Right About Now - Legendary Business Advice - Marc Randolph - Netflix Co-Founder

Episode Date: October 4, 2022

We hope you enjoy this special rerelease episode with Marc Randolph! Welcome to another episode of The Radcast! In this episode on The Radcast, host Ryan Alford talks with Marc Randolph, Netflix Co-Founder, Entrepreneur, Mentor & Investor.In this episode of The Radcast, Marc discusses his experiences as the co-founder and the first CEO of Netflix. He talks about the most important lessons he has learned, and how his life changed after he left Netflix. Marc also shares how his path to mentorship started and dissected how to reconcile the fact that not everyone can be the boss to his mentees. Marc also shares the ingredients or ‘growth formula’ for companies to truly grow and discusses his book, "That Will Never Work", his motivation to write it, and more...Marc also has a quick take on RAD or FAD trending topics;TikTokOnline CoachingTom BradyThe Matrix 4Learn more about Marc Randolph: https://marcrandolph.com/ . Follow Marc on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/marcrandolph ; Instagram @thatwillneverwork and Twitter: @mbrandolphIf you enjoyed this episode of The Radcast, let us know by visiting our website www.theradcast.com. Like, Share and Subscribe on our YouTube account https://bit.ly/3iHGk44 or leave us a review on Apple Podcast. Be sure to keep If you enjoyed this episode and want to learn more, join Ryan’s newsletter https://ryanalford.com/newsletter/ to get Ferrari level advice daily for FREE.  Learn how to build a 7 figure business from your personal brand by signing up for a FREE introduction to personal branding https://ryanalford.com/personalbranding.  Learn more by visiting our website at www.ryanisright.comSubscribe to our YouTube channel  www.youtube.com/@RightAboutNowwithRyanAlford. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

I'm just going to go ahead and tell you, we've had some heavy hitters lately, but nothing is heavy as a co-founder of Netflix, my friend. Number one, there's no such thing as a bad idea, and I call it on that. The thing is that I tell people is stop falling in love with your idea. Your idea is flawed. Stop nurturing this little thing like a baby and protecting it at all costs and envisioning in your mind that it's going to grow up to be the high school trophy winner. It's going to grow up to be the, your baby's going to grow up, probably to grow up, do it all costs. crack behind the 7-Eleven. Being a great product is a tiny piece of the solution. You have to have a great product. But if you can't explain to people why they want this, why this solves their

problem, you're not going to get anywhere. You're listening to the Radcast. If it's radical, we cover it. Here's your host, Ryan Alford. Hey, guys, what's up? Welcome. to the latest edition of the Radcast. Ryan offered your host and where we are radical today with the founding, co-founders, Mark, I'm making up titles for you already. Before we even get started, entrepreneur, mentor, investor, author, Mark Randolph. What's up, Mark?

Ryan, great to be with you. Thanks for having me. Hey, man, it's great to have you. You are definitely, I'm just going to go ahead and tell you, we've had some heavy hitters lately, but nothing as heavy as a co-founder of Netflix, my friend. So, uh, congrats on that. I hope I can live up to the, uh, hope up to the hype. Oh, you can. And, uh, we really appreciate your time and coming on. And, uh, Mark, let's get right to it. I, I know you've done these a lot. I know your stories out there, but let's set the table at least. I'd like to, you know,

at least start with intro background. And of course, the, the, uh, the, uh, gorilla in the room that is Netflix, of course, and everything you had involved there. But let's just start with your background, man. Wow, my background. I don't even sure I have a background. No, it's a pretty much an atypical background, certainly for somebody who ended up in Silicon Valley being an entrepreneur. I mean, I was a geology major of all things in college.

But I think, I tell you that, not to say, look at this, how incredible geology is as a preparation for entrepreneurship. but more to say that that really is the most important thing you have to understand about my background, which is that I chose geology with zero thought of what it would do for me in the future, zero thought about would this be a career and could I pay bills with it. I chose geology because it was interesting. And more importantly, because people got to go on field trips. So that has been this pattern where I guide myself by what I think is interesting.

