This is The FASTEST Way to Overcome Doubters | Mark Cuban Insights in 19 Minutes

I literally was putting everything that I had on the line for something people just laughed at me and said, wait, audio over the internet? You know you can turn on the radio.

If it's your company and you can't sell, you're not going to be in business long, particularly when you're starting up and it's just you.

When I talk to entrepreneurs, you have to make a decision what's important to you.

Need motivation? Watch a Top 10 with Believe Nation.

Top 10, I got a top 10. Got my motivation high for my top 10. Gotta learn from the wise.

He's Mark Cuban, and here's my take on his Top 10 Rules of Success, Volume 6. Enjoy.

Okay, let's kick off rule number 1: take risk.

A Fiat X1/9 that had a hole in the floorboard.

I mean, you could tell I was living the high life.

I mean, and I was putting in oil every 60 miles and working as a bartender at night. What did I have to lose? And so it wasn't like, oh man, I could lose all this.

And so it was just like, you just go for it.

Now, later on, after I'd had some success and we got back and we started AudioNet, which turned into Broadcast.com, the math was different, the equations, the calculus was different. It was like, okay, I'm investing a lot of my saved money into this whole idea of netcasting, right? Or internet broadcasting in early 1995 when people didn't even know what the internet was. That was all risk because I literally was putting everything that I had on the line for something people just laughed at me and said, wait, audio? Over the internet. You know, you can turn on the radio, you know, you know, you can turn on a TV.

Yeah, but you don't get it.

No, that's just dumb. All right. You know, and so being able to overcome all that resistance because remember back then, A, you had to have a PC, B, you had to know what a modem was and install it, C, you had to know what the internet was, and then you had to download a TCP/IP client that worked over a modem and then connected to a browser that you probably didn't even know what it was or how to download it. And we had to take it on faith that all this was going to grow.

Rule number 2: Know how to sell.

Sales cures all. Lots of companies come in and say, I have a great idea, or I have a company and we've got some sales, but we only need to do this, we only need to do that. And you talk to them, and you talk to the entrepreneur, and I'm like, why aren't you selling? This is your whole company. There's never been a company in the history of companies to to survive without sales. And so I think, you know, now as more and more people watch Shark Tank, they're seeing it, but if you can't sell, if it's your company and you can't sell, you're not going to be in business long, particularly when you're starting up and it's just you. And sales is not something you can give to somebody else and say, okay, I'm just going to hire salespeople. Michael Humecki, remember that guy I told you about that fired me for handing him the check? He was the guy who wouldn't— he was the CEO and owner. He would never sell. He thought he could just bring us in and sell it. And the company failed afterwards, you gotta sell.

Rule number 3: Decide what's important to you.

What I advise people, when I sat down to make a decision, my goal always was I wanted to retire by the time I was 35.

Right?

Period, end of story. And I sold my first company, MicroSolutions, and I was gonna be willing to live like a student. I was 20, I just turned 30, I guess. And I bought a lifetime pass on American Airlines and just partied like a rock star. I was getting fucked up with as many people as I possibly could and going to as many countries as much as I could and loving life, and that was my goal, right? And then came back and started buying and selling stocks, made another $25 million, whatever, crushing it. Then we started AudioNet, and I financed it out of my pocket until we got big enough where we wanted strategics. And again, on one hand, we were doing a million people a day coming in doing multimedia in 1998. 1999. We were doing— when we sold to Yahoo, our last quarter, I think we did $23 million in revenue in 1999, right?

So on the internet, on the internet, yeah, all just on the internet, right?

Those are people paying you to do webcasts.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, it's shocking the things that we created back then that I—

that if I would have patented, it would have been a different world.

