Billionaire Todd Wagner Is Trying to Do for Charities What Amazon Did for Retail

In 1995, Todd Wagner and his business partner Mark Cuban pioneered streaming audio and then video over the internet.

AudioNet, which they eventually renamed to Broadcast.com, went public in 1998 and was sold to Yahoo for $5.7 billion in 1999. It made Wagner and Cuban billionaires.

In the wake of the sale, Wagner was twice offered the role of chief operating officer of Yahoo, which, in the 1990s, had the cachet that Google does today. He passed up the opportunity twice because he wanted to figure out a way to give back.