00:00
We're gonna I'm just gonna go ahead and tell you we've had some heavy hitters lately, but

00:04
Nothing as heavy as a co-founder of Netflix, my friend. Number one, there's no such thing as a bad idea. And I call on that. The thing is, what I tell people is, stop falling in love with your idea. Your idea's flawed. Stop nurturing this little thing like a baby and protecting it at all costs. And envisioning in your mind that it's gonna grow up to be the Heisman Trophy winner, it's gonna grow up to be the, your baby's gonna grow up, probably do crack behind the 7-Eleven. Being a great product is,

00:34
a tiny piece of the solution. You have to have a great product. But if you can't explain to people why they want this, why this solves their problem, you're not gonna get anywhere. The hardest part of ending is starting again. You're listening to the Radcast. If it's radical, we cover it. Here's your host, Ryan Alford. Hey guys, what's up? Welcome to the latest edition of the Radcast.

01:02
Ryan off as your host and where we are radical today. We're the founding co-founders, founding co-founders, Mark. I'm making up titles for you already. Before we even get started, entrepreneur, mentor, investor, author, Mark Randolph. What's up, Mark? Ryan, great to be with you. Thanks for having me. Hey man. It's great to have you. You are definitely, uh, we're going to, I'm just going to go ahead and tell you. We've had some heavy hitters lately, but.

01:29
Nothing is heavy as a co-founder of Netflix, my friend. So, congrats on that. I hope I can live up to the hype. Oh, you can. And we really appreciate your time coming on. And Mark, let's get right to it. I know you've done these a lot. I know your story's out there, but let's set the table at least. I like to at least start with intro, background, and of course, the gorilla in the room that is Netflix.

01:58
Of course, and everything you had involved there, but let's just start with your background, man. Wow, my background, I don't even sure I have a background. No, it's a pretty much an atypical background. Certainly for someone who ended up in Silicon Valley being an entrepreneur. I mean, I was a geology major of all things in college. But I think, I tell you that, not to say, look at this, how incredible geology is as a preparation for entrepreneurship.

02:28
But more to say that that really is the most important thing you have to understand about my background, which is that I chose geology with zero thought of what it would do for me in the future. Zero thought about would this be a career and can I pay bills with it? I chose geology because it was interesting and more importantly, because people got to go on field trips. So that has been this pattern where I guide myself by what I think is interesting.

02:58
trying to guess how a certain thing will set me up to do something else. And that's probably the best background, but it's led to all kinds of crazy places. You know, Netflix was not my first company. It was my sixth company. I founded two magazines, a mail order company, and a bunch of geeky software stuff. So it's been a career that kind of goes all over the place.

03:28
story there. It's funny, I had a conversation with someone the other day that talked about that very thing of chasing the interesting and the thing, their own curiosity, instead of necessarily having it all mapped out. And I think there's some fascination with that and I think there's some bravery in that that few have. You know, we get so kind of mired in thinking there's a process system, like we have to do it this way, versus changing the interesting and what you're curious about.

03:58
is probably a rare quality these days, isn't it? Well, and I think it's a necessary one, at least for the career that I've chosen for myself, because what entrepreneurship is, is doing things for which there is no predictable future. You're doing something that hasn't been done before. You're trying to build something where you don't know what the path's gonna look like, and you've gotta leave yourself open to following it wherever it happens to go. And so in some ways, that...

04:25
can get writ large into your life. That's a fun thing too. And almost, and Bill, I'm not just saying it's all carefree, do whatever you want. Certainly there's huge amounts of hard work that have gone into all this. It's more that, I had a friend when I was growing up right after college and he ended up working for, I guess, IBM or Xerox, one of those huge, huge multinational companies. And he'd be able to have these career conversations with me where he'd say, okay,

04:54
I'm going to do a year and a half here in headquarters. And then I go out to a field for two years. Then I'm going to come back and have a staff job here. And then he could like see the whole thing for like 10, 15, 20 years in the future. And not only was that this alien, it was a terrifying thought to me. I mean, I can see there'd be some comfort in that, but oh boy, that's not a fun way to live your life. At least not in my opinion. I know. And I know that, you know, the, that the Netflix story and you've told it, I mean,

05:24
I don't want to speak for you, I'm sure hundreds of times at this point, but, and so people can find that. So I don't want you to spend this entire interview rehashing what can be found out there, but I do want you, if you don't mind, call it the condensed version, call it whatever, and maybe built in with some of the lessons from that because it is such a behemoth in today's modern culture and everything like that. And I do want us to pause there because it's had an impact on your life, no doubt, indelibly.

