Mark Cuban Success Story: From Sleeping On The Floor to Over 2 Billion Dollars

“When I got to Dallas, I was struggling - sleeping on the floor with six guys in a three-bedroom apartment. I used to drive around, look at the big houses, and imagine what it would be like to live there.”

-Mark Cuban 

Mark Cuban rose from being the guy who got fired by bosses to become the billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks. This is in addition to having a personal fortune of $2.4 billion. He is a self-made billionaire, and as is with all success stories of the self-made filthy rich, his journey to belonging to the exclusive class of billionaires was no easy feat. Here is his success story.

Mark Cuban’s success story began in earnest after he decided to move to Dallas in his 1977 Fiat X19. This was after having been fired several times. He and his friends had to share a 3 bed-roomed apartment, and since they were six, some of them had to sleep on the floor. As he puts it:

“We had only three bedrooms and three beds. I slept on the floor. I had no closet and no dresser. I just stacked my clothes in a corner. The place was a dump, and we just destroyed it even more.”

Starting out, he worked as a bartender for some time. Thereafter, he got lucky so far as his employment search efforts were concerned and got himself a job as a computer salesman. It was however not long before he got fired from the job – again!

That was the turning point in his life. He then made up his mind not to deal with bosses again. His first major venture after setting for Dallas was a business under the name MicroSolutions. In his new company, Mark started out acting as a salesperson, a trainer and also a programmer. As for the programming, he had to learn by himself on the job.

A few years down the line, his determination, effort and willingness to innovate and quickly adapt to change turned the business into a company generating in excess of $30 million in revenues. He was finally financially successful.

But the Mark Cuban success story does not end there. He later sold his company to CompuServe and the capital he got from it enabled him to start a venture that made him a billionaire. That was the founding of Broadcast.com, a company that he sold to Yahoo! for over $2 billion.

He still actively invests. He no longer looks at the big houses to admire them. In fact, he once even bought a mansion worth $15 million without even having looked at it! He also doesn’t sleep on the floor and as he says, he loves his life and loves living. Mark Cuban’s success story is a true “rags” to riches story.