That Will Never Work
Marc Randolph co-founded Netflix with Reed Hastings in 1997, served as the first CEO, and walked the company through its first three years renting rooms above a dental practice and shipping DVDs by hand. The book covers the original "DVDs by mail" idea, the failed Blockbuster acquisition pitch where the executives laughed in their faces, the partner-friction with Hastings that eventually ended with Randolph stepping aside, and the cultural decisions that made Netflix the company it became. Randolph writes in the first person across roughly 280 pages, refusing to project any of the streaming-era hindsight back onto the founding years.
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Marc Randolph co-founded Netflix and tells the early DVD-by-mail years, the failed Blockbuster pitch, and the partner-friction with Reed Hastings in a candid founder memoir.
That Will Never Work was written by Marc Randolph and published in 2019. Randolph was the co-founder and first CEO of Netflix. The book covers the streaming company's early years from Randolph's perspective.
No. Reed Hastings co-wrote No Rules Rules (2020) with Erin Meyer about Netflix's later corporate culture. Marc Randolph's That Will Never Work is the founding-story memoir from a different perspective.
That Will Never Work is 336 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, That Will Never Work takes most readers 5 to 7 hours to finish.
That Will Never Work is a standalone novel by Marc Randolph, not part of a series.
That Will Never Work is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.