Mark Cuban

Mark Cuban is a Pittsburgh native, Indiana University graduate, Dallas resident, entrepreneur, and investor. His own biography describes a long entrepreneurial path starting with selling and trading baseball cards, garbage bags, magazines, and stamps before he moved to Dallas after college and worked at Your Business Software, one of the city’s early software retailers.

After being fired from that job, Cuban founded MicroSolutions, a systems-integration and software company. The company grew to 80 employees and nearly $36 million in annualized sales before he sold it to CompuServe, then a subsidiary of H&R Block, for $6 million in 1990. He then invested in public and private companies and briefly built and sold a hedge fund.

Cuban later co-founded AudioNet with Todd Wagner so they could listen to Indiana University basketball broadcasts over the internet from Dallas. AudioNet became Broadcast.com, went public in 1998, and was sold to Yahoo for $5.7 billion in stock. Around the same period, Cuban purchased the Dallas Mavericks for $285 million; the team won the 2011 NBA championship, and Cuban sold majority control in 2023 while remaining involved.

Cuban has also built and backed media, entertainment, healthcare, and consumer businesses. He co-founded HDNet, was involved with 2929 Productions and Magnolia Pictures, became a Shark Tank investor in 2011, and co-founded Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company, which launched in January 2022 with transparent pricing and a limited markup.

• Cuban invests across a broad personal-company portfolio rather than through a conventional venture fund. Mark Cuban Companies organizes portfolio companies across AI, apparel, blockchain, consumer, food, healthcare and biotech, media, productivity, social and civic, and sports.
• He is drawn to practical disruption in large, opaque markets. On Cost Plus Drugs, he told TIME that capitalism is about “finding solutions to problems,” and the company’s model sells generic medications at manufacturing cost plus a 15% markup and fees.
• He responds to concise, high-signal founder outreach. TIME reported that hundreds of investment pitches reach his inbox weekly, that he reads the first paragraph, and that he deletes most; Alex Oshmyansky’s cold email led to Cost Plus Drugs because Cuban saw an opportunity after asking follow-up questions.
• He values preparation and resilience in founders. In a 2026 interview, Cuban said entrepreneurs need “the will to prepare,” and he has repeatedly framed failure as acceptable if founders learn quickly.
• He is active in AI and believes AI creates leverage for small companies. In 2025, Cuban said small and mid-sized companies need help from “AI natives” who can implement AI into workflows.
• He has backed both traditional venture-style technology companies and Shark Tank-style small businesses, including consumer products, healthcare, sports technology, media, education, and software.