This Netflix Co-Founder Turned His Idea Into A Company Worth Over $100 Billion | Marc Randolph

what i'm trying to do is give people a whack on the head and go stop thinking and start doing the the real brilliance behind entrepreneurs today is not how good their ideas are it's how clever they can be about figuring out ways to test those ideas to try them to as i say collide them with reality that is what separates an entrepreneur from a dreamer hope you guys enjoyed the episode brought to you by our sponsor blinkist go to blinkist.com impact theory to get 25 off a blinkist premium membership and a 7-day free trial all right enjoy the episode hey everybody welcome to another episode of impact theory i am here with an extraordinary entrepreneur mark randolph the co-founder of a little company you may have heard of called netflix mark welcome to the show well thanks very much pleasure to be here dude i'm excited to talk to you um as i was saying before we started rolling i am not a born entrepreneur so talking to somebody like you that has just from the time they were a kid doing candy arbitrage and had the instincts of an entrepreneur it's so exciting that you've both written the book and now doing the podcast that will never work both under the same title um is really cool and i'm super glad that you're giving people a glimpse into the way you think and where i want to start is with the idea that nobody knows anything why did people tell you that netflix was never going to work so first of all it's certainly not an uncommon thing because everyone's had that experience where you kind of wake up with the brilliant idea and then you rush downstairs and tell your best friend or your spouse and run into the office and they all say the same thing which is that will never work and i heard it thousands of times you know especially when i was pitching the idea that eventually became netflix i heard it from investors from potential employees heard it from my wife but there's a reason why everyone says that will never work and it's because it's impossible to tell a good idea from a bad idea uh it's probably the most important thing i've learned in my 40 years as an entrepreneur is that you can't tell by thinking about it that there's really only a way to figure out whether it's a good idea or a bad idea and that is to do it and the sooner you recognize that you have no clue as soon as you realize that the experts you're talking to have no clue as soon as you realize that everybody has no idea if it's a good idea or a bad idea uh the better off you are yeah see that to me is very interesting one thing that i'm always telling my team is action cures all so you can try and think your way to a solution but the reality is even just trying to overcome the anxiety of is this going to work or is it not go take action i'm not sure what to do next go try something and in taking the action you begin to get the data you need well you were saying you're not not a born entrepreneur but that certainly is talking like one right because only because i fell on my face so many times so you give an example so your son is teaching how to skateboard like now no no no this was wild this is years ago how many years though oh my son learning how to skateboard you you were talking about dropping in oh gosh me sure that yeah that don't remind me that's a very painful part of my uh part of my past no it's true my this was i don't know maybe five years ago six years ago because my son he's pretty passionate about it i mean passionate enough that we built a huge half pipe in the in the backyard and of course you want to do things with your kids and so i wanted to learn how to skateboard and then one of those fundamental things you learn in skateboarding is that there's that act called dropping in where you're standing on the edge of the half pipe and you've got to drop forward and roll down that slope but it's something that if you hesitate if you lean back if you hedge your bets you are guaranteed to end up in your ass and the only only way to do it is to fully commit to lean forward to put all your weight in that front foot and down you go yeah that to me is one of the most apt descriptions of what being an entrepreneur is like and one when you said that you were taking up skateboarding i think you would have been in your 50s five years ago so that's already very impressive um but that you likened it to you know you're going to be taking a risk as an entrepreneur and obviously what you've built is so incredible to take something from an idea that everybody thought was going to fail all the way to something that's worth hundreds of billions of dollars is really quite extraordinary and that idea of all right you're standing at the top it does look like it's going to fail even in your own mind you're thinking this is going to fail and the only answer is to lean so far out over your board that it seems like you're going to crash and burn on your face but what did your son tell you about leaning too far forward oh i think he said that no one ever leans too far forward that it's impossible to lean too far forward that whatever your mind is saying this is too far forward you're still probably too far backwards in other words don't worry about it go for it commit yeah that is so i've dropped in exactly three times in my life and so i know what it's like to stand at the top of that ramp and of course that's exactly what you do you try to hedge your bet it's like you feel like you're going to fall on your face it is the weirdest feeling ever so as you were going down the path of starting netflix and how do you make sense of all of the trying so you've committed you're in but now how do you actually turn that into a business because most things fail and you talk a lot about how you sort of systematize your way through those early days well you know it's true that you know everyone says you know that will never work and with netflix they go that'll never work and the thing is they're right that the idea you start with uh it didn't work but it's a starting point but once you start you actually begin learning what might be the path to something that will work i mean in netflix's case it took a long time but it doesn't mean that it's not a fun process or that it's a it's a process in itself you're actually moving forward even though you know you haven't figured it out yet i mean certainly when we started netflix was not streaming video it was dvd it was mailing dvds and for those people who might actually be familiar