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.

“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.

Sales is theater: every pitch, every call, every interaction in which you, the businessperson, are trying to convince someone else – the customer, the client, the potential investor, you name it – is a little performance, in which each side plays a role.

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.

What they really want is freedom and responsibility. They want to be loosely coupled but tightly aligned.

Bollywood was big.

To simplify things – and to prevent a format war – representatives from the three biggest companies formed an uneasy alliance, agreeing to a set of specs for the nascent technology. They called it the DVD Video Group.

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.

You don’t have to have all the answers if you appear to be the sort of person to whom they’ll eventually come.

And nothing forces people to bond like shared embarrassment.

People who have the judgment to make decisions responsibly love having the freedom to do so. They love being trusted. But that just makes sense, right? If you fill your company with people who lack good judgment, then you have to build all kinds of guardrails to keep them in line. You have to define everything for them: how much they can spend on office supplies, how many vacation days they take, when they are expected to be at their desk.

Here’s what I’ve learned: when it comes to making your dream a reality, one of the most powerful weapons at your disposal is dogged, bullheaded insistence. It pays to be the person who won’t take no for an answer, since in business, no doesn’t always mean no.

and the expectation that every day you’d be working on a problem that wasn’t strictly tied to your job description.

Radical honesty. Freedom and responsibility.

Sometimes you have to step back from your dream – especially when you think you’ve made it real. That’s when you can really see it. In my case, I left Netflix because I realized that the finished product of Netflix wasn’t my dream. My dream was building things. My dream was the process of making Netflix.

But I’ve come to realize that success is not defined by what a company accomplishes. Instead, I have a different definition: Success is what you accomplish. It’s being in a position to do what you like, do what you do well, and pursue the things that are important to you.

The most powerful step that anyone can take to turn their dreams into reality is a simple one: you just need to start.

So take that step. Build something, make something, test something, sell something. Learn for yourself if your idea is a good one.