Habits and Hustle - Episode 128: Marc Randolph – Co-founder of Netflix, Host of “That Will Never Work” Podcast and Best Selling Author

Episode Date: August 10, 2021

Marc Randolph is a Co-founder of Netflix, Host of the “That Will Never Work” Podcast, and Best Selling Author. Gate-keeping and secrecy of ideas and strategies is a pervasive part of almost any high-stakes career. You’d think one of the co-founders of Netflix would hold those as close to the chest as possible. Well, with that setup, obviously no. Marc goes as far out of his way as possible to share what can and has been proven to work for himself and many other entrepreneurs. Whether it’s his own podcast, book, speaking events, or coaching he is determined to bring what he knows to the table and prove that anyone can do what he’s done. It’s not a “born with it” quality. It’s just good ideas, work, and either knowing or having the tools provided to you for success. This podcast episode is no different. Marc answers every question fully and openly, not skimping on the details. In fact, near the end, Marc reveals a deep secret of his own that may shock you. Looking to hear from the real deal? Learning from one of the very best in the biz right now? Finally, a profound success of an entrepreneur is not only kind and open with what to do, but ecstatic and practically mission-bound to let us all in on how it’s done. Don’t miss out. Youtube Link to This Episode Marc’s Instagram Marc’s Website ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Did you learn something from tuning in today? Please pay it forward and write us a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts. 📧If you have feedback for the show, please email [e-mail]  📙Get yourself a copy of Jennifer Cohen’s newest book from Habit Nest, Badass Body Goals Journal. ℹ️Habits & Hustle Website 📚Habit Nest Website 📱Follow Jennifer – Instagram – Facebook – Twitter – Jennifer’s Website Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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I got this Tony Robbins you're listening to Habitson Hustle. Fresh it. Today on Habitson Hustle, we have Mark Randolph, also best known as the co-founder and the first CEO of Netflix. Heard of them. Mark Randolph's career as an entrepreneur, though, spends more than four decades. He's founded or co-founded a half a dozen other successful startups, including most recently Locker Data Sciences, which is sold to Google

in 2019 for a cool 2.6 billion dollars. He is currently mentoring a handful of other early stage companies and advising hundreds of other entrepreneurs. He is also an active seed investor in startups all over the world and an author of the internationally best-selling memoir called That Will Never Work. He also has a podcast called That Will Never Work where he dispenses advice, encouragement, and tough love to struggling entrepreneurs. I really enjoy doing this podcast with Mark.

He is super down to earth, gave really practical tactile information for entrepreneurs at every stage. I hope you enjoy listening to this episode because I really enjoyed speaking with him. I was really happy and excited to even be speaking to you even more so after I read your book, after I kind of watched you in a bunch of different podcasts because you speak my language. I mean, I kid you not. I did a TED talk maybe a year and a half ago with the one, with what I say over and over again is the one thing that you say over and over

again, which is this whole like stop thinking and start doing, like action, action, action. And that really is like a kind of like your tag, like that's what your book is about. Really, and about like, you know, that's a tagline. So I was like, this is my kind of guy. And then every time I opened your mouth and said something to you, I was like, you like the outdoors about that. I mean, everything I'm like, I can't wait to actually have the chance to speak to you.

I guess not in person, but I guess as close as possible. What passes for it these days, yeah? Yeah, exactly. Where do you actually live? Are you in California, but just north? Yeah, I live in Santa Cruz. Oh, you're in Santa Cruz. Northern California, but you know, south of San Francisco, kind of in the more rural. It's nice. Right. Well, I'm just really happy to have you on the podcast. So welcome. Thank you very much. A pleasure. You're so happy to hear that. So let's get right into it because I got so many questions

for you. I don't even, let's just start with what I said, the whole stop thinking and stop and stop acting concept. Do you feel that as an entrepreneur, I mean, you've had quite a, you know, your career has been just exceptional. This Netflix was not obviously your only success. You've had the newest one is Looker. It's a call Looker data, is that? Yeah, Looker data, yeah. That was acquired by Google for what, $2.6 billion as well.

Yeah, I know, right? I mean, like, you're no slouch, right? Like you're doing really, you're picking well, but you kind of like pride yourself on being the startup guy. Like you kind of really enjoy that space a lot, right? Like the actual, the beginnings of a company, the startup. So I guess my first question would be to you, like, can you, do you think that an entrepreneur is born or made? Do you think you have to have certain qualities and characteristics to have the chops, so to speak, or is it something that can actually be learned over time?

I 100% believe it can be learned over time. I explicitly think it's not something that you have to be born with. Or more specifically, I just don't want people to think they can't do it because they don't have some special talent that's irretrievable. I mean, I think one of the things I really try and emphasize, and it sounds stupid, is like how unspecial I am.

I mean, I do have certain things that I'm really good at, but there are things that I worked at and taught myself and learned through practice rather than something that I sprang forth fully formed from my mother's womb as it immediately began working on a pitch deck or something like that. Right. Yeah. These are all things that I think I really think anyone can do it. And I'm not saying that someone can just,

you know, roll out of 12th grade and immediately do a huge, you know, $50 million round startup. No. But this the exact same way you wouldn't roll out of your 12th grade high school tennis team and then immediately say, I'm ready to play in Wimbledon. You've got to kind of work, maybe you do, but you've got to work your way up.

And the same thing goes for entrepreneurship. So the only way to do it is not necessarily the big leagues. If you have an idea, like we both say, just try it. Just try it. And you talk about that. So before I even go into that part, what you said, something just now, what was interesting, you said you were really good at certain things.

What do you think that you're really good at that kind of helped your trajectory of so? One thing that I've honed over time is something. I guess I call it remote empathy, which is the ability to understand how people may feel about something. We're not necessarily watching them. You know when you're in a one-on-one and you say something and then someone nods or they smile or they get nervous, you really can immediately know how your words have impacted them. And then having general empathy is saying, yikes, I know that when I say this,

that Jennifer's gonna be really disappointed. But remote empathy is saying, I'm gonna put together something and offer a solution, a price point, even the words I use in an email. And I've got a pretty good sense how those things are going to make someone else feel. It turns out that in a startup where you're always doing things that most likely haven't been done before, being able to have an intuitive sense of how those things will impact somebody is a really, really helpful skill. But again, I don't think I was necessarily born with this.

I just was lucky enough to spend the first 10 years of my career as a direct marketing guy, which by definition requires being able to anticipate in advance how someone's going to respond to something you've written or priced or described. And it might happen a day or a week or a month in the future, either looking at a piece of paper, but if you better have some sense of how that's going to work. So that's just one. I mean, another one, let's give you one more, is I'm pretty good at this combination of triage and focus. And triage is this recognition that in a startup, but it had most things, there's usually 100 things

you could do. And in a startup, it's more that there's 100 things that are broken. There's 100 things crying out for attention that are all screaming, fix me, fix me, fix me. And what the triage is recognizing that of all those things, well, a whole bunch of them, no matter what you do, they're still going to be broken. And a whole bunch of

them don't really need to be fixed, that they're fine the way they are. But there's a handful of things that if you get those right, it'll make all the rest not matter. And I do have a pretty good intuitive sense about what those focal points not matter. And I do have a pretty good intuitive sense about what those focal points should be. And I'd paired with this ability to put blinders on and say, I'm just gonna attack those two things and put 100% of my time into two things, rather than 2% of my time into 50 things.

Right, so then, and that's a good point too, because I feel like that's what people don't do that very often. A lot of times, and that can be their downfall. Oh, I think so too. They have the sense that they need to be, everything needs to be perfect, or that everything needs to be in place. I'm launching a company.

I better have a good sales function, better have a good support function. I better have a good way to do this, that, and the other thing. Right. And that's great. And you end up with everything kind of half-assed, but you have it all. Right, perfect.

It's so much more important to pick one piece of it. And if you get that one piece of it right, they will ignore it. I was just talking to an entrepreneur this morning, and they were asking about looker. And I was thinking, to an entrepreneur this morning and they were asking about looker. When we launched that, it was really a terrible product. It was hugely deficient in the feature set that most companies would want. But we knew it did one thing and one thing really well because we did that on purpose. We just had to find customers who had such a severe problem.

