Startups, Investing, And Daily Deals: Five Questions With Mark ...

Some think Mark Cuban is a genius, some think he?s lucky. Either way, the guy has a knack for seeing value where others may not, for locating long-term investments, and for ending up on the right side of the deal. Some may disagree with his approach, but Mark Cuban is a billionaire, and while making money is a lot easier when you have stacks of it to play with, becoming a billionaire doesn?t happen by accident. (Lotto winners not included.)

For those on the younger side who haven?t yet made their first billion, the investor?s early story should be comforting: After graduating from college, Cuban started his career (auspiciously enough) as a bartender. Next, he worked for a year as a salesman at a PC software retailer, making $18K in salary, before being fired for meeting with a new client to close a deal instead of opening the retail store.

He later founded MicroSolutions, a systems integrator and software reseller, but it wasn?t until eight years after grabbing his diploma that he sold his first business, which CompuServe acquired for $6 million in 1990. And then, a bit more famously, he founded a company based on his mutual love of college basketball and webcasting (Audionet), turned it into Broadcast.com, and sold it to Yahoo at the height of the dotcom boom for $5.9 billion in stock.

Since then, he?s been involved in a number of projects, most notably helping build the Dallas Mavericks, a team in which he bought a majority stake back in 2000, into an annual playoff contender and Lebron-slaying NBA Champions in 2011.

He?s also become an increasingly active angel investor in tech startups over the last decade, (you can get a brief sense of the companies he?s invested in on his CrunchBase profile), and spends quite a bit of his time coaching young entrepreneurs.

So, seeing as he?s spent more than a few minutes growing businesses, investing in startups, and advising companies on how to grow, when to pivot, and how to make money (he even recently wrote a book on the subject), we took the opportunity to ask the investor a few questions on some topical issues facing the tech industry. Check out his responses below:

There?s a big debate going on about whether startups are overvalued / overfunded ? is there really a series A crunch and do you think this will end badly?

It really depends on where you live. The approach to startups is far different in Silicon Valley than it is in the rest of the world. Valley startups start big. Everywhere else we take the lean, mean startup machine approach.

The former could run into cyclical financing problems because their success is dependent on exits first and operational profitability second. If the IPO market shuts again, and foreign investment dries up, the capital for Valley startups could be impacted.

As far as overfunding, it seems to me that the prevailing wisdom out West is that the only way to exit big is to start big. With that mindset there is no such thing as overfunding. But its not an approach I ever take. I?m funding multiple companies across the country every quarter. Trust me, none are overfunded. If they execute, they will get the cash they need.

Do you think Groupon is overvalued?

I like Groupon. Their valuation is whatever the market says it is. They can?t pay attention to that noise. They have to be relentless and focused on continuously adding value to their customers at the consumer and retail sides. If they can do it, they will laugh all the way to the bank.

We?ve seen the rise of Pandora and a host of interesting web radio/music services, like Spotify, take off recently. Curious how you view these players both as an investor/advisor. Do you see potential for Amazon/Google Music/Spotify etc to supplant iTunes?

It all comes down to licensing fees from the labels, both direct and statutory. One of my biggest professional mistakes at Broadcast.com was not fighting the DMCA harder. There are so many ridiculous and arbitrary limits that every music company has this as an overhang on their business.

I also worry about patent trolls coming in and killing this business.

As a guy who understands digital video better than most, what are some of the most interesting companies and trends there that you think we should be paying attention to?

Just remember one thing: The future of TV is TV. Television is still the best alternative to boredom. If you look at all the internet video companies that try to complement TV, they are doing well. If you look at those trying to replace TV, they are sucking wind. I categorize Netflix as doing well and a complement. They made a big mistake, but they are still the big dog.

Do you think Facebook has a chance to become the OS of the Internet? Or is social/friendsourcing really just in a bubble of its own?

