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people go tell me your biggest failure and i feel like a fool because i sit there like oh i can't i can't think because you were learning but yeah i don't frame it that way what's your biggest lesson there you go yeah i mean i got a million
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of those yeah because so many of my ideas were terrible hey everyone welcome back to on purpose the number one health podcast in the world thanks to each and every one of you now i know that you're coming back every week to learn
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to listen to grow to expand your mind to be able to make a difference in your business in your work to make an impact in your personal and professional lives and you though that i'm always focused on finding you incredible guests who i can learn from
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by listening to them and share their insights with you in digestible relevant ways so that you can make the changes so that you can take the steps in your life to overcome those fears to put aside those excuses and start making real progress and
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today's guest is going to help us do that in an unbelievable way now i'm going to introduce you to him in a second and when you hear his resume and you hear what he's achieved and the work that he's doing now it is going to blow your mind so this is
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definitely one you want your notebooks out for if you haven't got your notebooks out because you're traveling or you're driving or you're walking your dog then take a screenshot right now and come back to this podcast
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so that you can take notes because i promise you the amount of mentorship you're going to receive is absolutely incredible today's guest is mark randolph the co-founder and first ceo of netflix he's a veteran silicon valley entrepreneur advisor and
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investor mark was co-founder of netflix serving as their ceo as the executive producer of their website and is a member of their board of directors until his retirement from the company in 2003. mark's career as an entrepreneur spans
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more than four decades he's been a founder of half a dozen other successful startups a mentor to early stage entrepreneurs and an investor to numerous tech ventures most recently mark co-founded analytics software company looker data
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sciences and his new book which you'll be talking about today is called that will never work i love the title the birth of netflix and the amazing life of an idea that will never work mark thank you for being here oh it's a pleasure jay thanks
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for having me yeah it's awesome to have you here and i i love that title by the way i think it's brilliant i can't think of the amount of times i've heard it i can't even remember the amount of times i've heard it
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and who was the first person you ever heard it from well i've been hearing it all my life for the most part because i've been one of those guys with these crazy ideas uh probably the most famous one is my wife who you expect to be deeply supportive but
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you know but it happens to all of us you come running down with a great idea and what did everyone say and she said that will never work that'll never show and then that'll never work you know but and now of course it's a joke between us because i've
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learned that she's kind of a reverse indicator that if she doesn't like an idea all right i'm onto something right right that's interesting my wife is my mainstream test so if i'm thinking about something and wondering whether i think it's
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scalable or whether a lot of people will be interested into it that's when i go and ask my wife so so we have the opposite effect but actually in the conference you said that your number one rule in life was staying married
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why was that such a priority for you well you know people tend to get get this whole business thing and let it take them over you know they think this is what's important that somehow if i make so much money i'll be happy or if only this i'll be happy or only
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that i'll be happy and you've got to put these things to perspective the the goal is balance at least my goal is balance so long long time ago i said i know a lot of guys who are on their sixth startup and their sixth wife
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and i don't want that to be me so it i mean we're kind of jumping almost to the punch line of my life which is like the thing that i'm most proud of in my life is not starting this company with a 150 million subscribers or any of the other things i've
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accomplished it's that i did all that stuff and stayed married to the same woman that my kids know me and i think like me and i get a chance to pursue the other passions in my life at the same time i absolutely love that i think that's
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such an amazing message and i'm so glad that you're saying that that's the punchline and that's the real success i think that's beautiful hearing for anyone who's an entrepreneur listening or anyone who's a business person listening
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for them to hear that is such incredible advice so thank you for sharing that my pleasure yeah i think it's awesome i i want to dive in this this interview is going to be really phenomenal because i think what you do so beautifully with
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your life like you just did is you have everything from business mentorship you have life mentorship you're able to really think about and we were just i was just getting mentorship on disney world i'm going to disney world this year and
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and mark was walking me through how to have the best experience at disney world so i love the breadth of your experience one of the things i wanted to start with and this is because i've been fascinated by this story i've read about it a million times on
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the internet i've seen so many versions but i get to ask you about what happened with blockbuster and i know you've shared it before but i i love it because i would love to hear it from you because i've only ever read and heard about it well certainly but
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the the first thing you've got to realize is that people kind of have this vision that netflix has always been the netflix they know now that it's in every country in the world that it's streaming video that it makes its own
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tv and radio that it's a euphemism for getting laid i mean that that stuff all came later there was a time when if you wanted a movie from netflix we mailed it to you and we were a dvd by mail business and uh it's kind of weird how often i
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meet people especially younger people who have no idea where netflix started totally uh and actually this again you got to stop me i'll go on these weirdos a day before yesterday netflix announced that it shipped its 5 billionth dvd which blows my mind anyway
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going way back um our company idea sucked i mean we launched this thing and the idea was to do video rental by mail and it didn't work and it took us two and a half years to finally come up with a business model that actually made sense and
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here's the how blockbuster gets involved is that when all of a sudden you figure something out things take off and it gets incredibly expensive and we didn't have the money so i think that year we were on track to do about five million dollars
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in sales which is not bad but we were also on track to spend 50 million dollars wow and you know you you don't need to be a accountant to know that that is not very sustainable so there's a a term uh in business called pursue strategic
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alternatives which is code for we got to sell this sucker right and fast and our strategic alternative was blockbuster and blockbuster was in a totally different place so we were on track for five million they were going to do six
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billion we had about a hundred employees they had uh 60 000 employees they had 9 000 stores so we were nothing so we called these guys up and said um we tried to get a meeting nothing like crickets so quiet better business and then as it
