AP Photo/David Zalubowski
- Mark Cuban said his best investment was living like a broke student for years after college.
- He said cutting expenses after graduation gave him the cash and freedom to launch his first venture.
- In blog posts from 2004 to 2011, Cuban urged young people to live lean to seize future chances.
Mark Cuban says his best investment wasn’t in a hot startup or a booming stock — it was in himself.
The billionaire investor and former “Shark Tank” star shared on BlueSky on Saturday that the smartest financial move he ever made was living cheaply long after graduation.
“Living like a student long after college so that I could start my business,” Cuban wrote in response to a fan asking about his best investment of all time.
Cuban often said in a series of posts on his personal blog, Maverick — named after his NBA team, the Dallas Mavericks — throughout the 2000s and 2010s, that keeping expenses low is one of the most powerful ways young entrepreneurs can prepare for success.
In a 2011 entry, he recalled sharing a rundown Dallas apartment with five roommates, sleeping on a couch without a closet of his own, and driving a Fiat that leaked oil — sacrifices that, he said, helped him free up cash for his first ventures and taught him to see every odd job as “getting paid to learn.”
In his 2004 “Success and Motivation” series, Cuban described bouncing between dead-end jobs, sometimes embarrassed to list them on his résumé, but convinced that every stint added skills that would matter later.
Later in another blog post, Cuban described setting $20 weekend budgets, living off happy-hour food, and sipping $12 bottles of cheap sparkling wine — all while devouring software manuals at night to get ahead in the industry.
When he finally saved $1,000, he wrote, his only splurge was a new set of towels.
In a 2009 post aimed at students, Cuban returned to the same theme, urging them to live cheaply while building a foundation in accounting, finance, and statistics so they’d be ready to seize the right opportunity when it came.
By delaying gratification and sticking to a student-like budget, Cuban said he was able to take risks that ultimately paid off — from building and selling his first company, MicroSolutions, for $6 million to cofounding Broadcast.com and selling it to Yahoo for $5.7 billion in 1999, eventually buying and selling the Dallas Mavericks, and becoming a household name on “Shark Tank.”
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