Marc Randolph 8:26
Yeah, you know, we all want that epiphany moment, because we kind of love that idea of the earth that we’ve been fed. Yeah, the Archimedes and all of a sudden, you’re ready, you know, the Apple has Newton on the head, or Yep, the guy’s girlfriend sells Pez dispensers. And boom, there is eBay. And the reason you come up with those stories is no one really wants to hear the long story. Long story is hours and pages. And so quickly, you go, okay, you just come up with something which is emotionally resonant. But the real story is, of course, a bit longer and that Reed Hastings and I had worked together at a previous company, one that redid founded, we’re all of a sudden going to be out of a job because we sold that company. And I was ready to do the next thing. I was going to start another company because Netflix was actually number six. So when this one was gone, I went okay, I’m starting another company. And Reed didn’t want a certain other company, he was going to become an educational flat therapist, but kind of wanted to keep his hand in this whole startup game. And so we can do an agreement that he would be my angel investor, that he would be on the board, that I would start and run the company and we both kind of get what we wanted. But what you’re mentioning is that process of there’s one little piece missing, which is what is this company going to be? What’s the idea? Right?
John Corcoran 9:47
And then I love some of the rejected ideas. I have to just throw this out there because we could be doing an interview right now about personalized shampoo delivered by mail, personalized surfboards, personalized baseball bats, all the other ideas that were rejected.
Marc Randolph 9:58
Custom dog food Don’t forget custom dog, dog. Yeah, I was I was an idea machine
John Corcoran 10:05
And time Marc, there’s still time.
Marc Randolph 10:08
Well, yeah, wonderfully, some of these actually happen. So I wasn’t so far off. But listen, one of the even more ridiculous ideas than personalized shampoo and custom dog food was doing. We pitched I pitched video rental by mail, that we would mail people videos, and that they’d watch them and return them. And it was a big category $8 billion a year with an entrenched competitor that everyone hated blockbuster. Yeah. The problem was, this is back in 1997. And if you just I don’t know, maybe you maybe remember, I guess. Yeah,
John Corcoran 10:40
I don’t remember. But I was gonna say, for the younger listeners that there was a time when you had to track down to a store and pick out what was leftover on a Friday or Saturday night and it sucked.
Marc Randolph 10:53
And even then back then the movies came in those big VHS cassettes. Yeah, these big massive, it’s like people of my generation remembering eight tracks. But anyway, that didn’t work. I did a lot of research and said there’s no way we can make this economically work mailing at someone and getting them back. But there was this breakthrough, which is one day while we were carpooling to work together, Reed mentioned, he’d read about this technology called DVD, this little thin piece of plastic, thin and light they were gonna put movies on them. And it kind of gave us an idea or more accurately a dusted off an idea which several months ago, we put a lot of time into thinking through how it might work, and realize this could be the key. And then this is the key thing, I believe, which is that we did not, then immediately go quick. Let’s go to the office and work on a business plan for this great new business. We did not put together pitch decks, we did not apply to do Shark Tank or something like that. We did the quintessential entrepreneur thing, which is immediately figured out is there a way we can figure out if this idea even has any validity. And so mid commute, we turn the car around and drove back down to Santa Cruz. We lived and went looking for a DVD. Which of course there weren’t any
John Corcoran 12:13
there were like only 100 or so titles that were even available at that point. It
Marc Randolph 12:17
wasn’t barely available in the test market. Yeah. And so we go what the hell. We’ll buy a CD, how different could that be. we want to use the CD, we only got a couple doors down to a gift store what a little pink envelope like you put a greeting card in. And we mailed the used CD to Reed’s house in Santa Cruz.
John Corcoran 12:36
Do you still have the envelope by the way?
Marc Randolph 12:38
No, you know, I wish I had some archives before that one is long gone. Probably sat in the backseat of a car for a couple months.
John Corcoran 12:48
And it was a Patsy Cline CD or something like that.
Marc Randolph 12:51
I think so. Yeah, you still have the CD. Oh, come on.
John Corcoran 12:57
Me too. I don’t have any CDs.