05:55
Can we start there a little bit? Yeah, certainly. And you're right. There's a lot of lessons there. And probably the first one is that when people ask about where the idea for Netflix came from, where did Netflix come from? How did you start Netflix? What they're looking for is the epiphany story. Uh, they are looking for that moment where it all becomes clear, where you wake up and you can see this dream about I can

06:23
see the streaming video around the world. And it doesn't work like that. And these myths endure, you know, you'll have like what's Uber, or you got, you know, Travis can't get a cab on New Year's Eve and boom, there's the idea for Uber where two guys can't make the rent and boom, there's Airbnb. Or some guy's a late Fina movie and boom, there's Netflix. But the reality is, the lesson is epiphanies aren't real. That company formation is sloppy.

06:49
It involves lots of people, lots of fall dead ends and false starts. And Netflix was certainly no different. In fact, before we even got anywhere close to an idea for video, I pitched my co-founder Reed Hastings, dozens, if not hundreds of ideas that were, you know, generations removed from what Netflix was. And.

07:17
If you have a second, I'll actually give you an example. I would love it. I think this is perfect. All right, Ryan, get ready. Here comes the bitch. All right. Imagine if you will, Ryan, personalized shampoo. Here's how this is going to work. You're going to cut off a lock of your hair. You're going to mail it to me and I'm going to have my team of ace hair scientists, whatever those are, formulate this custom blend just for you.

07:42
then here's the best part, you're going to subscribe to it. And so once a month, you'll get your custom lead. And that was a real idea that I pitched to Reed Hastings while we were commuting to work. And the same thing would happen, which is nothing. He'd be driving and he'd be just looking out the window and a minute would go by, two minutes. And I'd wait patiently, I could see the wheels spinning. And then of course, all of a sudden he'd turn and say,

08:08
that will never work. And here's why. And then he would lay into me with this dissertation about all the flaws, those FDA approval on the expenses and no one uses that much shampoo or whatever the reasoning was. And then I'm no, you know, I'm no shrink violet. So I would lay right back into him with all the research I'd done. And we beat these guys, these ideas up. And we did this for hundreds of ideas. And then yes, one of the ideas we ultimately pitched him was video rental by mail.

08:38
Picture this Ryan, $8 billion category. And rather than having to go to the video store, you'll order online and we'll mail it to you. Now that had a flaw too. This was back in 1997 and the VA, the video rental, if you were looking at you, you probably remember this. I was one of your first subscribers on the, I thought this was brilliant. Yes. I got them in the mail. I was on VHS cassette back then in 97 and it wouldn't work.

09:07
So that idea I got discarded and then I went to the, went to pitching custom dog food or something. And until about maybe six weeks later, uh, Reid picked me up in the way to work and said, Hey, I read about this new technology called the DVD. It's in test market now, but it's a plastic disc, like a music CD, but it holds movies. And we're kind of batting that idea around. And we realized that might allow us to dust off that old video rental, my mail idea.

09:36
And then here's the next business insight, which is that at that moment, with this great idea of how this could transform video rental, we did not drive to the office and begin working on a business plan. We did not go and begin working on a pitch deck. We did not try and book ourselves on shark tank or something stupid like that. We turned the car around then and there and said, let's see if we can validate this idea.

10:05
And we drove back to the town we lived in, tried to buy a DVD and weren't any, it's a test market. So settled for buying a music CD, uh, put it in a little envelope. Like you put a greeting card in and then mailed it to Reed's house. Uh, and the very next morning when he picked me up, he had a little envelope with an unbroken CD in it that had gotten to his house, uh, overnight or the price of a first-class stamp. And

10:34
If there was a, uh, epiphany moment, or if there was, as I say, in screenwriter speak and inciting event, that was probably it. Yeah, exactly. You, uh, you figured out that you could mail it like without it breaking and out that this would work and that you could make them the money work because didn't, didn't need, didn't need DHL or UPS or federal express.

10:57
we could use the U S post office. And back then, our first class stamp was 29 cents. No cardboard. I could send a movie from San Jose, California, where the first warehouses were to any place in the country. And that, that at least made it feasible. I'm not going to say it made it work. Now how messy, like we all gloss over these things and go, they had just like you just did. You did it perfectly. Like you thought it was one idea and it's like,

11:26
zero to a hundred million miles an hour overnight. But we know that's not, I mean, those that like myself that started businesses, no, that's not reality. Like what was the, how hard was it to go from testing the CD to mass mailing out DVDs? I mean, how long of a process was that? Well, there was two pieces. Both of them were brutally difficult. And both of them are totally different. You know, back then, this is again, 1997,

11:55
We wanted to do an e-commerce website, but it was not like you could just go online and pay $19.95 a month and have a Shopify store and boom, you're done. If you wanted an e-commerce website, you had to write it, every line of code yourself. You wanted to take payments, there wasn't PayPal, there wasn't Stripe, you had to write the payment portals to the banks. You wanted to serve the webpages, you couldn't go up onto Amazon Web Services in the cloud.

12:20
You had to buy the servers, you had to wire them up. You had to put them in a closet. You had to air condition it. Wanted security, wanted testing. Everything had to be done from scratch. So the first brutally difficult thing was getting this website off the ground. We also had to find a copy of every single DVD available, which at the time was all of 970 of them. Uh, and that was brutal. So there was the hard part, just getting this thing to start. And then we had the big moment on.

12:50
April 14th, 1998. And there was some interesting learning at that moment. And, you know, you know that my book is called that will never work. My podcast is called that will never work. And that's because that is what everyone told me when I pitched the idea for Netflix, it's what employees told me. It was what investors told me. I mean, my wife told me that. And I persevered anyway.

13:20
But lo and behold, we launched this crazy idea and you know what? Well, they were all right. It didn't work. It was a terrible idea. No one rented from us and if they rented from us once, they wouldn't come back again. It was one thing after another and we struggled for a year and a half. I mean, 18 months of almost no success in figuring out how to get video rental by mail to work.

13:46
And it took us 18 months before we finally stumbled on the crazy business model twist that unexpectedly, uh, it did work. So yes, there was a long period where we were struggling running out of money in a tiny office, sitting at card tables on beach chairs we had bought from home. It was a tough one.

14:11
That's a story that people don't hear in the entrepreneur world of what's not sexy. It's all sexy now, like the beauty and the pageantry of entrepreneurship. I mean, curiosity. In those early days, it was obviously not working. I guess you had maybe business coming in the front door and going out the back door with subscribers and things like that, or getting people to stick with the model. But what...

14:38
marketing channels did you use like out of curiosity? I'm trying to remember, cause I actually was a subscriber. I did get DVDs by mail when you were doing it. And I'm trying to remember what got me in. I don't know if it was a direct mail piece. I'm trying to remember like what, what marketing channels you guys were using. So the subscription business, the net, which really kind of defined Netflix. That was the innovation that we tried 18 months in. Okay. Prior to that, it was a la carte. Okay.

15:07
That was a different, you rented and you went away. And the way that we got you is we had to solve this problem that there was very, very few DVD players out there and the DVD player manufacturers were having a brutal time selling DVD players because no one was stocking DVDs. So it was a chicken and egg thing. You couldn't sell DVD players because there was no DVDs. No one wanted to stock DVDs because there's no DVD players. And so we realized we could kind of.

15:36
perhaps fill this hole. And so I spent personally months and months traipsing the wilds of New Jersey office parks, convincing these huge conservative consumer electronics companies that they should partner with us, that they should let us put a coupon in their box that said, buy this DVD player, and we'll give you 10 free, three free, five free DVD rentals.

16:05
And eventually I convinced every single one of them to do it. And that, again, our business model didn't work until we had the subscriptions. But that is what kept us alive because that kept a flow of customers coming in the front door, it kept it from getting overly depressing. It actually gave us a flow of customers to experiment on. And you started building the brand name. So that's what some people lose sight of is you may not have been successful. And who knows how you did have to make some money at some point.