I spend almost no time trying to guess how a certain thing will set me up to do something else. And that's probably the best background, but it's led to all kinds of crazy places. You know, Netflix was not my first company. That was my sixth company. I founded two magazines, a mail order company, then a bunch of geeky software stuff. So it's been a career that kind of goes all over the place. Well, I think there's a bit of a story there. It's funny, I had a conversation with someone the other day that talked about that very thing of chasing the interesting and the thing, their own curiosity, instead of necessarily having it all mapped out. And I think there's some fascination with that. And I think there's some bravery in that that few have. You know, we get so kind of mired in thinking there's a process system like we have to do with this way versus changing the interesting and what you're curious about is probably a rare quality

these days, isn't it? Well, and I think it's a necessary one, at least for the career that I've chosen for myself, because what entrepreneurship is is doing things for which there is no predictable future. You're doing something that hasn't been done before. You're trying to build something where you don't know what the path's going to look like, and you've got to leave yourself open to following it wherever it happens to go. And so in some ways, that can get writ large into your life. That's a fun thing, too.

And listen, don't let, I'm not just saying it's all carefree, do whatever you want. Certainly, there's huge amounts of hard work that have gone into all this. It's more that, listen, I had a friend when I was growing up right after college, and he ended up working for, I guess, IBM or Xerox, and one of those huge, huge multinational companies. And he'd be able to have these career conversations with me where he'd say, say, okay, I'm going to do a year and a half here in headquarters, and then I go out to a field for two years, and I'm going to come back and have a staff job here.

And then you could like see the whole thing for like 10, 15, 20 years in the future. And not only was that this alien, it was a terrifying thought to me. I mean, I can see there'd be some comfort in that, but oh boy, that's not a fun way to live your life, at least not in my opinion. I know. And I know that the Netflix story and you've told it. I mean, I don't want to speak for you. I'm sure hundreds of times at this point.

And so people can find that. So I don't want, you know, to spend this entire interview rehashing what can be found out there. But I do want you, if you don't mind, you know, call it the condensed version, call it whatever. And maybe built in with some of the lessons from that because it is such a behemoth in today's modern culture and everything like that. And I do want to pause there because it's had an impact on your life, no doubt, indelibly. So can we start there a little bit? Yeah, certainly. And you're right.

There's a lot of lessons there. And probably the first one is that when people ask about where the idea for Netflix came from, where did Netflix come from? How did you start Netflix? What they're looking for is the epiphany story. they are looking for that moment where it all becomes clear where you wake up and you can see this dream about I can see the streaming video

around the world and it doesn't work like that and these myths endure you'll have like what's Uber or you know Travis can't get a cab on New Year's Eve and boom there's the idea for Uber where two guys can't make the rent

and boom there's Airbnb or some guys a late Pina movie and boom this Netflix but the reality is, the lesson is, epiphanies aren't real, that company formation is sloppy. It involves lots of people, lots of dead ends and false starts. And Netflix was certainly no different.

In fact, before we even got anywhere close to an idea for video, I pitched my co-founder, Reid Hastings, dozens, if not hundreds of ideas that were... you know, generations removed from what Netflix was. And if you have a second, I'll actually give you an example. I would love it. I think this is perfect. All right, Ryan, get ready.

Here comes the pitch. All right, imagine if you will, Ryan, personalize shampoo. Here's those is going to work. You're going to cut off a lock of your hair. You're going to mail it to me. And I'm going to have my team of ace hair scientists, whatever those are, formulate this custom blend just for you. And then here's the best part, you're going to subscribe to it.

And so once a month, you'll get your custom blend. And that was a real idea that I pitched to Reed Hastings while we were commuting to work. And the same thing would happen, which is nothing. He'd be driving and he'd be just looking out the window and a minute would go by, two minutes. And I'd wait patiently. I could see the wheels spinning. And then, of course, all of a sudden, he'd turn and say, that will never work. And here's why.

And then he would lay into me with this dissertation about all the flaws, well, his FDA approval on the expenses, and no one uses that much shampoo, or whatever the reasoning was. And then I'm no, you know, I'm no shrink violet. So I would lay right back into him with all the research I'd done. And we beat these ideas up. And we did this for hundreds of ideas. And then, yes, one of the ideas we ultimately pitched him was video rental by mail.

