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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.
Iteration, not ideation, is the most important part of early stage entrepreneurship. You have to have a lot of ideas - a lot of bad ideas - if you want to end up with a good one.
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.
People watch 'The Social Network,' and what they hone in on is the wealth and the parties and the excitement, and they don't realize the grind and the 'gruelingness' and the disappointment.
Some of my fondest memories of the early years of Netflix have to do with our efforts to figure out the most efficient, effective, and fast methods to get DVDs to people all over the country.
At a startup, it's hard enough to get a single thing right, much less a whole bunch of things. Especially if the things you are trying to do are not only dissimilar but actively impede each other.
Certainly when I was starting, it required being in a community where, when you tried to rent a building, and they looked at your balance sheet and saw it was negative, that didn't scare them away.
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.
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'm this big believer that culture is not what you say, it's what you do. Who cares about your PowerPoint and about what you've carved into your cornerstone? If it's not being modeled, it won't be readable.
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.
When you're in a meeting and you pull out your paper notebook, people look at you and go, 'Oh, he's taking a note.' But if you're in a meeting and you pull out your iPad, they go, 'Oh, he's checking Facebook.'
Every successful career I've ever known was filled with long periods of meandering, months or even years when no one knew what would happen next. Look at me: I started as a geology major turned failed realtor.
That Will Never Work' is the untold story of Netflix. It's how a handful of people, with no experience in the video business, went from mailing a used Patsy Cline CD and ended up with a publicly traded company.
When I was 23, I was quite possibly the worst real estate agent in New York. I was working for my mother's agency in Chappaqua, and no one was buying houses. In eight months, I made zero sales. I rented one apartment.
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.
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.
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.
As entrepreneurs, or artists, or just people with dreams, the worst thing you can do is get so caught up in planning the perfect idea that you never get around to actually... well, doing it. I call this building castles in your mind.
I personally believe that a critical part to innovation is that exchange of ideas so when you say, 'Here's my idea,' someone else at the next table, who is in a different party, will go, 'Oh, these guys are trying that,' so that comes.
Negotiation is empathy. It's almost trite to say that if you can't put yourself in the seat of the other person you're speaking with, you're not going to do well. It's not about being a bully, not about making offers people can't refuse.
When a company gets bigger, when it begins to bring on employees, it naturally goes through this tendency of wanting to control, of wanting to build process - essentially to say not every one of our customers or employees has great judgment.
I don't know if there's a genetic marker for entrepreneurship. But if there is, it's most likely not a genius for planning. It's a propensity for action - and the ability to put failure behind you quickly. To stop being precious about your ideas.
When entrepreneurs talk about their success, they rarely talk about luck. I think that's because most of them think the concept denigrates the hard work and smart thinking they put into their projects. But luck is a huge part of any successful business.
It used to be true that to succeed in the creative class, you had to move immediately to where the action was. It was how you made connections, how you got auditions, how you found an audience and funding and some attention for your craft. But not anymore.
People imagine that Netflix sprang fully formed into a global streaming giant, but Netflix might have been personalised sporting goods - or customised shampoo - or even pet food, since these were all ideas that I pitched Reed Hastings in those first months.
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.
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.
At Netflix, we realized that we weren't in business with the Toshibas and the Sonys of the world. We were in business with the guy sitting at home trying to find a DVD to watch. If we had the courage to focus on him, everyone - movie studios, electronics companies, Netflix itself - won.
Like Netflix, Looker started as nothing more than an idea. Lloyd Tabb and Ben Porterfield were two brilliant engineers who had figured out a better way for businesses to see and analyze their data, and they asked me to join them to help out with the ABCs - that's short for Anything But Coding.
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.
I just always believed we would succeed. Even when everyone else said my ideas were ridiculous. Even when we were almost out of money. Even when the metrics were all upside down. I always have confidence that I'll figure something out. I just have that confidence that things are going to work out fine.
The biggest problem I see with early-stage entrepreneurs is they get the idea in their head, and they leave it in their head. And they begin embellishing it in their head, making it more ornate. They add on the second story to their dream house - then add the tennis court and the turrets and the gargoyles.
If you apprentice yourself to the smartest people who will take you seriously, you will learn at every step. You'll learn their special language. You'll see what real people do. Your interests might surprise you. They will evolve. And you'll be well-positioned to take advantage of whatever opportunity life throws your way.
Innovation is doing something in a different way, but it also has a subtext: When there's an established way, and that way is considered the best practice and how it's traditionally been done, innovation comes by and says 'Let's try a different approach.' It doesn't need to be big or company-wide - it could be a single thing.