How Mark Cuban couldn’t keep a job, so started his own company instead and made $3 billion.
“I joined Mellon Bank after graduating from Indiana University in 1980 at 22. A lot of my peers at Mellon were just happy to have a job. I wanted to be more entrepreneurial. I started writing a newsletter. I did updates on current projects. I tried to inject a little humor. I thought my boss would love me for doing these things.”
“Instead, my boss called me into his office one day and ripped me a new one. “Who the f— do you think you are?” he yelled.”
“I told him I was trying to help Mellon make more money. He told me I was never to go over him or around him, or he’d crush me. I knew then it was time to get out of there. That’s how I found myself back in Indiana, then on the road to Dallas.”
“In Dallas, I moved into a tiny apartment with five buddies at a place called The Village. We had only three bedrooms and three beds. I slept on the floor.”
“Our rent was $750 split six ways. In order to get some extra time to pay our rent, the guys would write checks to one guy who would collect them all and make a deposit and he would then pay the bills. It would give us three or four days of float. One time our roommate Dobie collected all the checks and skipped town. That was the last we ever saw of him.”
“I initially got a job as a bartender at a place called Elan, which was a hot Dallas club. While tending bar, I applied for jobs. I got an interview with a company called Your Business Software. I got the job.”
“I was happy. I was selling, making money. About nine months in, I got an opportunity to make a $15,000 sale to a guy named Kevin. I was going to make a $1,500 commission, which was enormous. It would have allowed me to move out of the apartment and maybe have a bed.”
“I asked a co-worker to cover me at the office. I called my boss, the CEO, whose name was Michael, and told him I was going to pick up the check. I thought he’d be thrilled. He wasn’t. He told me not to do it. I thought: “Are you kidding me?” I decided to do it anyway. I thought when I showed up with a $15,000 check, he’d be cool with it.”
“Instead, when I came back to the office, he fired me on the spot.”
“But being fired from that job was the determining factor in my business life. I decided then and there to start my own company. I was 25.”
“I went back to that guy with the $15,000 job and told him that I didn’t have the money at the time, but if he let me keep this job and the money, I would do the work and it would help me start my own company. He said, “Sure.”
“I started a company called Micro-Solutions. I remember one day I had to drive to Austin for some PC part, to a place called PCs Limited. The place was run by this kid who was younger than I was. We sat down and talked for a few hours. I was really impressed by him. I remember telling him, “Dude, I think we’re both going places.” That “dude” was Michael Dell.”
“That year I made the decision to get MicroSolutions into local-area networks. We were one of the first to do that. This was literally the foundation of my later career. MicroSolutions grew into a company with $30 million in revenues. I sold it a few years later to CompuServe.”
“That start enabled me to found AudioNet, which became Broadcast.com, which my partner, Todd Wagner, and I sold to Yahoo. Then came the Dallas Mavericks and everything else, of course.”
“Oh, yeah. A few years ago, I got an e-mail from my old roommate, Dobie. It said, “How you doing, man?” I wrote back that I wasn’t going to talk to him until he paid me the $125 he owed me for rent back from The Village. He sent me the check. I cashed it.”
Mark Cuban is now worth $3.3 billion. He wrote this story in Forbes.
Whatever life throws at you, as Mark says, it “doesn’t matter if the glass is half-empty or half-full. All that matters is that you are the one pouring the water.”
