Growing up in Pittsburgh, Mark Cuban’s parents wanted him to learn a trade so he’d have something to fall back on. So the guy — who is now worth $2.5 billion — got a job working for a carpenter laying carpet and quickly learned he was absolutely horrible at it.
He was so terrible at his next endeavor as a short-order cook that he couldn’t tell if the food was done right unless he tried it, so he always cut off tiny pieces to sample.
And then there was the time that he was a waiter in a nice restaurant and could never open the wine bottles without getting cork in the wine.
“It was just horrible,” he says. “I was like, ‘Why aren’t you scheduling me more hours?’ [They said], ‘You can’t do this worth a damn, Mark.’”
But through all of these early experiences, he learned that it’s OK to not be good at everything.
“I’ve learned that it doesn’t matter how many times you failed,” Cuban says. “You only have to be right once. I tried to sell powdered milk. I was an idiot lots of times, and I learned from them all.”
He applied lessons learned in his failures as he started Broadcast.com, an audio and video portal, which he later sold to Yahoo for $5.7 billion in stock. His failures also helped him succeed when he bought and turned around the Dallas Mavericks NBA franchise and co-founded HDNet, an all high-definition television network. And these are just a few of his successful ventures that have landed him at No. 144 on the Forbes 400 Richest Americans and No. 400 on the World Billionaires lists as well as a guest venture capitalist “shark” on ABC’s “Shark Tank” reality TV show.
“I don’t care if you’re working a counter at McDonald’s or as a bartender like I did or as a doorman like I did, when it fails, whatever it may be, you’re going to learn,” he says. “You’ve got to take that positive orientation to it and develop your skills.”
Cuban has refined many skills over the years as he’s built his businesses, and he’s learned a lot. But in particular, he’s learned how to look at opportunities, how to know himself and how to be ruthlessly focused.
Look at opportunities
If someone wants to pitch Cuban an idea, he’s open to it, but he’s not going to take a meeting for it. Instead, he wants to keep the details short, sweet and to the point.
“What I tell people is, ‘Anything you’re going to tell me in a meeting or a sales pitch, put it in an e-mail, and I’ll read it, and you know, give me as much technical information or business details as you can,’ because that takes all the personality out of it,” he says. “It lets me deal with just the facts or the details, and once I have a feel for the details, then we can deal with the personalities and the people involved.”
Cuban can quickly — often within seconds — recognize if a pitch is something he’s interested in or not. He starts with whether it’s an industry he wants to be in. He knows he wants to steer clear of websites driven by advertising, he’s not interested in being part of the next cool fashion trend, and it’s safe to say that his early experiences in the restaurant industry are just one reason he doesn’t want to open a restaurant of his own. Instead, he tends to stick to technology and play to his own strengths.
He says that just looking at the industry is about 90 percent of it. Beyond that, he looks for any red flags.
“The more people try to sell you on the size of a market, that’s usually a first red flag,” Cuban says. “If someone says, ‘This is a billion-dollar market, and all we’ve got to do is get one-half of 1 percent, and we’ll be making X, Y, Z,’ that’s someone usually selling themselves.”
Another red flag is if someone also says that the company is going to be better than an established player — like someone saying the company is going to be a better Facebook than Facebook. Also, he looks at how people react when he brings up competitors. If they start saying what those folks can’t do instead of talking about what gives this opportunity a unique competitive advantage, that’s a good indicator to him, as well.
