That Will Never Work: The Birth of Netflix and the Amazing Life of an Idea

by Marc Randolph

The best ideas rarely come on a mountaintop in a flash of lightning. They don’t even come to you on the side of a mountain, when you’re stuck in traffic behind a sand truck. They make themselves apparent more slowly, gradually, over weeks and months. And in fact, when you finally have one, you might not realize it for a long time.

You can talk until you’re blue in the face about how your employees are your greatest asset, or about how you want to ensure that your office is a great place to work, but eventually you have to start taking the small steps to put your words into practice.

So as a leader, the best way to ensure that everyone arrives at the campsite is to tell them where to go, not how to get there. Give them clear coordinates and let them figure it out.

Real innovation comes not from top-down pronouncements and narrowly defined tasks. It comes from hiring innovators focused on the big picture who can orient themselves within a problem and solve it without having their hand held the whole time. We call it being loosely coupled but tightly aligned.

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.

it doesn’t make a difference how good the ads are if the dogs don’t eat the dog food.

The idea was that no matter how much sizzle you’d given the steak – no matter how well you’d sold it – nothing mattered if the product was lackluster.

trust your gut, but also test it. Before you do anything concrete, the data has to agree.

Silicon Valley is full of nonsense phrases just like it. For instance, when someone says that he’s leaving to spend more time with his family, what that really means is my ass got fired. When someone says this marketing copy just needs some wordsmithing, what they really mean is this sucks and needs to be completely rewritten. When someone says we decided to pivot, what they really mean is we fucked up, royally. And when a company decides to seek strategic alternatives, what they’re saying is we’ve got to sell this sucker – and fast.

Nolan Bushnell, the co-founder of Atari, once said something that has always resonated with me. “Everyone who has taken a shower has had an idea,” he said. “But it’s the people who get out of the shower, towel off, and do something about it that make the difference.”