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00:00 Hello everyone and welcome to Ask Mark Randolph. I'm Dan Bova from entrepreneur.com.
00:08 And thanks so much for joining us once again to hear from the man, the legend, Mark Randolph,
00:15 co-founder of Netflix, original CEO of Netflix, and he's got some stories to tell about Netflix.
00:23 He's also an angel investor. He has helped thousands of entrepreneurs like you get their
00:31 stuff together, get launched and get going. Mark, how are you? I'm great, Dan. It's great to be back
00:37 with you after a little bit of a break. Kind of looking forward to answering questions again.
00:42 And as you mentioned, it's a very special week here in Netflix land. Yes, yes. We'll get that
00:49 to a minute. But you seem to be so happy to have had a long break for me. I don't know how to take
00:54 that. You know, I just know that I need to be able to engage in the witty repartee that you
01:02 were so famous for. I need to be fully rested and at the peak of my cognitive powers. Excellent.
01:11 Excellent. Well, as everyone is already doing, this is awesome. Looks like we got a lively group
01:17 today. Pop your questions to Mark in the chat. We'll get to as many as possible. We got a bunch
01:23 already in the can. But first, Mark, Friday, big day. You want to tell everyone what Friday represents
01:32 in the trajectory that is your career? Yeah, it's it's exciting but bittersweet. On Friday,
01:41 Netflix will be mailing out the very last DVDs in their DVD by mail service. And as
01:49 some of you may know, and I know some of you have the slightest idea, at the beginning,
01:55 Netflix was not a streaming company. If you wanted a movie, we mailed it to you. It was a DVD rental
02:00 by mail business. And more importantly, it was a DVD rental by mail business for nine years before
02:08 we finally actually did the first streaming. And so it's kind of amazing to me that Netflix
02:15 DVD by mail has lasted 25 years. When we started, you know, Reed Hastings and I envisioned that
02:23 the DVD by mail business would we could limp it along for five or six years, long enough to maybe
02:30 give a jumpstart to the inevitable streaming service. But wow, something resonated with people.
02:36 And now that's 25 years in, Netflix at its peak for the DVD business had 40 million subscribers,
02:45 5 billion discs shipped. And on Friday, they shipped the last of them.
02:53 That is amazing. Now, you've talked a little bit in previous episodes about, you know, starting the
03:02 company and testing it out. Do you remember the first disc that went out? I do as a matter of
03:10 fact, Dan, because it was a big moment. I mean, one of the things we've talked about here is that
03:14 starting a company back in 1997, 98, it was very different than doing it now, especially for an
03:19 e-commerce company. You know, now you just go over to Spotify, plunk down your 29.95, and you've got
03:25 an amazingly fully functional e-commerce website. You're on Amazon Web Services, so it's all fully
03:31 scalable. Well, back in the day, back then you actually had to build everything yourself. You
03:36 had to buy the servers and put them in a closet and wire them all up and air condition them. And
03:40 you had to write every line of code and exhausting even thinking about it. But it meant that when we
03:47 finally got to the point where we had a site that was stable enough to take an order, process it,
03:54 and ship the disc, it was a big moment. And that happened in March of 1997 when we actually shipped
04:02 the very first disc. It was Casino. Oh, there's the packing slip. To me, back to me. And if you
04:09 look up here, it's kind of a little hard to see, but in the upper right-hand corner, it says,
04:13 "Order number 000001." Wow. That was it. First order. And what movie was it? It was Casino.
04:23 [Laughter]
04:24 So I don't know if you can see it clearly, but there's a logo in the upper right-hand corner.
04:31 That was the original Netflix logo. Wow.
04:33 You can't tell it was in this beautiful purple color. There it is.
04:39 Wow. That's amazing. First order. And then about a month, that was a month before launch, a month,
04:46 in April 14th, 1998, we actually shipped the first 137 customer orders. I don't know what
04:55 the first disc was. Netflix says it's Beetlejuice. Awkward, but a good story, so I'm going to go with
05:03 that. Now, when you made that first order, were you running out to your mailbox every day, like,
05:08 "Please get here. Please get here"? [Laughter]
05:12 Well, I think at that point, we didn't even have a final envelope. We didn't have everything.
05:18 There was a reason we had another month worth of work to do,
05:22 so I think that one may have – I mean, it was taken at home with me, to tell you the truth.
05:25 [Laughter]
05:28 That's incredible. So now, I know – and we're going to get to everyone's questions, I swear,
05:31 but just since this is such a big thing, I know there's – you've got another great story about
05:39 an interesting disc that was just labeled "President Clinton Grand Jury Video." Now,
05:45 I don't know the details of this, but I hear it's an interesting story.
