Most entrepreneurial ideas will sound crazy, stupid and uneconomic, and then they'll turn out to be right.
Reed Hastings
Stone Age. Bronze Age. Iron Age. We define entire epics of humanity by the technology they use.
There is a revolution happening, and within two years I think that Wi-Fi and Netflix will be built into all the televisions.
At Netflix, we think you have to build a sense of responsibility where people care about the enterprise. Hard work, like long hours at the office, doesn't matter as much to us. We care about great work.
My first company, Pure Software, was exciting and innovative in the first few years and bureaucratic and painful in the last few before it got acquired. The problem was we tried to systemize everything and set up perfect procedures.
It turns out that all Netflix streaming peak on Saturday night can fit inside a single fiber optic, which is the size of one human hair.
If the Starbucks secret is a smile when you get your latte... ours is that the Web site adapts to the individual's taste.
But as an entrepreneur you have to feel like you can jump out of an aeroplane because you're confident that you'll catch a bird flying by. It's an act of stupidity, and most entrepreneurs go splat because the bird doesn't come by, but a few times it does.
Think of Internet on the TV like the Web browser. The amount of time you spend on the PC in the browser is just going to grow continuously.
Fibre optic is becoming like electricity. If you look at how electricity spread around the globe 100 years ago, that's what's happening now.
Well, we're about 24 million subscribers today, and that's up from about 15 million a year ago, so it's a very high rate of growth, and that's what's exciting about the business - more and more people are getting smart TVs, they're watching Netflix on their iPads.
Great leaders, like Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos, also focused on the long term.
In hindsight, I slid into arrogance based upon past success.
In fact, technology has been the story of human progress from as long back as we know. In 100 years people will look back on now and say, 'That was the Internet Age.' And computers will be seen as a mere ingredient to the Internet Age.
When we think about online learning, it's such 'early days.' Bill Gates is a wildly smart insightful guy. Yet, even a guy as smart and insightful as that, 30 years ago can say things like, 'Who's every going to need more than 640K of memory?'
On the Internet you get continuous innovation, so every year the streams are a little better.
In the States, there's ESPN3, and each country has different options, and other than premiere league football, there tends to be very little global content. And movie and TV rights are pretty broad content.
Our brand at Netflix is really focused on movies and TV shows.
In 20 years from now we will all be able to click and watch TV.
I'm an HBO subscriber, and I watch a bunch of great shows on HBO.
I think there will be 20 years of evolution from linear broadcast to internet television.
Most companies that are great at something - like AOL dialup or Borders bookstores - do not become great at new things people want (streaming for us) because they are afraid to hurt their initial business.
I've worked very hard, but my life's always been fun.
What's got me excited about the education space is the growth of the Internet over the next 10, 20, 30 years.
I founded Netflix. I've built it steadily over 12 years now, first with DVD becoming profitable in 2002, a head-to-head ferocious battle with Blockbuster and evolving the company toward streaming.
I watch mostly independent films.
We have a very wide range of content, but the brand-newest movies, what's happening with those is a $30 pay-per-view option - not from Netflix but from DirecTV and others - of movies that are in the theater.
I'm on the Facebook board now. Little did they know that I thought Facebook was really stupid when I first heard about it back in 2005.
I don't know of any Internet service that opens on a regional basis.
The Costa Rican government is prioritizing laying fiber optic over paving roads. Costa Rica is trying to become one of the Internet societies. This is happening throughout the world.
We are seeing the beginning of things. Web 2.0 is broadband. Web 3.0 is 10 gigabits a second.
Broadcast TV is like the landline of 20 years ago.
In the U.S., HBO is a very aggressive service.
I hate the photo shoots. I hate all that stuff.
So much of the downstream revenue is linked to that initial excitement, to how much revenue is produced in the domestic box office. For example, what we pay for a film three years later is highly correlated to how well it did in the box office.
How much has it been your experience that Americans follow what happens in the world?
There's a finite market for DVD-by-mail, and the growth over the next 10 years will be in streaming.
About half my work in education is U.S. political reform around school districts and charter schools, and creating more room for entrepreneurial organizations to develop. And about half on technology, which I look at as a global platform.
School districts in the US don't adopt technology very quickly.
I hate the photo shoots.
Comparing Apple to Netflix is like comparing apples to oranges, especially if the oranges made so many mistakes that people stopped eating oranges and just went back to Blockbuster.
It is clear that for many of our members two websites would make things more difficult, so we are going to keep Netflix as one place to go for streaming and DVDs.
