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398 days ago
bradley7's Answer
Cuban used to work as a salesperson for Your Business Software in Dallas (it was one of the first PC software retailers in Dallas), where he was fired less than a year later after meeting with a client to procure new business instead of opening the store.
This in a way forced Cuban into entrepreneurship as he, with his previous customers from Your Business Software, co-founded a system integrator and software reseller company named MicroSolutions in 1983. MicroSolutions was sold to CompuServe for $6 million in 1990, its annual revenue at that time was $30 million. Cuban got to keep approximately $2 million after taxes on this deal.
With the money from MicroSolutions deal, Cuban started other ventures. Cuban and fellow Indiana alum Wagner started AudioNet in 1995 so they and their buddies could hear Indiana Hoosiers basketball games on the Internet. Within four years, the company — renamed Broadcast.com when it went public in mid-1998 and soared to $62.75 a share its first day of trading — piped content from about 100 TV stations, 500 radio stations and thousands of artists to millions of PC usersworldwide.
While others lost paper fortunes and their reputations during the meltdown of the early 2000s, Broadcast.com was sold to Yahoo for a cool $5.7 billion in 1999 — netting Cuban $1.7 billion of stock. Cuban was ranked 179th on the Forbes' list of 400 richest Americans in the year 2003, with a net worth of $1.3 billion.
He then went on to buy Dallas Mavericks for $280 million in January 2000.
References:
- http://www.usatoday.com/money/2004-04-25-cuban_x.htm
- http://www.forbes.com/finance/lists/54/2003/LIR.jhtml?passListId=54&passYear=2003&passListType=Person&uniqueId=IXMB&datatype=Person
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