Mark Cuban

Mark Cuban is an American entrepreneur, investor, and self-made billionaire, born in Pittsburgh in 1958 and a graduate of Indiana University's Kelley School of Business. He got his start in Dallas with MicroSolutions, a technology-services company he built and sold to CompuServe in 1990, before co-founding the internet-streaming pioneer AudioNet — later renamed Broadcast.com — with Todd Wagner in the mid-1990s. When Yahoo acquired Broadcast.com in 1999 for roughly $5.7 billion in stock, Cuban became a billionaire and, in one of the most talked-about moves of the dot-com era, hedged the stock to protect his fortune before the market crashed.

In January 2000 Cuban purchased the NBA's Dallas Mavericks, and over the next two decades he became one of the most visible team owners in professional sports, with the franchise winning the NBA championship in 2011. In December 2023 he sold the majority, controlling stake in the Mavericks to Miriam Adelson and Patrick Dumont, retaining only a minority interest; he is now the team's former majority owner and, by 2024–2025, no longer controlled its basketball operations. For fifteen seasons he was also one of the "Sharks" on ABC's Shark Tank, investing in hundreds of entrepreneurs before stepping away from the panel in 2025.

Cuban's current chapter is arguably his most ambitious. In 2022 he co-founded the Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company, a transparent, cost-plus online pharmacy built on a simple promise — that everyone deserves safe and affordable medications — that has grown from about a hundred generics to thousands of therapies, added its own manufacturing, and begun to challenge the economics of the traditional drug-pricing system. He is also a prolific and often provocative commentator on artificial intelligence, business, and public policy, and the author of the best-selling How to Win at the Sport of Business.

What makes Cuban compelling on stage is the same thing that made him successful: he is direct, competitive, and allergic to spin. He speaks from lived experience across technology, sports, entertainment, and healthcare, and he is refreshingly willing to talk about what didn't work as well as what did — which is exactly what makes his lessons usable for the founders, leaders, and investors in the room.