My own approach has always been more measured. I think people are more productive when they’re happy, when their lives outside of work aren’t totally subsumed by their job. I’m the guy who wanted to put the company in Santa Cruz, remember? I’m the guy who wanted a short commute, and the opportunity to go surfing in the morning before work.
It was a given that once we started working to make Netflix a reality, the hours would be long. All of us knew that, because all of us were Silicon Valley veterans. We’d done the fifty- or sixty- or seventy-hour workweek before. The difference was that this time, we were choosing to do it. We weren’t working for someone else’s dream. We were working for ourselves.
So yes, I sometimes slept on a couch in the office. And yes, I once saw one of our coders taking a bird bath in the men’s restroom. I won’t pretend that my diet in the fall of 1997 consisted of much more than takeout eggplant parm (a steal at $6.95) from the Italian place across the street.
But when I needed a morning off, to mountain bike and clear my head, I took it. When Te wanted to chew over PR stunts during a manicure, she booked an appointment.
Nowadays, they call that “self-care.” Back then, we just called it common sense. If we were going to try to fundamentally change an entire industry, we needed to have our wits about us.
Even in the trenches of pre-launch Netflix, I kept to a long-standing tradition with Lorraine. On Tuesdays, no matter what, I left the office promptly at 5:00 and spent the evening with my wife. We’d hire a babysitter, go for a walk on the beach, and then head to our favorite restaurant, Bittersweet Bistro, for some roasted salmon and a few glasses of wine. Sometimes we’d hit the theater in downtown Santa Cruz and catch a movie.
I needed that time with Lorraine—just the two of us, no kids, no domestic duties. I needed to recharge, to be with my best friend for a few hours and not think about anything else.
I’d instituted date night at Borland, where it wasn’t unusual for workers to stay until seven or eight o’clock at night, regularly. At first, I didn’t mind the long hours—it was just how things worked. But after a few months I feared burnout, and I also worried that I wasn’t prioritizing my relationship with my wife. Especially once we had kids, so much of our time together was dominated by family: sports practices, family dinners, getting the children ready for school or sleep. I wanted to make sure that the two of us stayed connected.
Once I’d instituted Tuesday date night, I was fiercely protective of it. Five o’clock was a hard deadline. The moment the second hand hit the 12, I was out of there. Last-minute crisis? Too bad. An emergency meeting that could only be held at 4:30? Better make it short. Need to talk to me about something at 4:55? It would have to be on the walk to my car.
At first, this occasioned some conflict. But eventually, after people got the memo—and after I’d remained firm in the face of numerous challenges—my colleagues knew not to schedule anything that would conflict with my deadline. They both respected and worked around it.
In the fall of 1997, as we built our company, it would have been easy for me to break the Tuesday night tradition. There were so many things to do, so many problems to solve. And I had my hand in hundreds of them. My usual routine was to hit the office at around seven in the morning, eat lunch at my desk, and work all afternoon, until six or so. Then I’d drive the five minutes back to my house to be home in time for dinner with my kids. I’d help Lorraine put them to bed, and then, more often than not, I’d head back to the office for a few hours, eventually quitting around ten or eleven.
Then back home, for some winding down and a few hours of sleep. I think I was averaging about five hours a night in those days—often less.
One night when I came home for dinner, my son Logan greeted me at the door and, instead of a hug, said he had a question to ask me.
“Sure, Logan. What’s up?”
He studied me for a moment, staring hard at the backpack I was shrugging off my shoulders.
“Is the bacon in there?”
I cocked my head. “What do you mean?”
“Mom said you were bringing some home,” he told me.
It took me a second, and then I got it. I couldn’t stop laughing for about five minutes.
Lorraine told me later that when the kids asked where I was in those days, she’d say one of two things: that I was bringing home the bacon or climbing the corporate ladder. She only stopped saying it when Logan told some of his friends at school that his dad climbed ladders for a living.