Picture this, Ryan. an $8 billion category. And rather than having to go to the video store, you'll order online and we'll mail it to you. Now, that had a flaw too. This was back in 1997. And the video rental, if you were looking at you,

you probably remember this. I was one of your first subscribers on that I thought this was brilliant. Yes, I got them in the mail. It was on VHS cassette back then in 97. And it wouldn't work. So that idea, I got discarded. and then I went to pitching custom dog food or something. And until about maybe six weeks later,

Reid picked me up on the way to work and said, hey, I read about this new technology called the DVD. It's in test market now. But it's a plastic disc like a music CD that it holds movies. And we're kind of batten that idea around. And we realized that might allow us to dust off that old video rental my mail idea. And then here's the next business insight, which is that at that moment with this great idea of how this could transform video rental, we did not drive to the office and begin working on a business plan. We did not go and begin working on a pitch deck.

We did not try and book ourselves on Shark Tank or something stupid like that. We turned the car around then and there and said, let's see if we can validate this idea. And we drove back to the town we lived in, tried to buy a DVD and weren't any. It's a test market. So settled for buying a music CD, put it in a little envelope like you put a greeting card in, and then mailed it to Reed's house. And the very next morning, when he picked me up, he had a little envelope with an unbroken CD in it that had gotten to his house overnight for the price of a first class stamp.

and if there was a epiphany moment, or if there was, as they say in screenwriter speak, an inciting event, that was probably it. Yeah, exactly. You figured out that you could mail it, like, without it breaking and out that this would work and that you could make the money work because... Didn't need D.HL or UPS or Federal Express. We could use the U.S. Post Office, and back then, a first class stamp was 29 cents. No cardboard. So for 29 cents, I could send a movie from San Jose, California, where the first warehouses were to any place in the country. And that at least made it feasible.

I'm not going to say it made it work. Now, how messy, like, we all gloss over these things and go, just like you just did, you did it perfectly. Like, you thought it was one idea, and it's like zero to 100 million miles an hour overnight. but we know that's not. I mean, those that like myself that have started businesses know that's not reality. Like what was the, how hard was it to go from testing the CD to mass mailing out DVDs? I mean, how long of a process was that? Well, there was two pieces.

Both of them were brutally difficult and both of them are totally different. You know, back then, this is again, 1997. We wanted to do an e-commerce website, but it was not like you could just go online and pay 1995 a month and have a Shopify store. And boom, you're done. If you wanted an e-commerce website, you had to write it, every line of code yourself. You wanted to take payments. There wasn't PayPal. There wasn't Stripe. You had to write the payment portals to the banks. You wanted to serve the web pages. You couldn't go up onto Amazon Web Services in the cloud. You had to buy the servers. You had to wire them up. You had to put them in a closet. You had to air-condition it. You wanted

security. You wanted testing. Everything had to be done from scratch. So the first brutally difficult thing was getting this website off the ground. We also had to find a copy of every single DVD available, which at the time was all of 970 of them. And that was brutal. So there was the hard part just getting this thing to start. And then we had the big moment on April 14th, 1998. And there was some interesting learning at that moment. And you know that my book is called That Will Never Work.

My podcast is called That Will Never Work. And that's because that is what everyone told me when I pitched the idea for Netflix. It's what employees told me. It was what investors told me that. I mean, my wife told me that. And I persevered anyway. But lo and behold, we launched this crazy idea. And you know what?

Well, they were all right. It didn't work. It was a terrible idea. No one rented from us. And if they rented from us once, they wouldn't come back again. It was one thing after another. And we struggled for a year and a half. I mean, 18 months of almost no success in figuring out how to get video rental by mail to work.

And it took us 18 months before we finally stumbled on the crazy business model twist that unexpectedly it did work. So, yes, there was a long period where we were struggling, running out of money in a tiny office, sitting at card tables on beach chairs we had bought from home. It was a tough one. That's the story that people don't hear in the entrepreneur world of what's not sexy. It's all sexy now, like the beauty and the pageantry of entrepreneurship. but I mean, curiosity in those early days. It was obviously not working. I guess you had maybe business coming in the front door and going out the back door

with subscribers and things like that or getting people to stick with the model. But what marketing channels did you use out of curiosity? I'm trying to remember because I actually was a subscriber. I did get DVDs by mail when you were doing it. And I'm trying to remember what got me in. I don't know if it was a direct mail piece. I'm trying to remember what marketing. channels you guys are using.

So the subscription business, which really kind of defined Netflix, that was the innovation that we tried 18 months in. Okay. Prior to that it was a la carte. Okay. And you came in, you rented, and you went away. And the way that we got you is we had to solve this problem that there was very, very few DVD players out there.

