Mark Cuban

Mark Cuban is a billionaire businessman. He is known for holding the record for largest e-commerce transaction, which made him a billionaire. Like most, he started small. He moved to Pittsburg and found work as a bartender. Later, he was fired and Cuban decided to start his own business. This wasn't a large scale operation, and began simply as a software reselling business. He ran it for a few years, until it was bought for approximately $6 million, $2 million of which Cuban kept after taxes. This served as seed money for his next businesses. He began a small online video hosting business with a former Indiana University alumnus. It started very small, but soon grew in the midst of the dot com bubble. After a while, it was generating $14 million of revenue each quarter, and employed 330 people. It was known as broadcast.com. This was during the dot com bubble, and these companies were often highly overvalued. Yahoo.com offered and eventually did buy broadcast.com for $5.7 billion. This instantly made Mark Cuban a billionaire. He knew, however, that the dot com bubble was just that, a bubble. He diversified his assets in order to keep himself safe in the event of a market crash (which did happen later). Now, he is the proud owner of the Dallas Mavericks and several other businesses and entities. This is a prime example of a young, aspiring entrepreneur that worked hard and paid his bills and had it pay off. Some would say he got lucky because his company was bought during the dot com bubble, making him tons of money, but in reality, he saw an opportunity and took advantage of it.