4.8 • 2.9K Ratings
🗓️ 12 November 2018
⏱️ 90 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
In a world ravaged by late fees and lack of rewinding, one man two men from a sleepy California beach town make a stand against tyranny, daringly dethrone an evil empire and… oh who are we kidding, they just copied Amazon’s business plan for books and applied it to movie rentals. But as always there is much more to the story than that! We dive into the fascinating, true, and oft-untold history of Netflix in our first two-part special on Acquired. Part 1 covers Netflix’s original DVD rental business from founding to 2009, and next time on Part 2 we’ll cover the (rocky) transition to streaming from 2010 to present. Buckle up for a wild ride!
Sponsors:
Vanta: https://bit.ly/acquiredvanta
Statsig: bit.ly/statsigacquired
Modern Treasury: https://bit.ly/acquiredmoderntreasury
Links:
Carve Outs:
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
0:00.0 | Yep. It's so funny all the reviews of the iPad people were like you can't hook up USB storage to the iPad |
0:07.7 | I'm like I haven't used a USB thumb drive in like five years. |
0:17.6 | I don't care. My biggest complaint is the lack of scuzzy. That's a teaser quote right there. Welcome to Season 3 episode 8 of Acquired, the show about technology acquisitions and IPOs. |
0:42.2 | I'm Ben Gilbert. |
0:43.0 | I'm David Rosenthal. |
0:45.0 | And we are your hosts. |
0:47.0 | Today we are talking about a company that somehow, |
0:49.0 | somehow David, we have not covered on the show yet. |
0:52.0 | Netflix, and we're breaking this one into two |
0:54.8 | parts. Today we'll be covering the founding of the company up through the IPO and |
0:59.1 | the waning years of their DVD business and then next episode will pick up at the takeoff of |
1:04.1 | streaming and original content. So David I could not believe this when diving in |
1:09.4 | that the Netflix IPO was 16 years ago and it was founded 21 years ago. |
1:14.0 | Yeah, crazy. |
1:16.0 | All these fang companies, they're getting old. |
1:19.0 | I know. |
1:20.0 | I mean I just, I did not realize that it was a pre.com bubble. |
1:22.4 | In my head it was sort of like Facebook era not Google era or Amazon era |
1:27.0 | Well this is why we have to do this as a two-parter because you know we when we first started researching this we didn't think of it that way but like |
1:36.1 | there really are two different companies here there's Netflix pre-streaming and |
1:39.9 | Netflix post-streaming we're gonna cover the pre-streaming today. |
1:44.0 | Well, listeners, we announced on the last episode that we had formally launched the acquired limited |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2025.