Marc Randolph 12:58
But I’ll sell you an NFT about the idea behind that. There you go. No, and you know that it’s all of a sudden, the next morning, you know, Reed just shows up to pick me up and he has this little envelope, unbroken CD, at his house one day for the price of a stamp. And you know, as that there was a real inciting moment. That was probably
John Corcoran 13:24
it told you that this could possibly work. But it was interesting the timing, because it was still a bit of a gamble. Because you had there’s no guarantee that people were going to buy DVD players to replace their VHS and that people were going to adopt this and that and also that the DVDs are going to be affordable enough because one of the things he wrote about in the book is that VHS is were sold by the studios for like 80 bucks 100 bucks a pop. Whereas for an interesting reason. The studio’s decided to sell DVDs for a lot cheaper and it made the economics a lot more palatable for you.
Marc Randolph 13:59
You know, people discount the amount of luck that goes into success. So many things have to break your way. And it was in some ways kind of insanity to start a company that was predicated on DVD when DVD had barely launched, and there was certainly no assurance that DVD wouldn’t go the way of lol really did myself go the way of a Betamax as a competing format would take it down or go the way of the laser disc where it gets to a certain penetration and stops. And if either of those things that happened, you know, as you mentioned, we’ll probably be talking now about dog food or shampoo or something. Right But you’re right it was crazy that that bet paid off.
John Corcoran 14:45
And now even your wife said that idea isn’t gonna work.
Marc Randolph 14:50
Yeah, that’s I we got to be that’s pretty common. I mean, everybody is pitching ideas for things that haven’t happened before. Everyone says that never works. And you’re right. You know, my investors said that my employees said that my wife, thank you said that. But it’s okay. Because no one knows anything, you know, what do they know? It hasn’t been tried before, the only way to figure out whether it’s gonna work is to try it. And I think that that really is what separates a true entrepreneur from everybody else is that they don’t just harbor the ideas in their head, they say, let’s figure out a way to test it. But figure out a way to try it.
John Corcoran 15:34
And you were fortunate that you had a small team that had come over with you from the other company that helped you really to test that idea over a period of months and help to do market research and figure out how you could make it work. Yeah,
Marc Randolph 15:49
one of the big advantages I was 38 when I started Netflix, and one of the big advantages of doing it, when you’re a little bit older, as you’ve got it, you had this track record of working with other people. You know, as I mentioned before, I’d done five startups previously. And you find people who share this same enjoyment, that coming into work every day, having no idea what you’re going to work on, and sharing that feeling of the thing you worked on, all of a sudden, it doesn’t work anymore, you got to find something new, but enjoy that. And once you collect them all, each time you launch a new business, it’s like an episode. It’s like watching The Blues Brothers or any other of those kinds of buddy movies where it’s let’s get the band back together again. And you gather them all together. And yes, I was lucky I had these people who were able to come right in with excitement and enthusiasm to go, let’s figure out a way to make this crazy idea work.
John Corcoran 16:45
Yeah. Now you had this you had experienced, you’d been co-founder, the US version of Mac User Magazine, and also co-founded two of the first mail-order sources of computer products. There’s that famous speech that Steve Jobs gave about how you can only connect the dots looking backwards rather than looking forward. So connect the dots for me now, how that previous experience helped you as you’re building Netflix.
Marc Randolph 17:14
So the whole first path of my career, I was a direct marketing person. You know, I did junk mail, I did catalogs. I did direct response television, I did magazine circulation, all of these is that’s direct marketing. And for some reason, when I first was exposed to it in my 20s, it spoke to me, you know, and again, looking backward, it probably spoke to me because it was this combination of art and science, that you could No, no doubt of this seventh decimal point, how much better the red envelope was versus the blue envelope. But you still had a say, of these 10,000 color envelopes? What colors do I try? Or do I even test envelope color at all? It was this creativity meets analytics. And I did that for a long time. And I did that for a good 10 plus years. And what happened is that when the internet came along, all of a sudden I saw on the internet some things that I don’t think a lot of other people recognize, which is how incredibly powerful a tool. This could be for direct response for deep personalization. Because at the time in my direct marketing world, personalization was sending out a mailing to someone that said, Dear John, won’t tell your friends at 17 Crescent circle B You know, it was such blunt force personalization whereas the internet you can be a different website for every individual person catered to their tastes. Thus, these pitches of personalized shampoo, custom dog food and both of those were subscription businesses we’re going to be subscription businesses. So I was really just taking the thing that I’d already spent so many years loving and mastering and recognizing a whole new palette to play with.
