Review: That Will Never Work

 That Will Never Work is Marc Randolph's telling of the founding of Netflix from inception to the IPO. While the press has always credulously repeated Reed Hasting's narrative about the late fees from returning a late video, I never bought it, because I remember Netflix from the days when it had a rental service. I did not remember the days when it actually sold DVDs from a website, since I was not that early an adopter of DVDs.

My view of tech startups has always been from the point of view of the technology --- here's an innovation where something that didn't used to be possible is now technically possible and that creates a product. Randolph's approach comes from that of a marketing person, which is a completely different approach. What he wanted was to build a company, so he just kept coming up with ideas until he found one that he thought was feasible, and then with $1.9M in seed funding from Reed, went on to build a company.

I thoroughly enjoyed the iteration of ideas reflected in Randolph's account. I also remember all the free coupons bundled with DVD players in the 1990s, and the inside account of how Randolph managed to get those coupons bundled with DVD players is a good one --- this is not stuff that many tech founders could do, but Randolph did it.

There are several key moments in the book, such as the one where Hastings gave Randolph his performance review and essentially asked him to not only give over the CEO job, but also to give over a chunk of his equity in the company. I was amazed that Randolph did it instead of deciding to just sell the company, but obviously it was the right decision in retrospect. The creation of the subscription service is also another highlight.

Randolph quit shortly after the Netflix IPO (after working on the Redbox concept with another early employee), so we never get to see the iterations of the streaming service. Randolph was also never involved with engineering after Hastings took over, so we don't get any technical insights (though many of those were disclosed in a Netflix talk at Google that I arranged in 2003). To be honest though, most of the innovations at Netflix in those early years revolved around the movement of DVD envelopes, and Randolph does go into detail about some of those, including the design of the mailers and the development of a small storefront system for redelivering returned DVDs to the next customers with a sub 48 hour turnaround.

Randolph makes a big deal out of Netflix's culture and credit Patty McCord's "unlimited vacation" policy. To be honest I still think that's the biggest ripoff introduced in work culture. But until Americans wise up and institute sane vacation policies for everyone in the country (an unlikely event) I suppose it is here to stay.

The book is short, well written, easy to read, and a real page turner. Recommended.