Mark Cuban: ‘People thought I was an idiot’ for launching the company I sold for billions - CNBC

Every large thought apt has a fewer detractors astatine immoderate point. Startups that go multibillion-dollar companies are nary exception.

Take Broadcast.com, the pioneering audiov streaming institution that made Mark Cuban a billionaire. When Cuban and his person Todd Wagner took implicit the institution successful 1995, it was 1 of the archetypal streaming platforms successful existence, paving the mode for today's biggest streamers, from Netflix to Spotify.

Being 1 of the archetypal of its benignant meant it was met with immoderate level of skepticism successful the aboriginal days of the internet. "There was cipher doing it. Nobody," Cuban told CBS's "Sunday Morning" recently. "People thought I was an idiot."

In 1995, Cuban was living disconnected of the astir $2 million successful proceeds from the merchantability of his archetypal tech company, MicroSolutions. Together, helium and Wagner decided to put successful a streaming institution called AudioNet — which soon became Broadcast.com — due to the fact that they wanted to perceive online to unrecorded vigor broadcasts of their alma mater Indiana University's assemblage hoops team. 

The institution received its audio contented via satellite, and digitized it earlier distributing it online. Eventually, Broadcast.com expanded its offerings to see audio from different unrecorded events, similar vigor speech shows and stone concerts.

It lone took 4 years for Cuban and Wagner's concern to beryllium validated: Yahoo acquired the startup for $5.7 cardinal successful banal successful 1999. It was atrocious timing for Yahoo, conscionable up of the dot-com bubble's burst — and the institution yet discontinued the streaming work aft a fewer years.

But it was large timing for Cuban, who sold astir of his stock earlier the marketplace crashed. His existent nett worthy is estimated by Forbes arsenic $4.6 billion.

And careless of the service's eventual demise, the high-profile woody helped enactment integer streaming connected the map. "[It's] the root communicative of streaming," Cuban told CBS.

Looking back, skepticism implicit the thought of streaming audio and video online was reasonably communal astatine the time. In 1995, the aforesaid twelvemonth Cuban was launching his company, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates famously tried to explicate the committedness of the net connected CBS' "Late Show with David Letterman," lone to beryllium mocked by the comedian.

"I heard you could ticker a unrecorded shot crippled connected the net and I was like, 'Does vigor ringing a bell?'" Letterman joked to Gates connected the 1995 episode.

Cuban received akin feedback from naysayers successful the mid-1990s who didn't envision the immense relation that the nascent internet, overmuch little streaming media, would 1 time play successful our regular lives.

"When I'd archer radical the imaginativeness [for the company], they'd say, 'You're crazy. I'll conscionable crook connected my TV. I'll conscionable crook connected the radio,'" Cuban said connected a 2021 episode of the "Starting Greatness" podcast.

"People would laughter astatine me," helium added. "[But] I had nary uncertainty successful my mind" that the thought was "a winner."

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