Shark Tank's Mark Cuban Answers Business Questions From Twitter

I'm Mark Cuban.

Let's answer some questions from the internet.

This is Mogul Support.

[upbeat music]

atYoung EntrepHub, What will be your best advice

to those who are thinking of leaving their full-time jobs to

become a full-time entrepreneur?

Save your money first.

Don't just leave unless you know what the hell you're doing.

We hear all these stories

about all these people who quit their jobs,

started a company and made all this money.

What you don't hear are the stories

of the people who quit their jobs,

started a company and failed miserably

and are now working at a job they hate.

Before you quit, be prepared.

Know what you're doing.

Save your money.

Have at least six months to live

off if you can, and then maybe you're ready to

start your business.

atAlanBramley, Question, do billionaires create jobs?:

The answer is no.

Entrepreneurs create jobs.

I'm an entrepreneur and I do my best to create jobs

but the reality is, in order to become a billionaire

the one thing you have to have is luck.

Any billionaire who tells you they could just do

it again, no.

You have to be lucky.

Maybe you have a rich parent.

Question I get asked a lot is

should billionaires pay more in taxes?

Fuck yeah, we should pay more in taxes.

I would not be in this position

without this country because nothing happens, that's great,

whether it's healthcare, teachers, roads, you name it,

without people paying their taxes.

It may be painful when you write that big check

but just think about how you got there.

One of the most patriotic things that you can do

when you're wealthy is pay your motherfucking taxes.

atJCBAYC, You have six months to make as much money

as possible.

All you have to start with is a phone and $500 in cash.

What are you doing?

JCBAYC, that is the best question I have ever been asked

in my entire adult life.

I am really, really, really good at sales.

I'm gonna find a sales job because I already know

that if I'm onto my last $500 and all I have is a phone,

I am going to get that job and I'm gonna learn more

about that industry than anybody on the planet.

And I'm gonna set a commission as high as I possibly can.

And three months in when I've demonstrated

that I am the best salesperson

in the history of that company, I'm gonna walk

into my boss's office and I'm gonna tell 'em or her,

You're either gonna pay me this amount of money to keep me

or I'm gonna start my own business selling this stuff.

That is exactly what I would do.

Everything always goes back

to sales no matter what.

atanjain_1, If you buy shares

of a sports team, is it a gamble or an investment?

It's a gamble because you're a minority shareholder.

You have no rights.

Atmike25748592x, Question. Is the customer always right?

No. The customer is rarely right.

That doesn't mean you don't have to keep them happy.

Do customers make choices?

Of course they make choices.

We're all customers.

We know how we choose what we buy

buy and what we don't buy.

But the reality is, you don't spend a minute

of your day wondering what the next product should be

at 7/11, do you?

The customer is not the one who comes up with the ideas.

It's the entrepreneur that comes up with the ideas.

Ed Jameis wants to know, What are some great

businesses that people don't realize?

I'm gonna tell you a couple easy off the top

of my head that if I wanted to start a company

I would seriously look at this.

Number one, Alexa.

Alexa has so many capabilities and so many people have them

but they have no idea how to use any of

the programming or scripting capabilities of Alexa.

You can go and start a business where you could go

to your neighbors, to car dealerships, to businesses

and show them for 50 bucks an hour or more,

how to use their Alexa in their homes to save energy,

to save time in their businesses.

And two, that leads to the same thing happening

with large language models like Chat GPT.

There's new features coming out in Chat GPT

and its competitors every single month.

So if you just get involved and stay ahead,

you're gonna be the person in demand selling your services

on how to prompt Chat GPT to help a business

or even to tutor kids

on how to best use it for school.

Atcjnimod_is_back, If you could change one thing about the

sports industry, college or pro, what would you change?

Dumb question.

I'd change the officiating.

atashcryptoreal, You think crypto is dead, yes or no?

No. Hell no.

But I do think crypto has some problems.

Number one,

most people when they think crypto, they think speculation.

That's not what crypto's really about.

Number two, crypto is really

about creating new applications that make things better

and easier.

What crypto is missing is

that one application that grandma really wants to use.

Think back to the iPhone.

It came out in 2007, but it wasn't until the best apps

like Instagram and Snapchat and Facebook went mobile,

that the app store and the iPhone really took off.

Crypto is still waiting for its Instagram moment.

It won't be all that much longer where we'll be

able to use an NFT as a ticket.

Once the ticket is resold, we don't make a penny.

The scalpers make all the money.

