By Ethan Shanfeld According To The variety At the height of the Great Recession, Kevin O’Leary met Mark Burnett for breakfast at a beachside hotel in Los Angeles. The 71-year-old venture capitalist, known as Mr. Wonderful, had sold his educational software company to Mattel for $4.2 billion, and he had spent the last couple of years on a panel of investors on the Canadian series “Dragon’s Den.” Burnett, the reality TV titan behind “The Apprentice,” was looking to bring that same entrepreneurial format to American audiences with a new series called “Shark Tank.” He said, ‘We’re looking for a real asshole, and you’re it,’” O’Leary recalls, sitting in a Manhattan hotel room in December, far from the Santa Monica sunshine. “I said, ‘Do I take that as a compliment?’ We never looked bac...