- He's an American businessman, investor,
television personality, and philanthropist.
- He's the owner of the NBA Dallas Mavericks
and Landmark Theaters.
- He has an estimated net worth of $3 billion US.
- He is Mark Cuban, and here are
his top ten rules for success.
(whoosh)
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- You know, personally, I think every time's
a perfect time to start a business.
There's no bad times.
If you do the work, if you do the preparation,
you'll know when it's time.
And it doesn't mean that it won't be a little bit scary,
but, you know, you'll know.
And you don't have to quit the daytime job
if you don't feel all that comfortable,
and you can give it a run at night.
But whatever works for you.
Now, with the Internet, you've got
all the choices in the world,
and you can just go out there and do your own thing and,
you know, set up a business part-time.
The passion I've always had for business
and being an entrepreneur, that transfers into the Mavs.
I've always been passionate.
Some people thought, you know,
it's more OCD than anything else,
which I think is a great trait for an entrepreneur.
When I, you know, I mentioned the stamp business,
I would stay up 'till three, four in the morning
even though I had to get up and go to school
and read Linn's Stamp News and Scott's Stamp Journals
and to have them all memorized and use that
to give myself an edge.
Even when I was in college, I'd be in the library
reading business books and just looking
for business biographies and just reading
all I could about business.
When I had MicroSolutions and, you know,
I started with no money, you know.
I'd pull all-nighters in front of borrowed computers
teaching myself software and how to program.
Just to go after it.
I mean, the thing about being an entrepreneur
is it's just all to you.
You know, a lot of people like to make excuses,
I don't have connections, I don't have money,
I don't have this.
But, you know, if you find something
that you like to do or love to do,
be great at it and see if you can turn it into a business.
And worst case, you're going to have fun doing
what it is you love to do, and best case,
you can turn it into a business.
I'm just not big on excuses.
I just think if you're really,
everybody has that opportunity to go for it.
They've just got to do it.
One of the things that companies do or startups do,
they come up with an idea, they'll Google it,
and if they don't see it in the first two pages,
they think it's original.
You got to go back, right, because over the past 15 years,
there's so many different businesses
that have have tried and failed.
You have to go back and find those and learn from those.
So you've got to understand all the implications,
and you have to learn from history.
And so the best advice I can give you
on a video before talking to you or emailing with you
is that you've got to find out the history
of people who have tried your idea.
Because there's a 99.99999% chance
that your idea has been tried before.
That's not a good reason not to start it,
'cause you might be able to outperform them,
but you better learn from the history of your idea.
Because you know what they say about people
who don't learn from history.
I've always just really enjoyed
just the competition of business.
I think, you know, in the sports business,
I'll talk to our players, and it'll be like,
well, you guys compete for 48 minutes
and you practice a couple hours
and you work on your game independently a couple hours.
But the ultimate sport is business,
because you have to compete with everybody.
And you have to do a 24 by seven by 365 days a year forever.
And there's always somebody out there
trying to kick your butt.
There's always somebody who looks at your business and says,
I can do that better, I have a better idea.
And you have to compete with that person,
and all the while, you have to make
your customers happy, your employees happy.
It's the competitive side of me that, in any entrepreneur,
that I think that that has to drive you
and I think that carries over into the Mavericks.
I want to win, and I want to compete.
99% of small businesses you can start
with next to no capital.
It's more about effort.
You know, small businesses don't fail for lack of capital.
They fail for lack of brains, they fail for lack of effort.
Most people just aren't willing
to put in the time to work smart.
I mean, they go for it in a lot of cases,
but they just don't recognize how much work's involved
and if you do the preparation, if you know,
if you start a business, you'd better know your industry
and your company better than anyone in the whole wide world.
Because you're competing, and to think
that whoever it is you're competing with
is just going to let you come in and take their business,
obviously that's naive.
And I think most people don't recognize that.
If you're going to compete with me and one of my businesses,
you better realize that I'm working
24 hours a day to kick your ass.
One of the big things that all startups do
is they lie to themselves over and over and over.
Mine's faster, mine's cheaper, mine's better.
Mine's this, mine's that.
No it's not.
And the reason it's not is because
whoever it is you're competing with,
it's not like they're ignoring you.
It's not like, oh my goodness,
this guy just started on Shopify in the startup competition,
he's doing $1 million this year.
Woe is me, I might as well close up the doors.
What are they doing?
I'm going to copy what they're doing.
And now you've got to stay ahead.
