Every big idea likely has a few detractors at some point. Startups that become multibillion-dollar companies are no exception.
Take Broadcast.com, the pioneering audiov streaming company that made Mark Cuban a billionaire. When Cuban and his friend Todd Wagner, it was one of the first streaming platforms in existence, paving the way for today's biggest streamers, from Netflix to Spotify. Being one of the first of its kind meant it was met with some level of skepticism in the early days of the internet. "There was nobody doing it. Nobody," Cubanin proceeds from the sale of his first tech 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 online to live radio broadcasts of their alma mater Indiana University's college basketball team.
It only took four years for Cuban and Wagner's investment to be validated: Yahoo acquired the startup for $5.7 billion in stock in 1999. It was bad timing for Yahoo, just ahead of the dot-com bubble's burst — and the company ultimately discontinued the streaming service after a few years.