with the netflix dvd service now it wasn't like it is now it wasn't a subscription service it was due dates it was late fees i mean it was looking back on it ridiculous and so of course it didn't work i mean the occasional person would rent from us but they wouldn't rent a second time it was really hard to find someone who was willing to do it more than once but we learned we tried things we tested things and each time you do a test even though it may not solve the problem completely it does illuminate the path forward just a little bit at the very least you've learned what doesn't work and you can try a different direction and little by little in our case it took a year and a half but eventually you finally if you're lucky stumble onto the business model that actually does work that's repeatable and scalable and where you can actually lo and behold charge more for it than it costs you to deliver the service yeah that's one thing i hope that budding entrepreneurs really take seriously is that um and if you talk a lot about how the founding stories and the tales of how a company ends up finding its working business model they sound neat but the reality is far more messy than that and i've heard nobody's encapsulated it quite as powerfully as you which is most people will say hey there's no bad ideas right let's get them out on the table and you've flipped that and yeah they're all bad ideas i mean it's like but still get them out in the table just don't be searching for that one perfect one because they're all gonna be bad see that strikes me as the secret to entrepreneurship and as soon as i heard you say it i was like wow i've never allowed myself to go that far and just say there are no good ideas but if you operate from the framework of there are no good ideas it's only execution that feels like a key tenant to being an entrepreneur is that something that you because you now have the podcast you're you're literally coaching and real-time entrepreneurs is that something you're trying to convey to them well of course i mean first of all the reason i'm doing the podcast is because there are patterns to this there's classic mistakes people make and certainly in 40 years as an entrepreneur i have made my share of them but i've also kind of learned some of the things that do go into making an effective company and in the podcast i'm working with normal people i am not interviewing successful business founders i'm interviewing people who are in the midst of it who are trying to turn their side hustle into a real business or at least take this crazy idea in their head and make it real but the reason what's so interesting is probably the single most fundamental problem is what i call the failure to start you have this idea and you love this idea it's an amazing idea and the more you think about it the more amazing it seems and of course nestled safe and warm in your head of course it's a good idea because there's no reality there and there you're allowed to envision getting a hundred million downloads and imagine when everyone's using it how powerful it's going to be but of course the minute you actually try and make it real all of a sudden wham you bump into reality and all those assumptions well they're wrong and so what i'm trying to do is give people a whack on the head and go stop thinking and start doing the the real brilliance behind entrepreneurs today is not how good their ideas are it's how clever they can be about figuring out ways to test those ideas to try them to as i say collide them with reality that is what separates an entrepreneur from a dreamer yeah well said one of the things that i in hearing you talk about when you were really focused on angel investing and you realize you say you're bad at it i'll just say it's essentially impossible so i think everybody's basically gonna be bad at it um but you talked about how there was a thing that you would look for in an entrepreneur to find out if they were sort of on the right track and that was that sort of aggressive willingness to go take that idea and batter it against reality and see what happened how do people do that like if somebody has an idea right now what would you advise them to do how do they get out there and start battle testing this so the first thing is you have to make sure that your idea is scaled to your aspirations so if you're thinking wouldn't it be incredible to invent a portable cat scan device well you would better have spent 30 years as a physicist and in the medical field but most people don't have ideas like that they do have ideas that can be validated easily and quickly and cheaply and i don't mean this over wrought minimal viable product stuff i mean way more minimal way less viable and i thought you're going to go the other way no god no it's again it's how quickly and cheaply and easily can i collide the idea but listen we're talking abstractly so let me give you two specific examples um and i'll give you the quick one which is the netflix example which is you know reid hastings and i my co-founder were brainstorming ideas for businesses we were not movie buffs we had crazy ideas we had ideas to do personalized dog food and custom shampoo and personal sporting goods all kinds of crazy stuff and one of the ideas was this idea to do video rental by mail and at the time video was on vhs cassette this is back in 1996-97 so that idea was a non-starter and one day in the car reid mentioned he'd heard about this technology called the dvd it's thin light and the idea popped into our heads maybe we could make our video rental by mail business work with a dvd we just mail it so here's where you separate the entrepreneur from the dreamer rather than going what a great idea and rushing to the office and working on the pitch deck or going home and writing the business plan or applying to be on shark tank or something we said let's immediately try and collide this idea with some reality and in our case we just turned the car around and drove back down to town we lived to buy a c dvd but of course there weren't any it was in test market so we said well close enough we bought a music cd and we just mailed it to reid's house and we found out in 24 hours whether the fundamental premise of our idea would work we collided with reality within an hour of having the idea but let me give you one more example if we have a moment here yeah please and just because people are going oh that works if you have a dv but it works for anything so i was working with a young woman and she had an interesting