Mark Cuban

Although he isn’t young now, Mark Cuban has a great story of innovation and exploring a new underserved area.  Today Cuban is known primarily as an investor on the hit show shark tank and as the owner of the Dallas Mavericks NBA team.  Although he’s worth about 4.5 billion, he didn’t start with massive investments.  In a way, Cuban came from a history of entrepreneurs.  His grandfather immigrated from Russian and sold goods out of the back of a truck to feed his family.  At the age of 12, Mark Cuban sold garbage bags so he could buy a pair of shoes he liked.  Cuban enrolled at the University of Pittsburgh but transferred to Indiana after his freshman year.  After graduating in 1981, Cuban moved back to his hometown of Pittsburgh and took a job at Mellon Bank.  He immersed himself in the understanding of computers and networking and in 1982 he moved from Pittsburgh to Dallas.  Cubans first large scale profit came in 1990 when he sold his consulting company MicroSolutions to CompuServe for 6 million dollars.  In 1995 he and his business partner, Todd Wagner, started a company called AudioNet.  The service was created to stream Indiana Hoosiers basketball games while in Texas.  The company went public in 1998 and soon saw shares reach $200.  A year later the two men sold the business to Yahoo for almost $6 billion.  In 2000, Cuban bought the Mavericks for $285 million.  Today the Mavericks are worth over 2.45 billion dollars.  Today Cuban uses his knowledge of business to invest in startups on shark tank, he’s also regarded as one of the best owners in the NBA.