It’s so common for people to talk about curling up with a good Netflix special after a long work week that it may seem like a lifetime ago that people were driving to their local Blockbuster to rent a VHS tape. That huge shift in American culture was the result of Netflix co-founders Marc Randolph and Reed Hastings taking what was once just a crazy idea, applying it to the growing e-commerce industry that was just starting to grow in the late 1990s, and taking the concept to fruition. Randolph was the company’s first CEO before ceding that title to Hastings — the result of a hard-learned lesson about the difference between the start-up and maintenance phase of any successful business.
Randolph tells the story of how it all began in his new book, "That Will Never Work: The Birth Of Netflix And The Amazing Life Of An Idea," and he joined Jim Braude to tell him about it.
