s degree in business administration.

While in college, Cuban ran a number of businesses, including a bar, a disco dance lesson company, and a chain letter company. He really was a very restless person and always had a very good nose for business. After finishing his degree, he decided to look for better horizons in Dallas, he began to work as a waiter. Later, he was a salesman in a computer store. Years later, Cuban affirmed that this type of work was key to achieving what he has achieved today.

After a while, he decided to take control of his life and his future work, so he created his first business: MicroSolutions. After a few years, in 1990, he managed to sell his company to the renowned CompuServe, the leading internet provider at the time. He made good profits from his business and from said sale as well. But, the frenzy of money led him to make bad decisions and he began to travel and spend the money on parties. He was in various parts of the world Los Angeles, Moscow and Barcelona. Although, after a while, Cuban was introduced to the exciting field of financial markets, it was not long before he was hired by a small hedge fund.

With what was left of his money, 3 million dollars, he turned it into 20 million thanks to stock speculation. Cuban had a business project in mind, so he called an old friend from college and they decided to create Audionet.com, a website that broadcast sporting events online. Later, it would become Broadcast.com. In the second quarter they got $13.5 million in revenue from Broadcast. Now, Yahoo! he bought Cuban’s company for $5.9 billion just before the dot-com bubble burst.

At the time the market blew up, Cuban decided to acquire a majority stake in the Dallas Mavericks for $285 million. Let us remember that Cuban was a man who was fond of this sports discipline, and although this was considered a very profitable investment, it was also due to Cuban’s whim and passion. The Mavericks would now be worth $685 million. As for his personal life of this important American businessman, we must say that he married the beautiful Tiffany Stewart in 2002, and from this union they have had 3 children.

Two years later, Cuban got his own television program, called The Benefactor, a program that responds to his passion for business and seeks to help various entrepreneurs materialize their companies. His show has been compared to Donald Trump’s The Apprentice, though clearly Cuban’s award was more flashy. The winner received 1 million dollars. One of Cuban’s great properties in his 40 million private jet and a large mansion.

Cuban’s net worth is currently estimated at $2.6 billion, ranking him 696th on the Forbes list of the world’s richest. Although this could have been greater if he had not squandered it in the first stage as a businessman. In 2011 Mark Cuban released an e-book titled How to Win in the Sport of Business, in which he chronicles his experiences in business and basketball. He currently resides in Dallas and has continued to invest in other businesses. For example, in the production of television programs and series; he also has been a guest in some Hollywood movies.

Phrases

-It doesn’t matter how many times you fail. You only have to be right once and then everyone can tell you that you are an overnight success.

-I look at my annual budgets for everything and anything, and I look to see where I can save the most money on those items. Saving 30% to 50% buying in bulk – replenishable items from toothpaste to soup, or whatever I use a lot of – is the best guaranteed return on investment you can get anywhere.

-Don’t start a company unless it’s an obsession and something you love. If you have an exit strategy, it’s not an obsession.

-I’m a believer that you accomplish much, much more with direct relationships than by using an intermediary. And that cash you keep in the bank can be the difference between staying alive as a small business, or not.

-If you’ve got $25,000, $50,000, $100,000, you’re better off paying off any debt you have because that’s a guaranteed return.

-I wouldn’t be where I am now if I didn’t fail a lot. The good, the bad, it’s all part of the success equation.

-What I’ve learned in these 11 years is you got to stay focused and believe in yourself and trust your own ability and judgment.

-Everyone is passionate about something. Usually more than one thing. We are born with it. There are always going to be things we love to do. That we dream about doing. That we really, really want to do with our lives. Those passions aren’t worth a nickel.

-It’s not whom you know. It’s not how much money you have. It’s very simple. It’s whether or not you have the edge and have the guts to use it.

-Always ask yourself how someone could preempt your product or service.

-Do we know what we are designed to be or do we find out through experience?

-With every effort, I learned a lot. With every mistake, I learned what not to do.

-The edge is knowing people think you’re crazy, and they’re right, but you don’t care what they think.

-Everyday I look in the mirror and make sure I don’t pinch myself so I don’t wake up. I don’t take it for granted. All the time I say ‘Why me?’

-It’s always better if you’re honest with yourself and anticipate where the problems could come from.

-I had to kick myself in the ass and recommit to getting up early, staying up late and consuming anything I possibly could to get an edge.

-Relaxing is for the other guy.

-Wherever I see people doing something the way it’s always been done, the way it’s ‘supposed’ to be done, following the same old trends, well, that’s just a big red flag to me to go look somewhere else.

-I still work hard to know my business. I’m continuously looking for ways to improve all my companies, and I’m always selling. Always.

-I worked hard and smarter than most people in the businesses I have been in.

-Always wake up with a smile knowing that today you are going to have fun accomplishing what others are too afraid to do.

-Because if you’re prepared and you know what it takes. It’s not a risk. You just have to figure out how to get there. There is always a way to get there.

-Learn to sell. In business you’re always selling – to your prospects, investors and employees. To be the best salesperson put yourself in the shoes of the person to whom you are selling. Don’t sell your product. Solve their problem.