idea and her idea was to do peer-to-peer clothing rental she's saying i have this closet full of clothes i don't wear them that often i'd kind of like to borrow my friend's clothes i wonder if there was an app that lists all everyone's clothes and we could borrow each other's clothes and then she was talking to me about the thing that aspiring entrepreneurs do how do i raise money how do i find a technical co-founder how do i build an app blah blah blah dreaming and i said whoa whoa stop do you have a piece of paper and she goes yes i go how about a sharpie she goes i have that too and some tape and i said write on a piece of paper want to borrow my clothes question mark knock and tape it to your dorm room door and you're going to find out today whether your idea has any merit because if nobody knocks well you've learned something right there but let's say they do knock and they let them in you're going to find out about taste and about fit now let's say they do find something they like and that fits then you're going to find out a few days later how you feel about your favorite blouse coming back stained you're going to find out about the cost of dry cleaning you're going to find out so much and you're going to do it with a sharpie and paper and tape and you're going to do this for as long as it takes by hand to learn the fundamental premise which is is there a there there and once you've done that then it's easy to attract someone to help you with the technical aspects it's easy to raise money because then when someone says what's your idea you're not saying imagine if you will you're saying look what i've discovered look what i found out look what i know and you can demonstrate your idea is a good one and that's the trick is you don't need to build an app you don't need to start a business you don't need to raise money you just need to figure out a way to quickly take your idea and collide it with some reality that strikes me as so self-evident as being just great advice everybody that's ever started a company should have thought of that and tried that but people don't like that is about as far from what the average person does as you're going to get why do you think that is you know i'm not sure i think there's a couple things the lamentable one is that there's this glorification of entrepreneurship which is that people think that what an entrepreneur does is start businesses and they pitch for money and they hire people i mean they think that's what you do and so of course they believe that that is the mechanism for starting a company but i actually think the other reason is there's something psychologically deep seated in all of us which is this fear of having something not work and so we want to do every single thing we possibly can to try and make sure we've taken our best swing at it and this is not a i mean everyone has that issue i had that issue you know back when i was saying that we initially had these ideas that didn't work and netflix wasn't working there was no shortage of ideas the problem is i was a perfectionist too and i was designing these tests that were works of art that would take weeks to do because they'd have you know custom photography and we'd have arguments but everywhere to copy we'd stress test the site and then three weeks later you launch your test and it fails and you go you've got to better go a little bit faster you do a test in a week and it fails and you go faster you in two days then a day and then multiple tests in a single day and things are getting really crappy you have dead links and you're crashing the site and misspellings and all that stuff but here's the the punchline is it doesn't make a difference that no matter how much you polish something it was a bad idea it's still not going to work and if it's a good idea then even something completely half-assed people will immediately raise their hands they'll shine the spotlight and you know what to fix and so people go into this the same way they say i really have this idea and the only way to know if it's going to work is if i fully execute it and they build the app and they raise the money and then they find that it doesn't work but it's now 12 months in and a million dollars later um and they're stuck man that that is such good advice that advice is so good in fact that um when my own team encountered your book and you talk about that idea in the book we immediately implemented that here at impactful just because you really can first of all different people in different departments have ownership right so the guy that creates the landing pages his identity is tied up and making that landing page beautiful so he doesn't want you doing an ugly test oh but you know tom come on look it looks broken how can we do this and not realizing that the that's why i come back to man you've said a lot of brilliant things dude i'm not trying to diminish all the full range but when you say there are no good ideas that to me is so foundational it actually orients people in the way that they need to be oriented to figure something out have you found like so if you know you fall prey to this do you have rules that you live by or that you pass on to you know young teams that maybe haven't taken this in yet so that they don't get trapped by that yeah it's like any skill you have to practice and you have to practice um taking small steps i'm certainly a professional risk taker now i've been doing it for 40 years uh but you listen you know when i give us i do a lot of keynote speaking now and i speak in front of big audiences and i still get nervous backstage the difference is one part of my brain is going mark you are nervous i know you're nervous and you're panicking you're terrified to go out there but but remember the second you get out there you know from previous experience that you're going to feel fine and i can push through it and the same thing goes when i test something which is completely half-assed i go oh god this is so bad and the little voice goes mark you've done this a million times you know it doesn't make a difference that the speed getting it out there fast is so much more important than i do it so when i'm working with young people when i'm coaching people on the podcast it's it's really saying take a small step try something you know don't don't gamble something which is hugely consequential take a small step you'll find out directly that it's not going to make a big difference if it doesn't work in fact boy you got me rolling here now so you know that this little guy