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happens we were on this corporate retreat um and we were not far from here we're outside outside of santa barbara at this dude ranch called the alisal ranch and i mean i'm i'm dressed up today uh i shaved for you jay that that is my
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real life that's my sign of sincere respect i feel terrible now no no if you if you only knew how infrequently that happens you realize that's my genuflection um but so we're pretty casual in silicon valley and so when you go on retreat
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you gotta work at it and seriously all i had with me on this three-day retreat was shorts i had some t-shirts i was in flip-flop sandals that was it and of course that is when blockbuster calls and says we'll see you tomorrow
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in dallas we're going [ __ ] how are we gonna get from alisal ranch to dallas by tomorrow morning and so we did that um thing that prudent entrepreneurs do which is when they're 50 million dollars in debt and we chartered a private jet
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and here's the here's okay now i'm going to share the little bit of netflix trivia with you which very few people know the jet was owned by vanna white i don't know if you know who vanna white was she's the woman who spun the letters on a wheel of fortune oh wow
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so i did not know that yeah and i'm going wow spinning letters pays pretty well i guess so we're on vana white's jet we all fly to dallas we go up into this building this huge building and we walk into this massive conference
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room um and blockbuster guys come in john antioco the head of blockbuster ed stead is cfo and they're in there you know they're casual but they're like hollywood casual with the three thousand dollar loafer kind of casual right um and i'm
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in flip-flops and shorts and a t-shirt and i remember i was kind of jealous because reed hastings my business partner was there and he had on a hawaiian shirt get buttons um anyway make the pitch we're gonna we'll combine forces
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uh you guys will run the stores we will run the online business we'll find another buzzword synergies we'll all live happily ever after and they ask questions and finally um they asked the big question which is how much should we
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pay for you what do you what do you what are you talking here and reid we had talked about this on the plane we go well we're in the whole 50 million bucks so reed goes 50 million dollars and nothing nothing in fact i'm looking over at john antiocho and
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he's like struggling not to laugh and we're going ah and so obviously the meeting went downhill real quickly but it's a fun story but the real revelation took place on the jet home and we're all kind of sitting quietly and i know our cfo was
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there barry mccarthy and i know he's sitting there going all right how am i going to make the cash last longer and reid he's not a dwell in the past guy he's already off in the future of what some other business problem
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and i'm going like oh now what do we do this was going to be our way out and finally i go oh okay so i you know tink the glasses and uh go gentlemen one thing left now we have to kick their ass so that was the moment when you go that my dad used
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to say you know mark sometimes the only way out is through yes yes and um and this was that moment when we go okay if we're gonna make this happen we're not gonna have to rely on this deus ex machina of blockbuster saving us we're gonna have
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to figure this [ __ ] out on our own i love that and were there other interactions with them as well for the same purpose so that was the only one no there was no future discussion of collaboration but there was kind of this friendly um
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rivalry between the two companies and and it's funny now you know um you occasionally read stories the newspaper about some grizzled veteran of the vietnam war going back to um ho chi minh city and meeting up with this and so we i still have like um email
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converse and phone conversations with the guys that we were fighting with at blockbuster telling war stories together i love that oh that's beautiful that's awesome now tell me like you've obviously entered this book
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the amazing life of an idea and i think today i hear this a lot and i'm sure you hear it even more than i do but everyone has an amazing idea and everyone has a cool idea but in your work you talk a lot about how it's not just about the idea and the
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idea is actually a very small part of it tell us about that thought process and why it's such an important message yeah it it's um everyone has an idea and a lot of ways which is why i wrote the book is because you know there's this
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my daughter graduated from college you know four years ago and i was sitting in the audience and i'm just going waiting waiting and then i hear it which is the fall your dreams [ __ ] everyone hears that stupid thing because but then no one ever tells you how
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how do you follow your dreams because everyone has one i mean it's not just a business idea we've all got something that we want to make happen but no one knows where to start and what i try and tell people is your idea is
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nothing it your idea is not going to be what happens your idea is your starting point and it's called the amazing life of an idea because i'm trying to show people that the original idea we had video rental by mail was a terrible idea
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but that wasn't the point the point is that when reid and i had this idea of video rental by mail we didn't go home and go great let's write up a business plan and let's do a powerpoint slideshow we said what can we really mail a dvd to someone
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and so we just turned the freaking car around and went down to santa cruz and bought a passy klein music cd and mailed it to reid's house because we realized thinking about it was worthless you have to start and try something and do something
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so the po i rambled again no yeah you're allowed do it right as much as you like it's great that's why my head works um but the point is that these ideas are fleeting the idea your idea it's a bad one i don't know why it's a bad one and you don't know
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why it's a bad one but i guarantee i've never ever seen a successful company ever that's successful the way their original idea was the people that are successful are the ones who take that idea and start and then they find out why
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it's a bad idea and then if they're clever they try something different based on what they learned and if they're clever they try something different and eventually you end up with a netflix yeah your mileage may vary sure sure but that process
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is the ability to pivot consistently the ability to correct shift direction but i find that so often i i think the thing that i see the most and i think what people struggle with the most is knowing when to pivot yes and and when they're going in the right
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direction and how long is too long or how short is too short and i'm sure you've seen this time and time again with all the companies you've mentored and advertised it's probably the it's probably the question i get asked the most and unfortunately it's also
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probably the hardest one for me i wish they'd asked me one that i was easy but it's really when do i know when to give up yes and i think what happens is people fall in love with their idea they get this idea and it's it's like a
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baby and it can be the ugliest thing in the world but to them it's going oh my god it's beautiful and they project it forward they're holding the baby but they go oh gosh it's going to be the smartest it's the first kid he's going to walk way
