Why Skills-First Leadership Is Replacing the Ivy League Playbook in the C-Suite
05/23/2025
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The old prestige pyramid—where Ivy League degrees and blue-chip consulting backgrounds paved the way to the CEO seat—is cracking.
January 21, 2022: One defining moment for billionaire investor Mark Cuban led him to go all-in on cryptocurrency.
“I always paid attention to bitcoin, the pricing, the tokens, and the cryptocurrencies,” Cuban told Miami Mayor Francis Suarez at The North American Bitcoin Conference. “But what got me into it was, about a year ago, when I minted my first NFT,” he added.
NFTs, or nonfungible tokens, are unique digital assets. Minting an NFT is the process of turning an investment into a token that’s represented on the blockchain. It allows NFT owners to prove that they own the asset and sell it if they want.
For Cuban, the opportunity to earn royalties on secondary sales of his NFTs was huge.
“The fact that you can take a digital file, audio, video, picture, and not only mint it to sell it but also attach royalties to it, I’m like, ‘How can you do that?’ as you can’t do that with anything physical,” the “Shark Tank” investor and Dallas Mavericks owner said.
After knowing more, Cuban learned about smart contracts, which are collections of code that carry out a set of instructions on the blockchain. Intelligent contracts are crucial for NFTs and other crypto projects, such as decentralized finance or Defi applications. “To me, that’s very disruptive,” he said.
“NFTs, while they’re hot and everybody is talking about them, they’re more just a proof of concept for what you can do with smart contracts and decentralization,” Cuban told Suarez.
As of now, Cuban considers himself a crypto “evangelist,” he said. He’s extremely bullish in the space and has a cryptocurrency portfolio of various digital coins, NFTs, and investments in many blockchain companies.
The old prestige pyramid—where Ivy League degrees and blue-chip consulting backgrounds paved the way to the CEO seat—is cracking.
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