Mark Cuban turned a $5.7 billion Yahoo sale into a new business mission

Mark Cuban's business career has taken him from an internet broadcasting venture that sold for billions of dollars to a pharmaceutical company built around a very different proposition. According to a Forbes report, in 1999, Yahoo acquired Broadcast.com in a deal valued at $5.7 billion, turning Cuban's early bet on online media into one of the defining transactions of the dot-com era. More than two decades later, he entered the prescription medicine market with Cost Plus Drugs, an online business intended to make the cost of medicines easier to understand and, in many cases, lower. The two ventures operate in very different industries, but both reflect Cuban's willingness to challenge established ways of doing business.How Broadcast.com turned Mark Cuban’s internet venture into a $5.7 billion Yahoo dealBroadcast.com began in 1995, when Cuban and fellow Indiana University graduate Todd Wagner set up a business to deliver audio and video over the internet. The idea developed during a period when streaming media was still unfamiliar to most households and online connections were far less capable than they are today. Cuban and Wagner saw an opportunity to distribute content to people w...