16:35
but you did start building and seeding the Netflix brand. And that's where I remember it. Circuit City. I bought a DVD player and it came with the 10 free CDs. I think that's why I bought the CD, the DVD player. I can't believe that you actually remember that because you're correct. After we did the deals with the DVD manufacturers, you did a big deal with Circuit City. We had a big deal with all the other retailers. I mean, that was, you couldn't do television advertising because you would have wasted 99

17:03
point five percent of your money because there was so few people with DVD players out there. You couldn't do any kind of advertising. We had to be creative and say, how do we actually catch people at the moment of peak excitement? And you fished where the fish were. Yes, exactly. So transitioning to subscriptions. I mean, when did, I mean, we could jump ahead. We talked, it's out there, but like, how long was it DVD subscription until streaming? Is that?

17:32
Some people might lose track of how much time was in that sequence. That was nine long years. I knew it was longer. Netflix didn't launch streaming until 2007 and the site launched in 1998. And the subscription service began in the fall of 99. So we were going for a long time. And it was not because we didn't realize it was coming. Because you know what I mentioned before?

18:01
that will never work. People said that for two reasons. One, of course they go, well, there's Blockbuster. There's a Blockbuster in every corner. Why is anyone gonna wanna mail and wait two days for a DVD? Okay, okay, I get it. The other one though was, they go, this is a digital medium. Just a matter of days or weeks before people are downloading this or streaming this and who's gonna need DVDs anymore. And they were right that it was inevitable

18:30
But what we thought they were going to be wrong about was the timeline. I mean, I was pretty sure I didn't know how long it would be, but I was pretty sure it was going to be a while because, uh, you know, there wasn't the bandwidth. Uh, there was a bandwidth to the home. If it was there, it was connected to your desk in your office. It wasn't connected to your living room television. I knew Hollywood was going to be resident about releasing these things digitally. So we really had to build a company which could survive and thrive.

18:59
while we're in a DVD world, but be ready for the transition when it eventually came. And I think the smart thing we did was position the company, not as a DVD company. It was not about, this is the world's fastest shipper of plastic or whatever we could have said it was, but more did we say, this is all about streaming because we couldn't have delivered on that. So, you know, instead we positioned the company as the best place to find great stories.

19:29
That's delivery agnostic. That'll work now. That'll work in 2007. That'll work in 2021. It'll work in 2050 when we're beaming them, you know, telepathically into your fillings or however you're getting movies in the future. I know. And then proliferation of these guys, spark phones, a whole nother channel. But I have a really random question. Do you ever get hate mail from anyone at Blockbuster, executive leadership from Blockbuster, like old school, like anything, any, uh,

19:58
Any stuff like that ever go down? Any getting your DMs on Instagram? Like, hey, I'm kidding a little bit, but no, in fact, it's, it's some ways it's almost the opposite. I mean, I don't know that you've seen every so often you'll see these news stories about, or human interest stories about, uh, some American soldiers go back to Vietnam and they're sitting around with the people who are on the other side of the trenches from them and they're kind of talking about reliving the shared experience.

20:26
So I have had recently a bunch of conversations with blockbuster execs. Uh, and it's very friendly and very fascinating actually to hear that story from their perspective and actually to realize in my opinion, how close they were to actually taking Netflix out. So it's a, there's no hate. There's no hate meal there. I mean, listen, I feel badly, uh, in some ways, uh, because you know, blockbuster was huge. Blockbuster had a.

20:54
60,000 employees at one point, you know, now they're down to one store. And, and so I don't want to be happy or proud about having done that to a company. Um, I do feel proud that we were able to not only withstand, um, the blockbusters onslaught, but actually, you know, be resilient and creative enough to actually overcome it. Well, they were perfectly positioned to do what you guys did.

21:22
I mean, as far as capital, resource and everything else, but you know, it's innovation and it's the American way. I mean, like, I'm not saying killer be killed. I'm just saying like, you know, they had every opportunity. You guys just got ahead of them and then it snowballed from there. There was some, you know, bad decisions and, or I don't even know if bad decisions sounds like, oh, I understand. Like the size of them, they were behemoth, you know, but it's like, they had the opportunity, did they not?