They didn't care about the bells and whistles. They just wanted that one problem solved and lo and behold, this product would do it. So in that case, the thing to get right was the product. That isn't always the case. But usually, there's a focal point. Well, because you've had a couple that before you did, before Netflix even became Netflix,

you tried a bunch of other, again again a lot of other ideas, right? So you had you want to do a dog food company or like specialized dog food for well, you could like you tell me But I want I want to talk about that how your whole trial and error process like in the car with you know your co-founder If you tell us a little bit about that Yeah, you know because the people seem to think that if you do a startup, it's got to come from some passion. You could tell by my, like, on the voice, what I think about that.

I can't. It's great. Not like Reed Hastings, my co-founder and I were movie guys. We didn't spend our time commuting back and forth. The works we commuted together, debating who is the best French cinematographer or, you know, not at all. My kids were like, uh, three, seven and nine or something. And so I watched Lion King probably six or seven hundred times. Right.

But so this was much more about anything could have gone. We have different criteria. So yeah, I pitched, I mean, one of that, I, I get in the car with rigs, we commute it together to work. Right. Now, I would pitch them on the, on my latest crazy brainstorm. And they were crazy brainstorms. And one of them, as you alluded to, was custom personalized dog food that we would formulate a blend for your specific pet, for his age, and gender, you know, activity level, climate, whatever, and then you would subscribe to it. And the same thing happened every time,

I would get in the car, excited, and I've done some homework and I'd pitch this thing, and read with and say anything. He'd just be driving, looking up the window. And I would just wait patiently, and your minute would go by, or maybe a minute and a half, or two minutes, and finally, you would like to turn and go,

that will never work. And then lay into me with this incredible business school like dissertation on all the flaws in my reasoning and the market issues, or or legal challenges or regulatory problems. And then, you know, I was ready. I know what's going to happen. So then, of course, I lay right back into him, of course. No, I have done the research.

And we would basically beat these things to death. And if we came to places where we both agreed, we didn't understand enough to really get to a resolution, then I would spend the day researching it. And then in the carpool ride back, we just launched right back into it, but armed with new information. And we did that every day. And we did that with custom dog food.

I pitched him personal, I shampoo. I pitched him doing this. This is a good idea is actually. I think these are all great. And people are doing them now, aren't they? Most of them have happened now, isn't it? Yeah. Well, part of it was the things, as I mentioned earlier,

I was a direct marketing guy for 10 years. And so I was coming, and I won one element, so I was big into personalization. The other thing is one aspect of being a direct marketing guy is two of my startups were magazines and they were subscription magazines. So I really was into subscriptions. So that's why I was eager at subscriptions. One of the reasons why so many of those things are happening now is that 25 years ago, which is when some of these conversations started taking

place, people did not apply subscription business models to things other than maybe Book of the Month Club or magazines. And so it was... Or the Campfire Columbia, wasn't that... Columbia Record and Tape Club, exactly. Right, you get your pick your pick out 11 albums for 99 cents.

Exactly. That's where I got Rolling Stones, Sticky Fingers, and Steppenwolf, I think, were my two picks for my, uh, really, records for 99 cents. That just dates so old I am. Oh my gosh, yeah. Well, I don't even want to tell you how old I am because I don't even tell the albums I picked.

But I, no, I totally hear you. It's not funny though, how like you were kind of like ahead of your time because now everything is subscription, right? Like not just streaming every day. Personalized. Yeah. Personalized, right? Like everyone's doing oops, a personalized supplement, a personalized shampoo, dog food, and the list goes on. Nobody seems to that's like the the hot trend that's kind of become the thing now.

If I had a vision, and it's not necessarily my vision, it's just the vision that you recognize something's happening and it's going to be big, when I saw the internet, I mean, and I, you know, I, I was one of those people who someone came in and goes, you should check this thing out and install the browser from Champaign or Baina that Mark Andreson had written in his dorm room on my computer. I was going, oh my God, this thing is unbelievable. Archandrasen had written in his dorm room on my computer. I was going, oh my God, this thing is unbelievable. Within recognizing that this could be a tool for doing direct response selling at a level

that was just gonna be unbelievable. In other words, that was unenabled, this unbelievable personalization. I didn't quite get the subscription thing until a bit later, but I saw the personalization. I didn't quite get the subscription thing until a bit later, but I saw the personalization on it. So the e-commerce capability really early, which is why all these ideas that I was pitching read were combinations of personalization and subscription and e-commerce because I was going this and internet. Because I go,

the internet's enabling something which we have not yet really seen. Ever. Yeah. So then what happened? So why did those, so he so he didn't love those ideas right the the personalized shampoo and dog food. Obviously.

Now why did he take to the Netflix idea the the concept of DVDs or CDs? Well, he also didn't like this other one I pitched him, which was video rental by mail. Reed, picture this, $8 billion category. And who has it dominated? Blockbuster. And blockbuster sucks. Everyone hates the due days, hate the late fees,

they can't find a movie, it's surly clerks, the stores are dirty. I go, there's got to be a way we can do better than that. And it pitched the whole thing. And so we got into this debate, and probably the sticking point in the car was, because this was back in 1996, 1997, it was VHS cassettes. And the question was, that's going to cost $10 to ship that thing back and forth. I was going, now I'll probably figure it out of way. And of course, I came back at five

at six o'clock that night getting in the car with my tail with my legs and know you're right. These could video acests are going to cost us an arm and a leg to ship. And so that was out the window. So the breakthrough, if you want to call it a breakthrough, was months later where Reed picks me up and said, hey, I read about this thing, their test marketing in San Francisco. It's this little disc like a music CD, but it's gonna have movies on it. And all of a sudden we kind of began debating the round whether that might reinvigorate this old video rental by mail idea we had tossed around a month and a half ago.

And so and then here's the here's the real kicker because this time rather than going into the office and then setting me off on my little research mission, we actually literally turn the car around mid commute and drove back down into Santa Cruz, we both lived, and said, let's figure out whether this in fact works or not. This is not something we can actually find out today. And went to look for a DVD, of course, futile because it was still in test market. And so we said, well, we'll mail a CD, a music CD. And so we bought a used music CD from like one of those music swap places. And then went two doors down

and bought a little gift envelope from a stationary store like you put a greeting card in. And mailed, uh, used music CD to read house in Santa Cruz using the US Post Office. And then went to work. And then the next morning, when Reed picked me up, he just had a little envelope of an unbroken CD in it that had gotten to his house in less than 24 hours for the price of a postage stamp. And so, as I say in screenwriter speak, an inciting event.

Yeah, yes. This was potentially it, because all of a sudden, he go, wow, this does change something. We can now ship a movie anywhere in the country for at the time, 29 cents. That's amazing. Then what was the next step after that? We know how it kind of everything evolved. So then you realize that that can actually happen, right? So then what? So the next day, then you got the CD, like he got the CD, then what do you guys say?

Like then what happens? Well, then you begin saying that there's got to be a flaw here. And usually the process of doing the due diligence and an idea is this process of turning over rocks and all of a sudden you turn something over and there's something really ugly underneath it and you go, let's see, into that. And so I began turning over rocks because I didn't know anything about video rental except

for what it felt like to walk into a blockbuster. But I had no idea how the economics worked or the turns. I had no idea how many DVDs there were, how many DVD players were there going to be. I didn't even know how to build a, you wasn't't lucky to go to Shopify and be up and running with it. You had to build your own. And I go, what tools and technology are there to actually serve web pages? There was a ton to learn. I mean, it included even this incredible trip I took to the Video Software Dealers Association,

which was the trade industry for the video rental industry, which at the time was a huge business. And it was all finding myself in Chicago in this massive, huge conference center. It was like being on some kind of hallucinogen, mixed with a Disney movie. You know, big giant inflatable wallets and grommets that were three and four stories tall and people walking around and plush outfits and I mean it was what have I done? But anyway, that's what I want to do. Exactly. You do all those sort of things and then finally you do get to that point that every entrepreneur gets to,

where there's no more to learn, that I have answered some of the basic questions, like what will it cost to build a website, I think, et cetera, but I could never answer the real question, which is, is anybody really care? Is anybody actually gonna do this? Will someone really rent a movie and then wait two days for it to arrive? Or put a different way, are the benefits of an online store? The infinite selection, the fact that I

can have it categorized in different categories at the same time, that I can have editorial content, all the things that I'd used to pump someone up about the idea, is that enough to offset the fact that you've got to wait two days for your movie. And there's only one way to find that out, and you have to do it. And you have to kind of make a decision to move forward and base it on incomplete or inconclusive or contradictory information. And leap. And that's a classic entrepreneurial trait and read Bless his heart wrote a check for a 1.9 million dollars.