jeff bezos you've probably heard of him he hasn't been once or twice yeah he has this wonderful thing he talks about he calls them a one-way doors and two-way doors and he goes that decisions are like one-way doors and two-way doors that sometimes when you're making a decision you decide to do something and you walk through the one-way door and it slams shut and locks behind you you can't get back it goes well before you go through a one-way door you would better really understand the step you're taking he goes but most ideas are not one-way doors most things are two-way doors that you can step through look around and if you don't like what you see you just step right back and that once you've recognized you've trained your ability to know a one-way door from a two-way door then man you just blast through that door because you know oh if i don't like what i see i can step right back no harm no foul and it's teaching people to see that it's training them to have comfort doing that and it's giving them a little bit of encouragement that this is going to be fine it's interesting to me that both you and bezos talk about the need to test test test test test like that there is no crystal ball there is no such thing as being like such a business genius that you're just going to get it right and that it is about that risk tolerance it's about culturally building in a willingness to move quickly to ascertain whether it worked that to me is really powerful how do you get people to quantify that so okay we ran 30 tests and not just be running tests because hey culturally we run tests like how do you then make sense of what happens i before i became a tech entrepreneur i spent 15 years as a direct marketing guy junk mail you know mail direct mail direct response television catalogs magazine circulation so my entire training was about testing and i learned this really interesting fundamental truth about testing is that testing is fantastic for finding out after the fact which thing did better but not very often does it tell you exactly what it is you should test and in some ways knowing that i can determine beyond a shadow of a doubt which shade of blue performs better but there's a thousand shades of blue and i what am i going to spend all my time testing all of them and so i've learned you've got to combine instinct and intuition with this ability to measure afterwards that you're not just randomly fumbling around and that's really what i try and help people do is you need to understand what you're trying to accomplish and the ideas you come up with have to have some possible bearing on that problem you're trying to solve i mean the classic one that most e-commerce companies try and solve is the whole landing page problem like you were describing on your team i mean you have to clearly say what we're trying to test is how do we get a higher percentage of people to move from one page to another but you have to go deeper than that you go but wait a minute we wanted to move for the next page and if they sign up i want people who are going to stick around not just randomly come through there's a million dimensions so it's this combination of defining in advance what it is i'm trying to understand coming up with hypotheses of what tests might possibly get me there and then being very very deliberate about looking after the fact and go how did we do there was one test that you guys ran that i think of as a one-way door i'll be curious to think see if you think of it the same way that ah man i don't know how you guys had the cajones to do it so um walk people through when you guys decided to shut off the dvd sales portion and let people know how much of your revenue that made up at the time that you did that yeah that's not a that wasn't a test unfortunately uh that was a commitment uh but going back when we launched the company as i mentioned before there wasn't a lot of business model innovation you know we had due dates we had late fees and as a after thought we said we've gone to all this trouble to find copies of every single dvd available at the time so we may as well sell them too and so when we launched netflix you could rent dvds and you could buy dvds and at the end of our first month in business we had this great news and this terrible news and the great news was we had a hundred thousand dollars in sales more or less so million dollar plus run rate fantastic outcome the bad news is that 98 of it almost all that revenue came from selling dvds and this was bad for a few fundamental reasons the first one was that it was just a matter of time before we had competition there was that little company amazon which back in 1998 only sold books but even then it made no secret of the fact it was going to be the everything store and we knew the next category was going to be music and video and we were could just see our margins being dissolved now rental had potential because it was defensible had good margins the problem was no one did it but here was the real problem the problem is that doing both of them at the same time was brutal it was confusing to customers about what netflix stood for our checkout process was complicated because you had discs you wanted to rent this disk you wanted to buy the shipping and receiving like half the inventory went out and stayed out and half would go out and come back and inventory management all of our analytics were complicated i mean we realized that if we were going to get something right we had to focus on one of these two parts of the business and that was a brutal decision because if we had focused on selling dvds we would have had a great business for a while until eventually we didn't but if we bet everything on rental that could potentially be a huge business it's an eight billion dollar category but certainly from where we stood at the time you could see no possible route to getting there but i think fundamentally as a risk taker we decided that it was way better to take this long shot at a great success than to take this pretty pure path um to mediocrity and eventually going out of business and so we in one single day without a test just pulled the plug and focused everything we had on getting rental to work how do you think about the ability to think through problems so obviously we've already talked about action is going to be way better than sitting around thinking about it but something like that you really do just have to think through do you think you're naturally gifted at that or is that a process like hey ask these three or