Mark Cuban is so Fastlane

[sharky]

Great interview with Mark Cuban. Any of his principles and practices have a familiar ring to them?

http://lefsetz.com/wordpress/index.php/archives/2011/08/31/mark-cuban/

 

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[wilkin]

awesome thanks for sharing that, always been a big fan of Mark Cuban. You should see him on Shark Tank, he's amazing.

 

[fm1234]

If Cuban is so smart, why has his net worth steadily declined since his one lucky break? (Forbes currently lists his total net worth at $2.5 billion, which is of course a serious, non-trivial number of dollars, but that's not even half of his Yahoo!/Broadcasting.com deal value -- and adjusted for inflation he's down even farther.)

If he's such a great guy, why does he act just like a redneck who won the lottery whenever he's at a basketball game, which has resulted in him being fined nearly $2 million over more than a dozen of the worst incidents?

Cuban, Kiyosaki and Trump -- three hucksters who for all intents and purposes own the hearts and minds of the entrepreneurial crowd, despite the fact that a close look at their lives and histories suggest that if anything, these are people one would do well to avoid emulating, if you ever want to succeed at anything other than salesmanship and celebrity.


Frank

 

[911Carrera]

If Cuban is so smart, why has his net worth steadily declined since his one lucky break? (Forbes currently lists his total net worth at $2.5 billion, which is of course a serious, non-trivial number of dollars, but that's not even half of his Yahoo!/Broadcasting.com deal value -- and adjusted for inflation he's down even farther.)

If he's such a great guy, why does he act just like a redneck who won the lottery whenever he's at a basketball game, which has resulted in him being fined nearly $2 million over more than a dozen of the worst incidents?



Frank

Come on man. Just because he sold to yahoo for $5 billion doesn't mean he got $5 billion. Uncle Sam got a good share of it and stock prices could have dropped before he was able to cash all his stocks. Net-worth swing back and forth for most billionaires. Mark is actually doing extremely well among his peers.

At the end of the day, he's still billionaire and he didn't inherit his money. How you can question the intelligence of a guy like Cuban when it comes to entrepreneurship is beyond me. As for him being fined, the guy is just passionate about his team winning and basketball in general, more than any other NBA owners. The NBA is just likes to fine fine fine, I think fines are part of their revenue strategy. Yes he's silly at times but some of us can't help it.
Neworth in the billions can decrease and increase fast.

 

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[fm1234]

I will say first that I mis-spoke about Cuban's net worth -- I got thinking about it after I posted, and distinctly remembered seeing a sub-$2 billion figure at some point in the past, which would tend to negate my "steadily down" comment. So I went digging around, and the facts are that the of the $5.9 billion Broadcasting.com deal, Cuban only got a portion of that, with the rest split between his partner (more on him below) and the employees who had been paid in stock. So in point of fact, Cuban's net worth has gone up, a little, in the last twelve years.

That said, I do not see Cuban as an example of entrepreneurial success at all. His first company was started on the back of his employer, a questionable point of ethics (anybody can be a successful sleazebag) and sold to one of its own vendors (a sign of serious entrepreneurial genius.) So that's -- 50-50, I guess. He is then thought to have started Broadcast.com, a failed Internet radio company, but he can't even claim that -- it was a well-established company when Cuban and his partner Tim Wagner took it over. All the heavy lifting was done -- Cuban added his good sales pitch skills, and Wagner added actually knowing how to run a company, to the mix, but that's not the same as building a company. They bought it, gave it a paint job, hyped the hell out of it, then sold it at a point in time when venture capitalists were rolling in cash, and Americans had just reached the tipping point where (for the first time in the history of the country) they had more money in their stocks than they did in their homes. So, like so many other absurd, doomed-to-fail ventures, Broadcasting.com managed to get a lot of attention, make a few million dollars (which is not actually very much money in the great scheme of things) then get bought for an amount of money equivalent to almost 30 years' projected future revenue (not even earnings, but revenue. But not even revenue -- projected revenue.) Given that just a few years later, Broadcast.com no longer existed, I think it's pretty fair to say it was as crap an idea as much of the rest of the dot-com boom era companies. Mark Cuban didn't make a success of Broadcast.com; he just found a bigger fool and jumped ship right before the iceberg hit. Put another way, Cuban didn't make a smart decision so much as Yahoo! made a catastrophic one.