And so, you know, you've got to be very careful
as an entrepreneur to be brutally honest with yourself.
And those are some of the things
that you'll hear from me as a mentor,
that, you know, know what you know,
know what you don't know,
but you've got to know your business better than anybody.
I think the most important is knowing your strengths
and weaknesses and knowing what you enjoy doing.
You know, if you look at it as a job, you've already lost.
It's not going to be your passion,
and you're going to count the hours.
If you look at it as something you love to do
and then you know what your strengths are,
then you can leverage those strengths
in your business and in helping others,
and once you recognize your weaknesses,
then you can work with people that complement you.
I mean, every one of my businesses,
I've had a partner who's very anal.
(laughs)
Martin Woodall, Todd Wagner.
I mean, incredibly anal people, perfectionists.
'Cause I'm a slob, you know.
I'm a big picture, think about what's around the corner,
how's technology going to change things,
how can I change, you know, this industry.
And, you know, making sure that there's somebody there
to dot the Is, cross the Ts, and keep me in the baselines.
And, you know, recognizing my weaknesses
is just as important as recognizing my strengths,
my core competencies, and, you know,
having a passion to do them.
You've got to be differentiated and unique.
You've got to know what your core competency is
and be great at it.
I think what people fail to realize
is there's got to be a defining feature of your company
and you've got to be the best in the world at that.
Whatever industry you're in, if you don't know
more about it than anybody else in the world,
whoever those other people are that more
are going to kick your ass.
I had a job out of college working for a bank
for a short period of time, Mellon Bank.
And I decided to, well, first,
it might have been Inc. Magazine.
This is way back when.
But there was an article about using, changing something
in how you save social security from employees' paychecks.
And I literally hadn't been working there for three weeks.
And so I sent it to the CEO of Mellon Bank,
hey, I thought you might be interested in this.
Literally some guy he'd never heard of.
And I got a note back, said thank you,
and I'm thinking, okay, look, my whole job,
my whole motive in taking a job, working for somebody
was to help them become more profitable.
That's the way I always looked at it.
And then I started a rookies' club
where I reached out to some executives and all the people
who had started at the same time at Mellon Bank.
We'd all go out and get a drink
and we'd get this executive started.
And I didn't, like, run it through my boss or anything.
And so my boss at the time calls me in and says,
you're doing this, and I said yeah, thank you,
and he was going to say, great.
He just starts screaming at me and reaming me.
"How could you do this?
You go everything through me, you work for me."
Yeah, so I knew I wasn't destined there.
And then I left.
(crowd laughs)
And I went down to, ended up down in Dallas
and got a job working for a company
called Your Business Software.
And we sold software.
And I didn't know anything about software.
I took one computer class at Indiana
and kind of cheated to pass.
But not that I condone that, but.
(crowd laughs)
And so I had a customer, and I'd stay up all night reading.
I figured, you know, computers were new,
and technology was new, this technology was new.
So nobody had a head start on me,
'cause it was changing so rapidly like it is today
that if I just put in the time,
I can learn as much as anybody else.
And so I taught myself.
I'd stay up reading software manuals,
taught myself different little simple programming languages
and kept on getting bigger and bigger and better and better.
But it was at a retail store,
and one of my responsibilities was to come in,
sweep the floor, wipe down the windows, and open the store.
And I had a customer who wanted me
to come out there and close a deal.
And it was a $15,000 deal, $1,500 commission to me.
Told my boss, he said, no,
you need to be there to open the store.
And I made the executive decision
that I was going to go get the check.
'Cause, you know, I was living six guys
in a three-bedroom apartment, sleeping on the floor,
and this check meant I could, like not use
the same Holiday Inn towels with holes in them
that I had stolen, you know.
But anyway, I went and picked up the check, thank you.
When I came back and gave the check to my boss,
all would be forgiven, and, you know, the sales cures all.
Fired me.
And so those back-to-back experiences confirmed
what I already knew, that I was a shitty-ass employee
and that I'd better start my own.
(crowd laughs)
(whoosh)
- Thank you guys so much for watching.
- Now, this video was made because
Jose Bergos asked Evan to on YouTube.
If you have a famous entrepreneur
that you really want Evan to make a video of,
leave it in the comment below.
- I'd also love to know which of Mark Cuban's
top 10 rules had the biggest impact on you.
Leave it in the comments
and we're going to join in the discussion.
Thank you so much for watching.
Continue to believe, and we'll see you soon.
(whoosh)
(thump)