four questions of yourself whenever you're making a big decision like do you have some sort of framework like that no i don't i mean i would never say i'm naturally gifted at anything because most of the stuff i try doesn't work but there's a couple of things that i'm good at and i've realized over the years i'm good at and one of them is this ability to be focused in the foreground and the distance at the same time you know i've used the analogy that's a little bit like riding my mountain bike downhill on a steep trail that you've got your hands on the handlebars and you are looking 10 feet in front of you and that's the only thing that keeps you and the bike together but occasionally you do have to look up and see where you're going and make some fundamental decisions what's the right path and a startup is just like that and it turns out i've got a pretty good sense for that which is that i could see that this red sales thing was just not going to go anywhere with this confidence and this ability to say i can focus on the thing that's most important and if i get that right the rest of the problems go away but i spend a lot of time working with people on focus it's really kind of the entrepreneur's secret weapon it's just the nature of the beast that there's always a hundred things on fire and that if you try and put all the fires out you're going to exhaust yourself and really never accomplish anything and that the real skill is being able to pick the two or three things that if you focus on them the rest won't make the difference but what makes that devilishly hard is those two or three things aren't the ones that are burning the hottest or that are screaming the loudest um it's this intuitive sense that that's the one i've got to fix and then being able to block everything else out um and focus on that yeah focus i know was a big part of how you guys were able to be successful the i think the classic story you always tell with that is what we just talked about which is um you know cutting out the sales but you also talk about the canada situation problem forget the canada principle um walk people through that because that is like you guys what you did is so textbook for like just making the right decisions at the right time and i get it survivorship bias and all that but when you look back you've got an uncanny ability to say no no we made this decision and this is why it worked and maybe it wasn't self-evident at the time but you really are able to with mess included but sort of walk people through it so what's the canada principle how does somebody trying to accomplish anything in life bring that into their own being yeah as you as i've said you know i'm a focused guy and i've always learned that there if you spend 95 percent of your time on five percent of your problems that is usually going to be more effective than spreading it equally and a particular thing happened early at netflix which is we were united states only for a long time and there was always this um chorus of people who were saying we should get into canada we should be in business of canada it's easy and it's right next door it's a 10 bump that is significant and you know maybe they're right about the 10 bump because you know canada is approximately 10 percent the market size of the united states but where we were sure they were missing the mark was on the it's easy part because for one you have a border you have to cross you have a different currency dvds at the time were persnickety in that they had zones that didn't always work in every country independently you have a different language spoken in parts of canada but but fundamentally what you realize is that if you take the effort that was required to get into canada if you take the effort and the distraction to get you 10 percent increase in sales and took that effort and applied it to your core business how would you do and the answer is you do way better than a 10 bump and you always have to make that call and it comes up over and over and over again and we use the canada principle as a shorthand to remind us to ask ourselves is the effort that we're putting into something new if we took that effort and that distraction and that manpower and applied it in the things we're already doing would that be a bigger bump i mean it came up when for example we were starting to really roll in the united states you begin seeing competitors spring up you see someone doing dvd rental by mail in the uk and in australia and in italy and the temptation is let's get over there and put out that fire we'll stomp them right out and it takes some discipline to say stick to the knitting the effort that we're putting into making this company strong to learning our processes to figuring out how to be more efficient when we eventually do enter the uk and italy and australia we'll have no problem even when they're stronger even if there's more of them there's a lot of sort of self-awareness to you and the way that you approach business you talked about you know what you're good at you know you're not you've got sort of business fundamentals that you stay to and even if something is sexy or exciting or the you know easy 10 bump you're you're able to stay focused in the book you go into a moment that i was dude it's breathtaking so um reid ends up coming to you he's not working actively in the business at the time comes to you and says hey i don't think you're in your strong suit anymore i want to come in as ceo that moment implodes 99.999 of business relationships and i'm curious how did you not and obviously then from you not imploding the world gets you know this absolute behemoth but had you made a different decision at that moment i mean not to over dramatize but like the history of the way that we consume media would have changed yeah it's funny putting that much weight on it it certainly was uh had i known then no it certainly was a it was a very very intense time and this was reasonably early at the company and when we started the company together you know reid was not active full-time i mean he was my chairman he was my angel investor but he was going to school and i was running the company starting and running the company but um you know he was involved and it was great to have his sounding board and we talked all the time and so it wasn't unusual for him to stop in um to the office on his way home in the evening and he stopped in one night and you know knocks and basically says you know mark we've got to talk has anyone who's heard those words before