42 Inspirational Marc Randolph Quotes [2024] Co-Founder Of Netflix

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Updated: January 20th, 2022

Marc Randolph is an American tech entrepreneur, advisor, speaker, and advocate.

He is the co-founder and first CEO of Netflix, an OTT content platform and production company that provides streaming services.

Marc Randolph has acted as a mentor at MiddCORE and a board member of Looker Data Sciences. He is also an Entrepreneur in Residence for High Point University and its Belk Entrepreneurship Center.

We've put together an incredible collection of Marc Randolph quotes to read.

Here they are:

42 Inspirational Marc Randolph Quotes [2024] Co-Founder Of Netflix

List of Inspiring Marc Randolph Quotes

I still have long lists of things that I want to accomplish every day.

That Will Never Work' is my chance to share all the secrets I've accumulated in a 40 years career as a entrepreneur - secrets that can help anyone turn their dream into a reality.

At a startup, it's hard enough to get a single thing right, much less a whole bunch of things. Especially if the things you are trying to do are not only dissimilar but actively impede each other.

People are always advised to follow your dreams, but in 'That Will Never Work' I show them how!

Don't move to L.A to become an actress - you'll just be a waitress. Don't drive to Nashville to become a country music star - you'll just end up playing empty honky-tonks at two in the afternoon on a Tuesday.

In fact, I'm happy to go on record as saying that the ability to create a reality distortion field is right up there alongside optimism as an entrepreneur's most valuable weapon.

In the years after I left Netflix, the company I co-founded, I didn't want to puff myself up or tear anyone else down.

The lessons I learned starting Netflix - and over a lifetime of entrepreneurship - are broadly applicable to anyone with a dream.

If you apprentice yourself to the smartest people who will take you seriously, you will learn at every step. You'll learn their special language. You'll see what real people do. Your interests might surprise you. They will evolve. And you'll be well-posit

When I was 23, I was quite possibly the worst real estate agent in New York. I was working for my mother's agency in Chappaqua, and no one was buying houses. In eight months, I made zero sales. I rented one apartment.

No one has ever asked me to give a graduation speech. But in my years of working with aspiring entrepreneurs, many of them in college, I've gotten used to giving advice.

Now, I love a good factory tour. Drop me into a bottling plant, an automotive assembly line, or a jellybean factory, and I'm happy as a clam at high tide.

When I first met Jeff Bezos back in the late 90s, the only automated thing in his office was a rotating fan, gently blowing across a pair of identical blue shirts he'd hung on a water pipe behind his desk.

Diversity is not a skin thing, necessarily. Diversity is you have people around the table who have different backgrounds and different experiences and think differently.

I mean, at the simplest level, my entire background was in marketing, which largely is about understanding a customer, being able to be intuitive, being able to be empathetic.

Iteration, not ideation, is the most important part of early stage entrepreneurship. You have to have a lot of ideas - a lot of bad ideas - if you want to end up with a good one.

No one knows what's a good idea or a bad idea until you try it.

Companies make a big point of how their culture is all about 'bad news first,' but when it comes to people, they are suddenly scared to communicate bad news out of some mistaken feeling of politeness or political correctness.

My father was an investment banker, a stock broker.

Banks and investors don't usually view a high-ranking executive in the company selling off massive amounts of stock as a good thing. When someone uses 'low eight figures,' that means barely eight figures.

I played second base.

It used to be true that to succeed in the creative class, you had to move immediately to where the action was. It was how you made connections, how you got auditions, how you found an audience and funding and some attention for your craft. But not anymore

As software began to be sold to people who would never consider themselves technical, it suddenly became clear that you needed people who spoke their language.

When a company gets bigger, when it begins to bring on employees, it naturally goes through this tendency of wanting to control, of wanting to build process - essentially to say not every one of our customers or employees has great judgment.

If you want your company to succeed, you have to have the confidence in your business to take a bet on its future - to risk destroying a mediocre business model for the chance to have a strong one.

Like Netflix, Looker started as nothing more than an idea. Lloyd Tabb and Ben Porterfield were two brilliant engineers who had figured out a better way for businesses to see and analyze their data, and they asked me to join them to help out with the ABCs

Most people have a kind of survivor bias about luck. When something wonderful happens - when preparation meets opportunity, with excellent results - we think: 'How lucky!' But we don't usually acknowledge all the times when things just... fizzle out. All

I'm this big believer that culture is not what you say, it's what you do. Who cares about your PowerPoint and about what you've carved into your cornerstone? If it's not being modeled, it won't be readable.

I tell aspiring entrepreneurs all the time: Validate your idea locally. Get some experience under your belt. Prove your idea has legs where you are. Spend some time as a big fish in a small pond. Demonstrate that there's a there there... there. Where you

The biggest problem I see with early-stage entrepreneurs is they get the idea in their head, and they leave it in their head. And they begin embellishing it in their head, making it more ornate. They add on the second story to their dream house - then add

The role of a founder-CEO is extremely lonely. You can't always be fully forthcoming with your board or investors or employees.

You simply can’t know how things are going to behave until you’ve actually tried them. Go ahead and write up a plan, but don’t put too much faith in it. The only real way to find something out is to do it

Creative ideation and right people around are as important as focus.

When an opportunity comes knocking, you don’t necessarily have to open the door. But you owe it to yourself to at least look through the keyhole.

When your dream becomes a reality, it doesn’t just belong to you. It belongs to the people who helped you — your family, your friends, your co-workers. It belongs to the world.

Over-planning and over-designing is often just over-thinking — or plain old procrastination. When it comes to ideas, it’s more effective to test ten bad ones than spend days to come up with something perfect.

Focus is important for success.

Trust your gut, but also test it. Before you do anything concrete, the data has to agree.

Sometimes the only way out is through.

The most important step that anyone can take to turn their dreams into reality is a simple one: You just need to start.

As you get older, if you’re at all self-aware, you learn two important things about yourself: what you like, and what you’re good at. Anyone who gets to spend their day doing both of those things is a lucky person.

Everyone who has taken a shower has had an idea. But it’s the people who get out of the shower, towel off, and do something about it that makes the difference.

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Pat Walls

I'm Pat Walls and I created Starter Story - a website dedicated to helping people start businesses. We interview entrepreneurs from around the world about how they started and grew their businesses.

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