Pre-roll ads, we started that. Pop-up ads, we called them guaranteed click-through, we started that. Multicast distribution, All kinds of stuff, you know, different ways of connecting servers, writing software around it, all kinds of shit. But in my mind, it wasn't about— I wanted to create this huge company. I remember telling our employees, we're going to change— I want to be the next Ted Turner. I want to just change— cable changed television. I want to change media. I want all media to be driven online, that it's going to be crazy to think that there aren't going to be more choices online than there are TV. People are going to upload user-generated content, and that's going to change the world. And, you know, not the world, the country. I wasn't thinking that big. But more importantly, more important to me then was my personal freedom, right? The one thing my dad has always driven to me, the one thing you can't own is time, you know? And the one thing you can't give back is time. And while part of me wanted an amazing world-class company, a bigger part of me just wanted to see the world, you know, and just experience the world and just love life. Life and just enjoy life, and that was more important to me, and that's what the money enabled. And that's why when, you know, that's why I hedged my stock. I didn't need more, I just wanted more time, you know, because that was everything to me. And so, when I talk to entrepreneurs, you have to make a decision what's important to you. Time to go out and do whatever, be whoever you are, help whoever you want to help, raise your family, whatever it is, or do you want to create a world-class company?

What is your goal?

And you have to understand your goals. And there should always be a price. You know, if there's a— if it is about selling at some point, what's the price?

Rule number 4: Keep up with modern technology.

I focus on things that are AI-driven, artificial intelligence-driven, whether it's machine learning, deep learning, neural networks, medical applications. But within AI, AI is a buzzword that everybody's using right now. You know, every— and, and to that point, You know, we, as old guys, we go back and it's like 1995, we talk about the internet. And I would say to people back in 1995, look, if you don't understand the internet, you're not going to be able to do business.

And now that's just blocking and tackling, it seems obvious.

Back then it wasn't. I could even take you further back to my first company. You know, what we did was a company called MicroSolutions, and we did local area networks and wide area networks. And I used to walk into companies and say, you're going to have to hook these PCs together at some point. That'll make you more productive, more effective, you know, give you a competitive advantage. And people are like, now I just carry this floppy from this PC to that PC. Yeah, okay. But today we're at the same type of inflection point with artificial intelligence. You don't have to be an expert and be able to put together your own neural network. You know, you don't have to know what weights and biases are, but, but you have to have more than just a cursory understanding. Just like you have to know the difference between, you know, different types of websites, and you have to understand e-commerce if you're in e-commerce, you have to have a cursory understanding of how apps work. You're going to have to have at least, if not more, cursory understanding of artificial intelligence, because it will change everything we do. And if the internet was 10x in terms of change to business, Artificial intelligence will be 100x or more. So there's going to be a disruption and change in the types of jobs that's going to impact your customers, that's going to impact your businesses, that's going to impact the future of business. And so I can't— I don't want to be, you know, I want to be as clear and as forceful as I possibly can, because as fellow entrepreneurs, we always have to look for an edge. We always have to understand how our industry is changing. We always have to understand not only how we differentiate ourselves in our companies. But you always— I always want to know who can kick my ass, right? In all my businesses, who can kick my ass, and can I kick my own ass first? Because if you can disrupt yourself first, you're— the person who could otherwise do it is not going to do it, and you can compete and be successful. So pay attention to AI. It's important. If you go to my house, right next to my bed, there's a book. Machine Learning for Dummies. If you go into my bathroom, there's Deep Neural Networks for Dummies, right? If you go on, there's a something for dummies in every room of my house. You know, that can go two ways, I know, but I'm just telling you, put the time— I mean, I've taken, you know, I can't even tell you how many hours now I spend every week, if not daily, working. Like, I'll go into Amazon AWS and go through their machine learning tutorials. Don't think to yourself, I'm not technical enough, or I'm not going to get this, or I'm— I don't get into this, or it's too much. Try it. Get as far as you can, because it's like doing a basic website and a little bit of HTML. Just having done that, you feel smarter and you feel a little bit more confident about this. You know, I don't want to be an alarmist, but I'm trying to scare the hell out of you because it's important.

Also, if you want to build confidence like Mark Cuban, check out my 254 Confidence series. It's and the link is in the description below.

I've always been passionate.

Some people thought, you know, it's, it's more OCD than anything else.

Rule number 5: Have a unique advantage.