you know that this is not going to necessarily go too well and as you pointed out reid was concerned he was concerned about the business and more specifically he was concerned about my judgment and these weren't necessarily big things he was seeing but he was seeing patterns that he was concerned that as the company got bigger as we moved faster would become problems and this was brutal because reid and i have had this incredibly powerful honest relationship from the moment i've met him we have not minced words at all there's been no ulterior motives when we say things to each other and so for him to say that for someone i deeply respect and who is so smart i had to take seriously that maybe he was right uh and what was worse is i thought he was firing me he had more stock than i did but what i learned as we talked some more was he was saying something very different he was really saying that this company would be stronger if we ran it together and he was proposing that he joined the company full-time and he'd come in as ceo that i'd move over as president and we'd do it together and it was it was a hard ego moment because you know when you start a company you have these dreams and the dream is that you can see yourself running this successful company and now i kind of realized there was actually two dreams here there was the dream of me running the company and then there was the dream of the big successful company and those were different and more importantly the dream of the big successful company wasn't just my dream anymore it was the dream of my employees it was the dream of my customers it was the dream of my investors and i had to really think was i willing to compromise one dream for the other and and i can't say that i just went okay so you know it was this was hard you know there was a lot of wine drunk um on the porch with my wife as we kind of worked through this but fundamentally i realize you know reid was right that it was almost inarguable the company would be stronger with the two of us doing it together and certainly seriously looking back on all the decisions that i ever made before after at netflix that probably was the best decision i ever made because certainly in the years that followed was the renaissance at netflix almost all of the unbelievable things that transformed the company came during that period where reid and i were running it together and certainly looking at where reid has taken the company since i left it is just remarkable so i i look back at that and say mark you you did good and it's one of the things that i counsel other entrepreneurs all the time is that you have to be self-aware enough to recognize are you the right person for this job and as you pointed out it syncs so many companies when a company is successful but that just means that the problems change the management stresses change the requirements change and it's extremely rare that the person who had the skill set to start something to grow something is the same person who takes it the rest of the way i mean you can really count those people on the fingers of probably two hands and i'm delighted to say i'm not one of them yeah it's uh that story um there's another piece to it which is even makes it even more powerful which is that reid said hey if this doesn't sit right with you then we'll just sell we've been successful enough we can get our money back the um you know we'll make our investors whole and so it really wasn't a decision that had to be made that way you made that decision after setting the ego aside and the really interesting uh way that you teased out that there are two dreams here you know one is me running a big company and the other is me building a big company and it man just i've been in enough situations seen enough entrepreneurs enough companies enough teams to know that that moment is extraordinarily rare that most people cannot do that and that that ends in a super ugly way you talk very warmly of reed in the book and i don't know man it was just that that to me like there's so many pieces of your story and what you talk about that are really breathtaking in their usability in that like you talk about um in the book and in podcasts and just now that there are phases that a company goes through and so one moment a person might be right and one of the most brutally difficult things as an entrepreneur is you have worked your ass off to hire somebody to convince them to leave you know their comfortable high-paying job to come with you and then you get to a point where they don't make sense in the company anymore not that they're a bad person not that they're not talented it's just that the companies change so much that they don't make sense anymore that's already hard but to then have to reflect on yourself and say actually i need to retool my own position it's pretty extraordinary it's funny i mean it's the methodology i use to coach people that way because you start with coaching someone being able to recognize that this person who did join them early on who gave everything who's a good friend now is not the right person for what the company needs and it takes a while to get a founder comfortable with that and then the next step is to say and you need to every so often apply that exact same filter to yourself and if you fundamentally believe the most important thing you can do to create this legacy of something you've built is recognize that you may not be the person who takes it all the way and that people remember the company way longer than you'll remember your role in it yeah that's super interesting what's been important to you in this whole journey that you have i would say a pretty atypical look on what really matters in life is probably the right way to say it yes it is funny i mean i you know i wrote that will never work like 16 years after i left netflix and so i've had this benefit of kind of looking back with what i think is pretty good honesty about what really was my role here and what were the pieces that go into it but probably i think what you're alluding to is the fact that i was lucky enough to learn early on that business was not everything for me that i had other things that were important and that the challenge was not can i build an amazing business the challenge was can i build an amazing business and stay married to my best friend and have my kids know me and like me and be able to pursue the activities which i know make me whole you know which for me is things like climbing and you know back country skiing and those