I released an old bank office with dirty green carpet and an old bank vault. We hired about a dozen people. We spent six months building a the kind of e-commerce website that now you could have going in a couple hours for 1995 a month and an April of 1998 Ta-da Vitamin water just dropped a new zero sugar flavor called with love get the taste of raspberry and dark chocolate for the all-warm all fuzzy all self-care, zero self-doubt you. Grab a with love today. Vitamin water's zero sugar, nourish every you.

Vitamin water is a registered trademark of glass O. How would someone do that on a small scale, right? Like billions and billions of dollars later. But how does that, because you talk a lot about this, because I know with your podcast, that will never work in your book, that will never work. You talk to, well, in your podcast,

you talk to people who are entrepreneurs, regular people who are trying to make a business. And you kind of go through like how they could attempt before they go grandiose they have to like go micro and kind of see if their idea works and I know you talked I heard you talk about the girl who had that idea of sharing clothes and which is a great idea I think too. How was someone try the idea that you had on without 1.9 million right where you would have to like see if there's a market for people rent, like you said it, like how would you do something like that,

to send? It's a really great question and it's true. My story might lead people in the wrong direction, but this was a long time ago, right? It was a different world. Because back then, if you had an e-commerce idea, you couldn't, like I said, just dial up a Shopify instance. Now you had to actually write the code for a website server. You couldn't get Amazon to host it in the cloud. You had to buy servers. You had to put them in a closet. You had to wire them all together.

You had to write your own security software. If you wanted to take payments, you couldn't use Striper Paypal, you had to write the portals to the bank. Testing this thing, finding out if it will work, was you're right, a million dollars and six months, which is why back then to get funded, I was 38. You had to have a track record. You couldn't just wing it. You couldn't wave your hands. It's different now. I mean, now there is Shopify. If you have an e-commerce label, there is Amazon Web Services. There is optimizely for testing

and metrics. There's all these incredible tools. And so what I've sometimes said is that for us, incredible tools. And so what I've sometimes said is that for us, the distance from the idea to the validation was six months and a million dollars. Right. Now the distance from the idea to the validation is almost infinitely quick. Yeah. Which means you can try hundreds of things. I mean, the example that you alluded to earlier about the young woman who I was coaching, who had this clothing rental idea. At first, she was approaching it like it was 1998. Do I drop out of school? How do I raise money? How do I find a technical co-founder? And you have to go, whoa, whoa, slow down. Let's just parse this apart. You don't need to prove that you can build an app. That's proven. You don't need to prove that people will trust you

with their credit card. That's proven. You've got to prove a simple fundamental thing, which is will your idea of people barbing each other's clothes have any validity. And I said, we can do that just by with a piece of paper. You know, just write on it. You want to borrow my clothes, knock, and tape it to your door. And forget six months from now, you're going to find out in six minutes from now, whether anyone

knocks. And if they don't, well, you've learned something right there about your idea. And if they do knock, well, fantastic. Now you're going to learn the next thing, which is how do you feel about whether problems with size or their problems with taste and style. Now let's say someone borrow something even better. Now you're going to find out how you feel when it comes back stained or you need to pay for dry cleaning and it gets ripped. But all of this is not scalable. It's not repeatable. But it's quick and it's cheap and it's easy and it's almost instantaneous and you can do it for a piece of paper. And what I've learned from mostly from stuff that I've all the coaching and mentoring that I've done since leaving Netflix is that almost every idea

can be broken down to a simple enough form that you can validate it quickly and cheaply and easily, as almost as simply as with the piece of paper. And I give hundreds of examples of people who've called or who I've mentored on the podcast who come in thinking the only way to figure out if this idea is going to work is by you know fill in the blank. Yeah. Get my computer science degree, quit my day job, whatever bullshit excuse they have for not getting started. And if you begin walking them through it, you go there's almost always a way to start validating your assumptions right now. And do that in a way that's so quick and simple and easy, you don't need to

quit your day job, you don't need to get a computer science degree, you don't need to raise money, that all these barriers that everyone thinks they have toward getting started, I believe, or largely fear-based or naivety-nabete-based. Right. I think it's easier for some times for people to have these barriers to entry, so they don't feel like they failed. Like first I need to raise all this money, and then like, so they go through like a year of trying to put a deck together

and connecting to this person. When you're right, like there's so many easier ways to even see if your idea is valid, that you just save yourself so much time and energy and emotion really, right? And more than that, the idea that you spend a year putting your pitchset together is a bad idea. I don't even know what it is. They're all bad ideas. They're all flawed. It's just an inherent nature of anything you come up with in your head. It is absolutely wrong. And so spending a year finding that out is tragic.

And you want to start the process of finding it out as soon as you can, because you're going to be disappointed and you're going to go, oh, but wait, oh, that was interesting. I wonder if I tried this. And in the time that you spent right in your deck, you could have made so much progress. And that's what means me. That's what my mission here. Get the job right. Right, and you're doing a good job of it.

You have a lot of, I feel like you're coaching and mentoring all the time. I mean, this is, it's amazing. So, so then how did you even like, let's go back a second with the read because you guys worked together, you guys were buddies, like you guys are going, you're basically carpooling back and forth. All of the above. I mean, are you guys still friends, by the way?

Well, yeah, absolutely. We still live in the same town. Our kids went to the same, same school. We're in the same social group. You know, it's birthday coming up. Oh, wow. So you guys are like, buddy, still? I wouldn't say buddies. It's not like we go grab a beer every not every every evening and sit in the back porch and you know, whittle. But uh you know. Do you even whittle or drink beer? There's the problem. There isn't that you know but so he is is not certainly someone I see all the time we're absolutely friendly and we still you know we still shoot each other notes. We see something interesting in the paper that kind of friend

Right, right, right. So then okay, so how did you guys like so that's how you guys met you work together You just ended up by carpling together to work and read company bought one of my companies so We had a company that you started or coming. You were working at started Okay, myself and two co-founders started this little company. It was early, maybe only seven or eight months in. So it was only about ten of us, and Reads Company bought us. And what happened was the other eight or nine of them got consigned to this dungeon and

the basement of the building to the business unit and but Reed goes will crap my my VP of corporate marketing left And he goes you You with a sweater get up. So all of a sudden I went from the cerebral Positioning you know product strategy to all of a sudden boom. I'm running marketing for this multi-thousand person international software company, and working directly for read, and learning he lives in the same town that I do, and so we began commuting. So we got a chance to see each other professionally, so we both had this mutual respect there. That's where we kind of established that we thought so simultaneously, similarly, and very differently about problems, but also got a chance to know him and like him from

spending the time in the car going back and forth to work. Wow. It's amazing. Can we talk? I wanted to ask you something because I saw this. You talked with this to Canada Principal. I'm Canadian. So of course, that, yes. Sorry. No, you're lucky actually. I know. I know. I mean, I always have, I get a commentary from, when I'm in a car, So of course that yes. Sorry. No, you're lucky actually. I know. I know.

I always have, I get a commentary from whenever I say in Canadian. But of course the whole Canada principle stands out to me. Can you just talk a little bit about that and where it came from? Certainly. It's at Netflix and it happens every single company is that all of a sudden there's something which is the apparently low hanging fruit. And in this case for us, it was Canada. We were in business in the United States, and everybody's coming and going, you guys should

enter Canada. You should expand into Canada. It goes, that would be such an easy 10% pop. I think that's one tenth of the market size of the United States. So go, okay, well, great. And then you do a little bit of research and you go, wait a minute. First of all, they speak a different language in parts of Canada. And not only that, they mandate that you speak that other language. It is a different currency. It is a different currency. The movies, it's somewhat different in terms of the rights.

