Mark Cuban has come a long way, baby. In the April 15 issue of Forbes Life, the Dallas Mavericks owner and avid tweeter recounts his early (and poor) days living in The Village apartments, as well as some important leadership lessons. Notably, he writes about what he learned not to do based on some pretty bad bosses.
Cuban’s essay starts when he was 24, departing Indiana for Dallas, where his friends had promised great weather, jobs and amazing women. “I didn’t hear the first two pieces, but I definitely heard the third,” Cuban writes.
He piled into a tiny apartment with five other guys; there were only three beds in the place, and he didn’t get one. He bartended while job searching and eventually landed a gig at Your Business Software, which sold PC software to businesses and consumers, for $18,000 a year plus commission.
“I’d just bought a $99 Texas Instruments computer and was teaching myself programming. They were impressed by that. They were also impressed by the fact that I was actually willing to read all of the software manuals,” Cuban writes.
Cuban eventually was fired from that job for disobeying the CEO, but he calls that moment the “determining factor in my business life,” because that’s when he decided to start his own company. That company was MicroSolutions, and he grew it to $30 million in revenues before selling it to CompuServe.
From there he founded AudioNet, which later become Broadcast.com, which he and partner Todd Wagner sold to Yahoo. And the rest, as they say, is history.
For more stories about Cuban’s horrible bosses, his run-in with Michael Dell, and his poor party days in Dallas, read the full article.
Mavericks owner Mark Cuban has come a long way from a cramped Village apartment with five roommates.
