By Marc Randolph
Editors foreword
But Hastings was intrigued, and the pair-with Hastings as the primary investor and Randolph as the CEO-founded a company. Now with over 150 million subscribers, Netflix’s triumph feels inevitable, but the twenty first century’s most disruptive start up began with few believers and calamity at every turn. From having to pitch his own mother on being an early investor, to the motel conference room that served as a first office, to server crashes on launch day, to the now-infamous meeting when Netflix brass pitched Blockbuster to acquire them, Marc Randolph’s transformational journey exemplifies how anyone with grit, gut instincts and determination can change the world-even with an idea that many think will never work.
What emerges,though, isn’t just the inside story of one of the world’s most iconic companies. Full of counter-intuitive concepts and written in binge-worthy prose, it answers some of our most fundamental questions about taking that leap of faith in business or in life: How do you begin? How do you weather disappointment and failure? How do you deal with success? What even is success?
From idea generation to team building to knowing when it’s time to let go, That Will Never Work is not only the ultimate follow-your-dreams parable, but also one of the most dramatic and insightful entrepreneurial stories of our time.
Status:
Completed
Rating:
4 Stars
Quotes & Highlights
“own your own business. control your own life.”
“Epiphanies are rare. And when they appear in origin stories, they’re often oversimplified or just plain false. We like these tales because they align with a romantic idea about inspiration and genius”
“Culture isn’t what you say. It’s what you do.”
“Truths like: Distrust epiphanies. The best ideas rarely come on a mountaintop in a flash of lightning. They don’t even come to you on the side of a mountain, when you’re stuck in traffic behind a sand truck. They make themselves apparent more slowly, gradually, over weeks and months. And in fact, when you finally have one, you might not realize it for a long time.”
“everyone is aligned when the wind is blowing the right way. it’s when a storm comes up that all of a sudden it becomes apparent that people have different goals and objectives”
“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.”
“Nobody Knows Anything. And it’s not just in Hollywood. It’s true in Silicon Valley, too. “Nobody Knows Anything” isn’t an indictment. It’s a reminder. An encouragement.”
“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?”