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before his age group and they can picture it you know in in high school hitting the game-winning home run or graduating from college first but it's just a baby and it could just as easily end up you know doing heroin behind the
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7-eleven you can't tell you can't fall in love with the idea what you have to do is fall in love with the problem and the reason i say that is because the problem won't get old yes and you'll never give up on the problem eventually
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you'll figure something out and occasionally yes you do run out of time or not of money or you go i have no more ways to solve this but it's much more evident to you than knowing when to keep when to stop hammering on your idea
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yeah i love that emphasis i think that's great and and i think about that so often that whenever you hear about entrepreneurs solving problems and that being the root of where everything begins and i think so often we're like wow
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what's my idea or what's my passion or where do i want to start and it's like but then i don't know how this links to the real world and the only way it links the real world is if it's solving a real problem and i think it's so true that you can
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always go deeper into solving a problem and you can't get tired of it if the problem still exists and i think it's about finding a problem that we really believe in yeah because i think that's that's part of the challenge too is we often find
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problems because they're cool or they're interesting or they're trending but they're not necessarily a problem that we're deeply committed to so i'll play i'll play a little game with you please i'd love to hang with the people
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the people who are listening so um i'll tell a quick story um because and i'm going to tell you the story because there is a way to come up with ideas that are good ideas ooh i like this and it's a simple one it's by training yourself to look for
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pain to despite being an optimist to train yourself to see the world as an imperfect place and i don't mean solving these global problems like don't try and cure malaria or look at something that you know really well that you bump into every
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single day as you're you're promoting your business or working with your own with your family okay so the story is about this uh this job i had 40 years ago and i was a house painter this is during my university years and different world
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obviously you know no technology whatsoever and back then when you would buy paint it came in those cans i remember yeah my parents used to put a lid on it and that kind of stuff and that was fine and now 40 years later
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i go to paint and paint still comes in that stupid can and it's lame because it first of all it requires a screwdriver to open it right and then when you pour it it all drips down the side of the pant can and it fills up a little limb and
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you got to stir it with a stick and then you gotta paint and you spill paint all over you and it's just the most disastrous experience yeah um and then of course when you gotta close the can you hammer it put a hammer on it i mean it's ridiculous
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but what happens is if you're picturing as i'm talking this about painting and you're imagining painting and you're going yeah that paint can sucks some people go that's stupid what why don't they sell paint like in a milk jug or even better like the kind
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that um you put detergent in the detergent comes in or where it sits in a counter with a little spout that it all pours out from or why isn't there an aftermarket lid or why isn't there a magnetic stirrer but people automatically begin filling
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in these blanks and it's a story that happened to me that it's an amazing thing when people begin looking at the frustrations in their life without even thinking about it these ideas yes pop into their head and it's coming back to focusing
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on the problem yes because the problem will never get will never get stale and so much of what happened at netflix was just bumping into one problem after another and as soon as you solve one well lo and behold there's a new one yes and
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it's why being an entrepreneur is such an amazingly exciting business because it's perpetual yeah and i just want to point out to everyone who's listening and watching right now what mark said that was really powerful
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because not only is mark talking about finding the problem which you may have heard before you may be thinking about before but something he specifically said it was like trying to solve a problem that you know well and i thought that was a really
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powerful point because i think sometimes we can get lost in problems that we actually are very distant from and don't deeply understand and have no familiarity with and i think we are better at coming up with solutions for things we are very
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familiar with yeah you started off by saying that you know you might have an idea but you're not sure how it fits into real life or how even the problem fits into real world but you do you figure those things out by actually starting to try and solve
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them yeah and they take you places it is absolutely a follow where it goes it's a murder mystery it's a it's a crossword puzzle it's a jigsaw puzzle it's such an interesting process of seeing where this problem takes you yeah and then lo and behold
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sometimes it goes into an area and you go well i'm solving a problem for seven people and you go okay that's not viable yeah fine but sometimes lo and behold you stumble onto something that everybody wants and uh
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and that's that's luck and that's okay too but that's interesting you've just sparked a thought in my head that i don't actually think of often or i don't hear often at least and it's about how that the number one thing needed to be a
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good entrepreneur or an idea creator and someone who takes an idea into implementation and execution is wanting to continuously problem solve and and we don't actually hear about it like that often that someone who's an entrepreneur needs to constantly be
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happy to move from problem solving problem solving to the next problem yeah and just keep going down that road and i think the one of the things is a lot of people i mean it's back when i was a lad jay you know not not that long ago
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there wasn't this thing there was a thing called an entrepreneur but there certainly wasn't something that you became and it was never something that you would go to school and get a degree in you know inconceivable um so in some ways it's good because now
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not everyone who goes to a university thinks they have to be a banker or a lawyer or a doctor they actually think wow i could actually be an entrepreneur but the problem is a lot of them want to be it for the wrong reason
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and they want to do it for this the glorification which is also a shocking thing to me that they think it's the way to get rich or it's the way to be famous or you know you're going to be on shark tank or it's it's that is not what it's all about i mean
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we're here in uh in l.a and it's like the people who move here from all over the world to be an actor or an actress because they think they're going to get rich and famous well i hate to break it to you but not going to happen or at least the odds are extremely far
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against it but if you're in some city and you're going i love performing i love taking on characters you're doing it for the right reason but then it doesn't make a difference whether you're rich or famous you're still getting that
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enjoyment and entrepreneurship is the same and again long way back to where we started it's because of that thrill of solving the problem if that's the reason you're doing it you will never be unhappy in that job absolutely and how do you