21:50
I mean, absolutely. Start starting something new is really, really hard. You know, the idea is 1% of it. You can know what to do, but the execution is really, really, really hard. And you know, Blockbuster's probably single biggest flaw is they were struggling with the innovators dilemma, you know, which is they may have seen very clearly

22:18
what they had to do to enter into video rental by mail. They could probably see very clearly that this was gonna get bigger and bigger and bigger, but it was very, very hard for them to say, let's take our very best engineers and let's take them off the part of the business that makes us $5.9 billion a year, and let's have our best engineers working on something which may make us 10 or 20 million. Let's take our best executives and put them on that. Let's...

22:47
piss off our franchisee. It's really, really hard not just to execute, but to have the courage to execute when doing what the future requires means you have to cut into your existing business. Yeah. If they could write a book called too big to pivot, like, it's like, I mean, you know, it's like, it's like, it is, it's hard. I worked in New York. I mean, I've been in the ad agency business my entire career. I worked in Manhattan on some of the largest accounts in the world.

23:17
And it is, they move slow, it's hard for them to pivot. And it's not for the wrong reasons, it's not because they don't want to, but it's exactly what you described. It's just that machine and to take your eye off the ball, but in this case, the ball was not just taking it off, it was moving completely. But they just couldn't pivot, and you guys were smart enough, nimble enough, and made it happen.

23:47
Mark, you said something really interesting and you hear it a lot. I know you're doing stuff with personal development and mentoring and all those things. We hear it a lot. The ideas are 1% and the execution is everything. And I think it's becoming such common vernacular that it's kind of like glossed over a little bit. But I'd love for to know your perspective of like how people like yourself or others, are they just wired to get it done?

24:16
Because you all execution is just, it is everything. Yeah. It, I mean, I think probably the single biggest, uh, uh, personal trait for a successful entrepreneur is simply this predisposition to action. You know, they do more and they think less. They immediately, when they have an idea, they're not.

24:40
all of a sudden spinning off into this fantasy land, oh, how amazing this idea will be. Just imagine what will happen when they immediately go, how can I figure out a way to quickly and cheaply and easily try something? That's the big piece. And it's really tragic. And the other reason for this whole, you know, ideas 1% and executions 99% is that your idea is almost inevitably wrong. In fact, it's always wrong.

25:10
I don't know whether you're, yeah, absolutely. In fact, you come from a, a, a industry where brainstorming sessions are like, uh, you know, that's your daily meals. And for those of you who don't, if you've, you know, there's brainstorming sessions and there's always the moderator up there and goes, okay, some ground rules, folks. Number one, there's no such thing as a bad idea. And I call bullshit on that.

25:35
There are tons of bad ideas. In fact, the rules of a brainstorm session, these are all bad ideas. Because they are, all ideas are bad. And your job is not to come up with a good idea. Your idea is to figure out why your idea is bad. Because that's the process. That's what entrepreneurs do. They start with an idea and don't say, this is what it's gonna be. Again, there's no epiphany moment, but they start. And they realize by colliding it with real people, with a real market, with real problems, what the flaw was. And they go, oh.

26:05
that gives me an idea to try this and try this. And so the reason, listen, what are the, you got me, you got me, got me going here. I like it. I love it. Yeah. So, um, I've heard every single possible reason there is for people having an idea and I'm not wanting to start. And one of the most tragic ones that I hear is I don't want to tell anyone my idea because I don't want someone to steal my idea. And

26:33
The reason that is so tragic, besides the obvious, which is no one's gonna steal your idea. But by the very act of you not being willing to make your idea public, you're protecting the 1%. And you're then not enabling yourself to do the 99%, which is figure out why your idea is a bad one. You're protecting something which is a bad idea. You've gotta get out.

27:02
and figure it out. It's the execution. It's the doing, it's the doing, it's the doing. I love that notion that all ideas are bad because the notion, because all ideas are bad because of how hard it will be to execute them and how much you have to overcome to make them happen. No, that's not what I mean. What I mean is that idea that you have in your mind is not going to work. It's a creation. The evolution. It's a fiction.

27:31
You know, the evolution is the really hard part, but you know, when you, the idea we had was, Oh, what a great idea. We will do video rental by mail. People will come in the order of DVDs. We will mail up to them and then seven days later, they'll have to mail them back with due dates and late fees. That was a terrible idea. It didn't work, but it's fine by doing that by experimenting. We little by little began to learn a lot about what were the problems people had.

28:00
The thing is that I tell people is stop falling in love with your idea. Your idea is flawed. Stop nurturing this little thing like a baby and protecting it at all costs and envisioning in your mind that it's going to grow up to be the Heisman trophy winner is going to grow up to be the, your baby's going to grow up, probably to go do crack behind the seven 11. What you so ignore it. What you want to fall in love with is the problem because the problem will not abandon you.

28:30
The problem will get more and more nuanced and richer as you understand it better. And you take that first idea and you use that to learn the problem and then abandon that first idea when it doesn't work. And now you know a bit more about the problem, try something else, then try something else. And that process, that repetitive, that grueling, that ability to walk away from stuff two days after you work so excited, now you're disappointed, that's what entrepreneurship is. That's the process. And...

29:00
Luckily for me, I love that. And for most entrepreneurs I know, love that. There's nothing better than sitting around the table with super smart people solving really hard problems, especially ones that no one has really tried to solve before. What's your perspective on marketing? Like, I'm fascinated by your take and like, you know, your perspective and you know.

29:26
even though you say you're not maybe an idea guy, you are an idea guy, you just have figured out like how to make it, how to, you know, the secret sauce of making it work. But like, what was your perspective of marketing as it related to the growth of Netflix? I love marketing. Yeah. I mean, I'm, that's where I came from. I mean, I spent a dozen years doing direct marketing.

29:56
Uh, that was my first love. You know, I really fell in love with that blend of art and science of creativity matched with numeric and analytics, understanding how you did. Uh, my, my, my, my great aunt, my, was he grand uncle? Grand uncle was, um, Edward Bernays, who was the, you know, pretty of the father of public relations. Yes. So, um, I.

30:23
My first job, my first job offer out of college was to be an account executive and advertising agency. So I love, I love marketing and at Netflix, it was, it was critical. You have to.

30:40
I'll tell you a different story about it. So I worked for a software company for a long time and, um, we have a product coming out and it won some, you know, PC magazine best in class award and we all got excited and we go, oh my gosh, our product won this award. We are, we got it made and we go, we better go look up who also has won this award.

31:04
And you look back at the track record of other companies have won this best in class award and they're all total losers in the marketplace. Uh, being a great product is a tiny piece of the, uh, the solution. You have to have a great product, but if you can't explain to people why they want this, why this solves their problem, um, you're not going to get anywhere. Yep. I love it. The, um,

31:32
As a morn marketer to another, it sounds like, yeah, if I had my little ding on my soundboard, I would have given one right there. Let's talk about, and we've mentioned it already, that will never work a little more in depth. Maybe for someone out there that's fascinated by your story, I don't know who wouldn't be, but talk, I mean, obviously it's about the story of Netflix and everything, a lot of what you've already described, but is there anything else that you would

32:01
tell people that would be great takeaways from the book? Yeah, the book, the one thing is I wrote the book 16 years after I left Netflix. And there was a reason for that, it's because I really wanted this to be a record of what it was really like doing a startup. I wanted to fight against the...

32:27
the myth making of the CEO who knows everything in this chapter one, look how amazing this decision was in chapter two is look how great I've solved this problem and chapter three is et cetera. It goes, no, there is really hard moments. There's really sad moments, there's really lonely moments. I mean, there's certainly humor and excitement and that's what I wanted this to be. I wanted it to be the true behind the scenes, what goes into starting and growing a company.

32:56
But you know, I also wanted it to be this chance to share, I don't know what to call them, all the tips and tricks that I learned over four decades as an entrepreneur. Because I really believe that, as you mentioned earlier, lots of people right now are finding entrepreneurship as an interesting thing. And I wanted them to know that it's not magic. It's not superhuman people. It's taking some fairly basic skills and applying them to your starting point.

33:26
And I wanted the book to be about that. And I think it came out great. And I want it to be a good story. You know, it had to be entertaining. It had to be, listen, if the book about Netflix isn't bingeable, I don't know what book should be. Well, I enjoyed it. I listened to it, actually. I listen to most of my books now. I think books on tape, audio books rather, are awesome. I mean, recording that.

