Obsession Netflix Quotes

People in LA were always recommending things that were more about themselves than the recipient. They recommended obsessively⁠—films, Netflix series⁠—as though their association with a piece of media imbued them with sex appeal, intelligence, an irresistible whimsy. When I felt a recommendation coming on, I'd lie and say I'd already seen the thing: just so I didn't have to hear the plot explained. Did anyone genuinely like anything? So much art was bad. I preferred the work of dead people. At least the dead weren't on Twitter.

But this much can be said of Phillips, Polaroid’s Land, Netflix’s Hastings, Acumen’s Novogratz, the Airbnb founders, and others in this book: Confronted with a problem that was larger than themselves, they decided to make that problem—and the question that defined the problem—their own. The difference between just asking a question or pursuing it is the difference between flirting with an idea or living with it. If you choose the latter, the question will likely become what the psychotherapist Eric Maisel calls a “productive obsession.”35 It will surface, recede, then surface again. It will invade your dreams as it embeds itself in your subconscious. You’ll wrestle with it, walk with it, sleep with it.

The fate of the two companies was starkly different, as was its leadership. In its 25-year history, Blockbuster had five CEOs, none of whom had much interest in the inner workings of the video rental business. Netflix is still run by its Co-founder, Reed Hastings, who wrote a $1.9 million check 23 years ago to start the company. He is a self-described “math wonk,” and it shows in the company’s obsession with following the numbers to what its customers want. Blockbuster had thousands of times more data about movie watching than Netflix but rarely used it in productive ways. Even though Netflix was a fraction of the size, its obsession with data created a knowledge advantage that became its ultimate weapon against Blockbuster.

The answer is they became obsessed with understanding what subscribers watched and why. Netflix understood that there were thousands of movies as good or better than the new releases of the day. But that did not matter unless subscribers believed the same.