And the DVD player manufacturers were having a brutal time selling DVD players. because no one was stocking DVDs. So it was a chicken and egg thing. You couldn't sell DVD players because there was no DVDs. No one wanted to stock DVDs because there was no DVD players. And so we realized we could kind of perhaps fill this hole. And so I spent personally months and months traipsing the wilds of New Jersey office parks convincing these huge conservative consumer electronics companies that they should partner with us,

that they should let us put a coupon in their box that said, buy this DVD player and we'll give you 10 free, three free, five free DVD rentals. And eventually I convinced every single one of them to do it. And that, again, our business model didn't work until we had the subscriptions. but that is what kept us alive because that kept a flow of customers coming in the front door. It kept it from getting overly depressing. It actually gave us a flow of customers to experiment on. And you started building the brand name.

So that's what some people lose sight of is you may not have been successful and who knows you did have to make some money at some point, but you did start building and seeding the Netflix brand. And that's where I remember it, Circuit City. I bought a DVD player and it came with the 10 free CD. I think that's why I bought the DVD player. I can't believe that you actually remember that because you're correct. After we did the deals with the DVD manufacturers, you did a big deal with Circus City,

we did a big deal with all the other retailers. I mean, that was, you couldn't do television advertising because you would have wasted 99.5% of your money because there was so few people with DVD players out there. You couldn't do any kind of advertising. We had to be creative and say, how do we actually catch people at the moment of peak

excitement. And you fished where the fish were. Exactly. Yes, exactly. So transitioning to subscriptions. I mean, when did, I mean, we could jump ahead. We talked, it's out there, but like, how long was it DVD subscription until streaming? Is that, some people might lose track of how much time was in that, that sequence? That was nine long years. Yeah, I knew it was longer.

Netflix didn't launch streaming until 2007. and the site launched in 1998. And the subscription service began in the fall of 99. So we were going for a long time. And it was not because we didn't realize it was coming. Because, you know, when I mentioned before, that will never work. People said that for two reasons. One, of course, they go, well, there's Blockbuster.

There's a Blockbuster in every corner. Why is I'm going to want to mail? and wait two days for a DVD. Okay, okay, I get it. The other one, though, was they go, this is a digital medium. It's just a matter of days or weeks before people are downloading this or streaming this

and who's going to need DVDs anymore. And they were right that it was inevitable, but what we thought they were going to be wrong about was the timeline. I mean, I was pretty sure, I didn't know how long it would be, but I was pretty sure it was going to be a while because, you know, there wasn't the bandwidth.

There was a bandwidth to the home. If it was there, it was connected to your desk in your office. It wasn't connected to your living room television. I knew Hollywood was going to be reticent about releasing these things digitally. So we really had to build a company which could survive and thrive while we're in a DVD world, but be ready for the transition when it eventually came. And I think the smart thing we did was position the company not as a DVD company. It was not about this is the world's fastest shipper of plastic or whatever we could have said it was.

But more did we say, this is all about streaming because we couldn't have delivered on that. So, you know, instead we positioned the company as the best place to find great stories and said that that's delivery agnostic. That'll work now. That'll work in 2007. That'll work in 2021. It'll work in 2050 when we're beaming them, you know, telepathically into your filling. or wherever you're getting movies in the future. Yeah, no, and then proliferation of these guys, spark phones, a whole other channel.

But do you ever, I have a really random question. Do you ever get hate mail from anyone at Blockbill, executive leadership from Blockbuster, like old school, like anything, any stuff like that ever go down? And you getting your DMs on Instagram, like, hey, I'm kidding a little bit, but. No, in fact, it's some ways it's almost the opposite. I mean, I don't know that you've seen, everybody so often you'll see these, news stories about, or human interest stories about some American soldiers go back to Vietnam and they're sitting around with the people who are on the other side of the trenches from

them and they're kind of talking about reliving this shared experience. So I have had recently a bunch of conversations with Blockbuster execs. And it's very friendly and very fascinating, actually, to hear that story from their perspective. and actually to realize in my opinion how close they were to actually taking Netflix out. So it's a, there's no hate. There's no hate mail there. I mean, listen, I feel badly in some ways because, you know, Blockbuster was huge. Blockbuster had 60,000 employees at one point.

