How to build successful teams

If Indiana University wins the 2026 College Football Playoff National Championship on Monday, fans will owe some thanks to one of the football program’s biggest financial donors: billionaire Mark Cuban.

Cuban, whose net worth is estimated at $9.6 billion by Bloomberg, graduated from IU with a degree in management in 1981. He’s a longtime donor to his alma mater, including $5 million for a sports media center in 2015 and $6 million for IU’s rugby team in 2024.

While Cuban hasn’t disclosed the size of his recent donations to IU’s athletic department, it was a “big number,” the billionaire told CBS in October 2025. The team’s recent success under head coach Curt Cignetti, hired in 2024, inspired Cuban to open his checkbook again: The school is “happier this year than last year” after his latest donation, Cuban told Front Office Sports on Jan. 7.

Now, Cignetti’s team is just one win against the University of Miami away from a national championship and Cuban says it’s because the coach understands the most important aspects of building a successful organization.

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“I’ve been part of championship organizations and putting together a team isn’t easy,” Cuban told Bloomington, Indiana’s The Herald-Times on Jan. 10. The billionaire was the majority owner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks when that team won an NBA championship in 2011, and remains a minority owner of the team today.

Cuban discussed team-building strategy with Cignetti and came away impressed, he said. The coach assured Cuban that the team would use his donations to recruit a well-rounded roster of players, rather than putting the money toward chasing after just a few high-profile recruits, said Cuban.

“It’s about getting players that know their roles, work as a team, continue to improve and work in the system,” Cuban told the newspaper. “When you have a coach and organization that understands that, that’s how championship teams and organizations are built. That’s why I’ve been so excited to support them.”

Cuban has previously spoken about how good leaders build successful businesses through hiring the right people. Leaders should avoid hiring people who don’t fit their company culture, “because you can’t have conflict on what the vision of the company is,” he said on a March 2021 episode of the “Starting Greatness” podcast. “You’ve got to hire the right people for the right roles.”

Every winning team, or successful business, needs those employees who excel in their specific roles, like the “glue guys” on a basketball team, Cuban added on “Starting Greatness.” Culture and competency are the two biggest considerations for leaders when building a team, Cuban said during a MasterClass course released in February 2024. 

Cuban chose to attend IU because, at the time, the university offered the cheapest tuition out of the country’s top 10 business education programs, he’s said. He’s credited his time at the school for exposing him “to all kinds of different people [and] ideas” while nurturing his early entrepreneurial skills: Cuban opened and ran a local bar as an undergraduate, and picked up extra cash teaching dance lessons.

“Just watching the team I grew up with from the time I was 18 years old [and] to be part of this, wow,” Cuban told The Herald-Times. “What it gives me is far more than anything I could give to IU. No one would know who the hell I am if it wasn’t for Indiana University.”

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