Marc Randolph
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Netflix Co-Founder
I’ve worked hard, for my entire career, to keep my life balanced with my job. In my book, I write about my Tuesday date nights with my wife. For over thirty years, I had a hard cut-off on Tuesdays. Rain or shine, I left at exactly 5 pm and spent the evening with my best friend. We would go to a movie, have dinner, or just go window-shopping downtown together.
Nothing got in the way of that. No meeting, no conference call, no last-minute question or request. If you had something to say to me on Tuesday afternoon at 4:55, you had better say it on the way to the parking lot. If there was a crisis, we are going to wrap it up by 5:00.
Those Tuesday nights kept me sane. And they put the rest of my work in perspective.
I resolved a long time ago to not be one of those entrepreneurs on their 7th startup and their 7th wife. In fact, the thing I'm most proud of in my life is not the companies I started, it’s the fact that I was able to start them while staying married to the same woman; having my kids grow up knowing me and (best as I can tell) liking me, and being able to spend time pursuing the other passions in my life.
That’s my definition of success.
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It’s easy to look at entrepreneurial success stories as if they were destined to succeed. But for every Netflix story, there are hundreds—no, thousands – of other ideas that looked even more promising to their founders and failed. https://twitter.com/mbrandolph/status/1690912358502461440
- That’s why you’ve never heard of them.
- What made this one different? A big part of it was Luck, I’m not gonna lie: the right time, right place, right technology, right market, all coinciding. And a big part was a culture of experimenting and refining that let us turn an idea into a service that actually worked.
- But underneath all that was a critical tension. Reed, applying relentless, unsentimental logic in evaluating every concept; and me, with an endless supply of new ideas and enthusiasm. And crucially, we were both OK with that. We debated, analyzed, revisited, and threw things out, and we still kept going.
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