If that ticket was an NFT

and it will be in the future, every time it's resold

the original ticket holder can make some money,

the team can make some money.

You can't do that with physical tickets.

You can't do that with traditional digital transfer.

You can do that when you turn it

into crypto or an NFT.

When that happens, crypto go up.

Atblessin91077312, Why do most businesses fail?

Number one, sales.

No business has ever succeeded without sales.

Period. End of story.

Number two, preparation.

When you go to start a business,

have you done all the homework to know

about your industry, your competition, your products,

the profitability, your customer base, your demographics?

You need to know these things.

Three, effort.

It is not easy starting and running a business, it's hard.

If it was easy, everybody would do it.

And four, brains.

You gotta be smart.

You gotta learn this stuff.

You gotta put in the effort.

You have to be curious in order to be successful

at business.

You do these four things, blessing and you'll be okay.

Company doesn't do them.

They're in deep trouble.

atGhost93_X, Everybody losing money in NFTs.

Why are you still here? Lol.

I got a handy dandy graph.

This is the NFT market and this is the volume of sales.

Basically, it sucks.

You know how many other industries have sucked?

There was a time

after the internet stock market crashed where

Amazon was selling for $5 a share.

Microsoft was selling for hundredths

of what they sell right now.

Have you ever been in the trading card industry?

That Mickey Mantle card that, you know,

Steph Curry card goes up, goes down, go up, go down.

The same thing is happening to NFTs.

Now, there are some people that would tell you

that this is the best time

if you're an NFT collector to buy an NFT.

I'm not gonna tell you what you should

or shouldn't do other than to say with NFTs

the best time to buy is when you're a collector

and you love the NFT.

Don't buy to speculate.

I'm gonna say it to you for the people in the back.

Don't

speculate.

Yeah. You know what happens to speculators?

They get their ass handed to them.

I can stare

at my mutant punk all day long 'cause I collected it.

I'm not paying attention

to all the things that happen on a day-to-day basis.

And you shouldn't either because someday we're gonna turn

around and you know what you're gonna say to yourself?

You're gonna say to yourself,

I should have bought those damn NFTs when they were next

to nothing,

atTamaraShahan, What's something you wish your younger self

knew before starting a business?

I wish I would've known to respect the people

around me and to be nice to the people around me

that worked for me more.

Because it's stressful starting a business.

And I think too often I took that stress

out on the people around me.

And that was a mistake.

atErnestErnst4, Name image likeness. You get paid for that?

Dear God, wat is wrong with the NCAA?

Ernest, you just busted your ass for the first 17,

18 years of your life to be great at something.

You get recruited by a school

and somebody there wants to pay you

for your name, image, and likeness.

Now, if that same kid was a violinist

and they wanted to pay them to do an ad for violins

you'd be like, Yeah.

When an athlete makes it to the top at their level

and advertiser or sponsor wants to pay them, yeah,

let them earn the rewards of their efforts, Ernst.

NIL. Hell yeah.

Atbecomingamirror, Who is the best shark

on 'Shark Tank' and why is it Mark Cuban?

I'm the best shark on Shark Tank 'cause I've been there.

I've been broke, I've been fired,

started a business with nothing.

Built a business into something.

So when you're on that carpet pitching to us

not only am I thinking to myself, will I invest

but I'm also trying to come up

with a way that I can help that entrepreneur

because I know the challenge, the pain,

the anxiety of running a business.

And if I can make your life a little bit easier

with a good idea, that's what I'm gonna do.

Atturner_thinks, What is a business buzzword that

annoys you the most? I'll go first. Disruptor.

Cohort.

There's no reason to ever use the word cohort when

you can use the word group.

A cohort is a group of people.

Say group, you sound stupid when you use the word cohort

because you're trying to sound smart.

Always use the simpler word.

Atbashterminal,Can anyone explain in layman terms

what is series A, B, C, D funding?

I don't know why people apply these letters.

It's just a chronological order in which you raise money.

That's it.

Pre-seed, seed, series A, series B, series C, series D.

That's it.

It can come from anybody, come from mom,

it can come from dad, it can come

from your aunt, your uncle, a venture capitalist.

What is venture capital?

Venture capital is a vulture that sits

in an office telling you how smart they are

and how they're gonna give you money in exchange

for too much of your company to give you too

little support to end up trying to push you to

do things that you don't wanna do just

so they can get their money back.

But other than that, I have no problem with them.

Atcwaring, What is the most common mistake you

see entrepreneurs make?

They focus completely on raising money.

The less money you raise, the better

because that's how you own more of your company.

