#190 Co-Founder Cost Plus Drugs, Mark Cuban: Mavs to Meds

Guest: Mark Cuban, co-founder of Cost Plus Drugs and costar, Shark Tank

“I just love to compete,” says Mark Cuban. “And the day I stop is the day I’m dead.” Previously the co-founder of MicroSolutions and Broadcast.com, Cuban is probably best known to the public today for competing with the likes of Daymond John and Barbara Corcoran on the reality TV show Shark Tank. But his real focus — and his real enemy — these days is the pharmaceutical industry. His latest company, Cost Plus Drugs, aims to be far more transparent than established PBMs, or Pharmacy Benefit Managers, and Mark clearly relishes eating their margin. “Everybody talks about disrupting healthcare,” he says. “This is the easiest motherf**king industry I've ever tried to disrupt because it is so opaque, and everybody is so captured by the scale of these big companies.”

In this episode, Mark and Joubin discuss Luka Dončić, Synthesia, the Sony hack, the American Dream, TikTok propaganda, MicroSolutions, throwing away watches, keeping kids grounded, Black Mirror, keeping up, Ali Ghodsi, the NBA, MGM, gambling in Dallas, the Adelson family, CES, transparency, and Alex Oshmyansky.

Chapters:

• (00:55) - Game day and superstitions
• (03:08) - Email responsiveness
• (05:48) - Shark Tank
• (09:21) - Retiring young
• (10:57) - American Airlines’ lifetime pass
• (12:55) - Sports and blue-collar work
• (16:02) - Compete or die
• (17:43) - Why Mark hates meetings
• (19:57) - Immortality through AI
• (23:05) - The new AI wave
• (25:07) - Startup founders and low-hanging fruit
• (29:24) - Selling Broadcast.com to Yahoo
• (31:35) - The Dallas Mavericks
• (34:52) - Selling his majority stake
• (37:08) - The missing link in pharma
• (41:27) - Disrupting a huge industry
• (43:57) - The problem with debt
• (44:59) - What “grit” means to Mark

Links:

• Connect with Mark
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
• Connect with Joubin
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Email: grit@kleinerperkins.com
• Learn more about Kleiner Perkins
• This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm