Words matter. These are the best Marc Randolph Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Build something, make something, test something, sell something. Learn for yourself if your idea is a good one.
I’m not sure I want to preserve the old ways just for the sake of saying, ‘I don’t believe in change.’
My first real job lasted for three years. It ended the day I was unceremoniously fired.
Who knows what form storytelling will take in the future?
That became the Netflix culture: radical honesty.
One of my bywords is that nobody knows anything, including me.
At a startup, it’s hard enough to get a single thing right, much less a whole bunch of things. Especially if the things you are trying to do are not only dissimilar but actively impede each other.
The lessons I learned starting Netflix – and over a lifetime of entrepreneurship – are broadly applicable to anyone with a dream.
As entrepreneurs, or artists, or just people with dreams, 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.
Collaborative decision-making is very poor in crises.
When I first met Jeff Bezos back in the late 90s, the only automated thing in his office was a rotating fan, gently blowing across a pair of identical blue shirts he’d hung on a water pipe behind his desk.
I’m not a ‘but’ man. Nothing good ever comes of that word.
That Will Never Work’ is my chance to share all the secrets I’ve accumulated in a 40 years career as a entrepreneur – secrets that can help anyone turn their dream into a reality.
When I was 23, I was quite possibly the worst real estate agent in New York. I was working for my mother’s agency in Chappaqua, and no one was buying houses. In eight months, I made zero sales. I rented one apartment.
The simple reason I like every idea is that I’m an optimist.
Some of my fondest memories of the early years of Netflix have to do with our efforts to figure out the most efficient, effective, and fast methods to get DVDs to people all over the country.
By being courageous enough to state the difficult truth, the most important reputation that you will preserve is your own.
Two-sided markets are notoriously finicky.
One of the key lessons I learned at Netflix was the necessity of focus.
I still have long lists of things that I want to accomplish every day.
I’m not a glass-half-full optimist. I’m a glass-overflowing optimist.
My father was an investment banker, a stock broker.
Most people have a kind of survivor bias about luck. When something wonderful happens – when preparation meets opportunity, with excellent results – we think: ‘How lucky!’ But we don’t usually acknowledge all the times when things just… fizzle out. All the times when preparation comes to nothing.
Every successful career I’ve ever known was filled with long periods of meandering, months or even years when no one knew what would happen next. Look at me: I started as a geology major turned failed realtor.
No one has ever asked me to give a graduation speech. But in my years of working with aspiring entrepreneurs, many of them in college, I’ve gotten used to giving advice.
I’m this big believer that culture is not what you say, it’s what you do. Who cares about your PowerPoint and about what you’ve carved into your cornerstone? If it’s not being modeled, it won’t be readable.
There’s nothing worse than the guy who at the party goes, ‘Oh, I had that idea two years ago.’ Well, then, why didn’t you do something two years ago?
Once you’re an entrepreneur you’re always an entrepreneur, and you need that fix.
Pitching a concept well is certainly important, but ultimately you have to build it.
Like most people in 1997, I hadn’t ever even seen a DVD, much less watched one.
In a two-sided market, focusing on the customer will increase a business’s ability to extract value from the supply side.
I tell aspiring entrepreneurs all the time: Validate your idea locally. Get some experience under your belt. 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.
People watch ‘The Social Network,’ and what they hone in on is the wealth and the parties and the excitement, and they don’t realize the grind and the ‘gruelingness’ and the disappointment.
People imagine that Netflix sprang fully formed into a global streaming giant, but Netflix might have been personalised sporting goods – or customised shampoo – or even pet food, since these were all ideas that I pitched Reed Hastings in those first months.
As a student I’d done work with a charity that took inner-city kids from disadvantaged areas and introduced them to hiking and climbing in the wilderness.
Companies become what they want to become.
The biggest problem I see with early-stage entrepreneurs is they get the idea in their head, and they leave it in their head. And they begin embellishing it in their head, making it more ornate. They add on the second story to their dream house – then add the tennis court and the turrets and the gargoyles.
I personally believe that a critical part to innovation is that exchange of ideas so when you say, ‘Here’s my idea,’ someone else at the next table, who is in a different party, will go, ‘Oh, these guys are trying that,’ so that comes.
People are always advised to follow your dreams, but in ‘That Will Never Work’ I show them how!
As software began to be sold to people who would never consider themselves technical, it suddenly became clear that you needed people who spoke their language.
It used to be true that to succeed in the creative class, you had to move immediately to where the action was. It was how you made connections, how you got auditions, how you found an audience and funding and some attention for your craft. But not anymore.
Diversity is not a skin thing, necessarily. Diversity is you have people around the table who have different backgrounds and different experiences and think differently.
Companies make a big point of how their culture is all about ‘bad news first,’ but when it comes to people, they are suddenly scared to communicate bad news out of some mistaken feeling of politeness or political correctness.
It was a long, circuitous route from my mom’s real estate business to Netflix. It didn’t happen overnight. Or in a year. Or even in ten years. But it happened.
When a company gets bigger, when it begins to bring on employees, it naturally goes through this tendency of wanting to control, of wanting to build process – essentially to say not every one of our customers or employees has great judgment.
Take any job in a growing, exciting company. You’ll learn so much.
With people, if you see something you want to change, you can make the change immediately. And if that doesn’t work, you can change it again half an hour later. You can’t do that with a robot. They’re terrible at experimenting.
When someone uses ‘low eight figures,’ that means barely eight figures.
Now, I love a good factory tour. Drop me into a bottling plant, an automotive assembly line, or a jellybean factory, and I’m happy as a clam at high tide.
Culture is a critical piece of success.
I don’t know if there’s a genetic marker for entrepreneurship. But if there is, it’s most likely not a genius for planning. It’s a propensity for action – and the ability to put failure behind you quickly. To stop being precious about your ideas.
I played second base.
The role of a founder-CEO is extremely lonely. You can’t always be fully forthcoming with your board or investors or employees.
Here’s a simple truth: When you surround a good idea with brilliant people, it changes. No matter how much you plan, great ideas have a mind of their own.
As Looker got larger, the talented people we hired started to see things that we couldn’t. And what had looked like a company the three of us could run out of our houses for a few hours a day became something bigger. Much bigger.
