Every great idea is likely to have a few detractors at some point. Startups that grow into multi-billion dollar companies are no exception.
Take Broadcast.com, the pioneering audio streaming company that made Mark Cuban a billionaire. When Cuban and his friend Todd Wagner took over the company in 1995, it was one of the first streaming platforms to exist and paved the way for today’s biggest streamers, from Netflix to Spotify.
One of the first of its kind, it was met with some skepticism in the early days of the internet. “There was no one doing it. No one,” Cuban recently told CBS’s Sunday Morning. “People thought I was an idiot.”
In 1995, Cuban lived off the approximately $2 million in proceeds from the sale of his first technology company, MicroSolutions. Together, he and Wagner decided to invest in a streaming company called AudioNet — which soon became Broadcast.com — because they wanted to listen to live online radio broadcasts from their alma mater Indiana University’s college basketball team.
The company received its audio content via satellite and digitized it before distributing it online. Eventually, Broadcast.com expanded its offerings to include audio from other live events such as radio talk shows and rock concerts.
It took just four years for Cuban and Wagner’s investment to be confirmed: Yahoo acquired the startup in 1999 for $5.7 billion in stock. It was bad timing for Yahoo, just before the dot-com bubble burst — and the company eventually shut down streaming as a service after a few years.
But it was great timing for Cuban, which sold most of its shares before the market crashed. His current net worth is estimated at $4.6 billion by Forbes.
And regardless of the service’s eventual demise, the high-profile deal helped put digital streaming on the map. “[It’s] the origin story of streaming,” Cuban told CBS.
Looking back, there was widespread skepticism about the idea of streaming audio and video online back then. In 1995, the same year Cuban founded his company, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates famously attempted to explain the promise of the internet on CBS’s “Late Show with David Letterman,” only to be ridiculed by the comedian.
“I heard there was a live baseball game on the internet and I was like, ‘Are you on the radio?'” Letterman joked to Gates on the 1995 episode.
Cuban received similar feedback in the mid-1990s from naysayers who could not imagine the huge role the burgeoning internet, let alone streaming media, would one day play in our daily lives.
“When I told people the vision [for the company], they said, “You’re crazy. I just turn on my TV. I just turn on the radio,'” Cuban said on a 2021 episode of the podcast Starting Greatness.
“People would laugh at me,” he added. “[But] I had no doubt that the idea was “a winner”.
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