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

by Marc Randolph

Reed brought the drive for scale. I made sure that we never stopped focusing on the individual customer. 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.

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.

Okay, one more time—the story doesn’t end there. Because now the story is about you. Flip your book over. Read the title again. “That will never work.” That was the first thing out of Lorraine’s mouth the night I told her the idea for Netflix. She wasn’t the only one. I heard that from dozens of people, dozens of times. (And to be fair to her, the idea as originally conceived wouldn’t have worked. It took years of adjustments, changes in strategy, new ideas, and plain old luck for us to land on a version of the idea that worked.) But everyone with a dream has had that experience, right? You wake up one morning with a great idea that’s going to change the world! You can’t wait to run downstairs and tell your husband. Explain it to your kids. Run it by your professor. Or burst into your boss’s office to lay it all out for him. What do they all say? That will never work. By now, I hope you know what my answer to that line is. Nobody Knows Anything.

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. What happens if your idea doesn’t work? What happens if your test fails, if nobody orders your product or joins your club? What if sales don’t go up and customer complaints don’t go down? What if you get halfway through writing your novel and get writer’s block? What if after dozens of tries—even hundreds of attempts—you still haven’t seen your dream become anything close to real? You have to learn to love the problem, not the solution. That’s how you stay engaged when things take longer than you expected.

Nolan Bushnell, the co-founder of Atari, once said something that has always resonated with me. “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.”

Entrepreneurship is not a calling with a linear path, like medicine or law or finance. I should know—my brother is an investment banker. Like me, he often visits colleges to talk to students about their career options. A couple of times, he and I have ended up in separate rooms on the same campus, each of us counseling some of the country’s brightest college kids about their career paths. We call it “battling for the souls of America’s youth.” He tells them all about junior analyst positions with eighty-hour workweeks and starting salaries in the six figures. I tell them all about startup life, living three to a room in a San Francisco hovel, and eating ramen for dinner.

“If you want to spend the entire semester taking a single idea and making it perfect, be my guest,” he said. “But you already knew where that one was going.” He gestured at the mound of clay. “If it was good, then you’ve got a good head start on the direction you’ll go tomorrow. If it was bad, then you’ll try another direction. Either way, you’re going to be better, faster, and more intuitive.” There’s a lesson here for entrepreneurs. 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.

You won’t know for sure until you take that initial idea and put it into the world. That’s why, 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.

That’s why one more lap, then I’ll stop is so helpful: It allows you to achieve big by dreaming small. It allows you to react to the unpredictability of life, the way that challenges grow and multiply in ways that are difficult to predict. And by focusing on the immediate task at hand—the next lap, the next ridge, the very next step—you can make it up the mountain, even if it’s shifting beneath your boots.