John Corcoran 19:09
You know I think a lot of people remember the delight you open up your mailbox and you look in and there’s the red envelope so we’ll point out did you have that realization that that would really help it stand out?
Marc Randolph 19:23
What? The red envelope or just having it?
John Corcoran 19:25
Yeah, the red envelope. Yeah, we got a movie. We got a good movie. It came. It arrived.
Marc Randolph 19:31
well that Yeah, there is a certain Glee in that and you know when we did this idea that everyone said will never work. They were right because it didn’t work. Now for that first year and a half It was terrible red envelope or not. It would not get anyone to love it. What changed was when we a year and a half and finally came up with an even crazier idea of doing the no due dates, no late fees, subscription. Yeah and a queue.
John Corcoran 19:58
So how is it priced? Initially,
Marc Randolph 20:01
it was 1994. Oh, before we were Elkhart for the first year and a half it was all cart four bucks. For $4, you rent a movie, we mail it to you, you keep it for seven days, and you get to mail it back to us. If you’re late, we’re gonna hit you with a late fee. I mean, there was not a lot of business model innovation here. So So could I do
John Corcoran 20:20
Netflix is known as this very intelligent data company. Now, was that a? What? Did you use the data from that first year and a half to make that educated decision about changing to the subscript flats fee subscription? No, no overdue dates? Or was it more of a gut instinct? This isn’t working. We’ll try this
Marc Randolph 20:42
was a gut instinct thing. But don’t forget, we had tried several 100 other things which hadn’t worked. And we certainly had, it wasn’t like, Oh, we’ve got this one, which is going to work. But let’s do all a year and a half worth of crap first. This was as likely or unlikely to fail as all the others we really didn’t know. And in some ways, this one was even more irrational because it was so out there. I mean, this was Reed and I were one day, we’re in the warehouse and surrounded by 100,000 DVDs sitting in boxes on shelves, and asking ourselves how crazy it was that we’re storing them here where they’re useless. And led to this brainstorming of would there be a way to store them at the customer’s houses? Do you do peer to peer. And that’s where you come up with the idea? Well, maybe we’ll just let them keep as long as they want and swap them back when they’re done or mailman another one. And that was a crazy idea. But even that wouldn’t have worked. Without a couple things. It needed a subscription. But it also needed that cue because the queue, that list of movies you wanted to see was the magic. Because what it did is you put a mail, you put your disk in the mail, and then went about your day. And then not only did the next day, a disk arrived, but something was in it you’d wanted to see. You didn’t have to go order it. You didn’t have to think again, I need to get a movie that just showed up. Right? It was an amazingly magical experience. And lo and behold, again, looking backwards, it just worked,
John Corcoran 22:15
right just took off, it led to such happiness, because you were much more likely to get movies that you actually wanted to watch rather than going down to the store being stuck finding whatever was left over. Now you didn’t call the service DVDs by mail, you call it Netflix, talk a little bit about the naming.