We just sold a company out of Atlanta that went on Shark Tank, Cycloramic. They had the iPhone that used the buzzer and you ran this app on it and it just turned around and did a panoramic version of the phone, of took panoramic pictures. Well, they changed the format of the iPhone, which is great. This is a great lesson for entrepreneurs, right? So this guy came in with this really cool app, worked with an iPhone 5, and it just turned around and take panoramic pictures and then stitch them together, and it was a cool picture.

Well, not—

so I give him $250,000, I think, for 20% of the company or 25% of the company. Not 4 months later, Apple changes the iPhone. And it's got this like rounded thing underneath, and we're like, oh, what are we gonna do? But the guy was smart. And one of the things I always look for for companies coming in is what's your unique advantage? What is the one thing you have that differentiates you from other companies? And for this guy, the product was interesting, but you know, as I said on the show, the ability to program video and use what became computer vision was a unique skill that was hard to find. And so we worked with him and actually brought it— worked with him to bring in another CEO, and they used that same technology to be able to scan cars. So now if you go to websites like Carvana to buy a car and you see how you can turn the car around just right there, that started with their software. And the guy's name is Bruno. So Bruno We just sold his company for $22.5 million a couple weeks ago. And so I walked away with, you know, 25% of that. So I was like, yeah, Shark Tank.

Rule number 6, seize opportunity.

Amazon's the world's greatest startup. Netflix is the world's greatest next one. Which makes it harder to innovate. If you were Mark Cuban. I think you can still kick their ass. Starting all over again, I still think you can kick their ass, right? You do?

Yes.

Because I think on the margin, you can't, even at that scale, even with all the AI that they both use, there's still on the margin places to make money where they're inefficient. Because it's still vertical, and it still takes time to get to the edges. And so I think there's a lot of opportunities for small companies to come in. And you're seeing a lot of that now. Like, you see growth hacks on Kickstarter. Where I have one of my companies, a Shark Tank company, that all they do, their whole entire business now, is just releasing products on Kickstarter, delivering them, and then going on to the next product. And it's just a pure growth hack. There's other companies that they measure what's selling the best on Amazon. And then they go out and buy those products, brand them, and sell just on Amazon. And by Amazon, it's just its own little ecosystem where kids are— I tried to give this kid some money, right? Literally, because he was so good at it. Didn't need it. He was already making, you know, $1 million a year working an hour a day just by tracking Amazon.

Really? Yeah. And it's just—

so you can be smart because they're so big.

Rule number 7, make that first step.

We all are entrepreneurs or wonder if we're entrepreneurs at heart. You know, we all have that idea inside of us. We've all been through it. Oh, I got this idea. It's a great idea. You know, and you get all excited. You get that feeling in your stomach, right? And then you go to Google and you Google, there's nobody else doing this.

Ah!

Then you call your friends.

You go, what do you think? What do you think? Oh, that is really cool.

I'd buy one. You know, and then most people stop.

You know, what's for dinner?

But some people, they found their way to turn those into companies and they found their way onto Shark Tank. And we got to see examples of people from any little town and any, you know, anywhere in the country with backgrounds that weren't from some big Ivy League school. Maybe you didn't go to college at all. Maybe it was their last dollar and they started it up and they were desperate to get an investment. But they started it. And we showed examples of people who were willing to take that first step and start that company and where it could go. And I think that really, and to this day, really excites people and gets them, encourages them and really shows them that there can be an upside. And on the flip side, you know, there can be failure too. And so you have to be realistic about what can happen.

Rule number 8, nail it before you scale it.

The other thing is when people get some momentum, they want to all of a sudden go big, right? Particularly, that's kind of a dot-com thing. Let's buy our customers, raise a ton of money. Well, one of my buddies, Howard Tolman, says it best. He goes, you got to nail it before you scale it. If your company doesn't work, making it big won't solve your problems. It'll just add to your problems.

Rule number 9: Value time.

