It turns out you can still pitch to billionaire Mark Cuban even if you don’t get invited to go on Shark Tank.
“For me, I’m always accessible via email. I mean, my email is available publicly. And so I get email pitches all the time,” Cuban said on his MasterClass course “Win Big In Business,” which was released on February 22.
“I’ve literally invested $100 million in email pitches that people have sent me. Some of them, I still have not met the people,” he added.
In his MasterClass video, Cuban said that he preferred to take pitches via email instead of phone because he’s able to give “more comprehensive responses.”
“If we do it by phone, I’m going to forget half the stuff that we talked about because I’ve got so much going on. If we do it via email, I can search for it always,” he said in the course.
Cuban told BI that he doesn’t keep track of the number of investments or the amount of money he has dispensed specifically over email.
He also said he would be open to doing calls if investors were writing him a check or if he was closing a deal.
“It depends on the circumstances. There isn’t one rule,” he said.
Cuban also said in his Masterclass that he’s trying to find a way to integrate meeting transcripts from his company, Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drugs, and all correspondence about their business projects into a large language model. He added that down the road, this might morph into the company’s “own version of ChatGPT.”
That said, while Cuban might love email and extol the virtues of it, he’s also just one of many top executives who’ve relied on it to conduct business.
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt wrote in his 2014 book, “How Google Works,” that “most of the best — and busiest — people we know act quickly on their emails.” Also in 2014, Apple CEO Tim Cook told ABC he was receiving about 700 to 800 customer emails in a day, and that he read most of them.
While some may question if Cuban could fully assess a founder’s credibility via an email, he told BI that this pitching method has been effective for him so far.
“It’s easy to search for them online. And it’s just as easy to judge credibility based on the responses I get and the questions I’m asked,” Cuban said, adding that he spends about three to four hours a day on email.
“It’s not fail-proof, but it has worked for me,” he said.
And Cuban has the track record to prove it.
The businessman revealed on Monday that he is paying over $275 million in taxes this year.
The sheer heft of his tax bill also means that Cuban could single-handedly fund the annual salaries of all the lawmakers in Congress for nearly 3 years.
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