“You’re not a housepainter, after all,” she said.
Still, a part of me thinks that Logan was right. Those early days, pre-launch, were like climbing a long, endless ladder. There was a problem to deal with at every rung, and each time we solved one, we were one step closer to our goal. We were moving up, and it was thrilling to think of how high we could go.
But no matter how high I’d climbed, or how many steps I saw ahead of me, I always left the office at 5:00 p.m. sharp on Tuesdays. I didn’t want to be one of those successful entrepreneurs who are on their second or third startup but also on their second or third spouse. Saving a night for my wife kept both of us sane and in tune with each other.
By November of 1997, we had an office. We had a semifunctional website that we were testing. We had dozens of mailer prototypes. We had the beginning of an inventory. We even had a launch date: March 10, 1998.
What we didn’t have was a name.
This is often the case for early-stage startups. Most companies don’t keep the same name from ideation to funding to launch. Names are important, and sometimes they take forever to find. Amazon was originally called Cadabra. Twitter started off as Status.
You have to allow for serendipity, for the right name to come along as you develop your service. Sometimes that takes months. But in the meantime, you typically have a beta name, a working title that you use to test your site, set up email accounts, and write on bank documents. And it can’t just be The Untitled Marc Randolph Project.
Our beta name was Kibble. As in dog food.
Steve Kahn once advised me that when it came time for us to choose our beta name, I should choose something so bad it wouldn’t be possible to use it for real. “Six months in,” he said, “and you’ll be so fried that you’ll want to just say, ‘Screw it, let’s keep the beta name.’ Your sense of what’s good and what’s bad will be almost entirely depleted. But if you pick something so awful that it’s obviously impossible—WeWantToRipYouOff.com, GiveUsAllYourMoney.net—you’ll be forced to come up with something new.”
That’s why, months into our new offices, we were called Kibble.
Our bank statements said Kibble. The website we were testing had the domain name kibble.com. My email address was [email protected].
Kibble had been my idea. It came from an old advertising and marketing adage: It doesn’t make a difference how good the ads are if the dogs don’t eat the dog food. The idea was that no matter how much sizzle you’d given the steak—no matter how well you’d sold it—nothing mattered if the product was lackluster. It doesn’t matter how brilliant your ad campaign for Alpo is if your dog won’t eat it.
I’d picked Kibble as a working name because I thought it would remind us to focus on the product. Ultimately, we had to build something people would love. We were going up against some big guns, and we’d never succeed long-term if our service wasn’t something people wanted to use—if the dog food we were selling wasn’t tasty.
And it didn’t hurt that I already owned the domain name. Still do, in fact. Type kibble.com into a web browser and you’ll end up on my personal website. Send an email to [email protected] and you’ll find yourself in my in-box.
We’d never planned on using Kibble as the name for our service. But Steve was right—as the months went on and the launch date got closer and closer, Kibble was starting to look pretty good.
“Team meeting,” I finally said, one Friday afternoon. “We’ve got to decide on a name.”
/> The entire company—all fifteen of us—filed into my office. Soon after we’d moved into the building, Christina and I had written two columns on the whiteboard. One was filled with words related to the internet. The other was filled with words related to movies. We’d decided that the best name for our company would combine two words: one related to movies, one related to the internet. The best name would combine both terms seamlessly, with a minimum of syllables and letters.
Picking a name is incredibly difficult. For one thing, you need something catchy, something that rolls off the tongue and is easy to remember. One- or two-syllable words are best—and ideally, the emphasis be should on the first syllable. Think of the most popular website names: Goo-gle. Face-book. These names open with a bang.
Too many syllables, too many letters, and you run the risk of people misspelling your website. Too few letters, and you risk them forgetting the name.
And then there’s the issue of what’s available. It doesn’t matter if you find the perfect name, if someone else already owns the domain or the trademark.