Marc Randolph 22:33
Yeah, you know, it’s funny what you just said about getting these movies that you want, rather than having this miserable experience of wandering up and down the aisles of a Blockbuster and then ending up like a lemming at the new release wall. And we had that very front of mind at the very, very beginning. You know, everyone said it’ll never work. And they had to bait objections. And one, of course, was blockbuster. But the other objection was they go, it’s a digital medium. It’s just a matter of weeks before everyone’s downloading, these and streaming these. And we realized that if we bet everything on it being a plastic company, if we had called it, for example, the world’s fastest shipper of plastic .com, it might have done great for a while until that eventually went away because we knew it would. But then again, if we had bet it on streaming at the beginning, we would have had nine years of nothing, before the world was finally ready for that. And so with a positioning, we ended up choosing, which I think was one of the smartest decisions we made was to make it delivery agnostic. And the positioning was, Netflix is a place to discover great stories. Because that works. It works when we send it to you on a DVD. It works when we stream it to you, it’ll work when we can beam it telepathically into your filling or whatever. It just works. And then we just set about to make that real. And that was building all the deep content, making sure we had every single copy of every single DVD available, working on the algorithm predicting taste, eventually leading to creating our own content. But it was actually kind of a good idea so transcended. And in 2007 when Netflix began streaming, there wasn’t like launching a new company. This was the same company. We had millions of subs 10s of millions of subscribers who already thought of us as a place to get great content. We were just changing how we got it to the right.
John Corcoran 24:31
Right now you, it’s interesting because now you know with Netflix and Amazon dominating the streaming wars and dominating even Oscar nominations and things like that. You had a meeting with Jeff Bezos, I think was in 1998. Tell us, tell us that story.
Marc Randolph 24:49
Yeah, it was interesting because we weren’t far in this is probably the first summer in business. And we get the call from Jeff Bezos inviting us to come on up to Seattle to chat. And it didn’t require a lot of intelligence, know what he wanted to chat about. because believe it or not just like you may find it hard to imagine that you used to have to go to a store to get movies to watch. Well Believe it or not back then this company called Amazon only sold books. But Jeff had made no secret of the fact that he was going to be the everything store at some point. And we knew that video and music were the next one. So he was obviously calling us up to do a maker by decision. And so Reed and I flew up to Seattle. And it was fantastic. You know, Amazon was in the seedy part of town we are walking through, there are people shooting up on the sidewalk and broken glass. And we were looking at each other in disbelief that the pioneer of e-commerce, Jeff Bezos, would have his headquarters in a skid row here. But it was a fantastic meeting. Because you know, Jeff, and I were kind of chatting about these early days, what it was like at the beginning, and we both had a bell that would ring whenever an order came in. And then at the end, his CTO, he CFO, pardon me, started us out and kind of intimated that if the steel was going to happen, it would probably be you know, low, eight figures, you know, we figured that’s probably 14 to $16 million. And Reed, now we’re going on one hand, that’s a lot of money for just about six months work. But don’t forget, this was an idea that everyone said would never work. And here was Jeff Bezos, the king, who was seeing something that we were doing. And also Reed and I were right at that critical point where we thought we had solved all the big problems. I mean, we had managed to build a website, which was no small feat in 1998, we have managed to find a copy of every DVD available. We had made deals with the DVD manufacturers to distribute coupons in their boxes. We were now ready to start raking it in. And so in many ways that trip was like, it was more of a commitment ceremony that were Reed and I had to look each other in the eye and say, Okay, are we in?
John Corcoran 27:20
We’re not cautious going into it. Were you worried about sharing too many secrets?
Marc Randolph 27:25
No. And I think that’s just part of the fact that I’ve been doing. I’ve been an entrepreneur for so long that guarding secrets is ridiculously overrated. And 99% of success is the execution. But more importantly, you know, my whole premise is that ideas don’t count for anything. The idea you start with is never the idea that ends up being successful. So what if I share the idea that I started with? Right? That’s not the process, the process is the evolution of that, that idea, and no one’s going to steal that from me.
John Corcoran 28:00
Right. It’s really interesting, the dynamic between your personality and Reed’s personality, very different personalities, you bring different skill sets to the table. And you know, that Amazon meeting was interesting, because he owned a larger chunk of the company, my impression from reading your book talking about it, is that Reed, decided, no, I wouldn’t sell at this point, do you think you would have sold if it had been solely up to you if they had offered you $15 million for six months or their work?