sort of things um and that has really been the challenge of my life is how do i build a life which does can do all three of those things um and looking back that's probably the thing that i'm most proud of actually it's not netflix it's not the other six companies it's doing that while i've been able to have this what i would consider a balanced life and you know like any of these things it's not not an easy thing it's just something that if you i forgot who said this but maybe even someone like tony robbins but you know if you don't have a clear something clearly in mind what you're trying to achieve the odds you're going to achieve that are pretty low um and you know probably when i was in my late 20s early 30s i really said to myself i need to be able to have all three of these things take place you know and the classic one the one i talk about in the book was realizing this is even before netflix that it was just not fair to expect my my girlfriend at the time but to you know be there even though i was gone all the time and then if i was going to maintain the relationship i had to make make it clear it was a priority to me but at the same time i was building businesses and the way that i worked this out is we had this date night and it was every tuesday at five o'clock period i would leave she'd get a sitter we would go out and we'd spend time just the two of us um and at first that's really hard because there's you know startups don't stop at five o'clock but you know i i was i was stubborn you know i said listen if there is a crisis well we're going to solve it by five and if you absolutely have to talk to me we're gonna talk in the way of the car but the the the cool thing is that after a few months of being an absolute hard ass about this it stopped happening which is people realized mark's serious about this and they stopped asking and then an even better thing happened which is they began taking time to spend with their family and it goes to the show that culture you know isn't what you say it's what you do and that i could have said until i was blue in the face so it's important to have balance but by modeling that behavior you're demonstrating you really do believe that's important like you my marriage is my number one priority it's far more important to me than business but can you articulate why why did you care so much about protecting that relationship because it's not the norm yeah i don't know what i mean i have a my catchy way of saying is i really i decided i did not want to be on my sixth startup and my sixth wife i wanted you know i wanted this is my best friend i wanted to spend time with them i didn't want to have this be you know this side gig or something like that and by making it the priority it you work everything else around it and one of the big revelations for me is that you can do that i'll tell another dumb story if i have a second here absolutely um so i i worked in europe for about a year and a half uh running marketing for an international company and i had meetings four times a week in other countries you know so i'd fly to munich one day the next day i'd be flying to milan then i'd be flying to the uk from paris and so i was flying all the time and you know paris traffic is nightmare so i'd be late more times than not and i'd be huffing it through the airport and i learned something really important about running for planes which is that about 50 of the time you run for the plane and you make it anyway you're sitting on the plane sweating through your coat the 49 of the time you don't make it you come rushing up and the door has been shut and you can see the plane taxiing away one percent of the time running for the plane made the difference between making it not making it if that and i realized that that kind of applies to business too like i decided then and there i'm never gonna run for a plane and all these meetings that you have to be in all those calls you have to return all decisions which you know i could make it better than that person i should review their work maybe you know maybe you could do better than they could but is that going to make the difference no so chill you know don't don't be so self-important you have to be in every single meeting take time with your family or in my case you know my passion as i mentioned before is outdoor stuff and unfortunately most of the things that thrill me are not stuff that i can squeeze in between my 11 o'clock call and my 2 o'clock meeting i need to block out enough time to go fly up to alaska and do some crazy ass thing and that's only going to happen if i make it a priority and only going to happen if i block out the time and construct a life that lets that happen what is it about the great outdoors flying out to alaska carving out the time climbing mountains sleeping outside what does that do for you give to you how does it shape your mind like what's its importance oh wow that's i spent a lot of time thinking about that and i i then so this is going to be dissecting the joke which is you know you can do it after the fact and i have no idea if it's really real but i do for me um most of those activities are in the moment i mean you're not thinking about the past you're not thinking about the future you are in it right in that instant and it's a slow state yes yes exactly it's a form of meditation in a way um and there's something that does to how your brain is wired to do that so that probably for me is the common denominator about all these things i do the second thing is that there's an adrenaline aspect to it our lives have become fairly comfortable and there is nothing like fearing for your life but in a good way in a good way i mean doing a very very hard rock climb where you're using your full strength and concentration to keep from falling that is such a focusing moment that when you come through it there is this incredible rush of i don't know what to call it but it's a fun feeling and the third thing is there's a remarkable aesthetic to being outside there's a tranquility there's a beauty um but when you combine all three of those things i'm drawn to it um i every minute that i can i try and put myself in a position where i can be doing something like that mark you have lived a an extraordinary life you've taken a very unconventional and dare i say healthy approach to it all that brings me to randolph's rules for success which are not what even you expected when your father gave them to you um how would you categorize them see my father was a banker and on the