For the past several weeks, I’d invited anyone who had an idea to come add it to the board. I’d already done most of the legwork about availability, trademarks, and the like. Now it was time to make a decision. As the afternoon wore on and the shadows lengthened on the floor, we batted around names, matching up syllables from one column to the other. I’ve reproduced our final list of names below:
TakeOne
TakeTwo
SceneOne
SceneTwo
Flix.com
Fastforward
NowShowing
Directpix
Videopix
E-Flix.com
NetFlix
CinemaCenter
WebFlix
CinemaDirect
NetPix
There are some real gems here. Directpix.com. NowShowing. E-Flix.com.
We were almost CinemaCenter.
Everyone had a name they liked. Boris and Vita were big fans of my black Lab, Luna, who often visited the offices, and they favored the oblique name Luna.com. It had nothing to do with our service, but it was only four letters long. Jim liked NowShowing. Christina liked Replay.com.
I liked Rent.com. I thought it had, of all the names, the best connection to the idea of renting movies, but I hadn’t even added it to the board. Not only did it not say anything about the internet, but somebody else already owned the domain, and it would have cost me $40,000 to buy it. That seemed like a fortune at the time.
All of us—and I mean all of us—initially shied away from Netflix.com. Sure, it was two syllables. And sure, it satisfied both criteria, movies and internet. But there was a lot of worry in the office about the connotations of “flix.”
“It just makes me think of porno,” Jim said at our meeting. “Skin flicks.”
“Plus, that x,” Christina added.
“We’ve got to settle on something,” said Te. She’d been almost tearing her hair out. We were just a few months from launch, and she still had to design a logo. “We’ve got to just decide.”
So we did. There was no vote, no momentous ballot-casting. We printed out that spreadsheet and stared at it. Everyone went home to sleep on it. The next day, we all agreed: we were NetFlix.com.
It wasn’t perfect. It sounded a little porn-y. But it was the best we could do.
8.
Ready for Launch
(zero hour: April 14, 1998)
SPEAKING OF PORN, A week before the Netflix launch, Steve Kahn invited Reed, Lorraine, and me for dinner.
Wait. It’s not what you think.
“You’re probably running on fumes at this point,” Steve said when he called me. “I just got some new buttkickers I’ve been dying to test out. We’ll have a nice dinner, drink some wine. You can tell me what you’re worried about and I’ll be reassuring.”
“Buttkickers?”
“Huge subwoofers,” Steve said. “I put ’em under the floor and attached them to the joists. Makes the whole room vibrate.”
It was a Tuesday night, so our usual babysitter could cover for us, and even though the point of date night was to get away from work—to get away from members of the Netflix board like Reed and Steve—by that time, a week pre-launch, it was almost impossible for me to ever fully leave the Netflix offices behind. Even when I wasn’t there physically, my mind returned to the offices, looking for solutions to all the little problems we needed to fix before going live.
Steve knew that. He’d known me a long time. He knew I wouldn’t be able to truly take a break, so he decided to help any way he could—by at least giving Lorraine a night off.
“Only thing you have to bring is a DVD,” he said.
Easy enough. Before I left the office for the day, I swung by the vault, and, without looking, grabbed the top DVD case on the pile of new releases that had just arrived that morning.
I really needed a break. So did Lorraine. “Morgan’s been driving me nuts,” she said in the car, on the way to Los Altos. “She spent all afternoon stealing lipstick out of my purse and trying to eat it.”
This sounded almost unbearably cute to me, but I understood.
Steve lived on the east side of Los Altos, on a street crowded with gigantic new houses. His house wasn’t that big, but it was nice. I mean really nice. Architecture Digest nice. And it displayed (tastefully, of course) all the trappings of wealth that a long, successful career in business afforded.
“I don’t think you need to lock the doors,” Lorraine said sarcastically as I parked the car. “Not in this neighborhood.”