Marc Randolph 28:28
No, no, that’s who knows, but I’m extremely unlikely or I have zero recollection of feeling that way. You know, I’ve never been motivated by the stuff that I do by the money. It’s not what drives me. What drives me is the challenge of solving these really interesting problems. It’s identifying a problem and trying to figure it out. And to be at this point where you’re right on the verge of seeing whether this thing you’ve been trying to figure out is going to work. Hard to imagine, he could have bought that away from me. But listen, and never say never, you know, if you’d say I’ll give you $150 million for it, or 1.5 billion, who knows? But so it’s not nothing but seriously, this was not in the category of not being interested in giving up.
John Corcoran 29:21
Yeah. Relating to the other question that I asked about connecting the dots backwards, looking backwards, you are related to Sigmund Freud, and also Edward Bernays, who is a giant mass media and advertising kind of called the father of modern-day public relations. He figured out in many ways how to apply new discoveries in psychology and psychoanalysis to marketing and sales. How do you view that heritage influencing your body of work?
Marc Randolph 29:53
Well, I have it isn’t like you know, siggy came to me and said Marc. This internet thing is going to be huge,
John Corcoran 30:03
would have been helpful probably.
Marc Randolph 30:05
Cuz In fact, I had no direct contact with either of them in terms of actually sitting at their knee and listening to their wisdom.
John Corcoran 30:13
But influential, I think you said, as a kid you there are paintings of them or pictures of them.
Marc Randolph 30:19
Certainly That’s true. They mean that it was a big part of my family identity that we came from this lineage. But what’s weird is the fact that I did end up in being very deeply involved in media and public relations and marketing, having come from that background, but I have no idea how that transference takes place.
John Corcoran 30:47
You know, I, I’m curious, you know, we wouldn’t have Netflix today if it weren’t for you. But at the same time, as you look at Netflix today, in 2021, does it feel like a part of you? Or does it feel foreign? Or perhaps a mix of both? What do you feel when you hear the company
Marc Randolph 31:05
is certain? Well, certainly, I have a tremendous pride in what Netflix has become. I mean, it will always be my baby. But as anyone who has children knows, you’re always puzzled as to what was your contribution to the success? You know, kids do great things. And you’re going to do that for me. And certainly, my DNA is absolutely all over that company. I mean, culture and a company used to pick one culture is not what you say. It’s not what you write down. It’s not what gets formulated in a boardroom is what you do. It gets Ma, it’s how the founders act is how they treat each other. It’s how they treat their employees, how they treat their customers. And I can absolutely see those fingerprints, I mean, the analytic focus, that’s a cultural thing that I know came from how Reed and I behaved. So I know that a lot of me isn’t I mean, I, I joke, sometimes that doesn’t quite look like me, but it has my nose. But um, I’m as surprised as anybody. It’s, you know, back in 1998. When we started, we just wanted to see if this stupid website could work. We wanted to see if we could find a repeatable, scalable business model. You never imagined you’re going to be in every country in the world, you never imagined, you’re going to make your own TV shows. You never imagined you’re going to produce your own movies. And you sure never envisioned Netflix and chill. I mean, I never saw that.
John Corcoran 32:44
I want to ask you, so you know, you, you took the name ‘That Will Never Work’, you put it on your book, you put it on your podcast, you fully embrace this, because you were told it so often. And now you talk to founders all the time on the podcast and in real life and private phone conversations? And do you feel a tension? You know, if someone comes to you, and it is something that you feel like it will not work? Do you feel? Do you hold yourself back from saying that to that person? Or how do you decide when you have to give them the unvarnished truth and say, I really do think this is not going to work? Or do you always hold back and say, Well, maybe it could?
Marc Randolph 33:28
Well, the first thing is, ‘That Will Never Work’. There is a tension there. I love that name, because it has this tension in it between the fact that everyone knows everyone hears it all the time. But everyone knows, but Netflix, and they know what other things they’ve seen succeed. And that is the fact it’s yes, sometimes it does, which is the message that you have to keep trying, you have to try something. And the coaching that I do is not pronouncing judgment on people’s ideas, that’s not helpful. What I’m trying to do on the podcast is what I’ve been doing with people for 20 years is that helping them solve problems, encouraging them to take the idea that’s in their head and getting it out in the world, giving them the support as they take the side gig and try and make it into a real a real business. And I’ve been doing that forever. And what’s different now is just that I’m recording it, you know, as hard. Being an entrepreneur is lonely. I mean, most of the time you’re working on problems by yourself. And almost always the problem you’re trying to solve is not something you can go to someone else who solved it before. And but at the same time, there’s so much commonality, that the idea that the problems that I address on the podcast are ones that resonate with everybody and it just is great sometimes for someone to hear that someone else has the same problem they do. But then even better to be a fly on the wall as they help someone else work through how to address it, how to solve it, how to approach it.