05:49 Well, there it is. That's awesome.
05:51 There it is. They're at it. Okay.
05:54 So this is back at the very beginning of the DVD era. When Netflix launched, there was less than
06:00 400,000 DVD players sold, so our big challenge was, "How do you find people who actually have
06:07 a DVD player?" And one of the other big news items of that summer was that President Bill
06:13 Clinton was going to have to testify in front of a grand jury about his – the infamous blue dress
06:20 episode, which this is a family show, so I won't go into what exactly that meant. But he was in
06:25 some deep doo-doo, and so – but in an interest of having more transparency, they were going to
06:33 broadcast the grand jury testimony live, and all the major news outlets would get a feed.
06:41 And Mitch Lowe, who was one of our early people there, had this great idea that we should make
06:48 a DVD of the testimony, and we could use that to try and get some publicity. And we did this
06:56 big push, like, "Hey, if you want to get this testimony, we'll send you a DVD. It'll cost – we
07:02 said we'd give it to you for free, but then at the last minute realized that we could not process
07:08 an order at no cost." So we changed it to it was going to cost two cents, only because we had to
07:15 charge something. And Mitch thought this would be a piece of cake, that he'd be able to get it done
07:21 overnight. We'd grab the feed when it came in. He'd process – work with a DVD manufacturer,
07:28 process it, press it, be all ready. And it took forever. It took four days of him day and night
07:34 struggling. And at one point, Mitch called and said, "I think we're almost there. We're
07:40 running way behind. We've just about got it done. But listen, we can – do we need to do the label?
07:47 Because the label is going to take us another 24 hours to press those onto the discs."
07:51 And we all said, "Screw it. Forget the labels. Just take the blank discs. We'll package them
07:57 up in the sleeves that you saw and we'll ship them out." And then Mitch came in the next morning,
08:03 you know, pretty bleary-eyed with a whole spindle of discs, which we promptly mailed out. Huge
08:11 thing. Kind of got us all kinds of press. Exactly the things an early startup wants.
08:15 Until the next day and the day later, we begin to get some curious emails from people who were
08:23 saying, "This isn't quite what I expected the DVD testimony to look like." And it turned out
08:31 that one of the spindles that had gotten mixed in – and a spindle has about 200 DVDs on it – was
08:37 of this Asian porn that was also one of the products that this DVD manufacturer was doing.
08:45 And so we shipped out about 300 copies. And I've – of course, for research purposes, Dan, I assure
08:52 you – went digging around and found – and had someone mail one to me and watched it. And it was
08:58 like, "Oh, my God. I could –" I mean, it was pretty – it was really cringy awful. And we were
09:05 going, "Okay, damage control." And I quickly sent an email out to everybody and said, "There's a
09:10 good chance you may have gotten something you didn't anticipate, that you got some porn. And
09:16 if you send it back, we, of course, will promptly replace it with the right disc." And I don't know.
09:23 No one sent theirs back.
09:25 Wow.
09:30 One more great story from the Netflix stable.
09:35 That is incredible. Wow. I could talk to you for five hours about that, but we have to move on,
09:41 Mark. We have to move on.
09:43 We have some entrepreneurial questions to talk – and to answer.
09:45 Well, so to kind of segue a little bit – this is nothing to do with porn – but let's see.
09:52 So JC had asked, "Netflix is such a great name. How did you come up with it? And what's your
10:03 advice about the do's and don'ts of company naming?"
10:06 Oh, my God. So I'm going to do something very unhip for being on a show. Talk to someone
10:11 who's invisible. Brad, you should throw up the one if you can. It's called Netflix Naming.
10:17 But I'll start the story anyway.
10:18 So anyway, coming up with a name, as you said, is brutal. You have to find something which is
10:27 evocative of what you're doing. You've got to find something which doesn't look like you were
10:32 spelled in a way that doesn't look like you were drunk when you were playing Scrabble.
10:35 You've got to have it be something you can get the domain name for, something you can get a
10:40 trademark on, something that doesn't mean something obscene in Polish or Lithuanian or something.
10:45 It's really hard. And this was no different. And we had a whole bunch of names that we were
10:54 playing with. We did a brainstorming session. On one column, we had words that were evocative
11:00 of movies. And on the second column, words that were evocative of the internet.
11:04 And we began mixing and matching. And they were funky names. There was like,
11:09 I remember, and a lot of them were taken, like flix.com. Ooh, great name. Oh, taken.
