That Will Never Work The Birth of Netflix and the Amazing Life of an Idea
Reviews
“When an opportunity comes knocking, you don’t necessarily have to open the door. But you owe it to yourself to at least look through the keyhole.” I have a lot of respect to Marc Randolph for narrating the audible edition of this book so amazingly, and for writing it in the first place! His story is truly inspiring to anyone who’s ever had a dream, and I went into it having no idea that this is how Netflix had started, such humble origins recounted so humbly by the founder. A very enjoyable story, dare I say bingeworthy? ;)
i read this book along with my girlfriend and we loved the story behind netflix foundation, but also we hate the over-extended chapters with nosense descriptions in order to increase pages 😅
Such an inspirational book from Marc. The thing that makes me love this book besides on getting an inside look of how Netflix was built, is Marc’s way of storytelling. His manner in explaining events without technical jargons and clear yet concise way have really lifted the book to be such an enjoyable read for me.
With business biographies it’s challenging to separate the story from the storytelling. This is a case where the story itself wasn’t done justice by the storytelling. Admittedly, I listened to Randolph himself narrate the audiobook and his delivery might’ve biased my opinion; he gave the reading too much flair for my taste. But overall I found the story itself overly colorful, with inconsequential details that made this feel more like a personal memoir than a business biography. And often the details felt manufactured because the story itself was lacking. Truthfully if the book were subtitled “My Story of Netflix,” it would have been more appropriate. All that said I certainly don’t think it was a bad book whatsoever. It was fun being transported back in time. It’s hard to imagine the Netflix we know today started as away to buy DVDs online. The company has evolved with technology remarkably well. It’s just that the storytelling just wasn’t for me. And while I certainly don’t fault this book for not distilling any overarching business principles like many other l reviewers have complained, I would have appreciated more emphasis on Netflix and less on his personal life. Sometimes the personal side has relevance to the story but in this case I don’t think it added anything. The story of Netflix is interesting. But the drama (at least in this telling) is fairly tame. It was well funded from the start and continued to be through the dot-com bust. There’s a few happy accidents and some brief tales of dogged determination mixed in. But by and large it simply lacked a strong narrative. There were no strong characters, underdog stories, near failures, or strong adversaries. Even ones you’d expect like Amazon or Blockbuster are hardly mentioned. Instead this book read exactly how he prefaced it: Marc Randolph’s recollection of Netflix’s beginning. I had hoped for something more but his perspective alone wasn’t enough to make this a must-read.
Super interesting and crazy journey. Also a little heartless in terms of what he chose to spend 5+ years of his life on. But he wanted to get rich and got it, so great for him.
Highlights
Most times, deciding what not to do is harder than deciding what to do.
Trust your gut, but also test it. Before you do anything concrete, the data has to agree.
Focus. It's an entrepreneur's secret weapon. Again and again in the Netflix story dropping DVD sales, dropping à la carte rentals, and eventually dropping many members of the original Netflix team – we had to be willing to abandon parts of the past in service of the future. Sometimes, focus this intense looks like ruthlessness and it is, a little bit. But iť's more than that. It's something akin to courage.
When your dream becomes a reality, it doesn't just belong to you. It belongs to the people who helped you — your family, your friends, your co-workers. It belongs to the world.
You simply can't know how things are going to behave until you've actually tried them. Go ahead and write up a plan, but don't put too much faith in it. The only real way to find something out is to do it.
Steve Kahn once advised me that when it came time for us to choose our beta name, I should choose something so bad it wouldn't be possible to use it for real.
People want to be treated like adults. They want to have a mision they believe in, a problem to solve, and space to solve it. They wanto be surrounded by other adults whose abilities they respect.
Culture isn't what you say. It's what you do.
Culture is a reflection of who you are and what you do — it doesn't come from carefully worded mission statements and committee meetings.
Thať's one of the great pleasures of being at the helm of a startup in the planning stages. The company is small enough that everyone in it has to wear multiple hats, but big enough that you never have to wear one that doesn't fit properly.
Most business plans — with their exhaustive go-to-market strategies, detailed projections of revenue and expenses, and optimistic forecasts of market share — are a complete waste of time. They become obsolete the minute the business starts and you realize how wildly off the mark you were with all your expectations. The truth is that no business plan survives a collision with a real customer. So the trick is to take your idea and set it on a collision course with reality as soon as possible.
When you start a company, what you're really doing is getting other people to latch on to an idea. You have to convince your future employees, investors, business partners, and board members that your idea is worth spending money, reputation, and time on.
Epiphanies are rare. And when they appear in origin stories, they're oftfen oversimplified or just plain false. We like these tales because they align with a romantic idea about inspiration and genius.
Do at least 10% more than you are asked. Never, ever, to anybody present as fact opinions on things you don’t know. Takes great care and discipline. Be courteous and considerate always—up and down. Don’t knock, don’t complain—stick to constructive, serious criticism. Don’t be afraid to make decisions when you have the facts on which to make them. Quantify where possible. Be open-minded but skeptical. Be prompt.
The problem with this method, of course, is that filtering for rental history doesn’t really tell you whether I liked Casablanca, or if Reed liked The Mighty Ducks. It just tells us that we both rented those movies. We could have hated them. We could have rented them for our kids (or our wives). If we were going to use collaborative filtering to group customers and recommend films, we needed to know what customers enjoyed rather than just what they rented.
The problem was coming up with an algorithm that actually spat out movies that made sense together. Since it could only use the data available to it—things like genre, actors, location, release year, language, and so forth—the algorithm often made suggestions that made sense to a computer but didn’t really take into account any kind of real-world similarity. Or, it would give unhelpful suggestions: “You like Top Gun? Here’s another movie that came out in 1986!”
If people want what you have, they will break down your door, leap over broken links, and beg you for more. If they don’t want what you’ve got, changing the color palette won’t make a damn bit of difference.
If we were trusting them to make decisions on the company’s behalf that could make or lose millions of dollars, we could certainly trust them to make decisions about what type of plane tickets they should book for themselves.
Radical honesty. Freedom and Responsibility.
When a company is small, trust and efficiency go hand in hand. If you’ve got the right people on your team, you don’t need to tell them exactly how you want them to do things—in fact, you often don’t even need to tell them what you want them to do. You simply need to be clear about what you want to accomplish and why it’s important.
Steve Kahn once advised me that when it came time for us to choose our beta name, I should choose something so bad it wouldn’t be possible to use it for real. “Six months in,” he said, “and you’ll be so fried that you’ll want to just say, ‘Screw it, let’s keep the beta name.’
People want to be treated like adults. They want to have a mission they believe in, a problem to solve, and space to solve it. They want to be surrounded by other adults whose abilities they respect.
The company is small enough that everyone in it has to wear multiple hats, but big enough that you never have to wear one that doesn’t fit properly.
I always told my employees to sell when they could. One of my favorite expressions actually came from Lorraine’s old boss from her entry-level stockbroker days: “Bulls make money. Bears make money. Pigs get slaughtered.”