Business Blog: Hoover’s Business Insight Zone

This Silicon Alley Insider post by Peter Kafka discusses this Fortune magazine piece on Mark Cuban. Key early quote from the Fortune piece to give you the flavor:

For [Cuban], it is not enough to be rich. He wants to be famous and influential, much as he might argue otherwise. He clearly feels the need to show the business world that he’s more than a rabid sports nerd from a Pittsburgh suburb who cashed out at the top of the dot-com craze (thanks to a company that streamed live games over the web to other rabid sports nerds).

Kafka concludes, in so many words, that Cuban ain’t all that. He may be right. But here’s what I wrote in the comments to Kafka’s post:

In general I agree with you about Cuban, Peter: he’s a very interesting person, but I take everything he says about business with a grain of salt.

That said, he’s been pretty successful. Hasn’t he? I don’t mean that as a rhetorical question. Yes, he benefited from good placement and timing with MicroSolutions and especially Broadcast.com — but putting yourself in a good place & time to make a fortune is part of what makes a good entrepreneur, yes? His successes with those two companies put him way into the top 1% of the top 1% of all U.S. entrepreneurs, surely.

Oh, and as for “beyond turning the Dallas Mavericks around”: many, many rich businessmen have bought sports teams as a vanity and then struggled to do more good than harm to them. Cuban’s track record with the Mavericks is exemplary — again, he has to be put into the top echelon of most successful sports franchise owners in history.

Now, he’s not as successful as many other entrepreneurs we could name, from Gates through Jobs and Bezos to Andreessen and on down, and he’s not a genuinely great business thinker. So maybe he doesn’t quite live up to his own hype or aura. But he’s still pretty damn successful. No?

To me, this is like the debates over the guys a little ways down a Hall of Fame ballot: not among the immortals, but most honest observers would admit that they’d trade their eye teeth to have those folks’ careers.

Any thoughts?