11:14 DirectPix. Oh, crap, taken. Oh, there we go. This is the original piece of paper
11:23 that I was using once we came up with our brainstorming list. And I went back to my
11:28 desk and began digging through to see which domain names were available. And flix.com,
11:32 oh, it's taken. Fast forward, oh, taken. Now show, oh, taken. And so it was down to like three of
11:39 them. We had DirectPix. We had Netflix. We had Cinema Center and Cinema Direct. And Netflix,
11:47 we kept coming back to. But back in 1997, '98, when this was, a porno was called a skin flick.
11:57 So flix. And so people were going like, is this a theme to this whole show today?
12:02 Yeah, right.
12:03 So, and we were going like, oh God, and that X does not help anything.
12:08 Right.
12:09 But everything else was bad. And so eventually we're going, well, Netflix, it sounds a little
12:18 porny, but I guess it's the best we can do. And Netflix, it was.
12:24 Wow.
12:26 And that's how we came up with the name Netflix. And there's one more quick story about naming,
12:32 which is that, and this is more advice to everybody. Coming up with a name these days is so
12:38 hard that when you start, you use a beta name. And that's the name you're going to use to
12:46 incorporate. It's the name you're going to use to pay people, to issue stock, or do options if
12:52 you're doing a raising money. And I got some great advice from one of the guys on my board.
12:58 He said, when you pick your beta name, pick a name that is so bad that when you inevitably
13:06 get into the struggle, you can't figure out a name to use for your real company name. You're
13:11 not tempted to use the beta name. And our beta name at Netflix was Kibble, like the dog food,
13:18 kibble.com. And there was two reasons for that. One is I own the domain already.
13:23 But the other reason is that it was evocative of this marketing slogan. And I'm a marketing guy,
13:32 if you remember, which says basically that no matter how good your marketing is, there you go,
13:37 Kibble Incorporated, no matter how good your marketing is, if the dogs don't eat the dog food,
13:44 it doesn't make a difference. And so that was it. And you saw that stock certificate. That was the
13:49 original stock certificate name for kibble.com, which there's your trivia. That was the original
13:55 name for Netflix. Wow. We're getting business. We're getting history. I feel like that sheet
14:02 of the names, it's like looking at John Lennon's handwritten lyrics to Imagine. It's so wild.
14:08 It's so incredible. Yeah. There's some funny things here. Like for example, on flix.com,
14:14 you can see it says, yes, it's taken, but notes willing to deal and fastforward.com available for
14:23 $35,000. Wow. But back then $35,000 may as well have been $35 million, whether we'd be willing to
14:34 actually pay anything for a domain name. Had I bought it now, I could have done something with
14:40 it. Yeah. Right. Seriously. Wow. Mark, you never disappoint, man. We got porn, we got advice.
14:49 One of the questions that rolled in, I thought, jumped out at me after you were talking about
14:57 mailing out pornography. What is the biggest mistake most CEOs make in the infant stages
15:04 of a company? The name is not listed there. It's from LinkedIn sent that in.
15:09 Yeah. That's a long list of mistakes. And I've made all of them. So there you go.
15:19 So let's pick two. One I just miss up pretty quickly. One is, and this is an easy one,
15:29 is being undercapitalized. Obviously, you need money to get started. And don't take it the wrong
15:39 way. Not much, but most people think that raising money will be easier than it actually is. And so
15:47 they're not prepared for that. They don't leave themselves enough runway, et cetera.
15:50 But that's pretty obvious. People talk about it all the time. I think the single biggest
15:55 mistake that CEOs make is they do not adequately prioritize what they're working on.
16:00 Because the reality is in a startup, there's going to be a hundred things that are broken
16:06 more and all of them are crying out for attention. And if you try and do all of them
16:13 with the limited resources and the limited time and limited money, limited people you have,
16:19 what you're going to end up is with a hundred things done each 10% well. And it turns out that
16:26 despite all the fact that these things are all crying out for attention, almost none of them
16:31 are going to matter. Probably two or three things matter. And so if you have a limited amount of
16:39 resources, time and money, you want to focus them on the two or three things that do matter.
16:44 You don't want to do everything half well. You want to do those three things 200% well.
16:50 And that is not easy because the things you need to do well, the things that are going to really
16:56 make or break their business are not going to be obvious. In fact, they're not going to be
17:00 the ones that are crying out the most loudly. They're not the ones that are on fire. And so
17:04 it takes the skillset to recognize what they are and then the discipline to actually stay focused
17:10 on them even when the rest of the world is burning around you. And I see so many early stage CEOs
17:16 make that mistake. It's such a common mistake that I jokingly call it selling the t-shirts,
17:23 which is they're all going, "Oh my gosh, just think of it. Once our brand is out there,
17:28 how much money we can make selling merch?" And they're already thinking about the merch. And
17:32 I'm going, "You are, okay, that's the kiss of death." It's the same thing when a big company
17:37 buys a corporate jet. You go, "They're taking their eye off the ball. This is toast." Focus,
17:44 focus, focus. Focus. A question that sort of taps into that focus a little bit is this question
17:55 starts about a lack of focus or not really knowing what to do. This is from Craig Laichia,
18:01 which we got over the internet. Single mother of five in college for business administration.
18:10 He has a lot to say there, but basically she doesn't really know what to do. She knows she
18:20 wants to be in business. She knows she wants to pursue something, start something, but she doesn't
18:25 know what it is. Any advice to help her or other people in this chat who are wondering, how do you
18:33 find a good idea? I think you said she was still in school or she's back. Yes. She said she was
18:46 in college for business administration. I've talked about this a lot is that
18:54 there's no such thing as a good idea. There's no idea you're going to have
19:01 on your walk or at night or wake up in the middle of the night where you go, "Oh my gosh,
19:06 this is perfect and it's obvious and it's right. It's not going to happen." I can feel your pain.
19:16 Going back to Bill Clinton here, that you're struggling going, "I want something to work on
19:20 that I know is going to be the thing, the big idea. It's not going to happen." What you have
19:25 to do is just pick almost anything that interests you. You can winnow it down a little bit,
19:33 but really stop thinking so much about it. Even more importantly for the stage you're at,
19:39 what you need now is you need to start making all those mistakes that I just referred to as having
19:45 made all of them in the last question. The only way you're going to do that is by starting.
19:50 You're going to better to start with something which is the imperfect idea and let you make
19:55 your mistakes on that one, especially since you're just going. I listen to you, mother of five, I
20:01 know you don't have a lot of spare time, but do something simple and stupid at night before kids
20:08 wake up or at school when you have a few spare moments. Build something or make something or
20:14 test something. Sell something on the internet. Make a little dumb product you can sell to other
20:20 people at school. Do anything which begins giving you these basic building blocks of
20:25 entrepreneurship, the stuff that you're not going to learn in class where you're learning ridiculous
20:30 things like business plans and modeling. Fine, that's great, but do something real.
20:41 What will happen is I promise something will spark. Something you're doing will just all of
20:46 a sudden intrigue you enough that you go, "There's something there," and little by little it will lead
20:51 you. Netflix did not come because I go, "Oh, I can envision this 220 million subscriber,
20:58 $150 billion, $200 billion market cap." No, never. It was just, "This is cool trying to figure out
21:05 how to do DVD rental by mail." Every company that I've done has started off similarly.
21:10 Some of them hit, some of them don't, but you cannot tell in advance. Stop thinking and just
21:15 pick something and go with it. That's great. I love it. Here's a question for you, Mark.
21:23 I often ask you questions. I'm going to ask another one. I've heard very disparate thoughts
21:32 on this. The question comes from Leo Pang Maroki who asked, "Do you need a business plan to start
21:39 a business or to get funding?" I have heard people say you don't need one. I've heard people say you
21:44 100% need one. What does Mark Randolph say? Mine says you do not need one. In fact, not only do
21:52 you not need one, I believe business plans are the single largest waste of time in all of the
21:59 business world. The simple reason for that is that no business plan ever survives a collision with a
22:06 real customer. It is one thing if you are a large multinational and you have offices all over the
22:12 world and huge product lines and things are pretty predictable quarter to quarter. Fine,
22:18 do a business plan then, but for a startup to do a business plan is completely ridiculous.
22:24 All that stuff you think and plan and design, the minute you start, it's all going to go up in the
22:30 air. Don't think too much. Same thing as the last person, just start. I hate to do this. I actually
22:42 think Brad back there has a picture of the executive summary of the Netflix business plan,
22:48 which once again was a complete waste of time because almost all the stuff that I said in this
22:58 business plan we were going to do and how it was going to work never happened. As soon as we
23:04 started, the whole thing collapsed. In fact, in the plan it said in a few months, we're going to
23:10 have a collection of 70,000 different VHS tapes for sale. Then shortly after, none of that ever
23:17 happened. I don't know why I wasted time thinking about it, designing it or planning it. You can
23:21 tell. There we go. I just got to call your attention to this fourth paragraph from the
23:29 bottom. In the spring of '98, Netflix will also offer for purchase a selection of approximately
23:35 70,000 VHS titles with VHS rental available in the fall of 1998. Well, bullshit. None of that
23:42 ever happened. I don't know where it came from. Listen, school of hard knocks. Someone said,
23:48 "You need a business plan," and I fell for it. Never again.
23:52 Okay. All right. You seem pretty set on that. I don't think we're going to convince you otherwise.
23:59 Listen, my other big principle of mine is rules are for fools, famous words.
24:07 Maybe, listen, you don't be the person who's going, "But Mark, in this case, you've got to--"
24:13 Yeah, fine, fine, fine. 99 times out of 100, it's a waste of time. One time, great,
24:18 I'll give it to you. It's a wonderful thing. Have fun.
24:21 Great. Is that your Dr. Seuss book? I think you're on something there.
24:30 That's a great name for a children's book, Dan. It actually is--
24:34 Brad, trademark that.
24:36 The person who said that was a guy named Paul Petzoldt, who was the founder of Knolls,
24:41 the National Outdoor Leadership School. He was referring mostly to leadership in the mountains,
24:46 where if you say, "We always have to do it this way," it's how you get killed.
24:52 Right, right.
24:53 Rules are for fools. I think it applies everywhere else, too.
24:56 Here's a question that we got in, submitted earlier, and something that I'm sure is on a
25:03 lot of people's minds, but talking about debt. How do you decide what level of debt is healthy?
25:13 Now, I'm not sure if he means this in a personal finance way, I'm assuming in a business way,
25:18 but how do you calculate that? Is it calculated at all?
25:26 It's a good question. Every form of investment you take carries an obligation.
25:36 The obligation of debt is you got to pay it back. The obligation of equity is you have to provide
25:46 some form of liquidity and a premium at some point in the future. Both of those are genuine,
25:52 real responsibilities. Like anything you do, before you take on any obligation,
25:58 you have to really understand the consequences and are you prepared to do what you need to do.
26:01 I don't use a formula for that, but at every time in your company's growth,
26:10 some things are going to be dearer than others. Usually, when you start,
26:17 what you've got is tons of equity and not very much cash. If you can raise money using equity
26:29 at the beginning, I think that's far preferable because what that does is allow you to not have
26:35 to pay it back. You don't need to take something that's going to be a scarce commodity and use that
26:41 to pay your loan back. You don't ever need to pay it back. It's just equity, whereas debt does carry
26:48 that. Later on in your life, when all of a sudden you start successful, it's very easy to raise
26:53 money. Yeah, then the debt's more precious and then debt is a fantastic way to finance a business.
27:00 There's all kinds of other subtleties because some things you need money for are very short-term or
27:07 temporal. A classic example would be the apparel business, which is very seasonal. You have these
27:14 long periods where you've got to buy your materials and then you sell them three or four months later.
27:19 You usually have a commitment. That's a great opportunity to borrow because you are borrowing
27:25 against a very, very clear income against that debt. That's a specific circumstance.
27:34 My basic rule of thumb is I prefer doing equity at the beginning rather than doing debt.
27:39 If I do debt, I do as little as possible only because I do not want ... I have enough things
27:44 to worry about. Worrying about having to pay back debt is different. One last quick thing,
27:51 and this is getting a little geeky. Technically, most equity these days for an early-stage startup
27:59 is raised as a convertible note, which is debt, but not really because the expectation of the
28:09 person who gives you the money is not you're going to pay them back. The expectation is that you're
28:12 going to convert that debt into equity at some point reasonably near in the future. I count that
28:16 as equity even though technically it's debt, and I assume that wasn't the question you were asking.
28:22 Great. We got an aloha from Jody Endicott, who says, "Mark, okay, fine. No business plan.
28:32 Please elaborate ..." She didn't say that. I added that. She says, "Please elaborate on how to find
28:41 funding or sponsorship if you don't have a business plan to show potential investors."
28:50 I believe that you can't raise money on a dream anymore. You can take your dream and dress it up
29:00 onto a 26-page, one-and-a-half-spaced business plan that says, "Here's what you're going to do
29:08 in great detail," but it's just as flimsy as you going in and saying, "Here's what I'm going to do
29:13 in not very much detail." In other words, if you want to raise funding or raise sponsorship,
29:19 don't just talk about it. Demonstrate that the thing you want to do is real.
29:23 Go out and figure out some quick, cheap, and easy way to prove it. It does not need to be
29:28 repeatable. It does not need to be scalable. I just don't want to hear your hand-waving and
29:33 your dreaming, and a business plan is just a fancy way to wave your hands and dream.
29:38 What I want you to do is come in and go, "I've been doing this now using rubber bands and paper clips
29:44 and after work and part-time and for six months, and I've pretty much proven that this thing that
29:52 I believe is true is true, and here's why. Here's people who are paying me for it. Here's people who
29:56 are renewing their subscription. Here's people who are telling their... I can't do it anymore
30:02 because I'm doing it in a totally non-repeatable, non-scalable way." That's how you get funding
30:08 and get sponsorship, not by talking about it. All right. You got it, Jody.
30:15 Shut up. There you go. That's enough. That's enough.
30:18 All right. Here's an interesting one from Yura Karen Megan. Sorry if I'm saying that out of
30:26 order, but she's impressed with you, Mark. I think a lot of us are. Long story short,
30:34 she wants to work for you. Are you going to give her a job on the spot? I guess the bigger question
30:43 is, what is your advice for people who are looking to get into something bigger, work with someone
30:52 that they really admire? How do you get your foot in the door in a new place?
30:57 Well, spare my inbox, but you ask. It's such a classic case of it. It's a numbers game.
31:08 You would be amazed how many people are willing to give you a shot at something, but that comes
31:17 from familiarity. It's a numbers game, like I said. Let's take a couple of examples.
31:26 My son, when he was still in college, wanted to be an entrepreneur. I said, "No." I didn't
31:34 deny it, but I strongly advised against just wanting to become an entrepreneur. I go,
31:38 "Spend it. Do a summer working as an internship in San Francisco. We'll find a startup for you
31:44 to work at where you can see what this is like." He did that, but what he really did was networked
31:53 himself to death. Basically, he set this goal that he wanted to do coffee with someone four
31:59 days out of the five days of the week. He just began emailing people saying, "Hey, I'm in San
32:05 Francisco for the summer. I'm really interested in this. Would you have coffee with me so I can
32:09 learn some more of what you're up to?" He was doing this with startup CEOs and was really amazing.
32:17 Of every 100 people he emailed, maybe 20 would respond, and maybe three or four would say yes.
32:24 You might go, "That's a pretty low hit rate," but it's not. You get three or four people who will
32:30 sit down and have coffee with a college student, I think that's an amazing response. That's what
32:36 it takes. At a simpler level, let's say you're not in a place where you're in San Francisco where
32:40 you can go find people to have coffee with you. Engage with them in social media where they are.
32:46 I promise I read my comments. On TikTok, I try and answer every comment. On LinkedIn, I try and
32:55 answer comments and I read them. If you're engaging there and you're intelligent and you're asking
32:59 good questions, you're having interesting observations, and I see that name coming up
33:04 over and over and over again, and then I get an email from that person, believe me, it stands out.
33:12 Are you going to get a job by the first time I've ever heard from you sending me a long email? Well,
33:16 I do answer all my email, but it's going to be very, very polite. I'm sorry, I don't have time.
33:20 So you've got to set the groundwork first. The first request should not be, "Can I work for you?"
33:26 The first one should be, "I'm curious about something," or, "Can you help me with something?"
33:31 or something that's an easier yes. I promise you accumulate every 100 asks, you accumulate 20
33:40 maybes, and of every 20 maybes, you accumulate two "let's talk" and you accumulate one "okay,
33:45 let's do it." That's all you need, right? That's awesome. I love that. Nothing is easy,
33:52 but if you're not willing to put in the work, that's a sign that I don't want you to work for
33:56 me either. We had a question that was submitted from Rich Davidson, who, you know, this is in
34:06 regards to reaching out to people, but he's looking to connect with an investor that's not
34:12 just a bank, but someone who has experience and can provide guidance. Do you have any advice
34:20 for cold reaching out and knowing who might be that person and who isn't?
34:26 Well, first of all, there is a million people like that. I mean, I think virtually every single
34:33 person who has had some kind of successful outcome as a startup does angel investing.
34:40 I've met very, very few people who have not had that success, who don't want to pay it back or
34:47 find it's a great way to stay connected and engaged. And those are amazingly good people
34:52 to raise money from. You're not going to fill your whole round with it, but you're going to bring
34:57 someone into your orbit who wants to hear what you're doing, who wants to hear your request for
35:03 help, who wants to lean in and engage with you. It's exactly what you're looking for.