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see it like i know a lot of people who say to me like jay i'm just stuck with overthinking i just procrastinate all day however you push so many people to take their first step or to overcome the fear of getting started because i've
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heard you say before that and i love this by the way if you have an idea you learn more in an hour of doing it than in a year of studying it absolutely and it's like how do you get someone to just how have you seen and i'd love to hear your thoughts on this
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how have you pushed people into action so there's a there's two things there's one thing that you say and you say just [ __ ] do it like stop thinking start doing but that's very similar to the follow your dreams so i'll give you a
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longer explanation um i mentioned before that people fall in love with their idea but what happens when you fall in love with your idea is you naturally embellish so you start with this idea and it's simple and it could be done pretty easily but
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you don't do that you leave it in your head and you add something on and all of a sudden you've added it's a you know a house but you've added on a wing and now you put a second story on and then you add on the tennis courts
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and you go let's put in this beautiful driveway and let's put in the skateboard ramp and pretty s and you have gargoyles and turrets and you've got this castle in your head now then when you go to price it out you go [ __ ]
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this is going to cost a lot of money and this is going to be really comp i'm not even sure he can build it like it's too complicated and too big so the trick is not to build the castle in your mind but to take your immediate your small idea
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and do it and if your idea is i want to build a castle the cleverness is not what's my idea the cleverness is how can i figure out a quick simple and easy way to validate it i'm trying to think here whether i dare try and give you an analogy
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for that go for it it's a little dorky give it a shot and if i see you kind of your kind of eyes kind of glazing over i'll kind of know that maybe i'm losing you um so years ago i was working with a young entrepreneur in san francisco
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and um he was uh at a party um late one rainy well that's every night late one rainy evening in san francisco and what happened to him is something that happens to everybody at that situation which is the party ran out of beer
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and then they all been arguing about whose turn it was to go out and buy the beer find an open liquor store all that stuff and he goes idea entrepreneur idea pain um my phone knows where i am my phone knows my taste my phone can have a database of all the
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open liquor stores that deliver credit card hit a button beer shows up great idea this is a bunch of years ago yeah and back in the day to test that idea you would have had to actually build the app establish relationships with all kinds
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of liquor stores you'd have to do a marketing campaign he didn't want any of that crap didn't want to spend the money didn't want to have to code anything so he parsed apart the problem and he said am i really wondering
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does my phone know where i am no i know that am i worrying about can i build a database of no i liquor stores i can do that will people trust me with their credit card i know that what don't i know and what don't i know what i don't know
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is does anyone care yes and more importantly if they order once will they order again what's the average order size so now here that's the setup yes here's the clever creative way of quickly simply and easily testing it he goes huh and what he did is he
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printed up business cards that said nothing more than need beer call me and then he went and stood outside these apartment buildings in san francisco on friday and saturday nights whenever someone in the right demographic came along
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he'd give him the cards and say hey if you need beer call me and then he'd go back and he'd wait and they'd call and he'd get in his bike and he'd go to the liquor store and he'd buy the beer he'd go to the apartment and he'd put on a viking
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costume don't ask okay and then up he goes and delivers the beer and he figured out how to test this idea i love that not by building the app not by raising money not by getting a co-founding engineer but by printing out business cards i love that he collided
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his idea with reality he did the equivalent of what reid and i did we mailed that first music used music cd he quickly and easily found out is it a good idea and it wasn't yeah because everyone was drunk the orders were small they were all
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taking place at one o'clock in the morning there was no repeat business but he realized that with a business card and more importantly he had real people telling him what worked and what didn't work and someone eventually said
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you know i i have an office i'm an office manager during the day and we do these big beer parties and i'm carrying cases up and down the stairs and he goes huh maybe i'll pivot to doing pivot to doing this and that didn't work either and then
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someone said would you stock my fridge for me and he pivoted to that and it worked right and he took this meandering path of an idea and the idea that worked for a little resemblance to the one he had at the beginning it was another example of the amazing
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life and idea it was the amazing example of another example looking for pain another example of how to test something quickly simply and easily in many cases without even actually doing it absolutely that's such a great
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answer by the way i'm so glad you went off on that that journey that was brilliant and and again i'm learning so much just by this this conversation is unbelievable so far if you've been listening or watching right now i really hope you're
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taking notes again all of this conversation you'll learn so much more by reading the book that will never work which we're discussing right now by mark randolph so one of the things i love that you point out there which is which is so
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special i feel is testing that which you don't know right like it wasn't about building a database because you know you can do that i loved all the those examples you know you can build a network of liquor stores that that people have done that before
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but it was testing the part though you don't know and i think you're so right that so much we waste all our time and money and resources in building the website building the app building the platform and not even testing the idea at its
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root core which actually doesn't cost any money and that's what i love about your idea the most that people always say well i i need some investment or i need or i need someone to let's get dead on that is exactly it
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every i am now the master of collecting excuses okay everyone's got some reason i can't do it like and that's a great i can't raise the money yeah what's because you designed a castle which takes too much money figure out a simple way to try it i
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can't do it because i don't have a business degree i don't have a computer science degree i don't have a technical co-founder and these are all examples for people starting tech ventures yes but everyone with their idea
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has an excuse yes and what you have to begin recognizing is this is a legitimate excuse or not am i just scared absolutely and it's okay to be scared it's the nature of it's risk-taking is not doing something crazy scary dangerous risk-taking is starting
