If you have ever watched shark tank, then you know who this guy is.
Everyone loves him and wants to work with him because compared to other sharks, this
guy has more money than you can imagine.
Moreover, having him on board can be a big advantage.
However, if you take a look at how exactly he made his billions, you will realize that
he got pretty lucky.
I am not really a big believer in luck, but when it comes to Mark Cuban, it's fascinating.
That's probably why he said: “ to become a billionaire, you have got to get lucky.
But a multi-millionaire?
No problem!
Cuban had an entrepreneurial spirit since the beginning.
He started selling garbage bags at the age of 12 to pay for a pair of basketball sneakers.
Taught disco dancing and ended up opening his bar back then when he was in university.
Nonetheless, the first real business that he started was MicroSolutions after getting
fired twice.
Micro solutions was a computer-based company, they resold products, software and were pc
consultants.
In 7 years, Cuban grew the company to 30 million dollars in revenue and sold it for a total
sum of 6 million dollars to ComputerServe which was a bigger computer company.
That was basically all that Mark wanted, at least at that time, because he took that money
and retired.
He bought a lifetime pass on American Airlines and lived the life of a party boy, traveling
to every country he ever could.
Five years later, he probably got bored and wanted to get back in the game.
So, together with his friend, they founded AudioNet in 1995.
The idea behind it was to broadcast sports events and radio shows on the internet so
that everyone could watch them from anywhere in the world.
Soon later they realized, they can broadcast anything from presidential nominating conventions
to Victoria Secret fashion shows.
That's why in 1998 they renamed it to broadcast.com which gave a better idea of what the company
represented.
Company’s name is the first thing people notice, so it is essential to get it right.
However, today when you want to register your domain, its most probably taken because people
start websites every single day all around the world.
That's why I use hover, with over 400 domain extensions, you will most certainly find what
you are looking for, especially since they made the process of registering a domain so
simple that you can do it with few easy clicks.
Anyways, more on that later.
Remember, it was all during the period of the dot-com bubble when most of these tech
companies were hyped and overpriced.
People simply dumped money into every crap that came out thinking that it's going to
become the next multi-billion dollar company.
All you needed to do is to launch a website, do some fancy things and you would have investors
knocking into your door.
That was precisely the moment when broadcast.com went public.
The stock price soared 250% on its first day of trading, and the company was worth a billion
dollar, bring up Cuban’s net worth to 300 Million dollars.
It seems like they hit the lottery, but that was just the beginning.
Because a year later just before the dot-com bubble burst and the entire market crashed.
When dozens if not hundreds of internet companies went bankrupt, Yahoo which was the internet
giant at its time as Facebook is today suddenly decided to acquire broadcast.com for 5.7 billion
dollars in stocks.
It was the largest single e-commerce transaction, increasing Cuban’s net worth to 1.7 billion
dollars.
As Cuban himself said: we hit the lottery twice!
Because he realized that, wait for a second, its a bubble, therefore, the market is going
to crash soon.
So he quickly sold his Yahoo shares and diversified his wealth into many different businesses,
and that's precisely when the market went down.
And guess what happened to broadcast.com.
Exactly, It went bankrupt, and Yahoo shut it down in 2002.
It's easy to look back and criticize Yahoo for such a bad acquisition, but the internet
was at its initial state, and it was tough to predict which companies will service.
Even things such as registering a domain or starting a website were pretty tricky.
However, today with HOVER who gladly sponsored this video, you can do it easily in a few
minutes.
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Make sure you give them a try, that will really help the channel.
Thanks for watching and I will catch you in the next one.