Right now they are the platform that counts. So yes they have a chance to be the end all, be all going forward. They have become the home page for many of us. That said, their mobile solutions as a platform suck. They are very vulnerable to someone coming along and making social built on mobile a far better and more engaging experience than Facebook currently is.

And, what?s more, as a bonus for readers, Cuban has also agreed to answer three ?top? questions posted in the comment section of this post. The three that receive the most ?likes? will be chosen, so ask your own questions and ?like? away. Also, a word of warning: He won?t answer basketball related questions, so keep your inquiries focused on tech and business.

Part of the reason that the investor and Mavs owner has been in a question-answering mood lately is that one of the startups to which he plays both investor and advisor ? JungleCents ? recently launched a giveaway where the winner receives a free lunch with Cuban. Once users sign up for JungleCents? newsletter, they can then tweet at the investor, asking him questions on whatever topics they choose, to which Cuban has been responding in kind.

The Mavs owner is a good guy, but obviously JungleCents? model is one that Cuban sees great value in ? enough so that he?s allowed the startup to leverage his own personal brand for promotional purposes. Of course, this is in his best interest, but how many investors agree to do that?

Cuban invested $1.5 million in JungleCents back October of last year and is joined by a board that includes Hollywood producer Peter Safran, Guy Kawasaki and Bill Reichert from Garage Ventures. The reason Cuban believes in this San Francisco-based startup? Aside from the fact that in less than a year the startup?s deals are reaching 2.2 million email addresses, publishers included, and the user sign-up rate has tripled over the last 3 months, the company is taking an alternative approach to daily deals.

JungleCents uses a lead generation model ? similar to how airlines and travel companies like Orbitz pay sites like Kayak for bringing them new customers ? to give publishers supplemental revenue streams.

To do this, JungleCents accepts gift cards from companies instead of cash, then runs those as daily deals, which it offers as discounts. (You can read our initial coverage of the startup here.) In its recent partnership with men?s lifestyle magazine, AskMen, for example, the startup partnered with men?s merchandiser Bonobos to offer discounts on their products, which it then displayed both on JungleCents.com and AskMen.com.

This allows readers of AskMen to take advantage of a deal that?s pertinent to the content of the magazine, without having to leave the site. Customers might pay $48 for a $100 voucher to spend at Bonobos, which users can cash in whenever they want ? all at once, or over time.

When I asked the owner what it was specifically that attracted him to JungleCents, he said: ?I like the idea of white label deal solutions that allow sites to leverage their own traffic. The core competency of most websites is rarely if ever going to be to source deals. Junglecents can do it for them and take a share of the profits. It?s low overhead, lots of sweat equity so not a big cash investment, but with high leverage if they can match the right deals to highly trafficked sites?.

There you have it. Fire away with your questions.

As pledge brothers from the same fraternity, the three founders of Jungle Cents, Sameer Mehta, Haider Mirza, and Nadir Hyder, wanted to discover a way to fuel the growth of online shopping. They knew they had an idea so radical, yet simple that would transform the way people shop. In 2010, Jungle Cents was formed upon the ideals of being social and innovative. The idea of giving consumers steep discounts for stores that they want to shop at is the...

Learn more

Source: http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/30/startups-investing-and-daily-deals-five-questions-with-mark-cuban/

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NYC recommends AIDS drugs for any person with HIV (AP)

NEW YORK ? Health officials said Thursday they are recommending that any person living with HIV be offered AIDS drugs as soon as they are diagnosed with the virus, an aggressive move that has been shown to prolong life and stem the spread of the disease.

Standard practice has been to have patients put off the expensive pill regimen ? which can cost up to $15,000 a year in the United States ? until the immune system weakens.

But Health Commissioner Thomas Farley said recent studies have shown that the benefits of early treatment, combined with education and testing, appears to be a promising strategy for countering the epidemic.

"I'm more optimistic now than I've ever been about this epidemic that we can drive our new rates down to zero or close to it ? eventually. I don't know how soon. But I'm very optimistic of the direction that it's going to take the epidemic to," Farley said in an interview Wednesday.