So all of a sudden, one thing begins to end. The postage is different. One, the compounds, and you go, this is not low hanging fruit after all. And more importantly, you go, the time and attention and focus that would go into doing a slightly different business is so much more effective being channeled back into the core business. Right, oh wow, so that's the Canada principle. And it basically says that low hanging fruit,

one, low hanging fruit rarely is, but more importantly, it's back to focus. It's almost always better to take your attention and put it on the one or two things, which we get them right, will lift all the boats, then be chasing things. I also sometimes call it the t-shirt principle, because as soon as someone's pitching me and they get to the park, go and then think about when we can begin selling t-shirts, and I go, okay, you're screwed. And think about when we can begin selling t-shirts. And I go, okay, you're screwed. If you're spending one moment thinking about

what's gonna happen after you're successful, you've totally shown me how distractable you are because you should be putting every single bit of attention into getting to successful. Then you can worry about how to further monetize it. Oh, absolutely. And in fact, you've actually stayed in your book about how when you hire people,

or when people were hired at the beginning, it was really about, well, there's two things, about the whole, you know, picking the outfit we'll get to them slightly. But it's like, you wanted to hire like really smart people who could be like a jack of all trades versus hiring for very specific things, number one. And the other thing was about how,

and the other thing about how you would hire and then you'd make people like where outfits of their favorite movie character. Which I thought that was hilarious. Yeah, look at the point of that. That to get people close is like to build like to like a first like rapport I would imagine or. Absolutely, there is it you're trying

I spent a lot I've spent a lot of time in the woods More more specific not not by myself, you know Math or something As a lot of time back as, you know, backpacking, doing backcountry travel and living. And one of the wonderful things is that it's almost impossible to preserve your front country veneer in the back. It just takes a couple of days and pretty much everyone looks the same.

We all smell the same. You can't style your hair or put on your makeup. Totally. And so what it does is create this sense of who you are at a real level. And it's one of the most wonderful things I think about spending time outside. It's one of the things I think, which is so wonderful, sitting around a campfire, and that you can't see people. It's just, it's the exact same thing,

which causes the attraction of apps like Clubhouse and Greenroom. It's the sense of, you can't, you're closer to being your genuine self. And one of the reasons you go through these semi-humiliating rituals is to strip away some of that veneer and bond people in a certain way. And to have

this feeling of everyone else remembering how they had to go through this, it's just common right of passage. Right, amazing kind of. It is like, it is like a hazing. It's just common right of passage. Right. Amazing. Kind of. It is like a hazing. It's not that I'm a, I'm not like a big proponent of hazing because it certainly crosses the line sometimes, but I totally understand the little spool behind that, which is what it does to bond bond us together. And I think it was that, you know, I think maybe now I probably, I'm not sure you can get away with it the same way, but that was the reason why we did it. Do it that way then. It's too bad. I agree. You probably wouldn't be able to, but I think it's a great idea because to your point, to build like, not just to build a rapport, but like you're right, to strip away because everyone presents their sales rep to that outside world. It's only after you have a shared experience or something humiliating or whatever embarrassing

that you actually get to really know somebody's true character and how they respond and you guys become it. All of that's so important and I feel like, especially in today's time, with social media, everyone's like everything snippets of nonsense. That is not even really who the human being is. Is it posted? It's a constructive version of yourself, really. I agree. I agree.

Right? Absolutely. And so when you do these types of like things like that, that's how you kind of get to the real core of the person. Was it your idea to do that or somebody else's idea? I do the idea. Yeah. We started doing, I started doing that, but then it was actually patty McCord who figured out how to scale it, how to make the next new work.

Because I love rituals, but I'm also really careful about picking rituals that are scalable, that work, not just when you have five people going to six, but when you have 500 going to 600. And she actually did a great job of figuring out how to do that, although eventually it didn't scale either. I don't think they still do that at Netflix. It's now too, too desperate.

Because you'd hire too many people, right? Like you'd be hiring too many people all the time. The thing that really does it is that when you go through challenges together, when you have crises, when you are threatened, when you're struggling, that has the same effect. However, that's almost impossible to construct. That has to happen. But when it happens, and it happens at every startup, it's why so many people find that experience so gratifying

to you genuinely feel part of something doing something. As opposed to what a larger company sometimes you go, what am I doing? I come to work, I move some paper from this box to this box. Whereas when you're sometimes this startup is small enough and you go through this existential threat and you all rally and work really hard and come through it, that's a pretty powerful emotional experience. No, absolutely. So then, so what would you say is your leadership style to have one? I know you like what would be your, we just, is there a particular style you have or?

Yes, certainly. I mean, you know, culture is not what you say. It's how you act. So I certainly have one. Has it taken a little bit and say it's situational? So the first thing about my style is it's very situational. That there are times where when you're making a decision, you go, I like to hear what everyone thinks. And you know, that's a good point. Let's try and come to something we all accept. And that's one way of leadership. However, when the shit hits the fan, you after then shift gears and go, do you never do this, don't do this,

mark do this, and you don't wanna hear, but no, no, there's no time for that. And your leadership style needs to make that clear. I'm in control, we're in a crisis, we're gonna do it this way. So it responds. But basically, my style is I am not heavy-handed. My feeling is that my role is directional and context. I'm going and here's why. And here's why. And it's mixed with the sense of, I really want us to have a good time. I mean, a lot of my hiring is picking people who,

you have to be really talented too, but we'll add to the mix, we'll make this a really fun place. Right. I love the people who just love figuring out new ways to amuse their co-workers. That's such an unbelievably valuable trait to have because it makes other people want to come to work and enjoy being at work when things occasionally suck. So how do you do that though? Like how do you find, how do you kind of like, high interview for that even, you know, like as it

just feel like when you wear some core, I know you want them to be smart obviously who could be a jack of all trades. Is there some core personality traits though that you can kind of pinpoint that you like to hire for besides of course having that ability? Not something you can hire for. It's not something you interview for. I think, honestly, most people have this inside them. Yeah. And what you're doing is giving a cultural permission for you to express it.

Right. That's true. By laughing, by encouraging it, by doing it yourself. Yeah. It's it. And not everyone can be super witty, but that's fine. Everyone can shoot a nerf gun. You know, it is all kinds of different ways to do this.

But the other thing, and it's one of the big advantages of the fact of being a serial entrepreneur, it was that, you know, when I said, you know, Netflix, I was 38, but it was my sixth startup. And so I had already begun accumulating people who you work with and you go, oh, this person's, I love this person. And then when you begin to have the next startup, it becomes like an app like the blues, I don't know, date myself. Like the blues, date myself. No, it's okay. What? No, I'm just kidding. Blues Brothers, where the movie essentially could be described as, let's get the band back

together again. Right. Right. So you're bringing in your favorite people. Yes. You're going around to convince them and they're working in the diner. And you're going, come on, you got to come do this crazy startup. And they're going, oh, she'll kill me.

Anyway, it's the fun of putting these together. And then you know who the people are, who will work hard, but will make it a fun experience, not a grind. No, it's true. Is that what you did? You've kind of poached people from your from your previous hopefully. I mean, you were super stars and brought them with you. Absolutely.

And again, it's a certain thing you're looking for because at a start-up, you'd have no idea what you're going to be doing each day. You're going to have to have the temperament that says, I just spent five weeks putting this together and it didn't work. So now I'm going to abandon it and do something else. And have that be not only completely fine, but great, I get to do something different. And that requires a certain personality trait

and you're kind of looking for that as well. Is there a reason why you would enjoy startups more than the other? Is there like, are there reasons behind? Like do you feel that you're more suited for them? Like reasons behind, like, do you feel that you're more suited for them? Like, why are you, why do you feel like you're more suited for startups? It's, it's one of the lucky things for me is that I figured that stuff out pretty early,

which is those two critical things in your life, which is what am I good at and what do I like? And it turns out that both of those were the same thing, which is early stage companies, that I'm pretty good at it. And I love it. And so why wouldn't I want to just do that all the time? It's time to get back to the beach

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Save big on your favorites with the Buy, Fiver, more save a dollar each sale. Simply buy Fiver more participating items and save a dollar each with your card. Croger, fresh for everyone. Would you say that having self-awareness is a key point in terms of someone's overall life? I mean, not just personal success. I think not just professional success, but overall. You knew early on from what everything I've read about you and saw on you is that you wanted balance.

