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August 16 - October 7, 2021
general rule of web design is that if you have to explain something, you’ve already lost.
The second your dream becomes a reality, things get complicated. 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.
But that’s how things are – there is always so much to do that making plans and to-do lists is a waste of time.
married. Ever since then, when Devisree, his wife, knows it will be a late night, she keeps him company in the office, sometimes sleeping on one of the couches near his workstation. True love, startup style. It makes me smile.
most companies looking to enter a new business arena do what’s called a “make-or-buy analysis,” in which they consider the cost, timing, and difficulty of starting a new business from scratch, then evaluate whether it would be cheaper, faster, and better to simply buy another company that’s already doing it.
In the same way that he’s definitely hired a personal trainer since the late nineties, I think he’s also worked with someone to tame his laugh. Now it’s polite, a little giggly.
haaahah
“Okay, Jeff,” I said, grinning. “What’s with all the doors?” “It’s a deliberate message,” he explained. “Everyone in the company has them. It’s a way of saying that we spend money on things that affect our customers, not on things that don’t.”
this. Bezos was notoriously frugal – even cheap. He was famous for his “two-pizza meetings” – the idea being that if it took more than two pizzas to feed a group of people working on a problem, then you had hired too many people. People worked long hours for him, and they didn’t get paid a lot.
But Bezos inspired loyalty. He’s one of those geniuses – like Steve Jobs, or like Reed – whose peculiarities only add to his legend.
angle meant he was curious. At thirty-four, his demeanor
Outward behaviour
all the childlike delight in the world couldn’t mask the analytical and ambitious brain constantly at work behind his unblinking eyes.
Jeff bezos
exasperated.
Irritfate intensely
I’m not a “but” man. Nothing good ever comes of that word. This time was no exception.
“Kinda puts all our eggs in one basket,” he said. “That’s the only way to make sure you don’t break any,” I replied.
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.
When an opportunity comes knocking, you don’t necessarily have to open your door. But you owe it to yourself to at least look through the keyhole. That’s what we’d done with Amazon.
I’ve been so focused on the launch, on growing the company, on making it exist at all, that I’ve lost sight of the reason we’re doing this in the first place: to create something real that can stand on its own.
In a pitch, perfection isn’t always the goal: projection is. You don’t have to have all the answers if you appear to be the sort of person to whom they’ll eventually come.
dubious.
Hesitating or doubting
But that had less to do with my pitch than Reed’s presence. Reed was a known quantity, venture capitalist catnip. He’d orchestrated major deals, he’d appeared – reluctantly – on the cover of USA Today next to his Porsche.
That’s why the second he walks into a room, people whip out their checkbooks. They know that what he does isn’t teachable, isn’t reproducible – hell, it’s barely even explicable. He’s just got it.
Sana all marc randolph
That’s what great entrepreneurs do, in the end: the impossible. Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, Reed Hastings – they’re all geniuses who did something that no one thought was possible. And if you do that once, your odds of doing it again are exponentially higher.
Amazing
But one of the things I was learning, that first year, was that success creates problems. Growth is great – but with growth comes an entirely new set of complications. How can you preserve your identity even as you include new members on your team?
How do you ensure that you continue to take risks, now that you have something to lose? How do you grow gracefully? Early Netflix was a small, tight-knit group.
But I knew that both of them had the necessary drive and malleable creativity to make a go of
Everyone does a little bit of everything. You’re hiring a team, not a set of positions.
Small, semi-improvised rituals like this kept things light. They reminded us that no matter how stressful the job was, at the end of the day we were renting movies to people. And nothing forces people to bond like shared embarrassment.
When you’re trying to build a product, sometimes it doesn’t matter how many promotions you run or how many deals you offer. Sometimes, you just need to get attention.
awry.
Away from the usual expected course
They were saying that we had sent them real, honest-to-God pornography.
whuttt
And if they had received the porn version, we asked that they return it to us, at our expense, after which we would gladly send them out the proper DVD. But you know? Funny thing. Not a single person did.
HAaahaahaaaah
Sometimes chasing a dream is like that: a singular pursuit of something nearly impossible. In the startup world, where the money is perilous and the timeline is unbelievably compressed, the day-to-day pursuit of your dream can appear frenzied – even manic – to outsiders.
The point is the pursuit of the impossible.
dealing with all the shit. I’m quite familiar with the shit sandwich. Hell, I’d taught Reed how to make one. So it was with a peculiar mix of bewilderment and a teacher’s pride that I watched him serve one up to me on a silver platter.
Lol
it veered from individual hires I’d made to errors in accounting to corporate communications. It all went by in a blur, but one thing he said really stuck out. “You don’t appear tough and candid enough to hold strong people’s respect,” he said. “On the good side, no one good has quit, and your people like you.”
I had to smile at that. Forget radical honesty. This was brutal honesty. Ruthless honesty. “Gee, thanks,” I said. “Put that one on my tombstone: He may have run his business into the ground, but no one good quit, and his people liked him.”
hahaha love it
I’m sure Reed wondered why I didn’t see the situation with the same clarity and logic as he did. I knew that Reed didn’t – couldn’t – understand what was going through my head. Thank God for that, because the words going through my head weren’t polite. I knew that a lot of what he was saying was true. But I also thought that we were talking about my company. It had been my idea. My dream. And now it was my business. While Reed had been off at Stanford and at TechNet, I’d been pouring my entire life into building the company. Was it realistic to expect anyone to get every decision right?
...more
Not a ceo. But i can relate to him
Was I not fit to run the company alone, or did he just want back in, without the ego hit of being my employee?
“I have tremendous respect and affection for you. It pains me to be so harsh. There are a million good things about your character, maturity, and skill that I admire greatly. I would call you partner proudly.”
“I need some time to process this, Reed,” I said. “Look, you can’t just come in here and propose taking over the company and expect me to say: Oh, how logical, of course!”
True
I’m not going to force it down your throat, even though in my position as a shareholder I could. I respect you too much to do that. If you don’t believe that this is in the best interest of the company, and don’t want to go forward this way, I’m fine with that. We’ll just sell the company, pay back the investors, split the money, and go home.”
Radical honesty is great, until it’s aimed at you.
100%
Not because Reed was being unkind – he wasn’t – but because he was being honest. Brutally, astringently, rip-the-bandage-off honest.
He was driven by what was best for the business, and he respected me too much to do anything else but tell the complete, unvarnished truth. He was just doing what we’d always done with each other.
Reed had been so nervous about giving me honest feedback that he’d needed a prompt, a set of written reminders, something to make him feel like he was on solid ground. He’d wanted to make sure that he did it right. He wanted to make sure he said the things that needed to be said.
because our new partners knew that without some bold stroke born of dramatic, intuitive, and confident leadership, this company was never going to make it. They had never said it out loud, but it was probably obvious to everyone else in that room that the bold stroke, the dramatic and confident and intuitive leadership, was not going to come from me.
I needed to acknowledge that I was a builder, someone creative and freewheeling enough to assemble a team, to create a culture, to launch an idea from the back of an envelope into a company, an office, a product that existed in the world. But we were exiting that initial stage. Now we were going to have to grow, and rapidly, and that took a different skill set entirely.
Different skillset as you grow
But I also knew, even then, that Reed was in the 99.9th percentile. He’s one of the all-time greats. And he was better at this stage of things than I was. More confident. More focused. Bolder.
Love how he assessed this matter. How he processed his.thoughts despite how hurt he was
Didn’t I owe it to them to do everything I could to ensure that we survived, even if it meant that my role would no longer be the one I’d imagined for myself?
Awee :(
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.
