We didn't want to be the best shipper of plastic, nor the best streaming technology, we positioned ourselves as a great place to find stories. We could make that true in the DVD world and the digital world through things like our taste-engine meaning that whether the product came in the post or through a wire, customers saw it as the same.
The people who were there at the beginning may not be the people who are scalable... As a founder, one of the hardest things you ever may need to do is take someone into your office who was there from the beginning... but who you now recognise doesn't have the skills for the next chapter of the business' journey.
The layers of compliance that appear in companies are basically what the company does to protect itself against bad judgement. They build guardrails. At Netflix, we decided to flip that around – rather than building systems to protect ourselves from bad decisions, we built systems of judgement, systems that are optimised for the people who have good judgement.
The right idea is one that fascinates you, that you can't get out of your mind, that's a puzzle you want to solve. The path from a raw idea to success is a long one- full of frustration, dead-ends.... If you don't have something that genuinely fascinates you, you're going to give-up long before the point you finally stumble on the thing that works.
Culture is not aspirational, it's observational. It's not something you and your co-founders sit down, dream-up, put into PowerPoint, and create some posters from, for the break-out room. Culture, simply, is how you behave and how you treat your co-founders, employees, and customers.
The layers of compliance that appear in companies are basically what the company does to protect itself against bad judgement. They build guardrails. At Netflix, we decided to flip that around – rather than building systems to protect ourselves from bad decisions, we built systems of judgement.
Culture is not aspirational, it's observational. It's not something you and your co-founders sit down, dream-up, put into PowerPoint, and create some posters from. Culture, simply, is how you behave and how you treat your co-founders, employees, and customers.
When you start- the thing that you start with is almost never the thing that becomes successful. Lo-and-behold, in April 1998, when we finally launched this company – they were right, it didn't work, it was a terrible idea.
Marc Randolph on Netflix, Success & Building Billion-Dollar Companies
Marc Randolph is a veteran Silicon Valley entrepreneur, advisor, and investor. As co-founder and founding CEO of Netflix,...
What 337 conversations with the world's leading thinkers reveal about the spirit of entrepreneurship