Forty years ago, Mark Cuban wasn’t sitting courtside at Dallas Mavericks basketball games or hitting the courts on ABC’s “Shark Tank” — he was sharing a three-bedroom apartment with five roommates.
Then, he got his first job in technology as a computer software salesman at a company called Your Business Software. But in an old blog post, which Cuban recently separated on Twitter, the billionaire revealed that he almost didn’t get the follow-up role. He had no experience and was “trying to pull out every interview trick I knew.”
The interviewers weren’t impressed, Cuban wrote, until he answered a question: “What do you do if a customer has a question about a software package and you don’t know the answer?”
As Kuban indicated, there was a long pause. “After who knows how long, I said ‘I’ll look it up in the manual and find the answer to them,'” Cuban wrote. “Ding ding ding… [the interviewer] I just loved the response.”
The question was designed to gauge a job candidate’s confidence level – to see if they would freeze up, refuse to admit they didn’t know something, or swallow their pride and demand an answer right in front of a client . Cuban didn’t know it was a trick question, so he answered it honestly, stumbling over the correct answer.
A foot in the door of the technology industry was all Cuban needed: Less than a decade later, in 1990, he created and sold the computer systems integration company MicroSolutions for $6 million. His next venture, the Internet radio company Broadcast.com, was acquired by Yahoo in 1999 for $5.7 billion in stock.
Cuban bought a majority stake in the Dallas Mavericks for $285 million for a majority stake the following year, he tells CNBC Make It.
Ironically, Cuban says the best entrepreneurs often lie to themselves, at least a little. “Behind the lie are the ‘entrepreneurs,'” he said at a Dallas Startup Week event in 2019. “People who talk about doing it, but don’t take that step. And then lie to yourself a little bit and say, ‘I can do it. do this’. You’re less scared, but you know you can do it. You take a small step.”
You simply cannot lie to the people around you – especially in job interviews. In 2019, a joint report by US career advice site TopInterview and job search platform Resume-Library found that honesty was one of the five most desirable personality traits in employees.
Cuban Shark Tank star Kevin O’Leary feels the same way. In May, O’Leary told CNBC Make It that his top tip for job applicants was to tell the truth.
“Great HR managers have an innate ability to feel the bull—-,” he said. “They know when you’re lying to them, because [detecting that is] what do they do 24/7.”
This story has been updated to reflect that Cuban bought a majority stake in the Dallas Mavericks for $285 million in 2000.
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