Twenty years ago, a group of young people sent an audacious email requesting investment to the billionaire and investor Mark Cuban, leading to the cloud storage and file-sharing company Box, which today boasts a market value of up to $46 billion. Without Mark Cuban’s close attention to his email at that time, Box might never have taken off.
According to a report on CNBC’s financial website on May 19, in 2005, Box’s CEO and co-founder Aaron Levie was still a student at the University of Southern California, developing a cloud-based data storage startup in his dorm room. As the company needed startup capital, co-founder Dylan Smith contributed approximately $20,000 earned from playing online poker.
Levie mentioned that during the summer before his junior year in college, he and three co-founders, Smith, Sam Ghods, and Jeff Queisser, secured $80,000 in seed funding from angel investors. This funding helped them register Box as an official company and launch their first product.
However, they needed more funds to build the platform and attract enough customers to make it a viable business. Levie started emailing every potential investor he could think of, including Cuban.
“In 2005, if you were an investor, you’d probably receive my email.” Levie said. He estimated contacting “dozens” of investors “around the world,” starting from his hometown Seattle, expanding to Silicon Valley, and even reaching out to Cuban who lived in Texas.
Cuban replied within a few hours. Levie said the billionaire entrepreneur and then-owner of the Dallas Mavericks initially proposed a collaboration to carry out a data hosting project for his company. “After that, the scope of our collaboration basically expanded from there.”
Cuban even agreed to invest $350,000 without meeting Levie and the other co-founders of Box first.
“It was so crazy because things happened so fast.” Levie said.
He added that this investment represented a “breakthrough investment” for Box, giving him the confidence to drop out of school and focus on building the company.
Cuban has a public email address and checks it regularly. In November 2020, during an interview with “CNBC Make It” show, he mentioned that he receives up to 1,000 promotional emails daily.
Cuban estimated that he deletes about 90% of the emails, and he can decide in seconds whether he’s interested or not.
Although their partnership with Cuban was brief, Cuban’s investment helped Box achieve its initial growth. Twenty years later, Levie still vividly remembers the excitement he and his co-founders felt when they received the email from Cuban.
“When you see the name of someone you really respect in your inbox, that feeling is so wonderful.” Levie said, “It’s truly great. It might have been the first time I had this impulse: ‘Wait, sorry. Did Mark Cuban really reply? Is his name really in the sender’s list?’ We were really excited, and it really happened.”
Mark Cuban is a well-known American entrepreneur, investor, and billionaire who, through his hard work and wisdom, built massive wealth from scratch. In the 2019 Forbes World’s Billionaires list, Cuban ranked 478th with a personal wealth of around $4.1 billion.