A biography for Marc Randolphhasn’t been written yet.
“I personally believe that a critical part to innovation is that exchange of ideas so when you say, 'Here's my idea,' someone else at the next table, who is in a different party, will go, 'Oh, these guys are trying that,' so that comes.”
“Certainly when I was starting, it required being in a community where, when you tried to rent a building, and they looked at your balance sheet and saw it was negative, that didn't scare them away.”
“Two-sided markets are notoriously finicky.”
“Now, I love a good factory tour. Drop me into a bottling plant, an automotive assembly line, or a jellybean factory, and I'm happy as a clam at high tide.”
“No one has ever asked me to give a graduation speech. But in my years of working with aspiring entrepreneurs, many of them in college, I've gotten used to giving advice.”
“The real story of Netflix is complicated: an epic tale full of struggle, disappointment, drama, humor, and achievement.”
“The biggest problem I see with early-stage entrepreneurs is they get the idea in their head, and they leave it in their head. And they begin embellishing it in their head, making it more ornate. They add on the second story to their dream house - then add the tennis court and the turrets and the gargoyles.”
“Netflix was my sixth start-up, and that point I decided I didn't have it in me to start another company. At least that's what I thought at the time.”
“By being courageous enough to state the difficult truth, the most important reputation that you will preserve is your own.”
“Companies become what they want to become.”
“As a student I'd done work with a charity that took inner-city kids from disadvantaged areas and introduced them to hiking and climbing in the wilderness.”
“Diversity is not a skin thing, necessarily. Diversity is you have people around the table who have different backgrounds and different experiences and think differently.”
“When you're in a meeting and you pull out your paper notebook, people look at you and go, 'Oh, he's taking a note.' But if you're in a meeting and you pull out your iPad, they go, 'Oh, he's checking Facebook.'”
“I came from years and years in the direct marketing industry where everything is layered.”
“I mean, at the simplest level, my entire background was in marketing, which largely is about understanding a customer, being able to be intuitive, being able to be empathetic.”
“Culture is a critical piece of success.”
“Innovation is doing something in a different way, but it also has a subtext: When there's an established way, and that way is considered the best practice and how it's traditionally been done, innovation comes by and says 'Let's try a different approach.' It doesn't need to be big or company-wide - it could be a single thing.”
“The simple reason I like every idea is that I'm an optimist.”
“In fact, I'm happy to go on record as saying that the ability to create a reality distortion field is right up there alongside optimism as an entrepreneur's most valuable weapon.”
“Like most people in 1997, I hadn't ever even seen a DVD, much less watched one.”