You know, now they're down to one store. And so I don't want to be happy or proud about having done that to a company. I do feel proud that we were able to not only withstand the Blockbuster's onslaught, but actually be resilient and creative enough to actually overcome it. Well, they were perfectly positioned to do what you guys did. I mean, as far as capital, resource, and everything else, but, you know, it's innovation and it's the American way. I mean, like, I'm not saying kill or be killed.

I'm just saying, like, you know, they had every opportunity. You guys just got ahead of them and then it snowballed from there. There were some bad decisions and or I don't know if it's bad decisions sounds like, oh, I understand like the size of them. They were behemoth, you know, but it's like they had the opportunity, did they not? I mean, they have. Absolutely. Starting something new is really, really hard.

You know, the idea is 1% of it. You can know what to do, but the execution is really, really, really, really hard. And, you know, Blockbuster's probably single biggest flaw is they were struggling with the innovator's dilemma, you know, which is they may have seen very clearly what they had to do to enter into video rental by mail. They could probably see very clearly that this was going to get bigger and bigger and bigger, but it was very, very hard for them to say, let's take our very best engineers and let's take them off the part of the business that makes us $5.9 billion a year.

And let's have our best engineers working on something which may make us 10 or 20 million. Let's take our best executives and put them on that. Let's piss off our franchisee. It's really, really hard not just to execute, but to have the courage to execute when doing what the future requires means you have to cut into your existing business. Yeah. If they could write a book called Too Big to Pivot. Like it's like, I mean, you know, it's like, it's like, it is hard. I've worked in New York. I mean, I've been in the ad agency business my entire career.

I worked in Manhattan on some of the largest counts in the world. And it is, I've, they are, it's, they move slow. It's hard for them to pivot. And it's not for the wrong reasons. It's not because they don't want to, but it's exactly what you described. It's just that machine and to take your eyes. off the ball, but in this case, the ball was not just taking it off. It was moving completely, but they just couldn't pivot. And you know, you guys were smart enough, nimble enough, and, you know, made it happen. I also want to know, Mark, because you, you know, you said something really interesting and you hear it a lot. You know, I know you're doing stuff with personal

development and mentoring and all those things. We hear it a lot. The ideas are 1% and the execution is everything. And I think it's becoming such common vernacular that it's kind of like glossed over a little bit. But I'd love for to know your perspective of like how you, how people like yourself or others, are they just wired like to get it done? Like, because execution is just, it is everything.

Yeah. I mean, I think probably the single biggest personal trait for a successful entrepreneur is simply this predisposition. to action. You know, they do more and they think less. They immediately, when they have an idea, they're not all of a sudden spinning off into this fantasy land. Oh, how amazing this idea will be.

Just imagine what will happen when they immediately go, how can I figure out a way to quickly and cheaply and easily try something? That's the big piece. And it's really tragic. The other reason for this whole, you know, ideas 1% and, execution is 99% is that your idea is almost inevitably wrong. In fact, it's always wrong. I don't know whether you're, yeah, absolutely. In fact, you come from a industry where

brainstorming sessions are like, you know, that's your daily meals. And for those of you don't, if you're in these brainstorming sessions and there's always the moderator up there and goes, okay, some ground rules, folks. Number one, there's no. such thing is a bad idea. And I call bullshit on that. There are tons of bad ideas. In fact, rules of a brains and one session, these are all bad ideas because they are. All ideas are bad. And your job is not to come up with a good idea. Your idea is to figure out why your idea is bad because that's the process. That's what entrepreneurs do. They start with an idea and don't say this is what's going to be. Again, there's no epiphany moment, but they start and they realize by

colliding it with real people, with a real market, with real problems, what the flaw was. And they go, oh, that gives me an idea to try this and try this. And so the reason, listen, one of the, you got me, you got me going here. I like it. I love it. Yeah. So I've heard every single possible reason there is for people having an idea and I'm not wanting to start.

And one of the most tragic ones that I hear is, I don't want to tell anyone my idea because I don't want someone to steal my idea. And the reason that is so tragic besides the obvious, which is no one's going to steal your idea, but by the very act of you not being willing to make your idea public, you're protecting the 1% and you're then not enabling yourself to do the 99%, which is figure out why your idea is a bad one. You're protecting something which is a bad idea. You've got to get out and figure it out. It's the execution. It's the doing. It's the doing. It's the doing. I love that notion that all ideas are bad because the notion, because all ideas are bad because of how hard it will be to execute them and how much you have to overcome to make them happen. No, that's not what I mean.

