Quotes from Marc Randolph

That Will Never Work' is my chance to share all the secrets I've accumulated in a 40 years career as a entrepreneur - secrets that can help anyone turn their dream into a reality.

When an opportunity comes knocking, you don't necessarily have to open your door. But you owe it to yourself to at least look through the keyhole.

Don't move to L.A to become an actress - you'll just be a waitress. Don't drive to Nashville to become a country music star - you'll just end up playing empty honky-tonks at two in the afternoon on a Tuesday.

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.

Netflix is famous for its corporate culture, which rightly emphasizes directness and personal responsibility.

When I first met Jeff Bezos back in the late 90s, the only automated thing in his office was a rotating fan, gently blowing across a pair of identical blue shirts he'd hung on a water pipe behind his desk.

I wanted to use my story of starting Netflix - the whole thing, warts and all - to show how a dream could make it from the inside of one's head out into the real world.

In a two-sided market, focusing on the customer will increase a business's ability to extract value from the supply side.

Here's a simple truth: When you surround a good idea with brilliant people, it changes. No matter how much you plan, great ideas have a mind of their own.

Pitching a concept well is certainly important, but ultimately you have to build it.

Most people have a kind of survivor bias about luck. When something wonderful happens - when preparation meets opportunity, with excellent results - we think: 'How lucky!' But we don't usually acknowledge all the times when things just... fizzle out. All the times when preparation comes to nothing.

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.

When we were kicking around the idea for Netflix in 1997, proving out an idea was expensive and labor-intensive. There was no Squarespace, no cloud. If you wanted a website, you had to build it from scratch. If you wanted an online store, you had to completely design it yourself.

Companies make a big point of how their culture is all about 'bad news first,' but when it comes to people, they are suddenly scared to communicate bad news out of some mistaken feeling of politeness or political correctness.

I tell aspiring entrepreneurs all the time: Validate your idea locally. Get some experience under your belt. Prove your idea has legs where you are. Spend some time as a big fish in a small pond. Demonstrate that there's a there there... there. Where you live.

The real story of Netflix is complicated: an epic tale full of struggle, disappointment, drama, humor, and achievement.

As Looker got larger, the talented people we hired started to see things that we couldn't. And what had looked like a company the three of us could run out of our houses for a few hours a day became something bigger. Much bigger.

Usually, when I give talks, I'm 100% there, 100% present.

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

If you want your company to succeed, you have to have the confidence in your business to take a bet on its future - to risk destroying a mediocre business model for the chance to have a strong one.

I certainly don't only watch Netflix. I enjoy the fact there is multiple companies producing content. I think it's great for consumers.

Risk taking in business is one thing. Risk taking in your personal safety is a different thing.

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.

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.