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

by Marc Randolph

The truth is that for every good idea, there are a thousand bad ones. And sometimes it can be hard to tell the difference.

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.

“Sure. But you want something that will scale,” he said. “You want to sell something where the effort it takes to sell a dozen is identical to the effort it takes to sell just one. And while you’re at it, try and find something that’s more than just a onetime sale, so that once you’ve found a customer, you’ll be able to sell to them over and over again.”

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.

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.

It’s the same at a startup. 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.

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 damned bit of difference.

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 it’s more than that. It’s something akin to courage.

As you get older, if you’re at all self-aware, you learn two important things about yourself: what you like and what you’re good at. Anyone who gets to spend his day doing both of those things is a lucky man.

But success could also be defined a bit more broadly: having a dream, and through your time, your talent, and your perseverance, seeing that dream become a reality.

The only real way to find out if your idea is a good one is to do it. You’ll learn more in one hour of doing something than in a lifetime of thinking about it.

You have to learn to love the problem, not the solution. That’s how you stay engaged when things take longer than you expected.

“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.”