33:55
was so fun because you realize, I mean, you, um, it's an, I'm a, I'm a decent writer. I'm not a professional writer, but you realize how limited written types, languages, you know, you're limited to things like italics and exclamation points and all bold to try and convey what you're saying or feeling. And then all of a sudden you're sitting there reading it and you can use the full range. And I was like having

34:22
you know, PTSD in the recording booth when I was going through a certain of the really intense, uh, stressful moments. I'm sure reliving it. Cause when you talk it, you think it. And when you think it, you relive it. And it came through your, your, your ex, you're a really good storyteller. I know it's a real story and it was your life, but, um, it's really good. Um, you know, I do want to go down that path. Um, you know, as we start to close out a little bit, but the, the entrepreneurship,

34:51
you know, with our youth especially, it's cool. You know, folks like Gary Vee, who I certainly admire and others, and I don't think they're over intentionally glamorizing it. And they tried to be transparent about the ups and downs, but what's your thought about, you know, I don't know if everybody wants to be an entrepreneur, but it's certainly at the forefront more than it used to be good, bad perspective on all that. You know, there's some really great things and some really terrible things about it. I mean, just to be optimistic,

35:21
The great thing about it is that lots of people have this urge to do something. They have an idea and they'd like to see it real. It doesn't need to be start a company. It could be any dream you have. And certainly when I was growing up, when I was in college, even the early years of my career, there was this unrelenting pressure to you had to be a banker or you had to be a lawyer or you had to be a doctor or you had to have some predictable chart your path profession.

35:51
And so I think a lot of people who actually had this feeling that this might be a hugely fulfilling career for me, uh, didn't go down that path. Uh, and because there was no one there saying, no, this is an acceptable thing. This is a fun thing. This is a, uh, a rewarding thing. Uh, and so I think the fact that you now can take classes in entrepreneurship, now you can watch television shows and movies about entrepreneurship. I think that piece of it in that it's normalized, this is a career choice.

36:20
Um, has paved the way for thousands and thousands of kids going to their parents and saying, Hey, I'm moving to San Francisco to live for, to an apartment and eat ramen and not have the parents freak out. So that's a good thing. The bad thing is that I think the media has pumped up the wrong aspects of entrepreneurship. They've pumped it up as this path to becoming wealthy or six famous. Uh, they've pumped it up that it's all about pitching.

36:49
that it's all about raising money, that it's all about the parties. And in reality, that's a tiny, tiny, tiny piece of what an entrepreneur actually does. And in terms of the wealth part, it's a tiny, tiny fraction of entrepreneurs for whom that actually happens to. I mean, it's akin to the person in Kansas, in Kansas, who was the lead in their high school play and wants to move to Hollywood to become rich and famous. Why?

37:19
I hate to break it to you, but you're doing it for the wrong reasons. You're not gonna be rich or famous. The very, very, very, very, very small fraction of actors and actresses become rich and famous. But listen, if you love creating characters, if you love performing, if you love influence, and you love the emotion of it, all power to you should be an actor. And the same thing with entrepreneurship. If you love the challenge of starting something, of figuring things out, of, as I said before, sitting around the table with super smart people solving really interesting problems,

37:48
It is the best career in the world. So I love the fact that it's encouraging more people to take that step. Um, I don't like the fact that it's having some people drawn to it for the wrong reasons, cause they're bound to be disappointed, but fundamentally I've kind of made it my life's mission to try and let people know that if they do want to do this, here's how, or if they do want to do this, here's where to start. I mean, it's what there is that in the book. It's really the focus of the podcast. It's not me.

38:18
interviewing very successful, famous entrepreneurs. Other people do that way better than I do. My podcast is listening in as I'm actually mentoring other early stage entrepreneurs like the audience who can hear someone struggling with the exact same thing they are. How do I raise money? How do I get along with the co-founder? How do I take this idea and start? And that's what I'm trying to do too. I'm gonna be a little bit less hysterical way than Gary V.

38:48
But we're motivated, I think, by the same thing. I think so as well. I have one final question and you know, you can answer this in any way that you want. You know, and you talk about some of these things with the book and everything, but if you were computing the growth formula for a startup or companies to truly grow, is there like, and I know this could be a podcast on its own.

39:17
So I know, I mean, I'm sure, but like, is there two, three, four ingredients, call them, that are common in that, in any kind of company's growth? I mean, like, are there things that are like, you absolutely have to have these two or three things that are just, that you see as you watch either businesses you've grown or others you've been invested in or help? Is there any commonalities in the ingredients?