More than 110,000 people in New York City are infected with HIV, more than in any other U.S. city and about 75 percent of all cases in the state. San Francisco, which had more than 18,000 people living with HIV, is believed to be the only other major city to have made a similar recommendation in 2010.

City health officials said the new recommendation could initially help about 3,000 people get on medications. About 66,000 New Yorkers living with HIV that the Health Department tracks are being effectively treated with AIDS drugs, they said. But they said it was difficult to estimate how many people would eventually need the medications.

Some doctors agree with the Department of Health that it is time to update the guidelines for initiating AIDS drug treatment.

"The New York City health department is a little bit ahead of the curve. In my opinion, the rest of the country will follow and I think it will be pretty quick," said Dr. Michael Saag of the University of Alabama at Birmingham and past chairman of the HIV Medicine Association.

The standard measure of the CD4 count ? a way to measure the strength of the immune system ? is an outdated trigger for therapy, a relic from research on early antiretroviral drugs, Saag said.

"It's anachronism. It's old school. It's yesterday," Saag said. "I agree completely with the New York City health department."

Dr. Joel Gallant of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and vice chair of the HIV Medicine Association also agrees with the New York recommendation for offering early treatment. He recommends early treatment for his own patients.

"Nobody I know who is an HIV expert feels that it's a bad idea to treat HIV at high CD4 counts from a medical or scientific standpoint," Gallant said. "If there are objections, they'd usually be based on cost or feasibility."

Saag said the cost questions are very important because a brand-name drug can retail for $1,200 to $1,600 per month.

"For sure, they're very expensive drugs and we should be careful about that," he said, though he added that the medications are going generic so costs should come down.

City health officials said they anticipated that the cost for expanding the use of AIDS drugs would be covered by private insurance or by the AIDS Drug Assistance Program, a $270 million program for the uninsured or underinsured that is partially funded through federal dollars. The health officials said they expect the benefits over the long term would far outweigh the initial costs because there would be fewer hospitalizations and new HIV cases.

"There will be some increasing costs over the short term," said Farley. "But over the long term, it's absolutely the right thing for the epidemic."

HIV experts are split about whether early therapy should be recommended or optional. Besides the high costs, the pills have side effects from nausea to liver damage. Patients unwilling to take them religiously for life could develop drug resistance.

A panel that recently updated U.S. guidelines was divided evenly, with half favoring starting therapy early for everyone and half regarding an early start as elective.

But there's growing evidence that untreated HIV can lead to cancers and heart disease. What's more, antiretroviral drugs are safer, have fewer side effects and work better than they did in the past. New research also indicates that people live better, healthier lives and their partners do as well when they get early treatment.

The new research cited by the city's Health Department in making its recommendations includes a nine-nation study whose preliminary results were announced earlier this year and showed that earlier treatment meant patients were 96 percent less likely to spread the virus to their uninfected partners.

Dr. Moupali Das, the director of research at the San Francisco Department of Health HIV Prevention Section, said its surveillance data indicated that physicians were treating their HIV patients early even before the city recommended doing so. She said the average amount of time from diagnosis to having no virus in the blood went from 32 months in 2004 to eight months in 2008.

"That reflects that the newer medications are more potent and efficacious, and the doctors were likely initiating them earlier," she said.

She said they are currently analyzing what has happened since the recommendations went into effect. But, anecdotally, she said that there has been a change among patients seeking treatment. "It's changed the dialogue and empowered our patient population," she said.

Public health experts predict the guidelines for starting AIDS drugs treatment will shift toward a clear recommendation for early treatment.

But New York City's health commissioner said officials there could not wait to respond.

"What we're doing here is we're making a really clear and unequivocal statement that we think this is good for the health of the patient, good for the health of the entire population, good for the response to the epidemic," Farley said.

___

AP Medical Writer Carla K. Johnson contributed from Chicago.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/health/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20111201/ap_on_he_me/us_aids_prevention

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