By Mark Kindley, VARBusiness
Fri. October 22, 1999
Mark Cuban is very rich, even on the hyperbolic scale of Internet wealth. When he sold Broadcast.com, the company he founded in 1995, to Yahoo last year for $5.7 billion, well more than a billion of that reportedly went into his pocket. I used to talk to Cuban when he ran MicroSolutions, a VAR in Dallas. He always had an intelligent opinion about whatever subject I was researching at the time. I had an asterisk in front of his name in my database. Now he's 41 and an Internet superstar. I admit the fact that I am slightly more than a decade older than he and have not created a multibillion-dollar empire of my own does influence my opinion of Cuban's success: I am both inspired and depressed by it. His story is easy to take personally because, even now, he is life-size. It's hard to imagine being like Bill Gates, and I don't feel depressed at all by not being like Larry Ellison. But Cuban is one of us. You could be him. That's a challenging realization. I think the way Cuban ended a column he wrote for sister publication Computer Reseller News in 1997 gave some indication of an attitude that would, if not lead him to success, at least allow him to find his way there. After writing about the hurdles he saw ahead for push-technology companies, he signed off with the line, "That's my story, and I'm sticking to it, until I change my mind." The point is, you have to be willing to change your mind to succeed in this business. And to be able to do that, you have to have enough humility to admit that you don't have all the answers. It is enough to have an intelligent opinion and an open mind. The Man Behind the Megabucks To learn what Cuban is thinking about today, executive editor T.C. Doyle flew to Texas last week and spent 90 minutes with him at his Dallas office. For all the money and media coverage, Cuban still drives the same Lexus he did before he became megawealthy, and, he says, he still reads every issue of VARBusiness and CRN. Cuban is more of a salesman than a technologist. He has no formal computer training. What he knows he taught himself while working for a Dallas software retailer. Cuban got pushed into entrepreneurship: After getting fired from that software retail store, he started his own PC business, focusing on services at a time when most rivals in the channel were pushing boxes. Cuban says he feels as though he is still in the channel. Certainly, he sees everything as a services business today. And in his current capacity as vice president of Yahoo, Cuban says all the rules of getting ahead that he learned as a reseller apply as well to getting ahead in the area of Internet content and services. His first rule is: Know your customers. He talks about staying up nights reading up on his customers' businesses during the early days at MicroSolutions. For one building client, for example, he recalls poring over architectural journals so he could, in his words, "talk the customer's talk" the next time they met. Another Cuban rule is to migrate to the most advanced part of the market as quickly as possible. Cuban partnered with Novell before the Provo, Utah, company did business as "Novell Inc." He was one of the first VARs in the country to qualify to sell Notes. And, he moved into streaming video when the best that could be said about it was that "it would never get any worse than it was." He was right. Being right, obviously, is important, but what's more important is being able to change your mind and set off in a new direction. It certainly worked for Cuban. What's on your mind? You can contact me at mkindley@cmp.com.
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