Mark Cuban Luckiest Guy in Tech
I read/heard somewhere that Mark Cuban is the luckiest guy in Tech, maybe being at the right place/right time with Audionet? Any thoughts?
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** it may have been more along the lines of "Luckiest guy in the world"
He has things a lot of other techies don't have. Street smarts, business smarts and is actually able to talk to other people in a fluid way. Due to these things he is seen as lucky rather than smart.
Also the guy is actually a really genuine person. I've spoken to him a couple dozen times.
He's also really fucking lucky.
Check you out BSD, do you guys go yachting?
No, yachting is kind of hard in Dallas. I do have a pretty sweet boat though.
Mark Cuban is a bit of a polarizing figure in the business world. A lot of people say that he was very lucky. The points they make are that he took his startup Audionet (later Broadcast.com) public during the dotcom boom. This company had very minimal revenues, was unprofitable (it never posted a net profit in its entire existence) and basically no real proprietary technology. To give credit to Cuban, though, he was able to create a brand and generate a lot of buzz/excitement surrounding his company. Critics would then say that he was still very lucky since he was able to find a "sucker" in Yahoo to hugely overpay for his company in an all stock transaction.
One could argue that all of the above constitutes "luck." However, the fact that Cuban immediately dumped all of his holdings in Yahoo at the very top (or near the top) of the bubble suggests to me that it is not simply all luck. Cuban probably recognized from the time he started his company that the whole thing was a bubble, and the frothy markets and insane valuations of the dotcom boom would not last indefinitely. This leads me to believe that Cuban's plan from the very beginning was not to create a company that would create any lasting value, but instead to take advantage of the circumstances of the time and cash out and make himself as rich as humanly possible.
Was it sleazy? Yes. But what we are concerned with here is not whether or not it was sleazy, but whether or not it was a product of luck.
Since Cuban recognized that the market was frothy, he knew that if he could generate enough excitement and buzz around his company, he would be able to find someone who was willing to pay for it. I don't think that is luck. Mark Cuban knew exactly what he was doing and what he needed to do to get what he wanted.
I suppose one could make the argument that there was an element of luck involved in how much Yahoo was willing to overpay... $5.7 Billion is insane for a company with miniminal revenue and absolutely no proprietary technology. Of course, Yahoo is no stranger to making investments that spectacularly failed. For every one Alibaba, there are countless investments in companies such as Geocities, Broadcast.com, and the list goes on...
very insightful response
I agree with @"Deo et Patriae" and @"heister" in that, yes, he got lucky that he was able to be in the right place at the right time of the dotcom boom but he was able to put together a company that the greater fool, Yahoo, bought for an outrageous sum of money and he sold at the right time. And for those who weren't around at the time of the dotcom boom, Broadcast.com's valuation didn't seem that outlandish because really bad ideas and companies were begin valued at outrageous amounts. It was in fact a new paradigm if you didn't know. He had the foresight to realize it wasn't.
Then Cuban collared his Yahoo shares and everyone thought he was insane because he was limiting his upside because of course Yahoo's share price was going to ∞, as were all internet stocks. Unlike dozens of others who made hundreds of millions or billions on paper and ended up with a fraction or nothing of the apex of their paper net worth, he walked away with more than a billion. That was a very shrewd move at the time. And since, as everyone knows, he's been involved in a multitude of businesses and has increased his net worth greatly.
So yes, there was some degree of luck, but I think he took advantage of the times and protected his downside. To him I don't think his internet company was a labor of love as it was for so many others, but much more of a strategically planned and executed operation.
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