Marc Randolph Quotes

As you get older, if you’re at all self-aware, you learn two important things about yourself: what you like, and what you’re good at. Anyone who gets to spend his day doing both of those things is a lucky man.

Nolan Bushnell, the co-founder of Atari, once said something that has always resonated with me. “Everyone who has taken a shower has had an idea,” he said. “But it’s the people who get out of the shower, towel off, and do something about it that make the difference.

you're going to get things wrong. you just don't want to get the same things wrong twice.

You see, a startup is a lonely place. You are working on something that no one believes in, that you’ve been told time and time again will never work. It’s you against the world. But the reality is that you can’t really do it on your own. You need to enlist help. Bring others around to your way of thinking. Let them share in your enthusiasm.

own your own business. control your own life.

Culture isn’t what you say. It’s what you do.

Epiphanies are rare. And when they appear in origin stories, they're often oversimplified or just plain false. We like these tales because they align with a romantic idea about inspiration and genius

everyone is aligned when the wind is blowing the right way. it's when a storm comes up that all of a sudden it becomes apparent that people have different goals and objectives

Nobody Knows Anything. And it’s not just in Hollywood. It’s true in Silicon Valley, too. “Nobody Knows Anything” isn’t an indictment. It’s a reminder. An encouragement.

no doesn't always mean no

do at least 10% more than you are asked to

So as a leader, the best way to ensure that everyone arrives at the campsite is to tell them where to go, not how to get there. Give them clear coordinates and let them figure it out.

Real innovation comes not from top-down pronouncements and narrowly defined tasks. It comes from hiring innovators focused on the big picture who can orient themselves within a problem and solve it without having their hand held the whole time. We call it being loosely coupled but tightly aligned.

The truth is that no business plan survives a collision with a real customer. So the trick is to take your idea and set it on a collision course with reality as soon as possible.

working, for me, was never about getting rich - it was about the thrill of doing good work, the pleasure of solving problems

it wasn't finishing the train that he liked. it was the years of labor.

we developed complex algorithms to accurately match supply with anticipated demand. But back then, we were just guessing.

Focus. It’s an entrepreneur’s secret weapon.

took one of our biggest liabilities - delivery time - and in one fell swoop turned it into one of our biggest advantages

when it comes to making your dream a reality, one of the most powerful weapons at your disposal is dogged, bullheaded insistence

Truths like: Distrust epiphanies. The best ideas rarely come on a mountaintop in a flash of lightning. They don’t even come to you on the side of a mountain, when you’re stuck in traffic behind a sand truck. They make themselves apparent more slowly, gradually, over weeks and months. And in fact, when you finally have one, you might not realize it for a long time.

Plenty of people ask their parents for money during the seed stage of startups. In fact, back then nobody even called it a “seed round.” People called it the “friends and family round.

Most engineers can choose where they want to work, and the way they make their decision boils down to two questions: 1) Do I respect the people I’m working for? 2) Will I be given interesting problems to solve?

What do they all say? That will never work. By now, I hope you know what my answer to that line is. Nobody Knows Anything. I only get to write this book once. And I’d feel like I missed an opportunity if I ended this story without giving you some advice. The most powerful step that anyone can take to turn their dreams into reality is a simple one: you just need to start. The only real way to find out if your idea is a good one is to do it. You’ll learn more in one hour of doing something than in a lifetime of thinking about it. So take that step. Build something, make something, test something, sell something. Learn for yourself if your idea is a good one. What happens if your idea doesn’t work? What happens if your test fails, if nobody orders your product or joins your club? What if sales don’t go up and customer complaints don’t go down? What if you get halfway through writing your novel and get writer’s block? What if after dozens of tries – even hundreds of attempts – you still haven’t seen your dream become anything close to real? You have to learn to love the problem, not the solution. That’s how you stay engaged when things take longer than you expected.

Epiphanies are rare. And when they appear in origin stories, they’re often oversimplified or just plain false. We like these tales because they align with a romantic idea about inspiration and genius. We want our Isaac Newtons to be sitting under the apple tree when the apple falls. We want Archimedes in his bathtub. But the truth is usually more complicated than that. The truth is that for every good idea, there are a thousand bad ones. And sometimes it can be hard to tell the difference.

scrolling through entries on Fucked Company, the cynical website

It was time to seek strategic alternatives. Sound like jargon? That’s because it is. Silicon Valley is full of nonsense phrases just like it. For instance, when someone says that he’s leaving to spend more time with his family, what that really means is my ass got fired. When someone says this marketing copy just needs some wordsmithing, what they really mean is this sucks and needs to be completely rewritten. When someone says we decided to pivot, what they really mean is we fucked up, royally. And when a company decides to seek strategic alternatives, what they’re saying is: We’ve got to sell this sucker. And fast.

In the book ‘That Will Never Work’ by Marc Randolph, Reed Hastings gives Marc advice on starting a new company: You need the same people to return and use your product. You need something that is consumed; once a movie is done you need another one. The market of new customers is limited. There is no way you can succeed if you must keep finding new customers. - Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix

There are bad ideas. But you don’t know an idea is bad until you’ve tried it.

Now, of course, Netflix’s culture is famous. There’s a much-downloaded PowerPoint presentation given to all new employees. But the truth is, it wasn’t the product of meetings or careful planning or roundtable discussions. It arose organically, through a shared set of values among a team of people who had been through their fair share of offices—startups, major corporations, and everywhere in between. Netflix, for all of us, was an opportunity to work at the kind of place we’d always dreamed about. It was a chance to do things truly our way. Culture isn’t what you say. It’s what you do.