What I mean is that idea that you have in your mind is not going to work. It's a creation. The evolution. It's a fiction. The evolution is the really hard part. But, you know, when you, the idea we had was, oh, what a great idea. We will do video rental by mail. People will come in, they'll order DVDs. We will mail up to them. And then seven days later, they'll have to mail them back with due dates and late fees.

That was a terrible idea. It didn't work. But it's fine. By doing that, by experimenting, we little by little begin to learn a lot about what were the problems people had. The thing is that I tell people is stop falling in love with your idea. Your idea is flawed. Stop nurturing this little thing like a baby and protecting it at all cost and envisioning in your mind that it's going to grow up to be the Heisman trophy winner. It's going to grow up to be the, your baby's going to grow up, probably to do crack behind the 7-Eleven.

So ignore it. What you want to fall in love with is the problem. because the problem will not abandon you. The problem will get more and more nuanced and richer as you understand it better. And you take that first idea and you use that to learn the problem and then abandon that first idea when it doesn't work. And now you know a bit more about the problem. Try something else. Then try something else.

And that process, that repetitive, that grueling, that ability to walk away from stuff two days after you work so excited and now you're disappointed. That's what entrepreneurship is. That's the process. And luckily for me, I love that. And for most entrepreneurs I know, love that. There's nothing better than sitting around the table with super smart people solving really hard problems, especially ones that no one has really tried to solve before. What's your perspective on marketing? Like, I'm fascinated by your take and like, you know, your perspective. And, you know, even though you say you're not maybe an idea guy, you are an idea guy,

you just have figured out like how to make it, how to, you know, the secret sauce of making it work. But like, where, what was your perspective of marketing as it related to the growth of Netflix? I love marketing. Yeah. I mean, I'm, I, that's, that's where I came from. I mean, I spent a dozen years doing direct marketing.

That was my first love. You know, I really fell in love with that blend of art and science, of creativity matched with numeric analytics, understanding how you did. My great, my, was he, grand uncle? Grand uncle was Edward Bernays, who was the, you know, father of public relations. Ah, yes.

So I'm, my first job, my first job offer out of college was to be an account executive and advertising agency. So I love, I love marketing. And at Netflix, it was, it was critical. You have to do, I'll see you a different story about it. So I worked for a software company for a long time. And we have a product coming out. And it won some, you know, PC magazine.

best in class award. And we all got excited. We go, oh my gosh, our product had won this award. We got it made. And we go, we better go look up, who else has won this award? And you look back at the tracker of other companies have won this best in class award, and they're all total losers in the marketplace.

Being a great product is a tiny piece of the solution. You have to have a great product. But if you can't explain to people why they, want this, why this solves their problem, you're not going to get anywhere. Yep, I love it. As a morning marketer to another, it sounds like, you know, anybody more. I had my little ding on my soundboard. I would have given one right there. Let's talk about, and we've mentioned it already, that will never work a little more in depth. You know, maybe for someone out there that's, fascinated by your story. I don't know who wouldn't be. But talk, I mean, obviously it's about the

story of Netflix and everything, a lot of what you've already described, but is there anything else that you would tell people that, you know, that would be great takeaways from the book? Yeah, that, you know, the book, the one thing is I wrote the book 16 years after I left Netflix. So there was, and there was a reason for that is because I really wanted this. to be a record of what it was really like doing a startup. I wanted to fight against the myth making of the CEO who knows everything. In this, chapter one, look how amazing this decision was. And chapter two was, look how great I have solved this problem. And chapter three is, et cetera. He goes, no, there is really hard moments, there's really sad moments, there's really

lonely moments. I mean, there's certainly humor and excitement. And that's what I wanted this to be. it to be the true behind the scenes what goes into starting and growing a company. But you know, I also wanted it to be this chance to share, I don't know what to call them, all the tips and tricks that I learned over four decades as an entrepreneur. Because I really believe that, as you mentioned earlier, lots of people right now are finding entrepreneurship as an interesting thing. And I want to let them know that it's not magic. It's not superhuman people. It's taking some fairly basic skills and applying them to your starting point. And I wanted the book to be about that. And I think it came out great. And I wanted to be a good story.