We're going to get to—

in my opinion, we're going to get to a point where decisions are made individually on arbitrage of time. We'll value our time. You'll value your time. That's the whole Uber economy, right? Where people say, what's it worth? We do that now. We do. What's it worth for me versus I can hire somebody, right? And that somebody can be for 10 minutes. That somebody can be for 10 hours. It could be for 2 seconds. Like a couple of my companies, we have scripts now for Mechanical Turk on Amazon where it might cost us a penny to label things. Really? Oh, it's crazy, right? I invested in the company because the guy was a computer vision genius. All he does is hand puppets. So you do like this, you know, hand puppets like you do with your kids when you're little, right? Right. Only it digitizes it using AI 'cause he has to write computer vision AI scripts that say, okay, this is a knuckle, here's a second knuckle, here's the thumb, right? And I'm gonna recognize it spatially.

Right.

And all that stuff is advanced computer vision. But it all goes back to hiring people based off the value of their time. When I make decisions, build versus buy, robotics are now part of the decision. It's what's the most cost-effective way? What's going to give me the best return? What's going to be the path of least resistance for me effectively? And now it's not just, OK, who can I hire? It's what can I hire?

Rule number 10, do things your way.

I went to Dallas after college because a bunch of my buddies were down there, and I got a job working as a bartender at night and was looking for a job during the day and got a job working for a retail software company. And this was in the early days of PCs and was doing okay there. And then about 9 months in, I made— let me add, I was living 6 guys in a 3-bedroom apartment and I was sleeping on the floor. It was the rattiest, nastiest hole you've ever seen in your life. I mean, and I literally didn't have a closet, didn't have a drawer. All my shit was in a pile on the floor. I had my one towel that I stole from Motel 6 that had a hole in it that was mine. And so I was trying to grind it out and learn tech, which I really realized that I loved. And I made the— one day I called up my boss, a guy named Michael Humecki, H-U-M-E-C-K-I. And I said, Michael, I've got this deal I'm going to close. Now it's $1,500 commission to me, which meant I can move out of the And so I said, now one of my responsibilities was to open up the retail store, you know, make sure the door is open, the floors were clean and all that kind of stuff. I said, look, I've got this big deal. I want to close it. And he said, no, you need to be at the store. I'm like, I got someone to watch. He goes, no, you need to be at the store. So I made the executive decision that if I went and picked up a $15,000 check for this company, Your Business Software, he would see the light and all would be good. And I'd have my $1,500 commission. Fired my ass. Seriously, Michael Humecki. And so—

I'm assuming you've spoken to him since then.

One time, one time, literally after Broadcast.com went public, he sent me a letter asking if I would invest in his company. You should bring him on Shark Tank.

Anyway, so that was the only time I've talked to Michael Humecki.

And so now I've got a special bonus Mark Cuban rule on how to make smart decisions that I really think you're gonna enjoy. But before that, it's time for the 3-point landing questions. Let's go from just watching the video to taking action. Here we go. Question number 1, where do you need to value time more? Number 2, what's that first step that you need to take today? And number 3, what is the opportunity in front of you that you need to seize?

I had watched in the '80s, You know, these PC companies go bam, bam, Eagle Computing, names you won't even remember go bam, bam, bam, then I watched software company, WordPerfect, you know, Ashton Tate, you know, WordStar, all these companies, bam, and then networking companies, I mean, it didn't take a genius to say, wow, this might happen again. And so the first thing I did the minute we sold, I wasn't allowed to put on a collar for 6 months because of the laws. And so what I was allowed to do was find an index, an internet index that didn't have Yahoo as more than 5%. I took every penny that I had, literally every single penny that I had, and bought puts on that index that got me to the point where I could put on my collar. I lost 90% of that, of those puts, but I was able to put on my collar on the other side. And, you know, the rest, they call one of the top 10 trades in history.

If you want more Mark Cuban, check out the top 50 rules video I made on him. The link is right there next to me. I think you'll enjoy it. Continue to believe, and I'll see you there.

Nothing you can't accomplish in life with the right amount of work. The challenge is, you know, are you willing to do the work?