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00:00 So JC had asked, "Netflix is such a great name.
00:05 How did you come up with it?
00:08 And what's your advice about the do's and don'ts
00:10 of company naming?"
00:11 - Oh my God.
00:13 So I'm gonna do something very unhip for being on a show.
00:16 Talk to someone who's invisible.
00:17 Brad, you should throw up the one if you can,
00:21 it's called Netflix naming,
00:22 but I'll start the story anyway.
00:24 So anyway, coming up with a name, as you said, is brutal.
00:29 You have to find something which is evocative
00:33 of what you're doing.
00:34 You've got to find something which doesn't look like
00:36 you were spelled in a way,
00:38 it doesn't look like you were drunk
00:39 when you were playing Scrabble.
00:41 You've got to have it be something
00:43 you can get the domain name for,
00:44 something you can get a trademark on,
00:46 something that doesn't mean something obscene
00:48 in Polish or Lithuanian or something.
00:51 It's really hard.
00:53 And this was no different.
00:54 And we had a whole bunch of names
00:58 that we were playing with.
01:00 We had done a brainstorming session on one column.
01:02 We had words that were evocative of movies.
01:06 And in the second column,
01:07 words that were evocative of the internet.
01:09 And we began mixing and matching.
01:12 And they were funky names.
01:13 There was like, I remember,
01:15 and a lot of them were taken like flicks.com.
01:18 Ooh, great name.
01:19 Oh, taken.
01:20 Direct pics.
01:22 Oh crap, taken.
01:24 Oh, there we go.
01:26 This is the original piece of paper
01:29 that I was using once we came up with our brainstorming list
01:32 and I went back to my desk and began digging through
01:34 to see which domain names were available.
01:36 And flicks.com, oh, it's taken.
01:38 Fast forward, taken.
01:40 Now show, oh, taken.
01:41 And so it was down to like three of them.
01:45 We had direct pics.
01:47 We had Netflix.
01:48 We had Cinema Center and Cinema Direct.
01:52 And Netflix, we kept coming back to.
01:54 But back in 1997, '98 when this was,
01:58 a porno was called a skin flick.
02:03 So flicks.
02:04 And so people were going like,
02:06 is this a theme to this whole show today?
02:07 Yeah, right.
02:09 And we were going like, oh God.
02:11 And that X does not help anything.
02:14 Right.
02:15 But everything else was bad.
02:18 And so eventually we're going, well, Netflix,
02:22 it sounds a little porny,
02:24 but I guess it's the best we can do.
02:26 Netflix, it was.
02:30 And that's how we came up with the name Netflix.
02:35 And there's one more quick story about naming,
02:38 which is that, and this is more advice to everybody.
02:41 Coming up with a name these days is so hard
02:44 that when you start, you use a beta name.
02:49 And that's the name you're gonna use to incorporate.
02:52 It's the name you're gonna use to pay people,
02:54 to issue stock, or do options if you're raising money.
02:59 And I got some great advice from one of the guys on my board.
03:04 He said, when you pick your beta name,
03:07 pick a name that is so bad
03:09 that when you inevitably get into this struggle
03:12 that you can't figure out a name to use
03:14 for your real company name,
03:16 you're not tempted to use the beta name.
03:19 And our beta name at Netflix was Kibble,
03:23 like the dog food, kibble.com.
03:25 And there was two reasons for that.
03:26 One is I own the domain already.
03:28 But the other reason is that it was evocative
03:33 of this marketing slogan.
03:36 And I'm a marketing guy, if you remember,
03:37 which says basically that no matter how good
03:40 your marketing is, there you go, Kibble Incorporated,
03:44 no matter how good your marketing is,
03:46 if the dogs don't eat the dog food,
03:49 it doesn't make a difference.
03:51 And so that was it.
03:52 And you saw that stock certificate.
03:54 That was the original stock certificate name for kibble.com,
03:57 which there's your trivia.
03:59 That was the original name for Netflix.
04:02 - Wow, we're getting business, we're getting history.
04:05 I feel like that sheet of the names,
04:07 it's like looking at John Lennon's handwritten lyrics
04:10 to "Imagine."
04:11 It's like, it's so wild.
04:13 (laughing)
04:14 It's so incredible.
04:15 - Yeah, there's some funny things here.
04:17 Like for example, on flix.com, you can see it says,
04:20 "Yes, it's taken, but notes, willing to deal."
04:25 And fastforward.com, "Available for $35,000."
04:30 - Wow.
04:31 - Back then $35,000 may as well have been $35 million.
04:37 Whether we'd be willing to actually pay anything
04:41 for a domain name.
04:43 Had I bought it now, I could have done something with it.
04:46 (upbeat music)
04:49 (chiming)