35:08 But it's not like you just go in and put, and you have to work at it the same way that the person
35:15 in the previous question has to work at it. And do your research. If you aren't reading all the
35:22 places people post, if you aren't looking at their blogs, if you aren't following these people on
35:27 Twitter, you've got to understand whether you're in their wheelhouse or not. It is ridiculous for
35:34 you to try and raise money for a startup doing something in whatever, pardon me, a social venture
35:41 doing someplace from an entrepreneur, from an investor who only does, you know, SaaS, AI stuff.
35:50 But if you're doing AI stuff, don't try and pitch it to someone who specializes in robotics.
35:57 Do the research. Because if you find the person who genuinely interested in what you're doing,
36:03 that's the best possible way that you're going to get a positive response. But again, it's not
36:08 easy. You just have to play the numbers. But there's so many people out there, there's no
36:12 reason why, if you have a reasonable idea and you work hard at it, you can't find someone to
36:17 back your business. >> That's great. Mark, this is not so much a question, just a comment I thought
36:24 you'd like to know from Richard Norin. He says, "You come across as a highly likable person."
36:29 >> I don't know how to respond to that. I hope so. I have resting smile face.
36:44 >> I like that you come across. We're not sure that you are likable, but you come across as
36:53 likable. >> Okay. I'll take that. Listen, in all sincerity, I have no idea really why that is. But
37:02 one thing, and this is very, very true, I try so hard not to be full of myself. I so much believe
37:10 that success that I've had, so much of it is luck, so much of it was being in the right place at the
37:16 right time, that for me to believe that I'm somehow special or different than all the people who are
37:21 listening would be the worst act of hubris ever. I think it gives me an empathy too for the people
37:29 who are struggling with all the same stuff that I've had to struggle with too over the years.
37:34 It's why I love helping people so much with those things. >> That's great. You are much appreciated
37:41 in this chat. I can confirm having spent some time with Mark Randolph, he is actually a likable,
37:47 great guy. >> Thank you, Dan. >> I love to see people are inviting each other out for virtual
37:53 coffees in the chat. That's awesome. I love people right on it. That's excellent. Let's see. We got,
38:01 we're starting to get towards the end here. A couple more questions. This is a question from
38:08 Nick Curry. It's your advice for future disruptors. When you started Netflix, it didn't exist. So how
38:16 do you explain that to someone? They have to have some kind of vision to understand this thing that
38:22 doesn't actually exist yet. >> Yeah, it's true. Netflix is different and not because it's a
38:28 different idea, but it's because of it happened 25 years ago. 25 years ago, it was extremely hard to
38:37 prove things in advance because the infrastructure wasn't there. The support wasn't there. The tools
38:42 weren't there. It took us, like I mentioned at the beginning of our live stream here, six months
38:47 and a million dollars just to have a stupid website. But now you don't have that excuse.
38:54 If you have a good idea, there's no reason why you can't quickly, cheaply, and easily validate it in
38:59 some way so that when you do present it to someone, you have some evidence that it actually works.
39:08 That is the way, that's the advice for someone who's a future disruptor is prove it. If you have
39:16 this great idea, which is going to completely change the world, just talking about it isn't
39:22 enough anymore. I'll be the first to say, I kind of roll my eyes at that. I get the emails from
39:28 people saying, "This is guaranteed to be a hundred billion dollar." I go, "How do you know?" The only
39:35 way you know is if you start and you stumble onto something. If you have this great idea, it'll
39:39 change the world. Figure out some quick and cheap and easy way to take the first step and see what
39:44 you find out and then show me. I know the answer to this, but how do you feel about people telling
39:51 you this is a $12 billion industry and if we can get like 0.001% of that, we'll be making this much
39:59 money? What do you think? It's a classic. I love that one. It's also, we're up there with the
40:06 hockey stick, where after a few years of struggling, boom, all of a sudden you hit.
40:10 Danny, I might surprise you. There's a little bit of truth in that. I agree. I hate hearing the,
40:21 "All we need is 1% of this," because it's still pretty damn hard. However, there is a factor about
40:32 not being scared to go after big opportunities like that. For example, I talk about it. I mean,
40:38 Salesforce, it's like a hundred billion dollar business. One percent, not a hundred billion,
40:45 whatever the number is, but even a one percent, it could be a hundred million dollar opportunity.
40:50 They're not going to defend their least important $100 million piece of the business.
40:58 Even though someone else is doing it, that one percent of their total revenue is a big number
41:05 to you and it might be worth going after. There's a little bit lamer answer.
41:14 Let's see. We got maybe two more here. Fulma brings up the, you mentioned AI.
41:21 Now, we just saw on the news that ChatGPT can now hear and speak in real time. I guess,
41:30 not Fulma's question, but my question, is it over for humanity, Mark?