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down a path where you can't see around the corner you don't you don't know what's next and not being afraid to re-route along the way yeah that's that's the fun part of it i mean it's not just jumping off a cliff yeah here's another mask talking about
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cliffs let's go the opposite direction let's go up the cliff yeah so i do a lot of i'm a climber i'm an alpinist for most of my life yes and in rock climbing um and now people climb the gym so maybe people might recognize this that when it's easy
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okay two things are in place one is you can see all the way to the top and the holds are big enough that you can not only climb up but if you don't like it you can climb back down all right so the next level of difficulty is you can still see all the
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way to the top see the whole route but it's so hard now that you can climb up but you can't climb back down right now the real scary stuff is when you can't see all the way to the top and it's so hard that if you climb
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halfway up you can't climb back down but the other piece about rock climbing is that you can't always see all the way to the top from the bottom so what you have to do is you go up the first four or five holds and oh now i think i can see the next
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four or five and you go up those and all of a sudden the root reveals itself to you that is what taking an idea down a path is like it requires that courage to start even though i'm not sure exactly how i'm going to get there yeah i mean i
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i'm going to gather your i'll go on a limb here you're probably a reasonably adventuresome eater just because of the travel stuff that you've yeah sure so you go into a restaurant sometime and you see something on the menu and you go i have no idea what that is
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yeah but you order it yeah to try it out yeah experiment if you have that level of risk taking you are fine right because something comes what the hell if you don't like it you don't need it yeah right you know but occasionally you
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get amazed yeah and that's what's so wonderful about trying things yeah that's beautiful so well said and where is where on the journey is feedback useful and what feedback is useful because i think because i think you know you've you
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talked about obviously a wife you talk about this conversation with blockbuster and of course countless more but just this i think a lot of us struggle with people's opinions and how people's opinions hold us back or focus back
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and i'm not talking about the excuse kind i'm really focusing on feedback and going what type of feedback is useful and and how do you decipher whether that feedback is useful or not whether that's from a potential investor or a customer
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or client or whatever it may be um none of it is useful why is that that's that's too simple a way to say it but what you're hearing is mostly right nothing is useful or a different way to say it and especially pertinent since i'm down here in
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hollywood is nobody knows anything nobody knows anything and that's the immortal worlds of william goldman famous hollywood screenwriter and ironically he wrote 20 movies and won academy awards but is known for those three words from his adventures in the
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screen trade book but he meant that no one can tell how well a movie's going to do until after it does it it is absolutely true in any new venture no one knows and so anyone who tells you well i think this or i think that
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they don't know what they're talking about the only feedback that's valuable is the feedback that comes from trying it and seeing how the real person you want to respond actually responds that's the only thing that counts investors no they don't know and they
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also don't necessarily have the same criteria in mind for success that you do your spouse god bless them they have the want the best for you but they don't know either you just can't tell no one can tell a good idea from a bad
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idea the only way to do it is to try it i'm sorry i know that no it's great that's it i wish there was a shortcut so i guess i guess looking at it from a different perspective it's like when are mentors useful like you obviously mentor
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people and guide and and how do you know a mentor is useful that's a great question what type of yeah what type of question should you be asking and since i'm a mentor myself i guess i don't want to dismiss all of my advice but most of my advice is designed around
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helping people get started and when they're starting how to keep them on the right path of continually getting customer feedback yes and again i don't want this to be too commercial because this advice is good for anybody who's trying to solve
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something yeah whatever you think your problem is trying to solve even if it's a problem of your own you want to collide that with the reality as soon as you can and that's the feedback but yes having a mentor who understands
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what you're up against and has confidence in you and that you enjoy spending time with that's the three uh the three critical things interesting i mean that now i can't remember at the very beginning of our conversation but um in many ways
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i am le i do a lot of work with early stage founders so i'm a mentor or you can call me a founder coach um but what's interesting is most of my job is marriage counseling is that because the real challenges are those oh that's where this came from
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we were talking about the beginning about life balance yes how do you do this at the same time keep yourself healthy and keep yourself sane and maintain your relationships and keep your hobbies alive and so it's funny
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people can be brilliant marketers or brilliant technologists and the thing they struggle with is that wow and at least in the tech world where i spend a lot of my time the most stable configuration is two founders attacking a business but it's one from
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mars and one from venus yes and they're spending more time together than they would with their partners and you realize that helping them keep that relationship healthy is critical and hard they have to it's incredibly lonely being a ceo
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because you can't necessarily reveal everything to your employees and you can't necessarily reveal everything to your board who is your boss and so there's really no one who understands that you can talk to that's another role that a mentor plays
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you're kind of gathering not just the role a mentor plays but how much of making a company successful is emotional and psychological yeah not technical and accounting yeah i love that answer let's dive a bit into the marriage counseling because i
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know that my audience is so focused on learning about relationships and i love learning about it too and i'd love to hear from your perspectives and learn from you as well what have you seen have been the kind of like the building blocks of
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making sure that a relationship with your spouse or your girlfriend or boyfriend or whatever it may be has been able to be maintained through the growth and momentum of a successful company so one thing i've learned is um i can't
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speak for humanity i i know what's worked for me yeah i'd love it but again i just want to make sure that you know that there's not it's not a miracle and i'm not a i'm not a guru in in this sort of thing but what works for me is radical honesty
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um and what's interesting is that radical honesty is the principle that i use with my wife it's what i use with my kids but it's what reid hastings and i use with each other it's what i use with my employees it's there's life is way too short to
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[ __ ] people and more than that people are smart and they can tell when they're being spun and there's something incredibly powerful about speaking from the heart and honesty doesn't mean just delivering bad news
