In a nutshell, Mark Cuban is the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, an NBA franchise and Chairman of HDNet, an HDTV cable network. [wikipedia] He recently wrote on his blog about how he was pissed off about an interview he recently had with Deadspin.com sports blogger Will Leitch, who wrote a somewhat nasty critique about him on valleywag.com.

And as usual, valleywag.com went back to critique Mark Cuban even more for critiquing Will Leitch! I don’t blame valleywag for doing that, because it’s what they do best. However, Mark Cuban has every right to complain that a blogger took advantage of the interview and spun it off, basically into writing nasty comments about Mark.

I’ll take a bold stand: I like Mark Cuban. I respect him, and I think he can teach us a lot about running an organization, whether it be a basketball team or an internet start-up. I especially loved his recent blog post about honest and respect: being absolutely honest with evaluating yourself and others. Going back to topic, his interviewer might have had a lot of fun bad-mouthing him on valleywag, but that’s a permanent action that will prevent others from wanting to work with him.

I’m used to speaking to business execs and start-up founders, and I don’t blog about the stuff they explicitly tell me NOT to make public. Sure, I would love to tell all of you about so-and-so’s latest and greatest projects, but that would completely destroy my credibility. I was nasty about Meg Whitman two blog posts below this, and that probably hurt my credibility. If I sat down and learned about what she did, I probably would have had more respect for her as a CEO. If I sat down with Mark Cuban and I disagreed with him on something, I’d tell him on the spot. I’d tell all of you about it if I had the permission to.

Looking back at this issue from blogger Will Leitch’s perspective, he needs to be fun and entertaining to keep the traffic flow coming. Mark Cuban just so happens to be an easy target because of his personality and the fact that he’s incredibly rich. Ethically speaking, I’ll say that Leitch has the right to bad mouth Mark Cuban without Mark’s permission, but I don’t see how it’ll pay off in the end. If anything, having not blogged about Mark or posting some sort of apology would clear up his reputation if he wanted to speak to another CEO in the future.

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore in college. She’s currently the founder of a startup, managing editor at Startupism.com, and Jessicamah.com. In her free time, she enjoys the prospect of being an underage angel investor while partying like a rock star.