John Corcoran 35:10
I’m going to wrap things up in a moment here. But one of my last questions here, when you started Netflix, you didn’t put any money into it. One you had Reed to put money into it. But you’d also just had your third child and just bought a house. And you wrote in the book that you didn’t regret the decision, but rather had a sense of wonder and how little anybody knows at the outset of any startup venture. And I, you know, one of the last questions I like to ask on this podcast is what are people excited about? What trends are they keeping their eyes on in the future? Are there trends that you’re looking at that you see that you’re excited about? Or is it just really hard to predict? Those sorts of things?
Marc Randolph 35:52
It’s impossible to predict. And certainly, I’m not the guy to predict it. And I don’t try and handicap it that way. So it’s not like I’m saying, okay, cryptocurrency or robotics or AI.
John Corcoran 36:04
And I mean, this respectfully, that is so hard to hear that you can’t see the future because you know, you invented Netflix. Yeah, I mean, jeez, you know,
Marc Randolph 36:13
sure. But I didn’t do that, because I saw a house of cards and the crown in the future. And all I had to do is connect the dots from here to there. I did this because I was trying to solve customer problems. And it just led in that direction. And that is the very nature of entrepreneurship is you just don’t know, what I’m looking for is the people. They dragged me into fascinating things. I mean, on the podcast, just the most recent episode that dropped with someone who’s launching a chain or a hoax, it’s a chain of ping pong studios. Autonomous ping pong studios opened with a key well for the keypad, you get the balls out of a locker using another keypad. Put a crazy idea, but he’s making it work. And it’s fantastic. And other entrepreneurs, I’m speaking with launching a 60,000 square foot indoor action, and Adventure Park with rappelling and zip lines and alcohol. What could go on there. And his challenge is not logistics. So the construction, he’s going this thing’s gonna be open 18 hours a day, seven days a week? How do I maintain some sense of balance with my family? Another woman is doing an online erotic Art Gallery trying to sell erotic Art Online. And she’s struggling with how do I make social media work when one false slip? And I get banned? I mean, these are such interesting things. I just love getting the chance to sit down with people and help them work through how do you approach problems like this?
John Corcoran 37:48
Yeah, the podcast is a perfect medium for you. I can say having done it for many years. You’re gonna love it. Last two questions. So first, I’m a big fan of gratitude. So as you look around at peers, others in your industry, contemporaries, who do you respect who you admire right now,
Marc Randolph 38:04
you know, it’s the thing which has always been my objective in life is balance. I was lucky enough to launch on that I wanted to hold on to when I was still in my late 20s, early 30s. And have struggled and fought large, they’re successful in doing that. And for me, it’s different for everybody. But for me, balance, I do need, I do need the business piece of it is so intellectually engaging. It’s really the intellectual challenge that I have of starting, growing and making successful businesses. But on the other hand, I made this vow years ago that I was not going to be this guy on his sixth company and his sixth life, that I was going to prioritize that relationship with my kids. And the third thing is, I know what makes me personally whole and it’s outdoor stuff, it’s being able to get out and go climbing to be able to fly up to Alaska and kayak a river, it’s been able to do mountain biking. And those are not the types of activities you can squeeze in between your 11 o’clock meeting and your two o’clock call, you’ve got to make sure they all fit. So that’s a long way of saying that the person I respect a lot is someone who has, I think, done that as best I can tell, which is Richard Branson. You know, I look at him. And I go certainly as an entrepreneur totally kicks my ass. In terms of the breadth and range of the company, he started, but I deeply respect the fact that he still has this tremendous connection to his family. You know, still on his first wife still as very, very closely, she has kids, and then certainly deeply respects the way that he feeds the rat. He still has time to go ballooning around the world so I spent some time with him. And it was like, Hey, we’re gonna swim from this island to that island. He’s just like two and a half. Miles,
John Corcoran 40:00
It was exactly an invitation to speak at his Island at Necker Island that inspired you to write your book. Do you want to tell us about that?
