February 11th, 2009
Mark Cuban as a transparent VC
During a bout with depression after the 2004 elections I wrote part of a novel in which Mark Cuban emerged as a hero.
This does not mean I know him. I have never met him. Never did business with him. And the Cuban of my fiction bears scant resemblance to the real man.
With that minor bit of disclosure out of the way, let’s look at the real Cuban’s latest, the Mark Cuban Stimulus Plan.
He calls it open source funding, but that’s a bit like calling American Idol open source entertainment. (Note: Cuban once tried and failed at the reality TV game himself.)
The deal is you show him your deal, posting it online, and if he likes it he funds it. His blog post offers a set of rules aimed at weeding out the William Hungs of the business world. But hope springs eternal, and it’s always possible you could post with Cuban and get a nibble elsewhere.
One of the great fears of every would-be entrepreneur is that their “great idea” may be stolen, either by another wannabe or by some big corporation. This is generally a misapprehension. The key to success in business is not the idea, but its execution, the ability of an entrepreneur to turn that idea into a working business model.
That’s where Cuban’s plan, if it truly is open source venture funding, will fall short. At least for Cuban. What a good entrepreneur needs is not an idea. Ideas are a dime a dozen. It’s execution skills.
If Cuban can scare someone who has real entrepreneurial skills out of the woodwork with his proposal, I will be pleasantly surprised. It will also say volumes about where we are in the economic cycle, because entrepreneurs who can execute their ideas are my real heroes. And if there’s no work for heroes, what is there for the rest of us?
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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| 02/11/09
