That Will Never Work: The Birth of Netflix by the first CEO and co-founder Marc Randolph

But you want something that will scale,” he said. “You want to sell something where the effort it takes to sell a dozen is identical to the effort it takes to sell just one. And while you’re at it, try and find something that’s more than just a onetime sale, so that once you’ve found a customer, you’ll be able to sell to them over and over again.”

The reasons for working there weren’t exotic perks or free food.

People want to be treated like adults. They want to have a mission they believe in, a problem to solve, and space to solve it. They want to be surrounded by other adults whose abilities they respect.

Focus. It’s an entrepreneur’s secret weapon. Again and again in the Netflix story – dropping DVD sales, dropping à la carte rentals, and eventually dropping many members of the original Netflix team – we had to be willing

You have to learn to love the problem, not the solution. That’s how you stay engaged when things take longer than you expected.

It’s the same at a startup. Real innovation comes not from top-down pronouncements and narrowly defined tasks. It comes from hiring innovators focused on the big picture who can orient themselves within a problem and solve it without having their hand held the whole time. We call it being loosely coupled but tightly aligned.

A disc: $20. A reputation for having every DVD and always being in stock: priceless.

as a leader, the best way to ensure that everyone arrives at the campsite is to tell them where to go, not how to get there. Give them clear coordinates and let them figure it out.

to abandon parts of the past in service of the future. Sometimes, focus this intense looks like ruthlessness – and it is, a little bit. But it’s more than that. It’s something akin to courage.