Balance was extremely important to you. You had what was it? Like you had personal life on Tuesday, you left it five,, I mean, that's something that people don't have that. Like that, even if they want to do that, I feel a lot of people are scared to kind of put that out there because they're nervous of the failure on the other side. You tell us about that whole thing. Yeah. Tuesdays at five. Yeah. The real thing was, you're right, I recognized early on, I didn't call it balance back then, but I recognized early on that my life was going to be pre-stereil if all I did was work. That I had a girlfriend at the time, was living with though, and going, this relationship

is not going to be very sound if she ends up getting the time which is left after I put everything I have into my work. Right. That's just not going to be the basis for a long term sound relationship. I'm in the week and I'm so married to her. And so I recognize. Thank you to make this make to make this work. I have to make this as important as my job and or maybe more so, but that it's hard because the work never stops shouting at me about all the things it needs me to do and it needs me to work late and it needs me to come an early and it needs me to be on the weekends and my wife, plus her heart, does not ever do that. But I still have to make sure I divide my time equally, and that just requires a tremendous amount of effort and focus and prioritization. And to make my life even more complicated, there's a third component to this, which is that you,

I have some things which I know make me whole as an individual. And for me, it's the aforementioned outdoors time. And unfortunately, going off and doing a three or four day climbing trip or even going flying up into Northern Alaska to go canoeing is not the kind of activity you squeeze in between an 11 o'clock phone call on a two o'clock meeting. Right? You've got to block that out. Along with your time you want to spend with your wife and your family and keep your business alive. But I said, that problem is the problem I'm going to use my life to solve is how can I have all three of these things work? And so you asked about the relationship part,

one of the tricks, for example, was we had a date, which was Tuesdays. And every Tuesday, rain or shine, no matter what, she'd get a sitter. I would leave at 5 p.m. and we'd have a date night, a no phone date night. And that happened regardless it was going out of the office. And you know, it's a start-up. And so, okay, if there's going to be a crisis, okay, we're going to wrap it up by 5. Okay, you have to absolutely talk to me on the way to the car. And the amazing thing is, and I don't know how the universal lines like this, but you do

this for four or five weeks and low and behold, the crises stopped happening after five o'clock on Tuesdays. And all of a sudden an even better thing happens, because I mentioned before that culture is not what you say, it's what you do. And you can talk, you can put a really beautiful break room poster up that says how important it is to have balance in your life, but nothing signals that more strongly than the CEO of the company taking one day a week,

leaving it five. And then pretty soon other people begin realizing, hey, it's okay. And they would begin leaving in certain days of the week to spend time with their hobbies or with their family or with the other. And you guys would be okay with that. You and Reed would be like,

so if an employee Akku was working for you, was like, hey, you know, even though there's a crisis, I gotta get out of here. I'm having, I'm going, you know, fly fishing with my girlfriend at five. I'm just making up what it is or, you know, whatever, drinking a beer on my back porch or whatever. You guys would be cool with that.

That's a, you're a tiptoeing, actually a tiptoeing. You're barging into a even bigger cultural thing about Netflix, probably on purpose because you really could at this. Which is that, um, thank you. It's a compliment coming from you. That's a different, a very different thing, but it's a critical thing, which is part of that whole culture that we had developed at Netflix, which now is called kind of the freedom and responsibility culture, which basically says, I could care less how much you work.

I don't care. I don't care what hours you're in. I don't care. I really cared about is, are you achieving the thing that you need to get done? And I'll tell you a quick story about that. So, it illustrates it really well. That early on, midway at Netflix, I had an engineering manager who worked for me, who ran a team of other engineers. He came in one day and goes, I have got great news. I go, dummy. He goes, I'm in love. There's something corny like that.

After a obligatory eye rolling, I go, that is just awesome. Congratulations. He goes, is there anything you want to talk about? And he goes, actually, yes, she lives in San Diego. And I go, okay. And he goes, so I want to propose something. He says, what I'd love to do is I'm going to leave work, maybe late on Thursday. And then I'll work from there on Friday,

and I'll spend the weekend there, and I'll work there on, maybe Monday, I'll come back Monday evening. And I go, okay. Well, let me so I get something right. If you're asking is it okay for you to work from San Diego and because I don't care you can work anywhere you can work from the moon. I don't care where you work from. That's fine with me. I go, but if you're asking me, am I prepared to accept less from you because of this? Well, that's an easy one too.

No. Right. And just think about what your job is. You're an engineering manager. You have other people who rely on you, who need you to communicate, give them context in their jobs so they can do their job well. If you can do that from San Diego, and only being in the office three days a week, all power to you, you are a better manager than I could be. But I leave it to you. And he made the right decision,

in my opinion, which was he didn't think he could fulfill his responsibility to the company while doing it that way. Right. But it was up to him. Meaning it is so, you know, you probably aware that the Netflix has these interesting policies, you know, and their vacation policy is that there isn't one. You take time when you want to. But if you are a warehouse manager and you say, I'm going to take my vacation for two weeks with the two weeks leading up to Christmas,

what kind of judgment is that? You're the wrong person. What you should be doing is going, I need to take time. Vacation is important. You absolutely, but take it when it's not going to impact the business. This is not just a managerial thing. When we hire a receptionist, we don't say your receptionist, your job is to be here from nine to five, you get an hour for lunch, pencils going to box. No, here's your job description. Your job is to put the best face forward for the company. Period.

You decide what hours you need to beat your desk. If you have a doctor's appointment, I don't need to hear that. I trust you to cover your spot. You don't need me to set a policy that says, there's no eating lunch at the desk. You should be able to make a judgment, does sitting there with a mouthful of pizza, put the best face forward for the company, or doesn't it? But and what that does is it gives them the freedom to make the decisions, which is so empowering for people.

But it couples it with the responsibility to achieve the objectives for the company. And it's my job as a manager to make sure those objectives are set clearly and that I give you all the context and information you need to make good judgments. And that's just, that, that, that, that means it applies every place. It's not just a VP. It's for anyone in the company. So I think that's so clever, right? And you bring the onus on the other person to make those, make those decisions because I think again, people out of fear would be scared, or people like to have direction.

Like they like to know a lot of people who work for companies, they want to have a box and say, okay, I have to be here at this time, I'm going to leave it that time, and they're not entrepreneurs, right? They are people who like to work for corporate companies. And that's perfectly okay. I'm not saying that there's no value judgment here that one personality type is different than the other, but one of the huge things that Netflix has done,

which gives it a huge competitive advantage, is realizing that the most talented people in least this industry, what they want is not kombucha on tap. They don't want firemen poles and nap pods. They don't want all that bullshit that people seem to think is the perks. What they want is freedom. They want to be empowered to make decisions, not be a person who gets told what to do. And when companies get bigger, there's this natural problem, which is that you begin deluding people,

we begin getting people, we don't have good judgment. And then the well-meaning company goes, we can't do this, we need some guidelines. So, oh, putting a place of occasion policies, they don't do something stupid Or they go and everyone goes ah and then they go oh worse. They go okay Here's a travel policy and the person's going home going I'm in charge of a $30 million quarterly budget But you don't trust my judgment about whether I know what class hotel I could stay in or whether I should travel coach or Economy to Japan It's just it's infantilizing or or they go you need to approve every expense over

500 what you don't trust me to make good judgments for the company and so what Netflix did was Rather than build these guardrails For people who have mediocre to poor judgment, they said, what would happen if we built a company which was designed for people who had good judgment and took away all the guardrails? And that was the big Netflix experiment. And I think it's been phenomenally successful in making it a really, really attractive place to work for people who want nothing more than the ability to be.

I'm going to use the word in charge of something as a proxy for I met powered from my area of responsibility to really feel ownership here. That is so true. You know, you cut, because I find and I'm sure you see this all like Google's another world. They all have like a million kombucha tabs and Video games and pods of like it's like being at an adult like it's like it's being like a Disney world for like adults Really, it's like do they ever have a work or they're just doing all these other things on the side? I mean, I do that Why do people can why do people keep on doing those things though?

