Most investors demand a pitch deck, a formal board presentation, and several rounds of due diligence before they agree to write a check.
Former “Shark Tank” investor Mark Cuban took a different approach, and it started with a cold email he received in Dallas from a young engineer who wanted to build rockets
Cuban committed $500,000 to that stranger’s company, Relativity Space, without a single phone call or face-to-face meeting, and the two have still never met. That bet has ballooned into a stake in a company last publicly valued at $4.2 billion in its 2021 Series E, with launch contracts from NASA and the U.S. Space Force.
Cuban wired $500,000 to Relativity Space after a cold email Cuban shared the story during a September 2024 episode of comedian Theo Von’s podcast “This Past Weekend,” describing how Ellis and his friends emailed him from Dallas proposing a space startup. Cuban admitted he had no knowledge of the aerospace sector, but something about the founders’ ambition convinced him to take the risk anyway. “I don’t know s**it about space, but I’ll get you started and see what happens,” Cuban recalled telling them, Fortune reported. More Tech Stocks: Ellis had previously worked at Blue Origin, the rocket company founded by Jeff Bezos, where he was credited with bringing metal 3D printing in-house.