That will never work book review.
That Will Never Work is Marc Randolph's memoir about how he founded and built
Netflix. The book starts with Randolph coming up with the idea for mail order shampoo and
quickly evolves into the idea of mail order DVDs. The book concludes with his current (2004)
thoughts about Netflix. The book's main themes are the difficulty of entrepreneurship, the work it
takes, and the challenges of balancing social and business life. The book is a good explanation
of one man's dream becoming reality, though it is not well-written and sometimes overstays its
welcome.
One of the stories that Randolph discusses is how an idea can be turned into reality,
even when the reality isn’t the one he dreamed of. Randolph then talks about how his idea of
‘Netflix’ quickly outgrew him and thus feeling the need to move on. Though this book is detailed
and thorough, Marc Randolph is clearly a rookie at writing books as the story often moved
upridicably (in a bad way) and was hard to follow.
Rudolph did hit the mark on showing the emotional struggles of creating a startup. One
moment in the story, Randolph accounts a time in which he did not know if his company was
going to survive another day. He talks about how he had to put everything, including his own
family, aside to accomplish his dream, only to then hand his dream over two years later to Reed
Hastings, the current CEO of Netflix. Randolph’s handing over of the CEO position to Reed
Hastings struck me as shocking, as Netflix was originally Randolph’s idea. You could really feel
Randolph's emotions in his writing. Randolph did a great job at making the reader empathize
with him. You could tell in his writing where Raldolph was passionate about what he was writing.
In those parts, the book was great.
Randolph then explains what it means to be a part of something bigger than yourself,
and when it's time to let that thing go. In 2002, after the dot com bust, Randolph and Hastings
had to let go 40% of Netflix's staff. Randolph says this was the most difficult thing that he has
ever done. He explains how he spent weeks thinking about how to tell someone that you can’t
be a part of the team anymore. Before this book, I thought hiring and firing people was
something that people just did. As I said earlier, Randolf is good with emotions. In this case,
Randolph overstays his welcome, and uses 15 pages and almost a whole chapter to talk about
this issue. I found it hard to empathize with him when it took so long for him to explain himself.
This book is a good book. It does a good job of showing Marc Randolph's perspective
and his thoughts when going through the startup process. Randolph’s book at some points can
be redundant, and some chapters are longer than they need to be. I would give this book a 7
out 10 (good, not great).