They to make it looks much more like appealing to come to the office to work. But to your point, and you have way more experience in that level than I do, why do they keep on doing that then? It's easy. As a manager, it's a simple thing you can do. You can just add a line to the budget. You can hire a person who's in charge of,

right. And wow, look what I've done to increase my a spritical art at the company. Paddy McCord, who ran human resources at Netflix for a long time, her and I worked together in a previous company. And this classic story is we were walking back We it was a huge corporate campus, you know, it had tennis courts and an Olympics ice swimming pool and squash courts and a theater

It was like kombucha on tap going bad. Yeah, and it had it had a hot tub Okay, and we're walking back from lunch And we see two or three engineers in the hot tub and we stop by to say hello and get closer. They are bitching about the company. And in the hot tub. In the hot tub. In the hot tub. While they're sitting in the hot tub.

Yeah. Exactly. And so we're laughing at that going. There's something very ironic about this. They're sitting in the hot tub bitching with the company. But it kind of was the trigger for this question. Well, if that's not what does it, what is it? What makes you want to work someplace?

And that was some of the seeds of thinking, how do you begin to construct a company that people really want to work at? Were there treated like an adult? Were there any other empowered? And that's more than just saying, we're gonna do it, it really requires a whole cultural top to bottom transformation.

That's amazing. I mean, I love all that. I love that inside scoop on stuff. Like, is there any other kind of policies that Netflix has that are interesting that you can share like another great one like that? No, I mean, the classic, there's no expense policy. Like I said, you, yeah, that's a good one. Yeah, there's no travel policy.

There's no vacation policy. There's full transparency on salaries. Everybody knows that everybody makes really. Yeah. For everybody for every level. Yes, I think so except for I don't think that hourly or people who are working like in customer service know everything all the way up, but everybody who's at I, I want say management level, but a professional level end up. Yes. And with everyone's encouraged to go out and interview for jobs, because they won't absolutely. Really? Because this think of this, let's say that you're working for me and you, usually the one who finds out,

that how you've been grossly underpaid for two years. How do you, is that a good thing? Should I be shortening Mr. Burns with Glee at the fact that I was able to exploit you for two years? No, it's a horrible thing to have happened. Because then you're really pissed off, you feel exploited, and you're out of here and you're talented. My job is to make sure that I recognize your true value and pay you as such. And the best way for both of us to know what your true value is to find out what that value is by you being out in the world and understanding what your value is. I don't want to get you at a good price out of ignorance. I want to understand your value. But this means that salaries, for example,

at Netflix are not set based on a grid system. They're based on what the market is currently prepared to pay, which can feel cruel because it might mean that if you happen to be a specialist in AI, for example, and we need AI people, we want the very, very best AI people, we're going to pay that person four or five times what an engineer whose specialty may be search, which right now is just not favored by the market the same way. Right. It's a time to go on, though. Absolutely. It's being applied internally.

It's not like, oh, he's been the company six years and every year he goes, gets an array of x percent and you're encouraged to understand what the market is for that particular position. We want to pay, they want to pay at the very, very top of that scale. But you have to start by knowing what the scale is. There's actually, I'll pitch someone else, so I'll pitch my own book, you know, that will never work. It's an explicit idea, so buy that one.

But now when you're done, read Hastings has a book called The No Rules Rules, which is very explicitly about the Netflix culture. And how he's, they've taken some of these concepts that came when we were young and when we were smaller and actually managed to scale them. In other words, it's easy to have start-up culture when you have 10 people and it's easy to have 100.

And it's reasonably possible to have it when you have 1000. It's really hard when you have 10,000. And I think one of the big things is realizing how do you do that? How do you do that when you're all of a sudden? You have international employees who have different cultures. Do that differently than you in Silicon Valley people do? So it's really a fascinating book too. You know, I actually noticed his book when I was looking at your book really more too. So I'm like, hmm, maybe a, does he do podcasts? Maybe I should have him on at some point. Good luck. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, thank you. You're, you're just fine. You're not getting it. Not like interviewing him. No, I was just saying, you're perfectly fine for me. He doesn't do.

That's the nicest thing anyone's ever said to me. I'm full of it. I'm good. I'm good like that. I'm good like that. He doesn't do podcasts then. He's not a big podcast person or. No, he has not motivated.

He's totally focused on what he's working on and that. The quick calculation he would do in the car is turn you and go that has almost no bearing on how Netflix does. Right, right, right, exactly. Like I said, I'm perfectly thrilled having you on the podcast. So, works perfectly fine for me. Because my purpose is I want people to understand all the things we've been talking about. This is exactly a great, I'm delighted to do this because it is a big chance to tell people who listen to you and reinforce all the things you tell people, which is that you can do these things that have just started that were not special people. It's what the book was all about. It's what the podcast is all about. My mission seems very different. It's going to say,

your mission is very, very different. Your mission really is based on just everything I've seen and just in terms of your podcasts alone, most people do this type of interview style where they take someone who is more well known and the world and go back and forth. You really do. You take it from, like I said at the beginning, you really help somebody who's beginning a company and really help shepherd them and coach them. Like your mission does seem to be like very authentically giving and giving people the information and the knowledge and the wherewithal to succeed. You know? It's that, you know, there is this gap, I think, in that the interviewing, the well-known

entrepreneurs has done so well and by other people other than, I didn't need to add to that, uvra. But what is missing is there's so much Instagram trivial. And I'm guilty of it too. You do a beautiful little thing with maybe some little butterflies and you go Stop thinking and start doing and everyone nods and go think take the eight-year little junk food and they go Yeah, that's great and then they're faced with the problem and they go wait how how how do I start? It's platitudes, basically. Exactly. And I wanted, that's what the podcast is really walking through with real people

who are really struggling with all the same things that other entrepreneurs are struggling with. And let's, let's solve, let's walk through how you do this. How do you get started? Or if you already started, how do you think about how to position or how do you think about how to focus? How do you think deal with work position? Or how do you think about how to focus? How do you think deal with work-life balance? I mean, it's all these things that everyone who has ever tried to do something struggles with, they think they're the only person struggling with it. There's no place that you can really get information on it.

And I've kind of realized the only way that I have to do that is to let people listen in as I'm coaching someone who's struggling with the same thing they're struggling with. So then I have two question to you. How do you find a people to come onto the podcast? And then what happens after they leave the podcast, do you follow up with them or is it like, Zia, next? No, it's fantastic. I mean, to get on the podcast is people basically call, they come to the website, it's markrandolph.com slash guest. And they leave me a two minute message. They

talk about who they are, what they're working on. Because I am interested in, you know, while they doing something interesting, is this a problem I think I can help with other people want to potentially hear about too. And I'm also trying to get a sense of the energy the person has and will they be interesting to talk to. But and then we pick hand-flip people. Unfortunately, I wish I could do everybody, but I get way, way more submissions than I can do. But the answer to the other question is I absolutely follow up.

You do. In fact, the call that I was doing this morning was a follow-up call privately, not recorded or anything, with someone who I'd coached on a podcast interview almost a year ago, and who was making great progress. And now was kind of plumping into next level problems and wanting to help with it. I am also about to release some brief podcast

where these segments of follow up calls that I've done with people who were on the podcast earlier, mostly because where they've gone with either the advice or the business is just so interesting. It's just fun to hear what happened. Oh yeah, of course. It's like Shark Tank is super popular for a reason and the,

and the very big piece of people, what I think a very popular segment is when they go back to like, what happened next, like what happened to this person? Like, because it's like, you, you, you give them like a little taste and people get invested emotionally into the, you know, to their life. And then it's like, okay, well, then what, now what? You know. Exactly. Yeah, it's really fun. Are you investing?

Do you invest in a lot of that a lot? But do you invest in some of these people that their companies or their ideas or often or at all? I have not yet invested in anybody who has come on the podcast. But I do, I also do this live mentoring invested in anybody who has come on the podcast. But I do, I also do this live mentoring on Clubhouse every Tuesday at 5 p.m. Pacific.

You do it at 5 p.m. Uh-huh. Oh, that's okay. I got a cut. Now it's okay, right? Now you can do that. You're free on five at five, right? Your wife's okay.

Five o'clock Pacific. Oh, yeah, that's right. On Tuesday, oh, that's what. And it was made that realization. Oh, no. Oh, yeah. Now she gets me a lot more a lot more than just after five o'clock on Tuesdays. That's You didn't catch that whole five o'clock on Tuesday until now. No. Thank you. You gave me a good insight. Not gonna figure out how do I apply that? Oh, yeah. But anyway, so yeah, I do that. This live mentoring, and that's more random. That's people in the audience who raise their hand,

then we spend 10, 15 minutes with them. And there have been some of those people that I've invested in. Really? Yeah. That's interesting. You mentioned clubhouse, because I mean, I'm not very active on clubhouse.