evening before i was to start my first job he called me into the family room and handed me a little handwritten notepad in which he'd written the randolph rules of success that i was to get from him on the day before my first job and you know he was a banker and so these rules could have been you know buy low sell high or happiness is positive cash flow or you know some some kind of business rules but when you read them these were simple rules this was like you know stick to constructive criticism you know or don't knock don't complain uh be prompt you know quantify when necessary i mean these were instructions to be a a decent person and what that said about him was so interesting was that he believed the rules to success were being a decent person um and you're right though it led to something um which was probably the biggest revelation of my life that you don't need to be a dick that you don't need to be a hard-ass you don't need to sacrifice your marriage you don't need to submerge your hobbies that you can be a good person and have a decent life and still create some great things now have you passed on the exact eight rules to your kids or have you added some things to the mix i have absolutely passed it on the original i have framed in my bathroom where i can see it every morning and every evening when i brush my teeth but i also did copies up for all of my kids and they which is so touching they love them i mean they take them to heart they you know for me it's goes oh my dad but they're going these are really really cool and i think you know they're in there are in the book and it's funny they have touched um a lot of people but which is uh surprising surprising to me now they're really good rules the one that i couldn't parse on my own was don't knock don't complain i get that don't complain what did don't knock me it means just you know don't it's just don't knock people don't just don't don't put people down you know it's it's just a synonym for complaining and that's not helpful got plenty plenty of people it's easy easy to find the problems now as you were raising your kids what were like core principles you wanted to instill in them wow um joy really you know i uh you try to expose them to a lot of things because you're hoping they're gonna find their their passion um risk-taking certainly one of the most interesting lessons that i've taught my kids is the power of not taking no for an answer and not in a rude way but just the power of persistence and it's so remarkable watching what my kids have done with that and how it's this magic power which once you learn how to do it it just opens doors i mean i'll give you one completely ridiculous example not to get too personal in my kids lives about it but my daughter is an extremely accomplished mountaineer you know even when she was 17 years old i think you know she had extensive climate experience sensitive leadership experience extensive wilderness first aid experience but when she went to apply for jobs as leaders at some of these outdoor leadership places too young go minimum age 21 and she's going um oh this stinks i'm gonna have to work at summer camps and i go no what what's what can hurt like what are they gonna say no um apply and it's amazing every single place said we're going to overlook the 21 too and when i took two and i it's like magic i i could go on forever with these another great one um my kids went to kind of these these little elite liberal arts schools where it's very hard to get classes um and so what one of my kids will they nameless would do they just go uh to a sold-out class and uh and just sit there and the end and the the teacher would see everyone sitting there who wasn't in the class say just want you to know this class is full i am not taking anybody off the wait list we're done and 95 of the people in the back would get up and leave and my kid would sit there and the next day they go i see some of you were still coming back but i got to say this is a closed class we're not taking anyone in and they'd sit there and they'd do it for a week and the teacher would let them in every time every time i love that that that is a very good lesson in a sea of good lessons mark you're the fact that you are doing a podcast now i cannot tell you how excited i am about it i've listened to the episodes that are out already i'll just tell anybody out there whether you want to be an entrepreneur or just want to get better at thinking through things at developing self-awareness whatever it is amazing it's called that will never work of course um where else can people connect with you so certainly uh the podcast is available any place you get your podcasts i am talking to normal people uh this is not miracle solutions or secret techniques it's basic common sense about how to take your idea and make it real but the other place is to find me at mark randolph.com that's where you'll find all things randolph or i'm on twitter instagram etc etc but you can find that at the website i love it dude thank you so much for joining me today reading the book listening to the podcast all of it researching you has been a real joy man you've got a very specific take on how to do things um and it's it's incredible so thank you for sharing it with me and everybody else and thank you so much for letting me speak with you and kind of tell people you're not that special anyone can do this i love that all right guys if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care hey everyone there's no way to build an empowering mindset or get ahead in business without constantly learning and accessing new information and today i want to share with you guys my secret weapon in the battle to learn new things and get ahead blinkist blinkist is for anyone who cares about learning but doesn't have a lot of time blinkist 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Channel: Tom Bilyeu

Views: 107,192

Rating: 4.929049 out of 5

Keywords: Tom Bilyeu, Impact Theory, ImpactTheory, TomBilyeu, Inside Quest, InsideQuest, Tom Bilyou, Theory Impact, motivation, inspiration, talk show, interview, motivational speech, impact theory, impacttheory, inside quest, insidequest, it, theory impact, tom bilyeu, tom bilyou, tombilyeu, business ideas, entrepreneur, entrepreneur mindset motivation, entrepreneurship, good business ideas, how to take action business, learn entrepreneurship, marc randolph, netflix, netflix co founder

Id: GdJPPaKygFQ

Length: 58min 37sec (3517 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 02 2021