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.

What I needed was purpose.

The reasons for working there weren’t exotic perks or free food. It was the camaraderie and the challenge, the opportunity to spend your time solving hard, interesting problems with smart people.

You didn’t work for us because you wanted a beautiful office. You worked for us because you wanted the chance to do something meaningful.

Culture isn’t what you say. It’s what you do.

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.

More importantly, though, lunch is a chance to start imprinting culture: to explain the most important aspects of working at Netflix, what we expect of people, and what they can expect of us.

Most engineers can choose where they want to work, and the way they make their decision boils down to two questions: 1. Do I respect the people I’m working for? 2. Will I be given interesting problems to solve?

if you have to explain something, you’ve already lost. The

You simply can’t know how things are going to behave until you’ve actually tried them.

there is always so much to do that making plans and to-do lists is a waste of time.

One of the key lessons I learned at Netflix was the necessity not only of creative ideation, or of having the right people around you, but of focus.

We’d built a company where freewheeling discussions sometimes turned heated – and it was okay. Where ideas were more important than chain of command. Where it didn’t matter who solved a problem – only that it got solved. Where dedication and creativity mattered a lot more than dress codes or meeting times.

nothing forces people to bond like shared embarrassment.

that’s how small we were: we didn’t even have HR guidelines to violate yet.

A culture of freedom and responsibility, coupled with radical honesty, worked like a charm.

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.

Most companies end up building a system to protect themselves from people who lack judgment. And that only ends up frustrating the people who have it.

a little game we called Coins in the Fountain.

When you’re building something from nothing, you rely on talented, passionate generalists: people who can do a little bit of everything, who buy into the mission, and whom you trust with your time, money, and ideas. But once you’ve gone from 0 to 1, and the seed you’ve planted is starting to grow, some shuffling happens. Often the person who was right for the job at the beginning is not right for the middle. Sometimes bringing in people with decades of experience and institutional know-how is the necessary thing to do.

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.

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

People have come to understand that it’s a sign of great respect if I shave for a meeting.

you’re going to get things wrong. You just don’t want to get the same things wrong twice.

Winnowing our staff made us leaner and more focused.

And while we certainly had to lay off some very talented individuals, we’d been left only with superstar players.

When you retain only star players, you create a culture of competitive excellence.

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.

I missed the feeling of all hands on deck, and the expectation that every day you’d be working on a problem that wasn’t strictly tied to your job description.

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