Īfter the sale of, Cuban hedged against the risk of a decline in the value of the Yahoo shares he received in the deal. That year, during the dot com boom, was acquired by Yahoo! for $5.7 billion in Yahoo! stock. In 1999, helped launch the first live-streamed Victoria's Secret Fashion Show.
By 1999, had grown to 330 employees and $13.5 million in revenue for the second quarter. With a single server and an ISDN line, Audionet became in 1998. In 1995, fellow Indiana University alumnus Todd Wagner and Cuban joined Audionet (founded in 1989 by Chris Jaeb who retained 10% of the company), combining their mutual interest in Indiana Hoosier college basketball and webcasting. He made approximately $2 million after taxes on the deal. The company grew to more than $30 million in revenue, and in 1990, Cuban sold MicroSolutions to CompuServe-then a subsidiary of H&R Block-for $6 million. One of the company's largest clients was Perot Systems. The company was an early proponent of technologies such as Carbon Copy, Lotus Notes, and CompuServe.
MicroSolutions was initially a system integrator and software reseller. Ĭuban started his own company, MicroSolutions, with help from his previous customers from Your Business Software. He was fired less than a year later, after meeting with a client to procure new business instead of opening the store.
On July 7, 1982, Cuban moved to Dallas, Texas, where he first found work as a bartender for a Greenville Avenue bar called Elan and then as a salesperson for Your Business Software, one of the earliest PC software retailers in Dallas. After graduating, he went back to his hometown in Pennsylvania and took a job with Mellon Bank and immersed himself in the study of machines and networking. During college, he had various business ventures, including a bar, disco lessons, and a chain letter. He chose Indiana's Kelley School of Business without even visiting the campus because "It had the least expensive tuition of all the business schools on the top 10 list".
After one year at the University of Pittsburgh, he transferred to Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, and graduated from the Kelley School of Business in 1981 with a Bachelor of Science degree in Management. He is a fan of Pittsburgh's “beloved” NFL team, the Pittsburgh Steelers. Instead of attending high school for his senior year, he enrolled as a full-time student at the University of Pittsburgh, where he joined the Pi Lambda Phi International fraternity.
At age 16, Cuban took advantage of a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette strike by running newspapers from Cleveland to Pittsburgh. Some years later, he earned money by selling stamps and coins. Cuban's first step into business occurred at age 12, when he sold garbage bags to pay for a pair of expensive basketball shoes. His maternal grandparents, who were also Jewish, came from Romania. His paternal grandfather changed the family name from "Chabenisky" to "Cuban" after his family emigrated from Russia through Ellis Island.
Cuban has described his mother, Shirley, as someone with "a different job or different career goal every other week." He grew up in the Pittsburgh suburb of Mount Lebanon, in a Jewish working-class family. His father, Norton Cuban, was an automobile upholsterer. Cuban was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.