Mark Cuban's Prescription for Big Pharma

Drug companies face a whole other kind of trial, thanks to a dose of this entrepreneurial legend.

- By Tom Foster

MARK CUBAN GRINS. “I'm the luckiest guy in the world,” he says. It's mid-March and he's on a stage in front of a thousand fans at SXSW with tech founder Falon Fatemi of the new audio-video entertainment platform Fireside talking about, well, just about everything: why everyone should get a crypto wallet, how the metaverse will change media, what TikTok means for pro sports. And, little surprise to anyone who's watched him on Shark Tank or run into him on Twitter, Cuban has well-developed thoughts on each.

Ever since he sold his startup Broadcast.com to Yahoo for $5.7 billion in 1999 to became an instant billionaire, Cuban has followed his curiosity into a wild array of fields, from health care to fintech to media, consumer products, and, of course, sports. Where others might have settled into a comfy life as an NBA owner/playboy, he became a kind of super-entrepreneur, not only investing in a diversified portfolio of startups, but getting deeply involved in some as well, even co-founding a few.

Cuban describes his process as ready, fire, aim.” He plays up the whole just-a-lucky-kid-from-Pittsburgh thing. But to anyone who works closely with Cuban, he's more like a determined kid from Pittsburgh who still identifies with his blue-collar roots. Associates marvel at how hard he works, how deeply he likes to research and understand complicated systems. “People don't realize how technical he is,” says Fatemi, whose new app for creators Cuban co-founded with her, after having invested in her last company, an A.I. startup called Node.