writing script for broadcasting (meeting 14)

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 started to market the company, Cuban said he noticed a growing demand from those who wanted to listen to sports games or music during their workday, but couldn't keep a radio on their desk. 

Then, as Broadcast.com added the ability to watch video with audio, "most of our revenue came from corporate events streaming and all-hands meetings," he said. That was "the real money-maker for us."

In 1999, Broadcast.com was acquired by Yahoo for $5.7 billion in stock.

The experience led Cuban to be more open-minded and trust his gut to invest in companies or ideas that others may find "crazy," he said. Today, that includes his investments in companies centered around cryptocurrency and blockchain.