Mark Cuban has a lot going for him, and we can learn valuable lessons for our own careers by examining who he is and how he got to be extremely successful.
He is not just lucky; he is smart.
Mark Cuban started his own company, and sold it to Yahoo! for almost $6 billion in the 1990s. Selling his dotcom to Yahoo! just before the dotcom crash may have been dumb luck. However, it took intelligence and foresight to recognize that the business world changes. Instead of assuming his Yahoo! stock would stay high, he leveraged his assets before the crash.
Income Diary quotes Cuban:
“After we sold Broadcast.com, I hedged my stock with synthetic indexes, in case the market cratered in the six months before I could hedge my actual Yahoo shares. It cost me $20 million, but I protected what I had.”
Hedging, in simplest terms, is essentially purchasing a form of insurance. It buys the stockholder the right to sell stock not below a specific price, among other things. Hedging valuable stock is not lucky, it’s smart.
Cuban is also smart enough to diversify. That means he does not keep all of his eggs in one basket. Instead, he took monies he earned selling Broadcast.com to Yahoo!, and invested in other companies.
His net worth is $2,500,000,000.
He didn’t earn all that money being lucky. He came from humble beginnings and has been working hard much of his life. Everybody knows he currently owns the Dallas Mavericks, but not everybody realizes he worked as a bartender as a younger man.
He has been a serial entrepreneur since he was 12 years old. His first business was selling garbage bags door to door so he could buy a pair of basketball shoes.
His passion for making money has kept him working at it for most of his life.
He is a nice guy.
Anybody who watches Shark Tank knows that Mark Cuban has a good sense of humor, a real warmth about him, and is an “angel.” As an angel, Cuban is using his billions to help other entrepreneurs with great business ideas and the willingness to work hard. They need his investment dollars and his wisdom gained via experience. He offers both to entrepreneurs that impress him with their creativity and drive.
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