Steve greeted us at the door with glasses of wine, healthy pours of Cabernet (for me) and Chardonnay (for Lorraine). He gave us a tour through impeccably decorated rooms. Two things stand out in my memory: a wall in the study that was covered entirely with bird’s-eye maple cabinetry, and a living room filled with modernist furniture that looked straight out of Beetlejuice. It was the first time I’d seen more than one Eames chair in the same room.
“The furniture museum is Karen’s territory,” Steve said when his wife was out of earshot. “I don’t know what any of this crap is.”
Throughout this tour, I smelled cooking. But Steve and Karen were with us—who was watching the stove? It wasn’t until we repaired to the bar for finger food that I saw the white coat of a caterer, disappearing through the swinging doors to the kitchen. This was a first for me: I’d never been to a dinner party with a hired chef.
When Reed and his wife arrived, Steve lifted his empty wineglass. “Cocktails in the garage!” he said, laughing. Within thirty seconds a tray of gin and tonics appeared, carried by a smiling waiter, and Steve took us out to the garage to show off his new Porsche. I’m not really a car guy, but I know when to make appreciative noises. And it wasn’t just the Porsche—there was also a full home gym: gleaming, brand-new exercise machines, a treadmill, a stationary bike, all of it atop racquet-club-quality rubber mats. Though he was a decade older than I was, Steve was probably in better shape. Back at Borland, Steve’s fortieth birthday resolution had been to run every day on his lunch break, for forty days in a row. And to take me, wheezing, along with him.
Drink in hand, I wondered if all of this—the car, the furniture museum, the caterers in the kitchen—was in my future, too. I thought of my beat-up Volvo, dog toys in the backseat; the house with a leaky roof I couldn’t at that moment afford to repair; the stained green carpet of the Netflix offices, which had begun to exude a peculiar stench the closer we got to launch day.
It seemed unlikely. Or at least far, far in the future.
There was still about a half hour before the cooks would be done with dinner. So while Lorraine and Karen poured more glasses of Chardonnay and discussed our kitchen renovations, Steve, Reed, and I repaired to the back deck.
“Bring a suit?” Steve asked.
And that’s how I ended up in borrowed Hawaiian swim trunks, bobbing in a saltwater pool, in an impromptu board meeting
with two of Netflix’s earliest investors.
“There are a ton of things I’d do if we had more time,” I said. “For instance, we want to do a thing called The List, which would let you save a list of titles that you want to watch. Mitch has this idea to have a digital clerk who helps you find movies he knows you’ll like.”
“Makes sense,” Steve said, resting his wineglass on the side of the pool. “Every time I go to Hollywood Video I just ask the kid with the nose ring what to rent. The other guy always gives me French New Wave crap.”
Reed wasn’t really saying anything, but I could tell that he was thinking. About what, who knew. By spring of ’98 he’d gotten tired of his classmates at Stanford and had been focusing most of his energy running a different venture: Technology Network. TechNet was a lobbying group that combined Reed’s two overriding passions: the tech world and educational reform. It pushed for better protections for tech companies against lawsuits from shareholders, easier visa requirements for foreign tech workers, and improvements to math and science education. Reed was a big believer in charter schools and was using the group to advocate for them, donating money to a growing number of politicians.
Frankly, he had enough to worry about. But I was still relieved when he dunked his head underwater and swam to the other end of the pool. I didn’t want his laser focus on any of Netflix’s problems. Due to Michael Erlewine, we’d already missed one launch date—it was now April 14 rather than March 10—and I didn’t want Reed to think that we’d have any problem meeting the second one.
As Reed began swimming laps, his six-foot frame gliding through the water like a seal, I told Steve about the version of The List we’d actually been able to construct, under our deadline. Like a lot of our quick fixes, it wasn’t built to last. Christina had come up with it: a button a user could push that would flag a movie you were interested in, so that next time you saw it, an icon would appear. The icon? A finger with a red thread wrapped around it.
“The engineers hate it,” I told Steve. “They call it the Bloody Finger.”
That Will Never Work Page 10
