Marc Randolph

“No one knows what's a good idea or a bad idea until you try it.”

“I'm definitely a note taker.”

“Silicon Valley loves a good origin story.”

“Like Netflix, Looker started as nothing more than an idea. Lloyd Tabb and Ben Porterfield were two brilliant engineers who had figured out a better way for businesses to see and analyze their data, and they asked me to join them to help out with the ABCs - that's short for Anything But Coding.”

“When a company gets bigger, when it begins to bring on employees, it naturally goes through this tendency of wanting to control, of wanting to build process - essentially to say not every one of our customers or employees has great judgment.”

“Back in the early days at Netflix, it wasn't unheard of for me to tell prospective hires that I could see our stock going to a hundred dollars someday.”

“Take any job in a growing, exciting company. You'll learn so much.”

“The most powerful step that anyone can take to turn their dreams into reality is a simple one. You just need to start.”

“With people, if you see something you want to change, you can make the change immediately. And if that doesn't work, you can change it again half an hour later. You can't do that with a robot. They're terrible at experimenting.”

“As you get older, if you're lucky, you realize two things: what you like, but also what you're good at.”

“I'm not sure I want to preserve the old ways just for the sake of saying, 'I don't believe in change.'”

“It was a long, circuitous route from my mom's real estate business to Netflix. It didn't happen overnight. Or in a year. Or even in ten years. But it happened.”

“Long story short: I didn't start out thinking I'd be a tech entrepreneur.”

“It used to be true that to succeed in the creative class, you had to move immediately to where the action was. It was how you made connections, how you got auditions, how you found an audience and funding and some attention for your craft. But not anymore.”

“I'm not a glass-half-full optimist. I'm a glass-overflowing optimist.”

“People watch 'The Social Network,' and what they hone in on is the wealth and the parties and the excitement, and they don't realize the grind and the 'gruelingness' and the disappointment.”

“The number of people who have successfully scaled a company from dream to post-IPO success - you could list them on the fingers of two hands.”

“People are always advised to follow your dreams, but in 'That Will Never Work' I show them how!”

“Collaborative decision-making is very poor in crises.”

“The role of a founder-CEO is extremely lonely. You can't always be fully forthcoming with your board or investors or employees.”