Mark Cuban Sold Trash Bags Door-To-Door At 12 Years Old, 'In Our Household, If You Wanted Something, You Had To Earn It'

Billionaire Mark Cuban has been hustling and running businesses since he was a boy. Cuban shared how he got started out of necessity and how he’s always tried to take care of his employees.

What Happened: Cuban became a billionaire in 1999 with the sale of Broadcast.com, a company he co-founded, to Yahoo! for $5.7 billion.

Cuban got interested in business at the age of 12 out of what he calls necessity.

“In our household if you wanted something, you had to earn it,” Cuban said during an appearance on the Bio Eats World podcast.

Cuban recalls going to his Dad’s poker game and asking him for a new pair of basketball shoes. His father looked at the shoes Cuban was wearing and told him they looked just fine.

A friend of his father’s at the poker game said he had boxes of garbage bags that he could sell around the neighborhood.

Cuban took him up on it and went door to door selling the household necessity.

“Who’s gonna say no to a 12-year-old? I learned to sell.”

Cuban previously said that knowing how to sell is one of the four rules to making money. He recalled buying the trash bags for $3 and selling them for $6. Cuban would also pitch that he was available by phone whenever someone needed more trash bags, and he would come to deliver them in his wagon.

Cuban turned his garbage bag business into selling magazines door-to-door.

At the age of 16, Cuban turned to the business of stamps. The entrepreneur recalled going to stamp and coin shows and finding an arbitrage opportunity.

Cuban would buy an undervalued stamp for 50 cents from one table and then go to a table in a different area and show the dealer that it was valued higher and sell it for $25. Cuban said he learned more as a 16-year-old in the stamp market than many stamp dealers ever had.

The entrepreneur said it was important to be able to sell something and to recognize inefficiencies.

Related Link: 5 Things You Might Not Know About Mark Cuban

Rewarding Employees with Equity: Cuban also discussed rewarding employees as part of his vision of hustling and aligning those to see it.

“It’s not hard to get gifted people to come along,” Cuban said.

Cuban said he’s offered equity to employees at every company he’s started or taken over. The entrepreneur recalls making 300 out of 330 employees at Broadcast.com millionaires on paper when the company was sold to Yahoo!

“When everybody’s a participant, get personal goals to align with vision as an organization, it tends to work.”

Cuban added that a benefit of being in Texas, in the middle of the country, is getting a lot of smart kids that will also listen to their leaders. The entrepreneur called the talent pool in Texas a night and day difference from New York and California, where tech workers think they’re the smartest.

“Geography will have an impact on your culture.”

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