My mission is to help you get started
After leaving Netflix, I decided to spend my time sharing all the lessons I’ve learned in my 40-years as an entrepreneur. Here is a sampling of ways I can help:
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I’m Marc Randolph, and I’m here to tell you:
There’s no such thing as a bad idea
Marc Randolph
Netflix Co-Founder, Bestselling Author, Entrepreneur, Mentor, and Investor
Marc Randolph is a veteran Silicon Valley entrepreneur, advisor, and investor. As co-founder and first CEO of Netflix, he laid much of the groundwork for a service that’s grown to over 200 million subscribers, and fundamentally altered how the world experiences media.
He also served on the Netflix board of directors until retiring from the company in 2003. Marc’s career as an entrepreneur spans four decades. He’s founded or co-founded six other successful startups, mentored hundreds of early-stage entrepreneurs, and as an investor has helped seed dozens of successful tech ventures (and just as many unsuccessful ones).
Most recently, Marc co-founded analytics software company Looker Data Sciences, which was acquired by Google in 2019 for $2.6 billion. He currently sits on the boards of Solo Brands, Augment Technologies, Dishcraft Technologies and the Truckee Donner Land Trust.
Marc is also the author of the internationally best-selling memoir, That Will Never Work: The Birth of Netflix and The Amazing Life of an Idea which tells the untold story of Netflix. He is host of the top-10 Apple podcast That Will Never Work, where he works directly with entrepreneurs to provide 1-on-1 mentoring.. Marc is also a judge and investor on Entrepreneur Magazine’s Elevator Pitch web series.
The That Will Never Work podcast is available on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Podcasts. Listeners can apply to be on the podcast at https://marcrandolph.com/guest/. Follow Marc on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and TikTok at #ThatWillNeverWork
Marc Randolph
Have you ever been to a brainstorming meeting? They all start the same way; with someone saying:
“Remember… there’s no such thing as a bad idea.”
Well, I call Bullshit!
There are plenty of bad ideas. In fact, I believe there’s no such thing as a good idea.
And I’ll tell you why.
First, let me tell you a story.
My curiosity always got me in trouble
If there was a door, I had to open it.
If there was a lever, I had to pull it.
One time I even set off the school fire alarm because I wanted to see what would happen… 😬
In fact, when we first came up with the idea for Netflix, the first thing we did was to put a CD in an envelope and mail it to ourselves to see if it would break.
I just wanted to see what would happen!
The “perfect” plan
But once we decided to start Netflix, I was terrified of failing. I couldn’t afford to just “see what would happen” so I tried to plan everything out. It took six months and a million dollars to build that first website, and on April 14th, 1998 I was ready for the world to meet my great idea.
It was a DISASTER.
People found it confusing. The site crashed. No one behaved the way we expected. No one rented from us.
But luckily I had another can’t-miss idea!
This one took 6 weeks to test. There was custom photography. A week of copyediting. We double checked every link and stress-tested the site…
That idea didn’t work either.
I was getting nervous, so I started going faster. My next idea only took a month. The one after that, only a week. Soon I was testing a new one of my ideas every day.
Things were getting sloppier and sloppier. The tests had misspellings and typos. We used the wrong photos. We had dead links. We crashed the site.
My a-ha moment
But despite how fast we went . . . despite how bad the tests were . . . they taught me something super important:.
It didn’t matter!
If it was a bad idea, then even a perfectly executed test wasn’t going to make it a good idea.
But with every bad idea we tried, there was always something we learned. Some insight that brought us a few steps closer to trying something that might actually solve the problem.
I realized that it was a waste of time looking for a good idea, because there is no such thing!
The trick, I realized, was quickly, cheaply and easily testing as many bad ideas as I could.
It was getting back to being curious. Back to opening doors. Back to pulling levers. (And yes, back to pulling fire alarms).
Once I figured that out it changed my life. It changed the life of Netflix. It has changed the lives of thousands of entrepreneurs I’ve worked with.
But best of all, it’s an insight so powerful that anyone can use it to channel their natural curiosity and find success with whatever their challenges are.
But you don’t have to do this on your own. Sign up below to join the thousands of other subscribers who are receiving advice, inspiration, and encouragement from my weekly emails. (It’s spam free and i’ll never share your email with anyone).