'Cause when you raise money,

you have to give away part of your company.

So the biggest, most important rule is understanding

that raising money is not an accomplishment.

It's an obligation.

Atmahaveer_jyn, What are the three daily habits or

practices that have significantly contributed

to your success?

Read,

read,

read,

read,

read.

Gotta learn.

Two, be curious.

Shit changes. You gotta always be curious.

You gotta know what's up.

You gotta stay on top of it.

Three, be agile because the shit's changing

'cause you're learning all the new stuff that

you're curious about.

You always gotta be agile and be able to adapt.

And four, ABS, always be selling.

You gotta always be selling because that's the

way businesses work.

You do those things, you're gonna crush it.

And the fourth, that was a bonus.

I said three things, I can't count.

Atjoebasshd, What is the difference between cost per

acquisition CPA and customer acquisition costs CAC?

Well, let's just start with cost per acquisition.

This is the amount it costs you to acquire a customer.

Then there is customer acquisition cost.

That is your cost to acquire a customer.

So the only thing missing

between these two is the equal sign between them to tell you

that they are pretty much the exact same thing.

Typically what happens is people will go

and advertise on social media platform

and they'll spend a thousand dollars

and after the week or whenever it is, till it runs out,

they'll look to see how many customers that they have.

Let's just say they have a hundred customers.

Then you just do the math.

A thousand divided by a hundred gives you

for all the math whizzes out there, $10.

Now what is that $10?

That's your customer acquisition cost

or cost for acquisition.

Atkeepontrucking78, As a business owner, when is it

time to call it quits?

Walk away, give up, sell, move on, cut your losses.

You get the idea.

That decision typically is gonna be made for you.

You can't pay your bills, you can't pay your employees,

you can't pay your bank loan.

And somebody's coming in and telling you,

Look, Mark the game's over.

It's the worst feeling ever.

Just because the shit hits the fan

and things are going wrong, that's never the time.

You only close up shop when you have no choice.

Or if someone offers you so much money

it's just like, hell yes.

Then you look at selling it.

Are you ready to take another step in your life?

Is the most important thing

to you running that business, regardless

of how much it's worth?

Or is there so much money involved here

that you can change your life?

Like when I sold my first business,

I retired and bought a lifetime pass in American Airlines.

The most valuable asset to me wasn't the money.

It was the time the money could buy.

You have to make your own decision on what's most important

to you.

atGII16728893, Did you ever want to give up?

What did you do to get out of the funk?

I remember when I started my first business,

I had no sales and I remember being terrified.

I mean, the anxiety was through the roof

but I just, you know, reminded myself why I started

and reminded myself that I made a shitty ass employee.

I was never gonna be good at working for somebody else.

I was a lousy employee because I was a know-it-all.

Right? I was an entrepreneur at heart

and I always thought I had a better idea.

I worked for a bank, I called up an executive VP, said,

We want to have a happy hour where you talk

about what it's like to work at the bank.

I thought that was a really cool idea

and I was taking initiative.

My boss brought me into his office.

Who the hell do you think you are?

Who gave you permission to do this?

You know, you just started here.

What the fuck?

I had a tear coming from.

I mean, I'd never felt anything like that before.

And I just knew then

that I was not destined to be an employee.

Atobi_raul_kenobi, Why the fuck is medicine so expensive

in America? This is bull.

Yes, it is, obi_raul_kenobi.

And what I've learned in disrupting industries,

when an industry's been doing it the same way for decades,

that's one green flag for me to get in.

When that same industry, does everything possible to

complicate the business so no one else can get in?

That's a second green flag for me to get involved.

Third, when it's so complicated

but when you look at it

it's like this is a simple business.

You know what the prescription drug business really is?

Somebody makes the drugs, somebody buys the drugs,

someone prescribes the drugs, someone sells the drugs.

That is it.

That's the whole prescription drug industry.

And so when I saw that, I'm like, this shit's gonna be easy.

Not cheap, but easy to do.

And so we started costplusdrugs.com in January of 2022.

When there's an industry that's doing it the same way

forever, making things more complicated and everybody

hates them, that is the best place to start a business.

So you too can dunk on whoever you choose to dunk on.

So those were all the questions for today.

Thanks. There were some amazing questions.

I really enjoyed them.

If I can leave you with any words, the only reason to

consider being an entrepreneur, starting your own company,

investing is to make your life better.

Just enjoy your time.

Have fun, do your best.

Good things will happen.

Thanks for watching Mogul Support.

[upbeat prelude]