That Will Never Work

Marc Randolph, co-founder and first CEO of Netflix, tells how the company went from concept to business. In 1997, when video stores ruled, late fees were everywhere and streaming was unheard of, Randolph pitched his business partner Reed Hastings a stream of ideas on their morning commute, among them personalized baseball bats and shampoo delivery. Renting movies over the internet was the one that interested Hastings, and the pair founded a company with Hastings as the main investor and Randolph as CEO. Randolph recounts pitching his own mother as an early investor, a motel conference room serving as the first office, server crashes on launch day, and the meeting where Netflix offered itself to Blockbuster.

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