Mark Cuban put $10,000 into a radio website. Yahoo paid $5.7 billion.
In 1995 he and his friend Todd Wagner wanted to hear Indiana University basketball games live on the internet. Cuban was living off about $2 million from selling his first company, MicroSolutions, to CompuServe. Years earlier he had slept on the couch or the floor of a Dallas flat he shared with five friends.
He put $10,000 into AudioNet for 2% of the company. AudioNet took radio from a satellite and streamed it online. Few people understood it. Cuban recalled on the Starting Greatness podcast in 2021 that people told him: "You're crazy. I'll just turn on my TV. I'll just turn on the radio."
Renamed Broadcast.com, it first sold shares on the stock market in July 1998. The stock jumped 250% on its first day of trading, a first-day record at the time. In April 1999 Yahoo agreed to buy it for $5.7 billion in stock. Cuban sold most of his shares that year, before the market crashed. Yahoo shut its broadcast services in 2002.
Basketball got Cuban into streaming. Companies broadcasting their own all-hands meetings paid most of the bills.
One-minute true story. AI-generated illustration with narration by an AI voice.
What did your company first stream to its own people?
What the captions say
- Mark Cuban put $10,000 into a radio website. Yahoo paid $5.7 billion. But do you know what people told him first?
- It was one of the first streaming services online. Back then, Cuban lived off about $2 million from his first company.
- He had built that company from very little. At 24 he shared a Dallas flat with five friends, and slept on the couch or the floor.
- A software shop fired him for chasing a client. So he started his own, with no office and no investors.
- In 1995, he and his friend Todd Wagner wanted to hear their old university's basketball games live on the internet.
- So Cuban put $10,000 into AudioNet, a company that streamed radio from a satellite.
- But when he explained streaming, people laughed. In his words, they told him: "You're crazy. I'll just turn on my TV. I'll just turn on the radio."
- Listeners came anyway. The money came from companies streaming events and all-hands meetings.
- By then it was Broadcast.com. In July 1998 it went public. On day one, the stock jumped 250%.
- No IPO had ever jumped more on its first day. On paper, Cuban was worth $300 million.
- In April 1999, Yahoo agreed to buy Broadcast.com. The price was $5.7 billion, in Yahoo stock.
- Cuban sold most of those shares that year, before the crash, and netted more than $1 billion.
- Years later, on television, he said it: "People thought I was an idiot."