I've been invited to all these meeting rooms and to be on panels. And these things can go on for hours. I mean, like, if a few times I've done it, it's, it goes for like four hours. I'm like, who has four hours to be sitting in a panel? You know, like, and if you just put it beside you, it's still distracting.

You'd be still here, and it's still, if your phone calls to make or things to do. And, you know, I'm curious, you obviously like clubhouse if you're doing it. It's obviously, what's your feeling on it? Do you think it's going to take over to be next like Facebook or next Instagram? I really don't know. And it has a very compelling element to it, which is the audio only piece.

And the fact that it's always live, it's not a pre-recorded replayed. It's past, past you. It is that sense of sitting at the fireplace, at the campfire in the dark. And I'd like that. And it really speaks to me that way. It's also a really interesting way to have an unscreened interaction with somebody. to have an unscreened interaction with somebody Yes, people can for both the people in the room who realize I could raise my hand to be speaking to Elon Musk or whatever it is right for myself to have people to get the podcast as a screening process and it's a whole thing Well, I think whereas this it's random that we have people who who I have people help me who go through the audience looking at people's bio and picking people to come up and so it's that's really nice. I am not sure long term there's something frustrating for my someone like myself where all these things that I'm all this content is gone. It's like this river that just flows past.

But I'm not going to invest more into it. Doing an hour a week is perfect. It's an hour. I start a month time. I end them on time. I was going to say an hour that's like nothing compared to how they normally go. Correct. And that's why as someone has told me and I really believe it's not how many people it's the level of engagement. And we already are having, you can tell lots and lots and lots of people, you're coming back week after week. And that tells me it doesn't, if I wanted this to work for huge numbers of people, I would be tapping my network of celebrity entrepreneur friends and pumping my numbers up, but that's not what I'm in it for.

And it seems to be working for what I am, is trying actually to, yeah, okay, here's the corny story. And after, it was after a layoff, a lot of people were being laid off. This is at Borland where I worked before, but well, 300, 200 people were being laid off. And I was like fighting for this one person who worked for me in France trying to save their job. And the HR person goes, why?

He goes, I've got to say, I'm kind of impressed with all the effort you're putting into saving this one person. Out of the 400, he goes, it's select that story of the person walking down the beach. And there's thousands of sea turtles which evolve and turn up the beach and flipped over in their back and are all struggling. And he's walking along. One at a time going, okay, I can save this one. And I can save this one. And that's kind of how I feel about working with all these people who are all struggling to try and make the right ideas real.

I can't help everybody, but I can fix this one and I can help this one. And I can help this one. Right. How did this become your mission like this? Were you just kind of that person? Like, because it's not like your typical, like you're not, you don't seem very ruthless or callous or you've had some great obviously professional success but you've been very self-aware of how, you know,

I've heard in some of your stuff, like your wife and your kids, you talk about them all the time and like balance and, you know, you seem like just a regular dude that likes to like go outside and, you know, be with your family, you know what I mean? Like, okay, I'll start the story in a way that totally dispels that myth. Okay. Okay. So I'm going to spend four days in Richard Branson's

private island. Okay. Now you're going now or you're going to go. That's how the story starts. Oh, okay. Okay. I get invited to spend four days on Richard Branson's private island. But that's the obnoxious part of the story. But it's because Richard Branson has a nonprofit, and he makes the island available to certain groups, and they can come into a conference. He don't, it's the island. They charge people a lot of money to come do this, and it goes to charity. And this one particular group that was being brought on was a bunch of, was female business owners, very successful women.

And the theme of this conference was going to be finding your purpose. And because I did so much work on basically how to make the step of going from how do you take an idea and make it real, they asked me if I would come to speak. And I went came to my wife go I had just gotten invited to spend four days and Richard Branson's island with a bunch of women and I'm not going home by any instead. And she goes not so fast, Buster. And then all of a sudden,

of course we're buying sunscreen. And we end up in the island. Because I go, not a big deal. I'll do my 45 minutes and then my wife and I go hang out in the beach, because I go, not a big deal. I'll do my 45 minutes, and then my wife and I go hang out in the beach. How bad can that be? Right. So I did this, did the bit, and then I figured I'd

stick around and hear about what all this find your purpose stuff is about. Right. And I was like transfixed. It was like they were speaking directly to me. Because they were telling these women was basically as you've achieved all these things in your life. You have financial success, you know, companies, but what's it for? Right. What is that? How do you use that? And I realized I had the same thing. I

was at that point doing, you know, speeches and I could get 10,000 people listening to me talk, but how do I use that? I could write something and get lost to read it, but how do I use that? I could write something and get last people to read it, but how do I use that? And that four days was changed my outlook. And I went back and really began thinking about how do I take the fact that people like yourself are willing to give me the opportunity to come and talk to you. A book publisher will say, yeah, sure, we'll publish your book.

All these incredible gifts, and how do I use it for something? And it made me realize that all this stuff that I've learned, the more important thing was all of these tips and tricks, secrets that I've learned in 40 years of entrepreneurship are not just for starting companies and making money. They're all the exact same things that anybody could use who has something they want to achieve. I mean, it doesn't need to be starting a company. It could be, I'd love to live in the middle of the city.

I'd love to get a better job where I am. I'd love to be able to do something with this club, but they all start the same way. They all start with, I have an idea, how do I find a quick, cheap, and easy way to collide with reality? And I realized I had these things and it kind of became my purpose to try and unlock people to take them who are stuck and paralyzed and just give them the shove that they need it. Well, it's working. I mean, it's working. I mean, that's what your brand says. I mean, you should say thank you,

do you still talk to him? How many years ago was that? It was quite a, I've only talked to him once since then. So I, but I, you know, I still have a lot of admiration for him. He's in some ways, he strikes me as another person who shares my whole balance principle. Oh my god. Yes.

I look at, I go, here's a guy. So my three, success launch printer, God, kicks my ass. At plenty of time, outdoors, with adventures, kicks my ass. Family guy, okay, I'm gonna call it a tie. But so, but listen, he's walking, living proof that you can be very, very successful, but still be, have balance, be fulfilled in ways, and just working all the time. I have to ask you, I mean, it's kind of a sidebar here, but like, how did, when you were younger, when you grew up, did you have a very close-knit family, were you very close with your parents?

You seem like such a mensch, that's why it's like, you know, you know, you're not a mensch. I do, of course. Did you, like, how did you grow up? Like, how were you as a kid, like, little, little market 12 with your family in school? Like, yeah, I, you know, I, I don't know, you know, it's really hard to know. You're kind of dorky when you're that age.

So it's really hard to see what your deeper characteristics are. But we're family close with your family. Are you like close to your mom? Yes, close to my parents very much so. My siblings less so. I am now very much, but going up then, the more telling one is that I'm still really close with most of my high school best friends. Yeah. And still close to most of my, probably closer to them than my college best friends. and still close to most of my, probably closer to them than my college best friends. So it's really, yeah. So we've kind of still, we kind of still have all stayed

connected and we, you know, we had that. And I think I can't, okay, here's true confessions. So I paint my toenails, okay. Do you really? We really do. And the reason I'm sharing this deep insight with you is I had this realization a while ago, which is that there's two scales.

One is how much you care about what people think of you. And it starts at zero when you're about six months old. And it peaks at probably 16. And then it goes a bit lower. And then now I could give a shit. I'm at zero again. And my wife finally forced me a few years ago into getting pedicures on a lark.

I had them paint my nails too. And I go, I kinda like this. And at first I was going, I can't. And I went, what do I care? So it's like you had, so what you care about things and pursuing your own, what you, having a sense of what you like, goes up the other way. The reason I tell you that's now it relates is that I think I was incredibly lucky that I had this incredibly tight group of best friends when I went through that age. And I never had this sense of insecurity about who I was. I could always act myself.

