OWNER’S PROFILE
OWNER’S PROFILE PERPETUAL MOTION Co-founder of Netflix Marc Randolph may have reached the pinnacle of entrepreneurship, but he remains very much grounded in the moment. // By Josh Sims MARC RANDOLPH RECENTLY WENT over his handlebars. “I’m limping right now. But listen, at my age, if I’m still doing that kind of thing I’m not complaining,” he laughs. Indeed, Randolph, 63, is a great outdoorsman, often found up alpine passes, along wild rivers—and occasionally falling off mountain bikes. It’s a bug he caught as a teenager with the National Outdoor Leadership School, an organization whose board of trustees he now chairs. “I think you’re incredibly lucky if at some point in your life you work out what really makes you happy, and I’ve always loved what you might call ‘Type 2’ fun—the kind that you think of as fun retrospectively, when at the time you’re cold, hungry, and miserable,” he says. “But [all that] was teaching me leadership skills from the age of 14, when I got to lead a group and had the chance to make decisions with real consequences. Almost everything I learned [of use in] business I learned with a backpack on.” While the serial entrepreneur has many successes to his name—most recently mentoring the rise of Looker Data Sciences, which was sold to Google for .6B—he’s best known as the co-founder, with Reed Hastings in 1997, of Netflix. That’s the subscription DVD provider turned movie streamer and, finally, film and series production powerhouse. “The great irony of my [working] life is that Netflix puts so many people in front of a screen,” he chuckles, “though I was pleased to receive so many messages saying what a lifesaver it had been over the last 18 months [of the COVID-19 pandemic]. I wasn’t even a film buff when we created Netflix, not at all. Both of us had little kids so it was more about watching “The Lion King” over and over. [For us] it was all about looking for a startup idea, not to build on something we were already passionate about.” Out then went his idea for personalized shampoo, and for custommade dog food—both businesses that others have since brought into being. Randolph pitched all manner of things to Hastings, who had acquired a software start-up from him before a takeover looked likely to make them both unemployed. But it was Netflix that stuck and not least because Randolph’s wife, Lorraine, really wasn’t impressed. “The joke is that she’s like my negative indicator for ideas that could work,” Randolph laughs. “But then every idea is really a bad idea to start with. That’s the nature of doing things that haven’t been done before. Almost inevitably a new idea won’t work [as you imagine]. So if someone says it won’t, well, they’re probably right. The entrepreneurial process is all about trying it anyway, learning what didn’t work, and using that to inform the next thing you try.” It’s just such a lesson that Randolph has tried to impart to the entrepreneurs behind many start-ups over the almost 20 years since he left Netflix—having concluded his skills lay in launching businesses rather than scaling them and culminating in the aptly titled book “That Will Never Work,” the story of how Netflix got going. More unusually, it’s also led to a podcast series of the same name. Each episode sees Randolph—who has a great voice for audio—riffing off the cuff on possible next steps for all manner of business ventures. One notion he’s keen to dispel for any fledgling entrepreneur is that you need a great idea before you get started. Sure, Randolph says, the idea of the eureka moment—oft-repeated stories of how “you can’t get a cab on New Year’s Eve and so, boom! There’s Uber, or that you’re tired of 38 NetJets
COURTESY MARC RANDOLPH MOVING ON Marc Randolph has embraced many different projects since leaving Netflix in 2002. NetJets 39