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it means delivering good news it means revealing your vulnerabilities it means admitting i don't know something it means saying you're right and i was wrong i mean it but it's an incredibly powerful thing um and i can't i can't recommend it
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enough yeah yeah absolutely but again it's not easy yeah and in terms of time and energy do you feel that in the growth of the stages of a company it's is it impossible is it like literally impossible to spend quality time with your partner or is
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there a is there any balance or you know what is the reality of it i guess it's it's it is difficult i mean i i'm not gonna sugarcoat it um having a startup having launching netflix was like having a second family a family
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who woke up in the middle of the night and cried a family that required you to go away and take care of an emergency and you also have your real uh family and i had young kids who were waking up in the middle of the night and crying
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and were requiring me to travel away in emergencies so it pulls you in all directions and it's almost like the big rocks model of time allocation you've got to pick the things that are critical and make sure you carve out the space to fit those in and at netflix
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in those first few years even before then my wife and i had this principle that every tuesday 5 p.m sharp i would leave the office and she had a babysitter and we would have a date night yeah we just go downtown we'd go for a
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walk we'd glass of wine go see a movie but we'd spend time together away from the kids away from the business and it was really hard at first to preserve that time because it's a startup and everyone's always grabbing you so in an emergency emergency meeting
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before five yeah either talk to you on the way to the car yeah but the magic of it is that once you've defended it successfully for a month or two everyone realizes it's futile to even ask and more importantly they all begin
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going like well nothing's gonna happen on tuesdays after five i can now take some time off on tuesday after five absolutely and it ends up um giving them space but perhaps the most important thing is it models for everybody
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what the culture really is it models what the priorities are absolutely if the ceo of the company can do this well then i i guess i can i can too yes and culture is not what you say yeah it's what you do yeah so we can talk all we want about
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how we believe in family and balance um but then no one ever takes vacations and everyone is there until midnight every night that that's saying one thing and doing another which besides not modeling the behavior also says that you are insincere yeah
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liar so you know the um probably the most important lesson that i've learned from 40 years of being an entrepreneur is and this is going to sound strange but i am not that special i've really come to realize that so much of
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what i've done are things that anybody could do that these things which i try and beat into people are not rocket science they're not things that take a great education you don't even need to be that smart it's an attitude it's being willing to
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start it's being willing to take a risk and those are things that anybody can do and i've just realized almost everyone i speak to they're smarter than i am they're hard working more hard working than i am um they're better prepared than i am
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um and they just need to get going um and if i can let people know they can do this then i will really have accomplished something in my life that's beautiful mark and thank you so much for placing such a strong emphasis
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on life as opposed to just business and as opposed to just investments and mentorship and entrepreneurship but really putting that emphasis on relationships and love and connection and service so thank you so much for doing that it's my pleasure yeah
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and i i think i love that about setting and preserving these rituals that's kind of what it is it's like it's not i think when we leave it open like oh yeah we'll try and find some time this week to spend time together you never do yes right it's almost like
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it needs to be structure lets you be spontaneous i feel like i feel like if you just leave it to spontaneity then you'll never find any structure but when you start with structure you can find spontaneity so maybe one day you
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went for a walk or you went for a dinner or you went for a movie and you could do whatever it was but setting that structure is so helpful and useful i really agree yeah and you know it and having rhythm rhythm yes rhythm helps as well i mean i
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know that you have you have this nice rhythm set up so you know okay mondays i'm i'm busy yes but other days you can grab time for other things i mean it's a it's just a matter of figuring out how to make your life work
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with your work yes absolutely no i love that great advice and and then again what you mentioned the second partnership which is usually this co-founder partnership and you and reid hastings used to commute to work together yeah right tell us about that
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because that's fascinating is is that pretty common in in the startup world of co-founders no community and it's cool i love it i think it's great it is i mean and one little piece of it is that so much of a startup is luck
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i mean there's certainly a lot of things about the netflix story which were luck the dvd player actually being widely adopted was luck the fact that blockbuster said no was luck i mean you can you know i'm here because i did a bunch of things right
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but i also had a huge amount of things break my way but one of the lucky breaks was that reid hastings company bought a company that i had helped start um and that was luck but then the real luck was that he ended up happened to coincide live in the same
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town as i did and that we began carpooling back and forth and so we became friends in this weird way that would probably not have happened organically and then the other lucky thing is this company that reed was running that
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what my company it was again acquired by someone else and we were both being fired so there was another lucky break so a lot of things conspired to all of a sudden have reed and i together on a 40-minute uh to 40-hour commute knowing that in six months
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or so we'd both be out of jobs wow and that began the process of saying what reid was saying i'm going to go back to uh back to school get my higher degree in education and change the world and me saying i'm going to go start another company
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and then him saying i kind of want to keep my hands in this whole entrepreneurial thing so how about this i will be your angel investor and we decided to come up with an idea together and that i would he'd fund it i would run it and away we'd go
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and that began these crazy car rides um over the hill as we call it going over the mountains uh every day from santa cruz to sunnyvale brainstorming ideas brainstorming ideas about pain we had about ideas we'd come up with
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um and going back to that amazing life of an idea most of the ideas we came up with were terrible yeah i mean this is not like we're going gosh we've got to think of an idea about movies because we're both passionate about movies we were throwing all kinds
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of crap at the wall i mean one of the things netflix almost was was uh personalized baseball bats like made on a computer-driven milling machine right like just your exact specifications jay um another uh was customized shampoo like you send mail in