41:37 So Dan, I'm an optimist. An optimist is not someone who has this Pollyanna belief that
41:46 everything is going to go well. What an optimist believes is that we don't know what's going to
41:52 happen. Some good things are going to happen and some bad things are going to happen, but
41:56 eventually we're going to figure it out. I'm extremely excited about the opportunities that
42:05 AI presents. Are there going to be problems? Absolutely. Is it going to disrupt a lot of how
42:11 we work or will people lose their jobs? Will we have to do things differently? Absolutely.
42:16 We're going to figure it out. This is not going to be something which destroys humanity.
42:26 This is going to sound trite, but every major technological advance that humans have made
42:33 has threatened a lot of people. The steam engine, the assembly line, the internet.
42:41 These were huge changes in the way we did things and it resorts out who winners and losers are,
42:49 but overall, these all tend to advance what it's like to be alive today.
42:56 I think AI is going to be no different. All right. I'm going to hold you to that.
43:02 I'm an optimist, Dan. I love it.
43:06 We'll figure it out. I think we'll end on one last question.
43:10 This was sent from Lorenzo Dennis or possibly Dennis Lorenzo. I'm sorry if I mixed your name up,
43:18 but sort of bringing it back down. He is someone who's been making music for 20 years
43:27 and he kind of wants to turn this into his thing that he earns his money from.
43:31 Do you have any advice for someone, whether it's music,
43:35 someone who's trying to turn their passion for the arts or something else into a full-time job?
43:40 The quick answer is I don't know. I'll be quite honest about it because the category you've picked
43:49 is a very, very difficult one to make money into it. I just was in Nashville for Americana Fest,
43:59 which is kind of a singer-songwriter music festival. Oh my God, unbelievably talented people.
44:05 You're struck though that for most of them, this is just a middle-class job.
44:10 Very few of them are getting rich and famous, but they're doing it because they love it.
44:17 I think setting your aspirations for that is a wonderful one. I'll just say that the answer to
44:24 that is not asking me, who's a tech entrepreneur, it's going and looking at how all these people
44:30 who manage to make a living at music manage to do it. Merch, social media, I don't know,
44:38 but I know a lot of people seem to be able to do it. I know that it's not easy, but I still wish
44:46 you the best of luck. If you're enjoying what you're doing, you're pretty much winning already.
44:51 That's great. That's great. One more pressing question. This will be quick from Andre Savick,
44:58 14 years old. He asks, "Have you fixed your old Volvo?"
45:03 As a matter of fact, we still have the Volvo. It is a spare car because it's no longer
45:13 reliable enough that I certainly want to jump into it when I have to get someplace and
45:18 trust that it will start. It is still being driven around.
45:23 I don't think it has a vanity plate, so I'd say keep an eye out for it.
45:29 Do you have it bouncing? It's the one with the huge subwoofers.
45:38 It's pretty nondescript as far as old Volvos go, but yes, it's still going. Eventually,
45:44 I'll be showing photos of it the same way we showed the old photos today of the old
45:48 memorabilia from the Netflix days. That's great. Well, Andre, I think he's
45:53 going to reach out. He said he has some follow-up questions for you if the answer was yes,
45:57 so look out for those. I want to thank everyone who joined in. We had a lot of great questions
46:03 in the chat. I really love to see people connecting here. Really cool. You bring
46:09 people together, Mark. That's awesome. Aw, shucks.
46:11 Want to remind people where they can follow you. How can they get more Mark in their lives?
46:18 Two things. One is Ground Zero for me is my website, which is markrandolph.com.
46:23 There, besides you'll find all of my little social media handles so that you can follow
46:28 me on TikTok, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, etc. You also can find my blog posts there
46:33 where I talk about a lot of the stuff in more depth than what I talked about here.
46:37 You'll find links to my book. There it is. No, over here. There it is. Right there.
46:42 There it is. My book. You'll also find a way to apply to join Neverland, which is the
46:50 entrepreneurial community I run where we talk about, what a surprise, entrepreneurship. It's
46:56 a great place to connect with other entrepreneurs, almost as good as connecting in the comments
47:01 here on the entrepreneur live stream. That's awesome. Well, thanks everyone before
47:08 be sure to follow Mark and on that website, that's the place where you'll be able to submit
47:13 questions for the next one. Also follow entrepreneur on social media. We take questions
47:19 there. Thanks so much. Thanks, Mark. Hope your Volvo, you know, goes another a hundred thousand
47:25 miles. As do I, as well. Well, thanks, Dan. And thanks everybody for joining us today.
47:31 We'll see you again soon.