Shark Tank fans surely know Mark Cuban as the casually dressed billionaire who gained his vast fortune and financial success through smart investment decisions.
The investment guru is known for his candor on the show, especially when it comes to entrepreneurship and money matters. You might think investing is all about luck, but ask Cuban, who believes good business ideas are hard to come by.
The man has listened to numerous pitches from startups over the years, but if there’s one thing that attracts him to a company, it’s the openness to make mistakes and learn from them.
That’s because Mark has a history of mistakes himself, as does every successful businessman we know. Even though he is now the CEO of the Dallas Mavericks and has a net worth of $4 billion, Cuban comes from rather humble beginnings.
When asked about his success in a recent interview, he put it all into perspective by saying that he, too, had his share of failures before finding the perfect business idea.
By the time he was 30, Cuban had tried and failed at several businesses, but that did not stop him from moving on. The entrepreneur says you only have to get it right once. Then, when you have made it, people around you may think you have been lucky, but in reality it was your perseverance that got you this far, not luck.
This is a trend that is often seen in the media with wealthy business people. We are often so focused on their successes that we overlook the struggles they had to overcome to get to this point.
In Cuban’s case, we often hear about all his successful businesses, especially in the 1990s when he sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo! and received $5.7 billion worth of stock in return.
But probably his best move was selling the stock just before Yahoo! went belly-up in the wake of the dot-com bust. Cuban’s first business failure dates back to when he opened his own bar as a 20-year-old college student.
Unfortunately, it closed after management failed to conduct a thorough ID review of its customers. Cuban also faced many job interview rejections and was even fired from Your Business Solutions before eventually starting his own business.