39:47
Yeah, there was a number of things and you know that I used to think it was simple. And then that's when I began doing the podcast and speaking to one person after another, realizing there's actually a lot of things that go into it. But listen, there's a couple of things that are critical. I mean, the first one is, as I said, you have to start and that's what sinks. Most companies that people have the idea. And I can't start because I need to raise money. No, you don't. I need a technical co-founder. No, you don't need to quit school or quit my day job. No, you don't.

40:16
You can't tell them when my idea, they'll steal it. Yes, you can. So number one is if you don't start, you'll never get any place. And what separates all the people they read about the famous entrepreneurs is they're the ones who had the idea and did something about it. They didn't sit around thinking about it. But after that, the rest of the common denominators, I'll state two of them. The one of the biggest ones is it. People realize you can't do everything that you have to focus.

40:42
And there's always this sense that I have to get everything right before I start. Uh, and in fact, even once you're running, I have to get everything right. And the answer is you don't. There's usually two things, maybe one, maybe three, but if you get them right, all the rest don't matter. And the best entrepreneurs, a have this intuitive sense about what those important things are, uh, but then have this ability to put the blinders on and focus on getting those done.

41:10
at the expense of everything else, even when the other things are screaming the loudest or burning the hottest. Uh, it's a really, really hard, um, thing to do. And the last one is you have to make sure that you are always willing to walk, walk away from the present in order to get the future, right. Which goes back to a blockbuster didn't do it goes back to it. So many companies can't do. And in a startup, you're constantly learning new things. There's this temptation to say, we can't do that.

41:40
Just think of all the time, dollars, sweat. We've invested in this idea. No, you've got to say, well, sunk cost. We're going in this direction now. I love it. Don't fall in love with the idea. Fall in love with the problem. Exactly. That's a big one. I think it sums it up. Man. Awesome. Mark. I really appreciate your time. Do you have like one minute? We do a section. We do a little thing called Rad or Fad. I give you like.

42:07
Four keywords and you tell me rad or fad. Do my best. All right. TikTok, rad or fad? Oh God, a good one. Fad. All right. I like it. Don't think it's creating anything, any meaningful value and social media. People's case changed pretty quickly. Online coaching.

42:38
Jesus, you're good ones. Hey, that's good. You think I'll say rad. I'll say rad. Yeah. I think that's one of the silver linings of, uh, our pandemic here is realizing just how much you can get done. Uh, and since I do a lot of online coaching myself, I certainly I'm not going to think that's a fat Tom Brady.

43:01
Rad or fad? That's a fad for sure. You're a New Yorker. Are you a giant? Giant or Jets? Oh, I was always a Jets. Okay. J-E-T-S. Alright. Got a new quarterback in there. See how he does. The Matrix 4! Remember the Matrix movies? They got Matrix 4. Yeah, of course. And I know, I was just reading about that yesterday. Oh, that's rad. I like that.

43:32
That's going to have legs. I feel like we're moving more and more towards the metaverse anyway. It's like, I think we're moving more towards the matrix every day, right? It's becoming more and more real. My kids feel like it's real, you know, they're in roadblocks all day. There's some stock you should buy. Exactly. Mark, man, you've been awesome. Where can everybody keep up with you today? Uh, and obviously I know the books online, but tell everybody where we can find you, keep up with everything that you have going on.

43:59
So, you know, I do the podcast, which is available, that'll overwork available. Oh, wherever you get podcasts. But if you don't have the attention span for 30 minutes of this, you'll find all the shorter form stuff, my writings, my social media stuff, all at mark Randolph.com. And from, which is a Mark with a C Randolph with the PH. Uh, and from there you can jump off to the whole world of all the crazy shit that I'm doing and thinking about. I love it, man. I really appreciate you, Tom. You are very insightful. I love the book.

44:29
And I'm going to keep following along to see everything that you're sharing. Thank you so much, Mark. Thanks, Ryan. Really appreciate you have me on. Yeah, man. Thanks so much. Hey, guys, you know where to find us. We're at the Radcast dot com. Search Netflix. Search Mark Randolph. You can find all the highlight clips from this episode. Everything online. You know where to find me. I'm at Ryan Alford on TikTok. That's a fad. And Instagram. You know where to get us. We'll see you next time on the Radcast.