It’s the same at a startup. Real innovation comes not from top-down pronouncements and narrowly defined tasks. It comes from hiring innovators focused on the big picture who can orient themselves within a problem and solve it without having their hand held the whole time. We call it being loosely coupled but tightly aligned.

People don’t want hot tubs—not really. They don’t want free snacks or Ping-Pong tables or kombucha on tap. What they really want is freedom and responsibility. They want to be loosely coupled but tightly aligned.

Amazon was originally called Cadabra. Twitter started off as Status.

TakeOne TakeTwo SceneOne SceneTwo Flix.com Fastforward NowShowing Directpix Videopix E-Flix.com NetFlix CinemaCenter WebFlix CinemaDirect NetPix

So we did. There was no vote, no momentous ballot-casting. We printed out that spreadsheet and stared at it. Everyone went home to sleep on it. The next day, we all agreed: we were NetFlix.com. It wasn’t perfect. It sounded a little porn-y. But it was the best we could do.

If you really want to change the world,” he said, “you don’t need millions of dollars. You need billions.” Barring that, he thought the way to effect change was through education.

If people want what you have, they will break down your door, leap over broken links, and beg you for more. If they don’t want what you’ve got, changing the color palette won’t make a damned bit of difference.

We call it being loosely coupled but tightly aligned.

If you really want to build an estate, own your own business. Control your own life.

A part of me is starting to wonder if all of my business ideas are built on a foundation as unsteady and shifty as the sand loaded into the truck ahead of us.

I’m gonna pull my hair out,” I say, “and I don’t have much left.” I run my hand through the remnants of my curls, and then it happens: I have one of those all-too-rare epiphany moments. It seems like everything happens at once: The sun comes out of the clouds, and it stops drizzling. The sand truck wheezes to life and merges into the proper lane, and traffic starts to move. It feels like I can see for miles, down into the clogged heart of San Jose: houses, office buildings, treetops waving in the breeze. We pick up speed, and the redwoods fall away behind us, and in the distance I see Mount Hamilton, its crest sparkling with fresh snow. And then it comes to me. The idea that will finally work. “Personalized shampoo by mail,” I say.

When you start a company, what you’re really doing is getting other people to latch on to an idea. You have to convince your future employees, investors, business partners, and board members that your idea is worth spending money, reputation, and time on. Nowadays, you do that by validating your product ahead of time. You build a website or a prototype, you create the product, you measure traffic or early sales—all so that when you go to potential investors, palm outstretched, you have numbers to prove that what you’re trying to do isn’t just a good idea, but already exists and works.

With this morning’s launch of the nation’s first internet DVD rental store, every DVD owner—no matter where he lives, no matter how far he lives from a video rental store—is now guaranteed access to every DVD title available—to buy or to rent.

use the tools he'd been given to create something

in the interest of transparency and radical honesty, each of us would go around the room and say something that wasn't working

Hayaliniz gerçekleştiğinde artık sadece size ait değildir. Size yardım eden insanlara, ailenize, arkadaşlarınıza ve çalışma arkadaşlarınıza da aittir. Dünyaya aittir.

Focus. It’s an entrepreneur’s secret weapon. Again and again in the Netflix story—dropping DVD sales, dropping à la carte rentals, and eventually dropping many members of the original Netflix team—we had to be willing to abandon parts of the past in service of the future. Sometimes, focus this intense looks like ruthlessness—and it is, a little bit. But it’s more than that. It’s something akin to courage.

The best ideas rarely come on a mountaintop in a flash of lightning. They don’t even come to you on the side of a mountain, when you’re stuck in traffic behind a sand truck. They make themselves apparent more slowly, gradually, over weeks and months. And in fact, when you finally have one, you might not realize it for a long time.

Radical honesty is great, until it’s aimed at you.

What are you waiting for?” he asked. “As soon as any of my stock vests, I sell it. There is plenty more upside if the stock keeps going up. But if it goes down, you’ll be glad you took something off the table.

I suggested we call our list the “Queue”. I knew that queue meant line, but I also loved the idea that I could call the help section of this feature “Queue Tips”.

Because if Nobody Knows Anything – if it’s truly impossible to know in advance which ideas are the good ones and which aren’t, if it’s impossible to know who is going to succeed and who isn’t – then any idea could be the one to succeed. If Nobody Knows Anything, then you have to trust yourself. You have to test yourself. And you have to be willing to fail.

We’re getting to the end here, but not before mentioning the students at High Point University and Middlebury College, who over the years have shared all their great ideas for new ventures with me—and helped me realize that the lessons I learned as an entrepreneur can be used by anyone with a dream they want to make real. Thanks, in particular, to Jessica Holmes, past director of the Middlebury College MiddCORE program.

we'd finally figured out a way to make our original idea of DVDs by mail work, and here we were, looking ahead to a future without either DVDs or mail

this would completely turn our biggest weaknesses into our greatest strength

And then it comes to me. The idea that will finally work. “Personalized shampoo by mail,” I say. Silicon Valley loves a good origin story. The idea that changed everything, the middle-of-the-night lightbulb moment, the what if we could do this differently? conversation.

focus. it's an entrepreneur's secret weapon.