You know, it had to be entertaining. It had to be, listen, if the book about Netflix isn't bingeable, I don't know what book, what book should be. Well, I enjoyed it. I listened to it, actually. I'll listen to most of my books now. I think by books on tape, audio books rather, are awesome. I mean, recording that was so fun. Yeah. Because you realize, I mean, I'm a decent writer. I'm not a professional writer, but you realize how limited written typed language is.

You know, you're limited to things like italics and exclamation points and all bold to try and convey what you're saying or feeling. and then all of a sudden you're sitting there reading it and you can use the full range and I was like having PTSD in the recording booth when I was going through certain of the really intense stressful moments. I'm sure reliving it because when you talk it,

you think it and when you think it, you relive it and it came through. You're a really good storyteller. I know it's a real story and it was your life, but it's really good. You know, I do want to go down that path as we start to close out a little bit. But the entrepreneurship thing, you know, with our youth especially, it's cool.

You know, folks like Gary Vee, who I certainly admire and others, and I don't think they're over-intentionally glamorizing it, and they try to be transparent about the ups and downs. But what's your thought about, you know, and I don't know if everybody wants to be an entrepreneur, but it's certainly at the forefront more than it used to be good, bad, perspective on all that? You know, there's some really great things and some really terrible things about it.

I mean, just to be optimistic, the great thing about it is that lots of people have this urge to do something. You have an idea and they'd like to see it real. It doesn't need to start a company. It could be any dream you have. And certainly when I was growing up, when I was in college, even the early years of my career, there was this unrelenting pressure. to you had to be a banker or you had to be a lawyer,

you had to be a doctor, you had to have some predictable chart your path profession. And so I think a lot of people who actually had this feeling that this might be a hugely fulfilling career for me, didn't go down that path. And because there was no one there saying, no, this is an acceptable thing. This is a fun thing.

This is a rewarding thing. And so I think the fact that you now can take classes in entrepreneurship, Now you can watch television shows and movies about entrepreneurship. I think that piece of it, in that it's normalized, this is a career choice, has paved the way for thousands upon thousands of kids going to their parents and saying, hey, I'm moving to San Francisco to live for to an apartment and eat ramen and not have the parents freak out. So that's a good thing.

The bad thing is that I think the media has pumped up the wrong aspects of entrepreneurship. They've pumped it up as this path to becoming wealthy or famous. They've pumped it up that it's all about pitching, that it's all about raising money, that it's all about the parties. And in reality, that's a tiny, tiny, tiny piece of what an entrepreneur actually does. And in terms of the wealth part, it's a tiny, tiny fraction of entrepreneurs for whom that actually happens to. I mean, it's akin to the person in Kansas who was the lead in their high school play and wants to move to Hollywood to become rich and famous. Well, I hate to break it to you, but you're doing it for the wrong reasons.

You're not going to be rich or famous. A very, very, very, very, very small fraction of actors and actresses become rich and famous. But listen, if you love creating characters, if you love performing, if you love influence, and you love the emotion of it, all power to you should be an actor. And the same thing with entrepreneurship. If you love the challenge of starting something, of figuring things out, of, as I said before, sitting around the table with super smart people solving really interesting problems, it is the best career in the world.

So I love the fact that it's encouraging more people to take that step. I don't like the fact that having some people drawn to it for the wrong reasons because they're bound to be disappointed. But fundamentally, I've kind of made it my life's mission. to try and let people know that if they do want to do this, here's how. Or if they do want to do this, here's where to start. I mean, there is that in the book. It's really the focus of the podcast.

It's not me interviewing very successful, famous entrepreneurs. Other people do that way better than I do. My podcast is listening in as I'm actually mentoring other early stage entrepreneurs like the audience who can hear someone struggling with the exact same thing. are how do I raise money? How do I get along with the co-founder? How do I take this idea and start? And that's what I'm trying to, I'm trying to do too. I mean, a little bit less hysterical way than Gary Vee, but we're motivated, I think, by the same thing. I think so as well. I have one final question and you know, you can answer this in any way that you want. You know, and you talk about

some of these things with the book and everything, but if you are computing the growth formula for a startup or companies to truly grow, is there like, and I know this could be a podcast on its own, so I know, I mean, I'm sure, but like, is there two, three, four ingredients, call them that are common in that, in any kind of company's growth? I mean, like, are there things that are like you absolutely have to have these two or three things that are this that you see as you've watched either businesses you've grown or others you've been invested in or help is there any any commonalities in the ingredients yeah there are as a number of things and you know that I used to think it was simple and then that's when I began doing the

podcast and speaking to one person after another realizing there's actually a lot of things that go into it but listen there's a couple of things that are critical I mean the first one is as I said, you have to start. And that's what sinks most companies, that people have the idea. And I can't start because I need to raise money. No, you don't. I need a technical co-founder.

