USPS logo LINK — USPS employee news Printable

A debt to collecting

‘Shark Tank’ star gleans lesson from stamp hobby

Mark Cuban participates in an Air Force symposium in Orlando, FL, in 2019.

Dallas Mavericks owner and “Shark Tank” regular Mark Cuban credits youthful stamp collecting with helping him to better understand the wilder corners of today’s digital market.

Cuban explained in a recent blog post that, as a teen, he noticed that a certain stamp might be sold by multiple vendors at the same philatelic show for very different prices.

“I literally bought a stamp for 50 cents from one stamp dealer and an hour later sold it to another dealer at the same show for $25. I quickly went from being a collector to being ‘an investor,’ trying to take advantage of these inefficiencies,” Cuban wrote.

Today’s young digital investors are targeting similar inefficiencies, in his view. Where stamps, gold, art and other tangible assets require funds to store, sell and ship, digital “goods” require no such outlay.

“And it took me collecting stamps … to truly understand why this is true,” he wrote.

For those “old schoolers” who believe that value can only be had in tangible assets, he suggested that they wake up to the thinking of a generation of digital natives, who have “known their entire lives that what has been of greatest value to them has been digital.”

And in the last three years especially, digital and crypto assets have proven to be legitimate “stores of value,” in his view.

There is a “there, there,” he wrote.