Welcome to Nobody Told Me.

I'm Laura Owens, and I'm Jan Black.

And we are so excited to welcome veteran Silicon Valley entrepreneur Mark Randolph to the show. As you may know,

Mark is the co-founder and founding CEO of Netflix. He's mentored hundreds of early stage

entrepreneurs and helped see dozens of successful tech ventures in addition to many unsuccessful

ones. And Mark is the author of the best-selling book. That will never work,

the birth of Netflix and the amazing life of an idea. Mark, we thank you so much for joining us.

Oh, it's exciting to be with you. Thanks for having me. We love the book because you have a great way

of making the reader feel like they're right alongside you as Netflix goes from an idea to a big

business. You left Netflix in 2003 and you say you're glad you waited 16 years to actually

write about Netflix. Why is that? Well, there's a couple of reasons. You know, one reason I wrote the

book was I did want to give people kind of the untold story of Netflix, since

there's all kinds of myths and false founding stories. And I thought it was an interesting thing

for people to really understand how a startup works. But the real thing is I didn't really understand

why we had been successful.

And it takes perspective to look back and isolate which aspects were luck,

which were doing things well, which were mistakes, what was my contribution,

what was it of a team.

And I think I really was able to sort out some of the truths behind not just the success of Netflix,

but some of the things that I felt, you know, anybody could use to make an idea become real.

What I thought was so fascinating was that Netflix was actually your seventh startup.

And along the way, you said that you learned a very valuable lesson.

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