What's he done since then? Production company, mostly run by Wagner, marginal success (note that Cuban's actually trying unsuccessfully to cash out on that one.) Bought the Mavs, not an entrepreneurial choice (no idea whether or not it's a good investment, but it's not entrepreneurial in any event. Warren Buffet isn't an entrepreneur either -- I don't mean it as an insult; just an observation.) A floundering TV network. A failed TV show.

You see what I'm saying here? The man is just patently not an example of a successful entrepreneur. His big mouth and his one lucky break obscure this fact in a lot of people's eyes. I can understand it in terms of "media consumers" ie. people who watch reality TV and who think It's About Time Someone Stood Up to Those Fatcats at the NBA. But I have a hard time believing in the prospects of any young go-getter who is planning out a business, who can say with a straight face that he considers Cuban an inspiration. An inspiration to do what, exactly?

As far as Cuban's "passions" getting in the way of his manners, I just don't buy it. He gets off on the attention; his charitable matching of his fines, his blog rambles etc. smack of a guy who desperately needs the spotlight on himself, in order to feel like he can see himself. It's pathetic.

Perhaps unbelievably, I don't have some kind of grudge against Cuban. On a personal level he might be a great guy, and as long as he's a decent father and ok-or-better husband, no one in the world's opinion of him is really meaningful, least of all mine. And I mean that, sincerely. I am just continually mystified at the sheer volume of people in the general world of "Trying to Make It" who whisper Cuban's name like he's a god of success, when his successes in my view have been largely accidental and occasionally the result of questionable business practices.

Don't even get me started on those other two guys lol.


Frank

 

[Shades]

The fact that you used the term "lucky break" in your post shows your line of thinking. Id stop while your behind.

 

[Antonio.]

Frank what the hell are you talking about?

 

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[Illusion]

He's not my favorite entrepreneur either, but you must give the man some credit...

 

[fm1234]

posted by shades"

The fact that you used the term "lucky break" in your post shows your line of thinking. Id stop while your behind.

I normally don't bother responding to personal attacks, but let me offer a thought experiment (which I assume you'll ignore, since you clearly didn't read my posts if that's all you took from them, but maybe it will help someone else.)

Here goes:

1) What do you call spending almost six billion dollars on a business asset which never manages to return more than a tiny fraction of the acquisition cost, to say nothing of profit? Do you disagree with my contention that this math indicates a colossal error in judgement on the part of the buyer?

2) What do you call being the beneficiary of someone else's incredibly stupid mistake?

@Illusion I did give him credit, eg. referring to his sale of MicroSolutions as "entrepreneurial genius" and being man enough to point out my own factual error regarding Cuban's net worth faster than any of his followers could notice it and point it out.

Sorry I knocked over your golden idol, guys. I'm sure it will buff right out.


Frank

 

[911Carrera]

Here goes:

1) What do you call spending almost six billion dollars on a business asset which never manages to return more than a tiny fraction of the acquisition cost, to say nothing of profit? Do you disagree with my contention that this math indicates a colossal error in judgement on the part of the buyer?

2) What do you call being the beneficiary of someone else's incredibly stupid mistake?


Frank

Welcome to Internet company values 101. The hardest part of tech entrepreneurship is building up the value of your company and knowing when to cash out big and give it up before it loses that value, before something better kicks it to the curb. Think about MJ's limo company, with google places/maps and other similar services, If MJ didn't sell when he did, his company wouldn't sell for that much, he saw the threat and exited at the right time. At the time yahoo purchased broadcast.com. they saw a real value in it, a few years later, that value was pretty much gone with the dotcom bubble burst and better competition. Many other companies suffered the same fate. Ask AOl, a company that was once valued at around $240billion and now they're only valued at 1-2% of that.

 

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