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a lock of your hair and we'd formulate it just for you but i'd then go into my little office and research them all day and then the drive back i would tell reed what i learned and little by little um went through
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hundreds of ideas and even one of them um was let's do video rental let's try video rental by mail because video rental big category and i had previously in my career done a lot of um mail order stuff and direct mail uh getting stuff you knew stuff i knew
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yeah then i'd seen the problems and both of us had seen the problems with video rental who hadn't um but back then video came on those vhs cassettes yes i remember yeah you know i'm your age you probably watch lion king about six thousand
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times yes yes yes yes on your vhs cassette um but uh it didn't work like too heavy too expensive too fragile and so that idea got abandoned and then on to the next crazy idea and that's where the dvd came in because on one of these rides reed mentioned
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this new technology dvd and they go wow what is it like well it's this little disc the size the music cd and we're going huh thin and light it's cheap yeah sheep this this might change some things but then that's where it comes
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down to don't think act so rather than this big debate about who can we ask whether mailing a dvd is too fragile and who can we let's build a business plan and let's imagine how we're going to build the website we
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might screw it let's just take the first step and see if you can actually mail one of these things to yourself which is when we turned the car around and drove back to santa cruz and went to logos record and tape used music store and bought a
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patsy klein music cd and then two doors down to the stationery shop and bought the little pink gift envelope that you'd put a greeting card in yes and cd in the envelope and dress to reed's house in santa cruz and pop it in the slot
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and go to work and then 24 hours later reed shows up doesn't even say a word just holds up a little cd unbroken that got to his house for 29 cents and we went there might be some merit to this video by mail after all wow so you see that in all the examples
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you're sharing with me we know that the more we experiment the more we fail right it's the more we experiment the more you're gonna fail because the more mistakes you're gonna make the more you're gonna have to pivot
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the more you're gonna have to figure things out how have you and reid consistently gone through failure after failure after failure and and how when was there a time when you were failing where you just felt like this is not gonna happen like this is not
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working and how did you get through that one so um every failure is a learning and people go tell me your biggest failure and i feel like a fool because i sit there like oh i can't i can't think because you were learning
49:34
but yeah i don't frame it that way what's your biggest lesson there you go yeah i mean i got a million of those yeah because so many of my ideas were terrible yeah um biggest lesson okay it's the power of focus and the courage of walking away
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from today in exchange for tomorrow and that sounds so simple and boy it's hard and when we launched netflix it sold dvds and it rented dvds and about two months in we were crushing it million a hundred thousand dollars in that first month
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all selling dvds and that was a disaster because we knew amazon was going to come in and that was not sustainable and we did this for months and months and kept couldn't get rental to work and then finally realized that doing the sales is not is paying the
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bills but ironically it's making it harder to get rental to work because it's confusing for customers we're spending all of our time on sales and not focusing on rental so there you come down to the realization if you're going to do
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something pick one thing and do everything you've got on it but then comes the courage which is what do you focus on the sales which is paying the bills but it's eventually going to go out of business or do you bet at all on this unproven
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technology there's renting dvds by the mail which was showing no signs so we in one day pulled the plug walked away from selling dvds entirely 99 of our revenue turned off like a light switch but it focused the mind on how to make
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rental work and this scale's large that everyone has this problem where they're doing something that's working and they know that's not the future that's not what people want in the future yeah but they're scared to do it and you can take it at a personal level
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you really want to take a swing at doing this but god i have this job and i it's paying my rent and and you're trapped and that is the most tragic thing i can imagine yeah people feeling trapped um and i'm not naive i'm not saying you
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know walk away yeah just pull the plug but start start dreaming about it will leave you trapped even longer you have to recognize it's really hard to do two things really really well yeah yeah i know i and i agree with you i think you know
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i've had mentors who've said to me before that you know when you're really in pain that's when you will find your potential and that's when you'll be able to break through and i used to always be like oh yeah that makes sense but i'm proactive
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like that's not true like you know and then i realized that actually when you felt the plug was being pulled for you or you pulled the plug for yourself that's when you really dug deep yeah and you almost work harder because
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now you can't come back to what you had the day before in terms of your example you're not coming back to oh yeah we already know we make x amount of money through this right you've now made it impossible for yourself to rely on
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something that doesn't have a future and now you've got to find something and it's in that point that you're more likely to find something because you don't have a choice absolutely and i think it's almost like giving yourself no choice whenever
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that's right for you personally is is a good way to go because i've found that when i've had no choice that's often been the time when i've done my best work absolutely yeah and it is it's a courage thing too i mean you can wait a desperation but
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you can also say i'm going to just give it a shot do you you know ernest shackleton is no i don't know ernest shackleton he's he's kind of my hero okay there's he's a polar explorer okay and this is the turn of this turn of the last century
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and he wanted to be the first person to travel to travel by land over uh the antarctic continent so i will not tell this whole story it is the most unbelievable story though but anyway he has this boat it's the unsinkable
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wooden boat and he's dr sailing to drop off him in his expedition and they get stuck in the ice and they go no big deal so they all pile off the they will wait for the spring when it melts so they all pile off and they have camps on the ice
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but of course the ice crushes the boat and the boat sinks so now they're all sitting on this ice floe and it's pretty cushy they've got have dog sled races and they've got all kinds of food and they have wood from the boat for fires
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and he's watching this ice flow as the spring comes gets smaller and smaller and he's going well i can sit here in my comfortable surroundings yeah until all of a sudden we're all dropped in the ocean or i could take advantage of the fact that it's spring
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yeah and there's open water and i can put my entire expedition in our three lifeboats yeah and see what happens and it thus begins one of the most unbelievable stories of uh adventure and leadership you could ever ever tell but it's i i've
