Facundo Manes
World-Leading Neuroscientist | PhD, University of Cambridge | Founder, INECO | 250+ Scientific Publications | Bestselling Author | Argentine National Deputy
Billionaire Entrepreneur | Co-Founder, Cost Plus Drugs | Emmy Award Winner | Shark Tank Investor | Former Owner, Dallas Mavericks
Mark Cuban turned a $6 million exit into a $5.7 billion deal, won an NBA championship, and is now disrupting the US pharmaceutical industry with Cost Plus Drugs. An Emmy Award winner, Shark Tank icon, and keynote speaker at the Global Entrepreneurship Congress, he delivers high-energy, no-nonsense talks that push leaders to think bigger, move faster, and compete harder.
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Mark Cuban is one of America’s most iconic entrepreneurs — a self-made billionaire who built his fortune through relentless hustle, contrarian thinking, and an instinct for betting on the future before anyone else saw it coming. From selling garbage bags door-to-door as a kid in Pittsburgh to engineering two landmark business exits worth billions, Cuban’s story is one of the most compelling in modern business: unfiltered, unconventional, and impossible to replicate — except in its underlying principles.
Entrepreneur speaker Mark Cuban’s first major venture was MicroSolutions, a computer consulting firm he founded in 1990 and sold to CompuServe for $6 million. Five years later, he and co-founder Todd Wagner launched AudioNet — later renamed Broadcast.com — the world’s first large-scale internet radio and streaming platform. In 1999, at the peak of the dot-com boom, Yahoo acquired Broadcast.com for $5.7 billion in stock, generating Cuban a personal fortune of nearly $2 billion. His decisive move to sell near the stock’s peak, using a series of hedging strategies, is studied as one of the shrewdest financial maneuvers of the era. In 2000, Cuban purchased the Dallas Mavericks for $285 million. Under his ownership, the team reached the NBA Finals in 2006 and won the franchise’s first championship in 2011. He sold majority control of the Mavs in 2023 while retaining a significant stake, citing his desire to redirect his energy toward his next defining mission.
That mission is Cost Plus Drugs, the pharmaceutical company Cuban co-founded in 2019 and launched publicly in January 2022. Operating on a radically transparent pricing model that eliminates pharmacy benefit managers and passes savings directly to patients, Cost Plus Drugs now carries more than 2,500 medications, has established over 25 partnerships with pass-through pharmacy benefit managers, and opened a manufacturing facility in Dallas in 2024 to produce generic drugs domestically using AI-enabled robotics. In 2025, the company was selected as a partner in the White House’s Equip-A-Pharma initiative to strengthen US pharmaceutical manufacturing. Cuban has called healthcare pricing the most broken system in America — and has built a company actively dismantling it.
From 2011 to 2025, Cuban was one of the most popular and influential investors on ABC’s Emmy Award-winning Shark Tank, investing millions across hundreds of small businesses over fourteen seasons. He won the Emmy as Executive Producer for Outstanding Structured Reality Program in 2024 — one of nine total nominations the show received during his tenure. Through the entrepreneurship speaker platform Shark Tank gave him, Cuban became a household name for a new generation of founders. Beyond the show, his philanthropic work includes the Mark Cuban Foundation, which runs free AI Bootcamps for underserved high school students across 29 US cities, and the Fallen Patriot Fund, which supports families of military personnel killed or injured in combat.
As a keynote speaker, Mark Cuban brings the kind of raw, real-world authority that no case study or MBA curriculum can replicate. His talks are high-energy, direct, and built around the actual decisions — good and bad — that define entrepreneurial careers. Whether addressing startup founders, Fortune 500 executives, or sales organisations, Cuban challenges his audiences to think bigger, move faster, and question every assumption about how business gets done. Attendees leave with a sharper competitive mindset and a clearer sense of what separates the businesses that win from those that don’t.
Mark Cuban traces the unfiltered story of his entrepreneurial journey — from door-to-door sales as a teenager to back-to-back billion-dollar exits — and extracts the principles that made it possible. This keynote demolishes the mythology around startup success and replaces it with a hard-nosed, practical framework for building businesses that win: knowing your industry cold, out-hustling the competition, and making the bold moves others are too cautious to attempt.
As an investor who has backed AI-driven companies across industries and a philanthropist running free AI bootcamps for thousands of high schoolers, Cuban brings a grounded, non-hype perspective to the AI revolution. This session cuts through the noise to show business leaders what AI means in practice — where it creates real competitive advantage, where it is overhyped, and what organisations need to do now to ensure they are building with it rather than being disrupted by it.
Using his experience co-founding Cost Plus Drugs — a company taking on the entrenched interests of the US pharmaceutical industry — Cuban shares a master class in identifying industries where the incumbents are extracting value rather than creating it, and building a challenger model that puts the customer first. This talk is a blueprint for leaders who want to think and act like disruptors rather than defenders of the status quo.
Drawing from his two decades building the Dallas Mavericks into an NBA championship franchise, Cuban explores what elite performance looks like in organisations — the culture, the accountability, the willingness to make hard decisions, and the relentless drive to improve. This keynote is as applicable to a sales team as it is to a leadership summit: a direct, energising examination of what it takes to build a culture where winning is not an accident but an expectation.
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