Marc Randolph 40:08
Certainly, it’s actually a pretty good story too. But you know, he invited me to come speak at the island because they were doing a conference. And the conference was for a bunch of very successful female business owners who were Australian. And the purpose of the event was called finding your purpose. And it was for people who had business success, and they’re saying, Well, now what? And they were there for me to speak about how you turn ideas and realities. And I went, yeah, purposely, I’ll go to Necker Island. This sounds awesome. We’ll do my little gig. And then I’ll hang out on the beach with my wife. And I got there, and I did my presentation. And I figured I’ll stick around for a little while and see what this purpose thing is all about. And this net, one speaker after another, after another, and hours later, I’m still sitting in my seat, my towels untouched. And it was like they were speaking to me. They were really making me think, you know, I have this semi not deserved visibility because of Netflix. People will show up and 10,000 people will come to hear me speak for an hour. I can get people to read it. But what do I do with that? What’s the point? And it led to this long period of introspection about what is the point. And it said, I think for me, the point is encouraging people to take the same steps that I’ve taken, to give them this chance to tell them that you have this idea. If you think you might enjoy being an entrepreneur, if you have something you want to change in your life. Let me help you do it. And that led to the book. And it led to the podcast and I’m not sure where it will lead next.
John Corcoran 41:52
And and also a shout out for you’ve been involved with 1% for the Planet, which is a wonderful organization. So thank you for your, your service, that organization as well. Alright, final question. Let’s pretend we’re at an awards banquet, much like the Oscars or the Emmys, you’re receiving an award for lifetime achievement. for everything you’ve done up to this point, what we all want to know is in addition to family and friends, of course, who are the colleagues? Who are the friends or the business partners? Who are the ambassadors? Who are the mentors, peers? Who are the people that you would acknowledge in your remarks?
Marc Randolph 42:19
Well, since you’re dispensing with the family piece, which of course is a critical piece of support? No, you don’t do a startup by yourself. It’s impossible. I mean, there is this ridiculous glorification of the founder, as if they do it all themselves, but every idea of every company is a conglomeration of so many people’s inputs. You know, there is one person who comes into it with a background in direct marketing and another person who comes in with this deep computer science logical background. There’s somebody with a late fee on a movie, there’s somebody else who had this experience, someone else that one. It’s through all those pieces that these things have created. And so I am just so incredibly thankful to all the people who signed on, to help make these crazy ideas real. I mean, the people who are early on at Netflix, who were doing it for the fun of it. And all the other startups I’ve done at Looker, which I did after Netflix, that’s the great part is being able to come into work and sit around the table with really smart people solving really fun problems. I couldn’t have done anything I’ve accomplished without all of them.
John Corcoran 43:33
Marc, such a pleasure talking to you. That Will Never Work is the name of the book and the podcast, which you can check out on iTunes and all the different podcast channels and anywhere else Marc that people should go to learn more about you or connect with you.
Marc Randolph 43:47
Well, certainly for all things Randolph there’s a website, which is marcrandolph.com, Marc with a ‘C’, Randolph with a ‘Ph’. And that’s where you can find links to the podcast to the book, to all my social media stuff to my blog posts. You’ll be sick of me after a while.
John Corcoran 44:04
Well, I’m certainly not after this conversation. So Marc, thank you so much for your time. Thank you and have a great day.
Marc Randolph 44:10
Thanks, John. It’s been a pleasure.
Outro 44:12
Thank you for listening to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast with John Corcoran. Find out more at smartbusinessrevolution.com. And while you’re there, sign up for our email list and join the revolution. And be listening for the next episode of the Smart Business Revolution Podcast.