Welcome to our collection of quotes by Mark Cuban. We hope you enjoy pondering them and please share widely.
Wikipedia Summary for Mark Cuban
Mark Cuban (born July 31, 1958) is an American billionaire entrepreneur, television personality, and media proprietor whose net worth is an estimated $4.3 billion, according to Forbes, and ranked #177 on the 2020 Forbes 400 list. He is the owner of the Dallas Mavericks professional basketball team of the National Basketball Association (NBA), co-owner of 2929 Entertainment, and chairman of AXS TV. He is also one of the main "shark" investors on the ABC reality television series Shark Tank.
Work like there is someone working 24 hours a day to take it away from you.
Sweat equity is the most valuable equity there is. Know your business and industry better than anyone else in the world. Love what you do or don't do it.
Someone is out there looking to put you out of business. Someone is out there who thinks they have a better idea than you have. A better solution than you have. A better or more efficient product than you have.
'Shark Tank' is fun, but it's all business. We use our own money, and the competition between the sharks is fierce. More importantly, it's an opportunity to invest in businesses that are being watched and considered by millions of people every time it's shown.
Anyone who says he is an expert in the market is lying to you. There is no such thing.
I think what has allowed me to be successful is that I can absorb more information than most and drill down to the key business elements of that information and make faster decisions. And of course, I truly try to enjoy every minute of my life. I can never understand why anyone wouldn't.
When you look at 'policy wonk' in the dictionary, the one picture you won't see is Donald Trump.
I try not to be an ideologue about anything. If I'm wrong, I'm wrong, and I'm willing to evolve.
The people I don't like to work with are people like me. I need people who can complement my skill set, people who can do the nitty gritty with me.
All TV is now digital. It's a platform ripe for innovation; we just haven't seen any beyond picture quality changes. That's a secular problem.
TV is no longer the best alternative to boredom. To kids not old enough for Snapchat, music is the best alternative to boredom. For Snapchat users, it's the best alternative to boredom.
I would rather have the costs of consumer goods and restaurants -- products we as consumers can choose to buy or not buy -- go up and the need for public services go down.
Technological change always accelerates. It never stagnates over time. Which means we are going to face the fact that, if nothing in the States changes, we will find ourselves dependent on other countries for almost everything that can and will be manufactured in a quickly approaching future.
The first cities to create friction-free enterprise zones will get a lot of entrepreneurial traction.
If there was a template for success in sports, everyone would follow it. You do the best you can and trust the people you trust.
I have always been selling. I always had something going on. That was just my nature.
There is so much partisan and tribal politics, from not just those seeking office but potential voters as well, that we never get real attempts at solutions to problems.
Entrepreneurs need to be reminded that it's not the job of their customers to know what they don't. In other words, your customers have a tough enough time doing their jobs. They don't spend time trying to reinvent their industries or how their jobs are performed.
Whatever you can say in a meeting, you can put in an email. If I have questions, I'll tell you via email.
I've learned the number one job of a pro manager is not to win championships but to keep their job.
When you post something, when you text something, you lose ownership of it when you hit enter or send. Who you send it to, where you post it, they take ownership of that information whether you like it or not. Unfortunately, you don't lose responsibility for that text or post.
If I ran as a Dem, I know I could beat Hillary Clinton. And if it was me vs. Trump, I would crush him. No doubt about it.
I liked Trump's honesty because it was different and had a chance to change the business of politics. What I didn't realize he was missing at the time was a complete and utter lack of preparation, knowledge, and common sense.
You need to turn over every rock and open every door to learn your industry. This process never ends.
It comes down to finding something you love to do, then just trying to be great at it.
Open offices keep everyone in tune with what is going on and keep the energy up. If an employee is about privacy, show him or her how to use the lock on the bathroom.
I love being challenged and defending my positions and, when I'm wrong, learning from the exchange. It makes me smarter and better as a businessperson.
I am telling you, the world's first trillionaires are going to come from somebody who masters A.I. and all its derivatives and applies it in ways we never thought of.
I'm the type that thinks if you don't learn from history, you're doomed to repeat it.
If you want to deal with me, email is the way you do it. Working via email means that everything I do is searchable. I can go back and check out discussion threads from more than 15 years ago.
I love helping entrepreneurs. It's something I really have fun doing. It's like planting a little seed and watching it grow. Any time I can help somebody, that's a good thing. It's fun. If I get to make some money at it, it's even better.
I believe that starting any business should be as easy as a 10-year-old starting a lemonade stand.
To me business is a sport. I love knowing that 24x7x365xforever I'm competing with people I don't know. To build my businesses. To come up with new ideas. To come up with better ideas. That motivates me.
I love helping entrepreneurs. It's something I really have fun doing. It's like planting a little seed and watching it grow.
