"Papers for sale!" - Shark Tank's Mark Cuban reminisces about the time he sold newspapers at 16

Shark Tank investor Mark Cuban recently talked about how he did small jobs as a kid, which developed his entrepreneurial mindset. He is known for his business strategies and for being an investor and the minority owner of the Dallas Mavericks NBA team.

Even before he made a fortune via his business called Broadcast.com, Mark always found some ways to showcase his business talent, and this all happened at a very young age.

On Your Mom's House Podcast, the billionaire investor sat down and revealed the time he was 16 and sold a newspaper. It all happened when an opportunity presented itself to him, and along with his friends, he decided to grab onto the same.

Mark grew up in a working-class family in Pittsburgh, and the story he told is of a time when there was a strike at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Pittsburgh Press had left the city.

There were no newspapers in sight, and during that age, it was the only source of information for the public living in the town. Cuban and his friends devised a plan to fetch newspapers into the city from Cleveland.

Using their 1966 Buick LeSabre, they drove up to Cleveland, where newspapers were still being printed and sold. They brought back some, and the next morning, the Shark Tank investor revealed, they had started selling the same. He said,

"I remember standing downtown, you know, 'Papers for sale, papers for sale!' and instead of it being a quarter, they were a dollar each, and people would tip us because everyone got their news from the newspaper back then."

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Shark Tank investor Mark Cuban reveals how he sold a newspaper at 16 and analyzed the opportunity when it rose

At 16 years of age, the Shark Tank investor was already thinking like a businessman. He and his friends drove up to Cleveland, and he recalled how they got all the newspapers. Mark said,

"I had a 1966 Buick LeSabre—a big old boat. My friends and I piled in and drove to Cleveland. Back then, newspapers were like a quarter each, so we brought rolls of change and waited for the Cleveland Plain Dealer to come out. We tracked down every delivery truck we could find and bought as many papers as would fit in the car."

Once their car was filled with newspapers, as many as they could find, Cuban and his friends came back to Pittsburgh and set up their shop early at dawn to sell the stock.

By doing so, Mark Cuban, the Shark Tank investor, distinguished himself as a teenage entrepreneur. He showed his ability to identify a business and seize any opportunity. This happened long before he rose to fame.

Even as a child of just nine or ten years old, Mark said that he was interested in business and the way it worked. This is the mindset that drove him to create a multi-billion dollar business.

He rode the internet wave in the 90s when the software became too popular and founded a company called Broadcast.com. It was later sold to Yahoo for $5.7 billion in stocks in 2000.

With the same money, Mark bought the NBA team called the Dallas Mavericks. He changed the management around and led them to victory in 2011. Right now, Mark has sold the majority shares and is a silent partner in the team.

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Shark Tank Season 16 airs every Friday at 8 PM Eastern Time on ABC, with new episodes released weekly. They later become available for streaming on Hulu.