Mark Cuban

Shortly after college, in 1982, Cuban moved to Dallas, Texas and found work with a new IBM PC software dealer. He was fired for choosing to make a sales call to close a $10,000 software deal instead of opening the store on time.

Cuban founded a new company, MicroSolutions, and was able to convince some of his previous customers to come along. The Microsolutions became a system integrator and reseller for companies like Novell, 3Com, IBM, Banyan, Apple Computer and Sun Microsystems and an early adopter of technologies such as Carbon Copy, Lotus Notes, and CompuServe. One of the company's biggest clients was Perot Systems. In July of 1990, Cuban sold MicroSolutions to CompuServe, Inc, then a subsidiary of H&R Block, for $6 million.

He is now a well-known Internet billionaire and the owner of the NBA team, Dallas Mavericks.