-If you have managers reporting to managers in a startup, you will fail. Once you get beyond startup, if you have managers reporting to managers, you will create politics.

-Pay attention to what’s happening around you. Don’t think there’s just one way to do things—context is everything.

-One of the most underrated skills in business right now is being nice.

-In every business I have had, I have made sure my customers have had my email address and can reach me directly.

-Great entrepreneurs invest the time, no matter how many hours a day, to learn more about their industry and the business they want to start than anyone else.

What is your grind?

-It’s not about money or connections, it’s the willingness to outwork and outlearn everyone when it comes to your business. And if it fails, you learn from what happened and do a better job next time.

-What I do know, at least what I think I have learned from my experiences in business, is that when there is a rush for everyone to do the same thing, it becomes more difficult to do. Not easier. Harder.

-Being rich is a good thing. Not just in the obvious sense of benefiting you and your family, but in the broader sense. Profits are not a zero sum game. The more you make, the more of a financial impact you can have.

-The one person who you should never believe when it comes to evaluating your abilities is you. The very worst judge of your abilities is you. Self-evaluation is never successful. When you are the best at something, the demand for your services will grow. People want to hire the best. They want to be associated with the best.

-In my opinion, right now, there’s way too much hype on the technologies and not enough attention to the real businesses behind them.

-Your biggest enemies are your bills. The more you owe, the more you stress. The more you stress over bills, the more difficult it is to focus on your goals. More importantly, if you set your monthly income requirements too high, you eliminate a significant number of opportunities. The cheaper you can live, the greater your options.

-If you’re looking where everybody else is looking, you’re looking in the wrong spot.

-Once you have found out what you love to do, there is only one goal: How can you be the best in the world at it. It doesn’t matter if you are a filing clerk, athlete, accountant, or bartender. All that matters is that you do whatever you can to be the best.

-Focus on building the best possible business. If you are great, people will notice and opportunities will appear.

-Sweat equity is the most valuable equity there is. Know your business and industry better than anyone else in the world. Love what you do or don’t do it.

-Entrepreneurs have to be brutally honest with themselves and recognize where they have added value and where they have gone along for the ride.

-I retired at twenty-nine, bought a life-time pass on American Airlines and my only goal in life was to party like a mad man and get drunk with as many people as possible. And I was happy right there. But when we started the streaming business, I knew it could be something big.

-You have to learn how to use time wisely and be productive. How wisely you use your time will have far more impact on your life and success than any amount of money.

-Those back-to-back experiences confirmed what I already knew: That I was a shitty-ass employee and I’d better start my own business.

-Patent law holds us back, in every which way, shape or form. There is place for it, in physical products, in pharmaceuticals, but in software in particular, there is no place for it.

-You learn in life that a lot of things are the result of effort, but some things, in terms of scale, are random.

-We don’t sell wins or losses. The one thing you can’t control in sports is which games you are going to win or which games you are going to lose. But what I could control was the experience the fans have.

-I want the bad news first.

-One thing we can all control is effort. Put in the time to become an expert in whatever you’re doing. It will give you an advantage because most people don’t do this.

-I’m always afraid of failing. It’s great motivation to work harder.

-It’s hard not to fool yourself. Everyone tells you how they are going to be special. But few do the work to get there. Do the work.

-Creating opportunities means looking where others are not.

-Life gets easier when you don’t have to worry about the bills.

-It’s called working your ass off.

-I’m a big believer that you always reiterate, you always learn, you always realize your business is evolving.

-When you’ve got 10,000 people trying to do the same thing, why would you want to be number 10,001?

-The number-one job of the hedge-fund manager is not to make sure that you can retire with a smile on your face – it’s for him to retire with a smile on his face.

-A sure sign of failure for a startup is when someone sends me logo-embroidered polo shirts. If your people are at shows and in public, it’s okay to buy for your own employees, but if you really think people are going to wear your branded polo when they’re out and about, you are mistaken and have no idea how to spend your money.

-I create offbeat advice; I don’t follow it. I rarely take third-party advice on my investments.

-It is so much easier to be nice, to be respectful, to put yourself in your customers’ shoes and try to understand how you might help them before they ask for help, than it is to try to mend a broken customer relationship.

-If you are ahead of the curve and you can anticipate where things are going … anything is possible.

-We can talk about republican or democratic approaches to the economy, but until you fix the student loan bubble – and that’s where the real bubble is – and the tuition bubble, we don’t have a chance. All this other stuff is shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic.

-I love to compete. Somebody out there is competing against me, and I want to kick your ass. I say it all the time: Business is the ultimate sport.

-You always have to know what business you are in. Everybody thought we were in the basketball business. It’s an NBA-team; we are not in the basketball business. We are in the business of creating experiences and memories.

-When you first start working for me, directly for me, I micromanage until I trust you.

-Customers want to see that you have other customers.

-I spend time in bookstores because one idea from a book or magazine can make me money.

-Effort is measured by setting goals and getting results.