No, you don't. Need to quit school or quit my day job. No, you don't. I can't tell them when my idea they'll steal it. Yes, you can't. So number one is, if you don't start, you'll never get any place. And what separates all the people they read about the famous entrepreneurs,

is they're the ones who had the idea and did something about it. They didn't sit around thinking about it. But after that, the rest of common denominator is also take two of them. One of the biggest ones is that people realize you can't do everything that you have to focus. There's always this sense that I have to get everything right before I start. And in fact, even once you're running, I have to get everything right. And the answer is you don't. There's usually two things, maybe one, maybe three, that if you get them right, all the rest don't matter.

And the best entrepreneurs, A, have this intuitive sense about what those important things are, but then have this ability to put the blinders on and focus on getting those done at the expense of everything else. Even when the other things are screaming the loudest or burning the hottest, it's a really, really hard thing to do. And the last one is you have to make sure that you are always willing to walk away from the present in order to get the future. right, which goes back to what Blockbuster didn't do. It goes back to what so many companies can't do. And in a startup, you're constantly learning new things. There's this temptation to say, we can't do that.

Just think of all the time, dollars, sweat. We've invested in this idea. No, you've got to say, well, sunk cost. We're going in this direction now. I love it. Don't fall in love with the idea, fall in love with the problem. Exactly. That's a good one.

I think it sums it up. Man, awesome, Mark. I really appreciate your time. Do you have like one minute? We do a section. We do a little thing called rad or fad. I give you like four keywords and you tell me rad or fad. Do my best.

All right. TikTok. Rad or fad? Oh, God, a good one. Fad. All right. I like it. Don't think it's creating anything, any meaningful value.

and social media, evil taste change pretty quickly. Online coaching. Jesus, you're good ones. I know. Hey, that's what can you think? I'll say rad. I'll say rad. I think that's one of the silver linings of our pandemic here is realizing just how much you can get done.

And since I do a lot of online coaching myself, I certainly am not going to think that's a fad. Tom Brady. Rad or fad. That's a fad for sure. You're a New Yorker. Are you a Giants? Giants or Jets? Yeah.

Oh, I was always a Jets. Okay. J-E-T-S. All right. Got a new quarterback in there. See how he does. The Matrix 4. Remember the Matrix movies?

Yeah, of course. And I know I was just reading about that yesterday. That's rad. I think that's going to have the legs. that's going to have legs. I feel like we're moving more and more towards the metaverse anyway. It's like I think we're moving more towards the Matrix every day, right? It's becoming more and more real.

My kids feel like it's real, you know? They're in roadblocks all day. There's some stock you should buy. Blue pill. Yeah. Exactly. Mark, man, you've been awesome. Where can everybody keep up with you today?

And obviously I know the books online, but tell everybody where we can find you, keep up with everything that you have going on. So, you know, I do the podcast, which is available, that'll have a lot of work, available, wherever you get podcasts. But if you don't have the attention span for 30 minutes of this, you'll find all the shorter form stuff, my writings, my social media stuff, all at Mark Randolph.com, which is Mark with a C, Randolph, with a pH. And from there, you can jump off to the whole world of all the crazy shit that I'm doing and thinking about. I love it, man. I really appreciate you, Tom.

You are very insightful. I love the book. and I'm going to keep following along to see everything that you're sharing. Thank you so much, Mark. Thanks, Ryan. Really appreciate you have me on. Good luck, man. Thanks so much.

Hey, guys, you know where to find us? We're at the Radcast.com. Search Netflix. Search Mark Randolph. You can find all the highlight clips from this episode. Everything online. You know where to find me. I'm at Ryan offered on TikTok.

It's a fad and Instagram. You know where to get us. We'll see you next time on the Radcast. Finding great candidates to hire can be like, well, trying to find a needle in a haystack. Sure. You can post your job. some job board, but then all you can do is hope the right person comes along, which is why you

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