Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
By Marc Randolph, Endeavour, $32.99.
It’s a long title, but this is one of the most awe-inspiring and motivating business accounts as told by Netflix’s co-founder Marc Randolph. This untold story is extraordinary: of how Netflix went from concept to company. It was a crazy idea, but it’s how it was shaped into Netflix, and the way it disrupted an industry that makes it unique.
Netflix’s first CEO tells the inside story of how the business was built and changed the way people watch film and television. Randolph had a simple idea in 1997 when video stores were big and video-streaming was unheard of. It was a simple thought – leveraging the Internet to rent movies – that Randolph pitched to his business partner, Reed Hastings, who was intrigued. The company was founded with Hastings as the primary investor.
Priceless insights can be gleaned from a first-class entrepreneur about creating one of the world’s most successful start-ups: the obstacles, pitfalls and triumphs.
This memoir, by Randolph’s own admission, aims to render the “personalities of Netflix’s founding team as vividly and as accurately as possible. I wanted to show them as they were, to capture the mood of the time. Most importantly, I wanted to illustrate what we at Netflix were up against – and what it felt like to somehow, despite all the odds against us, succeed”.
It’s a story about the “amazing life of an idea: from dream to concept to shared reality. And about how the things we learned on that journey – which took us from two guys throwing ideas around in a car, to a dozen people at computers in a former bank to hundreds of employees watching our company’s letter scroll across a stock ticker – changed our lives”.
As Marc says, “one of my goals in telling this story is to puncture some of the myths that attach themselves to narratives like ours. But it’s equally important to me to show how and why some of the things we did at the beginning – often unwittingly – worked”.
Randolph’s career as a Silicon Valley entrepreneur spans more than four decades during which he founded or co-founded more than half a dozen other successful start-ups. He gives an insider’s view of how “we took a crazy idea and built it into one of the most disruptive forces in entertainment. This won’t be a book that feeds you a bunch of feel-good, inspirational-speech nonsense. I’m going to show you that what we did, anyone can do. It’s real, concrete and achievable”.
Now with over 150 million subscribers, Netflix’s victory feels inevitable, but the 21st century’s most disruptive start-up began with few disciples and mishap at every turn.
From idea generation to team building to knowing when it’s time to let go, That Will Never Work is not only the ultimate follow-your-dreams parable, but also one of the most dramatic and insightful entrepreneurial stories of our time.
The story of Netflix is intricate: an epic tale full of struggle, disappointment, drama, humor and achievement.