And I looked back, I was probably the biggest gift that being part of that group could have given me at what was usually a very, very vulnerable time, which is reflected, of course, in what happens, the tragedy of what happens to young people now who have to put up these appearances on Instagram and social media. Exactly. And also, you don't have that feeling of you have something to prove or you have a self-esteem issue where you're doing it further, you have to do something to prove something to yourself.

So you speak, you know? Just laughing, so I'm going, I can't believe I confess that I painted my toenails on a big, like that. Oh my God, don't worry, I'm going to use that as a teaser if you don't mind. You're not. You've got to leave this as the Easter egg

that someone happens to discover if they listen all the way through. That's true. But how do I tease them into the podcast? That's like a perfect way to get them to listen to the entire podcast. You are welcome to say that multiple reveals a very intimate secret about themselves at the conclusion of the podcast. That's exactly. That's great.

You must be a great at branding. We have a branding. I've decided to direct marketing guy. Well, you have a marketing guy my whole life. I mean, that's what that's what that's the side I come from is is the whole marketing side. But like but I guess branding is part of the marketing. So always huge. Yeah, it's what what is the company stand for? How do people think about you? It's abs. It's a big, big piece of it. Who came up with the name Netflix then? So picking a name is really, really hard because you've got to find something which you can get the domain name, which isn't taken, where you can also get a

trademark, you can get your Instagram, your Twitter. You can't mean something obscene in a corporation, whatever. And it's hard now, it was hard then. And I don't have time for the whole story. But we basically got to find a name. And the way we did it is we had a whiteboard and one column we wrote down. All the names that we think of that were a vocative of the internet, you know, web and net and whatever.

And then the other one were names of vocative of movies. And then began drawing lines between them all. And then I went back into all this research, trying to figure out which ones had the domain name available, did mean something obscene? Could get trade marks and all those things. And they were all bad, including Netflix. People didn't like Netflix. And if you remember, maybe you don. Yeah, I'm born yet. So back in 98, back then a porno was sometimes called a skin flick

or skin flicks would be the plural. And so people were going, ah, it sounds like we're still pornos. And they go, and that big exit the end, that doesn't help anything either. Right. But we were stuck. Everything else was worse. And so eventually we go, and that big exit the end, that doesn't help anything either. Right. But we were stuck. Everything else was worse.

And so eventually we go, okay, it's a little bit porny, but we're going to go with it. And that was it. And at first, it did not roll off the tongue. Now, of course, yeah, feels natural. But it takes a long time to get comfortable to name. Oh, wow. I mean, that's good. So, yeah, so you make two different columns columns and you kind of just blended them together and

that was the, that's the rest of the history. We had Netflix, Webflix, Interflix, you know, NetSinay, you know, NetFilm, you know, was ridiculous. I actually have this really cool archive item, which is the yellow pad that I had written down all the possible combinations that I was going to go back and research. So really? Yeah. It's actually, I actually reproduce the page in my book. So there's the teaser for the other people who get past the toenail I want to want something else they want to go looking for. No, exactly. That's a good one too. And I know I'm taking up so much of your time and I so apologize.

I've got about seven minutes. How about that? You know what I didn't even, I didn't ask any of the questions I even had written down if you can believe it, which is the most, the net for the Netflix versus Blockbuster, the going from renting to streaming, I have to ask you one of those. I mean, it just has to happen. So which one do you want to tell? What's the better story?

The blockbuster versus Netflix story, or the going from renting to streaming, the evolution? Can you, which one do you want to do? Can you tell us in seven minutes? Yeah, let's try. I don't know. Let's talk about the blockbuster one. Okay.

And I'll do it pretty quickly. So just to dispel the myth, everyone kind of thinks that companies you have an idea and then boom, they're perfect. And it is completely not true. Everything sucks. So this idea that Reed and I had in the car about DV's by mail, that my wife said, we'll never work. Everyone said it would never work. It didn't work. They were right. And it took us a year and a half to figure out how to make it work. And ironically, it was some subscription that made it work. It was no due dates, no late fees that made it work. And it was such a complicated, weird business model that made it work. We had

to give a first month free. And the problem with subscription businesses is that you pay all your acquisition cost upfront and you make it back over all the months someone subscribes, which means the more successful you are, the more money it costs you. Because you go deeper and deeper and deeper and you've got to dig out. All right, so we're crushing it. And so we are so excited because subscription orders are flying in, which means cash is flying out. Not a problem, except all of a sudden the spring of 2000 turns to the summer of 2000.com bubble

bursts, there's no more money. We are in deep trouble. And we're on the verge of going out of business. And so we decide to pursue strategic alternatives, which basically means we've got to sell this and pass. And the strategic alternative is blockbuster, but they're like infinitely bigger. I mean, we have hundreds of employees, they have 60,000 employees, they have 9,000000 stores and I think we were up 5 million and they're 6 billion so

Nothing they wouldn't answer the phone wouldn't return the emails and they happen to Call We're on this corporate retreat in the foothills outside of Santa Barbara and And on retreat, all I have with me is the t-shirts and shorts and flip-flops. And that's when they call and say we'll see you tomorrow in Dallas, which leads to Read and I in this 27th floor, cavernous conference room with the big 30-foot and danger hardwood conference table. And the blockbuster people in there and their hardwood conference table and the blockbuster people in there and their export codes that cost more than my car and I'm there in a t-shirt shorts and at least

has on a Hawaiian shirt so we've got buttons. But anyway we pitched to combine the companies that we would run the online business, they'd run the stores, we do a blended model and they're nodding and it's getting excited, this is going to work. And then they ask, read, how much? And he'd practice in the car, in the plane rather, and then he goes, okay, $50 million. And basically, they laughed at us. At the hubris that we could possibly be worth $50 million of the peak of the trough, I guess, of the dot com bubble bursting.

And it was this profoundly crushing moment because getting the call, seeing how well the pitch was going, we go, we're saved. Blockbuster is going to save us. And now we're flying back and realizing that not only is blockbuster not going to save us, they're going to compete with us. And that if we're going to get out of this, there is no magic bullet, there's no, as in the movies, the cavalry is not going to come, As the movies the cavalry is not gonna come tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt tt t solution, some way to avoid the problem, you just have to turn and face it head on. And we turned and face it head on, and it took us almost 10 years, but eventually did drive blockbuster into bankruptcy. The company which used to have 9,000 stores now has won.

The company they could have bought for $50 million. Now as a market cap of almost more than $200 billion. It's crazy. Did they counter your office though? Like offer? Did they say okay, not 50, but I was a non-starter. I think they didn't see. For them, they didn't see this as being a viable business. And it would have been a distraction. I think this was the kicking the tires exercise for them. Luckily for us, luckily for us. I think when they finally mounted a defense many years later, it was very effective and they almost took us down. So who knows what would have happened had that happened earlier. And you know, go, I know you've got to leave, but the irony is Netflix has a blockbuster documentary

on the demise of the company, which I think is hilarious. Yeah, I know. It's an amazing, amazing story. But listen, here's the lesson. We are taking anything away. It's simply this that, you know, if you don't want to disrupt your own business, you're just leaving it open for someone to disrupt it for you. And that works no matter what size or scale you're working on. I love that story. Thank you. That's a good way to leave it. I won't ask you the other question. People can go listen to it or read the book. You'll have to come back for a number two. For the follow up, like you say, you always think podcasters should do.

100%. 100%. You've been great. Where do people, do you want to give your information for people to find you or in a nutshell? In a nutshell, the best place for all things Mark Randolph is markrandolph.com. That's Mark with a C, pH at the end. And that's where you can get links to the podcast. You can sign up for all my emails I do

about all kinds of interesting entrepreneurial subjects. Find out about all my social media handles, including now TikTok, believe it or not. You're in TikTok now too? No shirtless dancing, that is purely content. Yeah, it's more because it's so interesting that you try and experiment. But that's the place. And listen to the podcast, that is purely content. Yeah, it's more because it's so interesting that you try and experiment. But that's the place. And listen, the podcast, which is probably the best source, is that will never work available wherever you get your podcast

from. Well, you've been great. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. You've been we've very insightful, great information that we can glean from. And I hope to see you again in person sometimes soon. Oh, I hope so too. That would be great. Thanks so much. This was really, really fun. Visionaries, tune in, you can get to know. Reinspire, this is your moment. Excuses, we're in heaven at the Habitat and hustle podcast,

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