Leaders don't change their positions mid-debate. They welcome scorn from the masses because it creates the opportunity for dialogue.
The reason I do Shark Tank isn't to try take make more money of the deals, even though every deal I want to make money off of and even more so I want the entrepreneurs to be very successful and make money, but Shark Tank sends a message to everybody that the American Dream is alive and well.
In the past, people used to tell me to shut up a bit. But what I believe is to put out your opinion and let everyone else react. If I'm wrong, I'm wrong.
There are a lot of things I suck at. I'm not organized. I have to have partners and people around me who dot my i's and cross my t's. I'm sloppy. I'm a ready-fire-aim guy. I need to have people around me who aren't.
When you turn your team upside down and try to figure out what the culture of the team is, you take the greatest risk a team can take.
Automation is going to cause unemployment, and we need to prepare for it.
I think people are tired of politics as usual. We're tired of everything being scripted; we're tired of every comment being politically correct.
I knew how to sell. I felt confident I could run a business. I was willing to outwork anyone. I wasn't afraid to live like a student on next to nothing. So that meant I had absolutely nothing to lose and everything to gain.
Leaders don't look backwards to condemn what has already been done; they look forward to create a better future.
When I started writing this blog more than years ago, it was in response to traditional media's habit of twisting interviews to fit the headlines they wanted to create.
Communicate with your fans or customers. They know we live in an ever changing world. If you tell them what you are thinking and why you are doing what you do, as I did with my blog regarding Nash leaving, they will respect and support you more.
Up until Trump announced his candidacy, the conventional wisdom was that you had to be a professional politician in order to run. You had to have a background that was politically scrubbed. In other words, smart people who didn't live perfect lives could never run.
I used to drive around looking at the big houses, wondering how they got there. I used to love biographies about successful business people, wondering how they got there. You start to realize that if they can do it, I can do it.
If you can't admit a failure, you're not an entrepreneur. You are not a good business person. There's nothing brilliant about what you are doing.
I'm a competitive person. Business is a much more competitive sport than any real sport. It's 24x7x365. I'm a business adrenaline junky.
With health care, despite the fact that we as a nation have already chosen to provide health care in one form or another to everyone, we have, until Obamacare, chosen to pick the least cost-effective means, a mix of private and public offerings, of providing that care. That makes no sense.
Traditional TV will have to innovate their TV delivery software in new ways beyond just offering their content in an app in order to change the viewing erosion of TV.
One thing I learned in the NBA is that the No. 1 job of a general manager is to keep his job. They are only 30 positions where you make millions and hang around with basketball players all day.
Staying true to who I am was tougher when I first got wealthy. Having great friends kept me grounded.
The key is having great players. But there are a lot of teams that have All-Stars and haven't been able to put it together.
Being able to take a traditional cable-television subscriber and give them new widget type applications to me is huge.
Do it because you love it. Then it's not a job. I'm a geek. I love
technology. I would be online working with technology regardless of what my day job is.
It would have been easy to judge effort by how many hours a day passed while I was at work. That's the worst way to measure effort. Effort is measured by setting goals and getting results.
What I do know, at least what I think I have learned from my experiences in business, is that when there is a rush for everyone to do the same thing, it becomes more difficult to do. Not easier. Harder.
Information is power. Particularly when the competition ignores the opportunity to do the same.
Sometimes you buy the horse, sometimes you invest in the jockey. It really comes down to the actual business and the upside.
There is very little knowledge that can't be obtained through effort. With knowledge you can determine the state of any business or opportunity and find a course to gain an advantage.
If I didn't like you, I could take any or all of what I found and invent a context that lost you your job, your relationships, your degree. People are so vulnerable online and they don't realize it. That is scary to me.
If Ayn Rand were an up-and-coming author today, she wouldn't write about steel or railroads, it would be Net Neutrality.
Everyone is passionate about something. Usually more than one thing. We are born with it. There are always going to be things we love to do. That we dream about doing. That we really, really want to do with our lives. Those passions aren't worth a nickel.
I do everything via email. Which in turn works as my tickler file and prioritization queue. I start at the top every morning and keep on going until I'm finished. I don't do calls. I don't do meetings.
Sports, music, movies -- basically, fans of any form of entertainment don't do a resume analysis before picking their favorite.
The only thing any entrepreneur, salesperson or anyone in any position can control is their effort.
I just started a business called HDNet. There never is one area that has a door open to everyone. Try to find an area with something you love to do and do it. It's a lot easier to work hard and prepare when you love what you are doing.
The NBA is never just a business. It's always business. It's always personal. All good businesses are personal. The best businesses are very personal.
The number-one job of the hedge-fund manager is not to make sure that you can retire with a smile on your face -- it's for him to retire with a smile on his face.
All that matters in business is that you get it right once. Then everyone can tell you how lucky you are.