Mark Cuban on the company that made him a billionaire: Why I knew it would succeed despite many naysayers In the mid-1990s, just before the dot-com bubble, Mark Cuban was approached by a friend about a business idea. As a fellow sports fan, his friend, Todd Wagner, pitched Cuban that it would be lucrative to start an internet audio company where users could listen to sports games online. Sold on the possibilities, Cuban agreed, and in 1995, the duo created AudioNet, which later became Broadcast.com. At the time, the internet was a very new concept to most people, so Cuban and Wagner faced many critics who didn't believe the company would succeed. Cuban said he "firmly believed that streaming would take over all of television," because he "believed in the price-performance curve for PCs [personal computers] and broadband, and that as PCs would continue to get more powerful, the price of disc drives and of bandwidth would continue to fall." Once the co-founders st...