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always thought about that yeah this guy who looked around and everyone's comfortable and said we can't sit and be comfortable yeah it's what happened at netflix what happens all over the place i love that thank you so much you're amazing you're an incredible
54:58
storyteller uh you're fascinating to talk too i'm excited for everyone else to read this book that will never work i genuinely believe that if you've got a big idea you've got a small idea you've got no idea this book's gonna help you navigate the
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process of getting started and then navigate the process of actually making it happen and i think those two are so distant it feels sometimes they feel so far away but uh this book will definitely definitely get you closer mark we end
55:23
every interview with the final five so i ask you a final five rapid five quick five questions so you have to answer each question in one word to one sentence maximum if i allow you to go on then you can and i probably will because
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no you don't know so here are the questions the final five number one what's your favorite slice of pizza start easy oh uh plain cheese man nice yeah question number two the best trail you've ever hiked or your favorite hike of all time because i know you uh
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it's the uh uh oh crap it's the the one along the coast of of italy the connect the cinque terre okay wonderful it's a small why that one it's a small trail that can these five towns which are only accessible by fishing boat really old towns and
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they've built this network of trails that connects the five towns that run right along the ocean amazing spectacular i love that okay awesome question number three one company you wish you started uh am i allowed to hit a buzzer and pass
56:33
uh yeah i i guess another way of rephrasing it is a problem you wish you would have solved was there a problem that you try to solve but then you've seen someone else actually solve it really well if there is if there isn't then you can
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pass and i'll do it i'll choose another one what does it say about me that i can't immediately jump to a one-word answer about it no that's good because of course there's hundreds of things where i go oh my god that was so clever
56:56
i wish i'd done that yeah i can't that's okay that's cool we'll substitute that for another one so your question number three is tell us about the canada principle yeah one more than one sentence yeah you can have someone said uh
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sometimes it seems that you can easily get a 10 lift for example as we could have by expanding to canada but it's always harder than you think and that if you take that same 10 of time or effort or attention and focus it on your core problem
57:24
you'll reap much bigger rewards another way of saying it beware of low hanging fruit because it rarely is nice wonderful great piece of advice awesome question number four your favorite show to binge watch or your favorite tv show uh
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i made everyone else we have so much access to almost done with sex education okay oh my god that is hysterical and fantastic yeah awesome yeah no i was thinking one of the one of the problems i'm just going off on a tangent here
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i think one of the problems that i always think about when you talk about the paint can what what i was thinking about was struggling to find what to watch at night that's that is literally the problem i think of all day long i'm literally me
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and my wife could sit down and we could spend an hour trying to figure out what to watch especially when it's two of us i can figure out what to watch when i'm on my own there's two of us and then you don't watch anything because it's too late
58:13
why is that so hard what someone out one of your listeners has to like totally go fix that yeah but here's another principle which uh isn't is that if something seems obvious there's something you don't know right so go on
58:30
tell us more that it's just that if it's something what you have to do before you have this great idea and you go it seems like there should be an obvious solution there's something you're missing so you've got to do is do the research and say who has tried this
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yes what is the unknown barrier that i just don't see yes otherwise you end up just repeating the same mistake someone else has made before absolutely absolutely so someone out there please go and solve this yes please yeah and tell me about it yeah
58:56
yeah yeah yeah exactly i wrote mark about it by tomorrow hopefully i love it and the fifth and final question is what is one habit you're most proud of breaking most out of breaking of breaking yeah any habits that you've broken in your
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life that you think were good mental physical sure a recent one is uh the cell phone um addiction okay tell us about that no i mean uh it's it's such an obvious one but everyone is afflicted with it and now it's almost like being a non
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next smoker which i was never a smoker but now you see people and you go oh my god what are you doing the constant pulling it out this uh habitually yeah and it's just taken me this sense of saying leave it in your pocket leave it and i
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finally actually got to the point where now i no longer have that urge to grab for the phone at every time i have a spare moment and it's it's partly this wonder wonderfulness the this wonder of stopping and taking it in i mean it's a medi it's
59:55
a standing meditation when you're in line or when the plane lands and everyone goes on their phone no just look around i mean it's such a it's a cool it's a cool replacement yeah i'm really really digging it so you know i i i was um [Music]
1:00:15
this was unfortunately not too long ago but i was flying someplace and i was flying first class um and something was wrong you know i don't know something with the seat or i didn't get my first choice of meal or the little wet little towel was too
1:00:32
dry or something so stupid and i remember us complaining to my wife and i had this this revelation like you stupid bastard how how dare you how could you possibly be complaining about something like that and it was this moment
1:00:51
where i realized i am so unbelievably lucky i have to appreciate everything about how unbelievably fortunate um that i've been that i've had this idea that actually turned into a real a real company that had the chance to spend time with my wife and my family
1:01:10
and have all these things happen i do not deserve anything else especially not to be complaining about that so i think i take back my stupid answer about the cell phones that is not the most important habit the most important habit i broke was
1:01:27
pity yeah and recognizing how lucky i am thank you so much mark for doing the final five thank you for being on on purpose it's been awesome talking to you and everyone has been listening or watching back at home you can get the book that will never
1:01:41
work the birth of netflix and the amazing life of an idea by mark randolph i highly recommend going out and picking up the book and diving into the story of the place that's giving us all the stories that we consume i mean to figure
1:01:52
out the fact that there are literally how many people in the world know like 150 million subscribers million subscribers in the world all of us consuming off this platform to figure out how it was actually birthed what happened behind
1:02:03
it and really what happened behind the scenes go and check it out thank you so much for listening make sure you have subscribed if you haven't already and please please please go and follow mark randolph mark where can they find
1:02:13
you if they want to follow more of your work and hear your insights they can find me at markrandolph.com or at mb randolph perfect awesome please please go check out mark and thank you so much for watching and make sure what i'd love for you to do with this episode
1:02:25
genuinely there were so many moments where there were so many subtle points tips and hints that i'd love for you to find those and share them on instagram and twitter as well i love noticing what you're learning from these sessions
1:02:36
and make sure you tag in me and mark as well so that we can respond and see what you've taken away thank you so much for listening and watching mark thank you as well jay what a pleasure thanks if you want even more videos just like this one make
1:02:49
sure you subscribe and click on the boxes over here i'm also excited to let you know that you can now get my book think like a monk from think like a monkbook.com check below in the description to make sure you order today