Mark Cuban has been a natural businessman and seller since the early age of 12. When his dad refused to buy him a new pair of expensive sneakers, Mark started selling garbage bags door to door to his neighbors. That first experience with selling became the seed that would eventually grow into his passion for business and entrepreneurship.

Many years later, after graduating from Indiana University – where he owned for a short period of time the most popular bar in town – Mark decided to move to Dallas. He got a job but working for someone else didn’t work out for him and after an argument with an employer he quit to become an entrepreneur. He created MicroSolutions, a computer consulting service which was sold not long after in 1990 to CompuServe.

Five years later, Mark met with long-time friend Todd Wagner and they both came up with a revolutionary idea: an internet-based solution for being able to listen to live sporting events and radio stations. The idea sparked when Mark and Todd wanted to listen to Hoosiers Basketball games while being in Texas, and they were unable to do so. This is how AudioNet was born, which was renamed to Broadcast.com. The company went public in 1998, and with the dot-com stock bubble the prize of the company soared immediately. Soon after, Cuban and Wagner sold the company to Yahoo for the staggering amount of $5,7 billion dollars in stock. Mark forecasted the market crash and sold his Yahoo shares in early 2000, almost at the all-time high for just short of $2 billion dollars.

Now a billionaire, Mark went to buy the Dallas Mavericks in 2000 – a dream for him, being an NBA fan – for $285 million dollars for a majority stake. Under his leadership, the Mavs went to compete on the NBA Finals for the first time ever in 2006 and became the NBA World Champions in 2011. Nowadays, they rank as one of the most valuable franchises in sports with an estimated value of over $2 billion dollars, according to Forbes.

Mark’s successful career as an entrepreneur didn’t end there, as he also founded HDNET in 2001, which rebranded to AXS tv and in September 2019 Mark sold his majority stake for an undisclosed amount. He is also an avid investor with an ever-growing portfolio of hundreds of business and a television celebrity being one of the “Sharks” on the international hit show Shark Tank.

Mark currently lives in Dallas with his wife Tiffany, and their three children.