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

by Marc Randolph

He saw me doing what I loved. That’s what really mattered.

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.

When you’re trying to take down a juggernaut, the story of your company’s founding can’t be a 300-page book like this one. It has to be a paragraph. Reed’s oft-repeated origin story is branding at its finest, and I don’t begrudge him for it at all.

And I’ll blow my own horn here for a minute: I’m pretty damn good at it.

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“Wow,” Lorraine said. “I knew it was big, but part of me still imagines you going to work every day with ten other people, sitting on our old dining room chairs.”

He thought that the tests had proven that kiosks could be an intermediary solution to our immediacy problem—when one-day shipping wasn’t fast enough, maybe a kiosk could bridge the gap.

Mitch, for his part, used the tests from our three months in Vegas to start another little company. You might have heard of it. It’s called Redbox.

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limerick.

It introduced the concept of binge watching, and is a popular euphemism for getting laid.

I know that the stock market is never an indicator of real value—but I can’t help but note that as of this writing, the little DVD-by-mail company that Blockbuster could have purchased for $50 million is now worth $150 billion.

And both of us came to realize that how we treated individual customers was as important at 150 million subscribers as it was at 150.

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.

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

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

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

But the great thing about having a dream is that you get to write your own story.

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I learned that if you mixed equal parts men, women, pool table, and liquor, a fight would result in less than twenty minutes.

But the point is, I didn’t plan on having those experiences. I didn’t think they’d come in handy for a long-term career as an entrepreneur. I wasn’t trying to put anything on my résumé. I was just doing what interested me.

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The kind of kid who wants a stable, linear path—and immediate money—goes with my brother. The kind whose passion is equally intense, but a little less linear, often ends up with me.

The happiest, most successful entrepreneurs I know do what they do because they followed a passion, not because they had a plan. The best journeys rarely proceed linearly.

Find something that strikes your interest. And don’t be afraid to take a trail just because you can’t see the end of it.

The worst thing you can do is get so caught up in planning the perfect idea that you never get around to actually, well, doing it. I call this building castles in your mind.

when it comes to making a dream a reality, the key isn’t to plan everything perfectly.

Iteration, not ideation, is the most important part of early-stage entrepreneurship. You have to have a lot of ideas—a lot of bad ideas—if you want to end up with a good one. You have to make a lot of sculptures. And then you have to put them out in the world, where people can see them and give you feedback—and yes, squish them if necessary.

genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent iteration.

A throwaway quirk can become a major function. A bug can become a feature.

Is there a lesson in all this? There is. Stop thinking and start doing.

Instead, validate your idea locally. Prove your idea has legs where you are. Spend some time as a big fish in a small pond. Demonstrate that there’s a there there…there. Where you live.

Succeed where you are first.

Ishita Gupta.

Kilimanjaro is 19,341 feet,

And like climbing Everest, if you fixate on the immensity of the goal, you’ll never take that first step.

So, we set a more manageable goal: to be the size of a single Blockbuster store. That took us two months. But if we’d started with the goal of being bigger than Blockbuster—something that would ultimately take eighteen years to accomplish—we would have found it difficult to even get started. And incredibly discouraging.

Giving up is usually something that is forced on us externally—often by nothing more than running out of money.

Persistence isn’t easy. It means picking yourself up, dusting yourself off, and screwing up the courage to head back into battle. But it’s funny; as I reflect on all my startup experiences, what I remember most vividly are not the big successes. Instead, I remember the hard times when things weren’t working. What makes persistence so rewarding is that wonderful feeling when you finally—on your hundredth attempt—finally do figure out that way to make it work.