Mark Cuban: belief

Transcript context

…Can you tell the story of that? And maybe it’s just interesting because it is illustrative how to know when a thing is going to be big and not, what are the fundamentals of it, and how to take the risk and all this kind of stuff. The backstory of that is Bill Gurley came to me and said, “Mark, there’s this guy, Travis, that has this company, Red Swoosh, which is a peer-to-peer networking company that I think you can help. ” I invested and would spend a lot of time with Travis. It’s funny because back then, that was 2006, I was an investor at Box.net with Aaron Levy and… Oh, there was one other company, but there were three of them where there’d be emails where I’d introduce them and we’d all talk in these emails and they’d all gone to have astronomical success. Red Swoosh had its issues. I always look at peer-to-peer as stealing bandwidth from the internet providers when bandwidth was a scarce commodity. What Travis did with that though, was great. He convinced gaming companies who wanted to do downloads of the clients for those games to use his peer-to-peer on Red Swoosh. He busted his ass, and I think he sold it for $18 million, so he did well. So it was natural for him to come to me, and I still have the emails and ask me about Uber Cab. I thought okay, this is a great idea. I really, really like it. He showed me his budgets, and I think they were raising money at $10 million or $15 million or whatever. I’m like, “Your biggest challenge is going to be you’re going to have to fight all the incumbent taxi commissions. They’re going to want to put you out of business. That’s going to be a challenge and I think you don’t have enough money designated for marketing to get all that done.” I said, “I’d invest, but not quite at that valuation.” Never came back to me. Yeah, there’s some lessons there connected to what you’re doing now we’ll talk about [inaudible 00:50:32], it’s looking at an industry that seems like there’s a lot of complexity involved, but it’s hungry for revolution and the cabs are that.…

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