Mark Cuban: The moment I realized corporate America wasn’t for me

Mark Cuban believed he was building valuable relationships, but his boss didn’t see it the same way. “I start to cry … because he’s just yelling at me nonstop,” Cuban said. “My only mission was to help my company make more money.” His peers and bosses didn’t quite see things his way, he told CNBC Make It via email. This experience affirmed to Cuban that if he wanted to run a company, he would have to build his own. This was the first of two wake-up calls that showed him he didn’t fit into “the structure and limits” of corporate America, he said on the podcast. The second one occurred at a PC software retailer in Dallas called Your Business Software, where he was fired after nine months for leaving the store unattended while closing a $15,000 deal with a client without telling his boss, he recalled in a 2017 podcast interview. “I was a lousy employee because I was a know-it-all,” Cuban told Wired last year. “I was an entrepreneur at heart, and I always thought I had a better idea [for how to do things].”Some entrepreneurs are “misfits, difficult employees who start their own firms” because they don’t want to be managed or “work in a pre-structured environment,” suggested a 2007 analysis in American Psychologist. That disposition may also help them survive the turbulence of launching a new company, the researchers found. However, not every prospective entrepreneur is as successful as Cuban, who launched a software company called Microsolutions in 1983 and kept it afloat through some turbulent early years, ultimately selling it for $6 million in 1990. Cuban’s second business, Broadcast.com, was acquired by Yahoo for $5.7 billion in 1999. He is currently running another entrepreneurial venture, discount prescription drug service Cost Plus Drugs, and has a reported net worth of $6.2 billion.

Author: OpenAI