The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Moment 193: Hard Work Doesn't Equal Success…Try This Instead...: Former Netflix CEO
Fri, 27 Dec 2024
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What about hard work? Does it matter?
Well, since you ask it so simply, I'd say no, or it certainly is not the most important thing. In fact, I think hard work leading to success is a myth that, and let me Let me give you two examples, okay? The first is to qualify what I mean.
I work with a lot of, as he spoke earlier before we actually began the session, about how younger people are different places in their life than older people, especially with career and how they think about it. And earlier in my life, I used to do triathlons, you know, the races that combine swimming and then biking and then running.
And back when I used to do them, they don't do it quite the same way anymore. It would be a mass water start. You have four or 500 people who the gun sounds and all 500 of them plow into the water simultaneously, not a phase start. And as you can imagine, it is a shit show. You're getting kicked and your goggles are being knocked off and you're being held underwater.
And you quickly realize that if you want to be able to survive in this mass start, you're going to sprint. for those first four, five, 600 yards to get yourself far enough in the front of the pack that you have open water. And in my opinion, work life is kind of like that.
When you're younger, when you don't really know what you're doing, when you have to go down a lot of false ends, because you're not productive, you better work your ass off. You better sprint. You better work three times harder than everybody else in the company. So it's essential.
But ideally, you get yourself far enough ahead that you recognize, I can't go at this pace for the entirety of the triathlon. I needed to, to get myself some breathing room, but now I can back off. So yeah, at certain points in your career, you need hard work. At certain points in the trajectory of your business, you need hard work. Your fundraising, you can't say, oh, we're closing the round.
I'm taking vacation for two weeks. Oh, we're doing M&A. I'm gonna be, I'm only gonna work a couple hours. No, you're gonna have to grind it. But that's not the answer. All right, one more little story, which is part two to this. which is why I say that it's a myth for hard work. So during one part of my career, I lived in Europe. I was doing international marketing for a big software company.
We had an office in Paris and I lived in Paris. But I was meeting every week with the marketing people in our other branches. So probably four days out of five, I was flying fly to Copenhagen one day, then I'd fly down to Milan, then I might fly to London, then I might fly to Madrid in one week. So I spent a lot of time at the airport. And because I'm sometimes not that organized, I'd be late.
And you would find me just sprinting down the concourse in my blazer and my wool coat, trying to desperately make the plane. And what I found out was that probably 49% of the time, I'd pull up to the gate and the plane was delayed and I'd have to wander onto the plane, no problem at all. I could have made it on crutches.
Instead, I'd sit there marinating in my sweat for another hour before the plane took off. Or the other 49% of the time, I'd come sprinting down the concourse and you'd see the plane halfway out in the runway about to take off. And what I realized is it didn't make a difference whether you ran for a plane or not. That you're either going to make it or you weren't going to make it.
And that running didn't make the difference. And I vowed then and there I'd never run for a plane again. And I never have. And I'm telling you that story because it's a metaphor in that so many entrepreneurs spend all this time running for planes. They are up all night polishing their deck. They're reviewing the work of people to make sure the spelling is correct.
They're double checking every detail. They are working so hard. But I know from experience that it's like running for the plane. Most of the time, it doesn't make a difference. You don't lose the deal at two o'clock that morning because you didn't check the funds. You lost that deal four weeks ago when you didn't have some fundamentals right. Or you just weren't the right company to begin with.
No matter how hard you worked, you weren't going to change the outcome. That is the key to having some balance in your life as an entrepreneur, is this recognition that if you're smart about the things that you choose to focus on, you make 99% of the difference. And that all that extra work does not really change the outcome any.
And in that analogy of running for the plane is the key thing to have just better prepared further upstream. I, you know, if we stick to the analogy, just have made a better decision to leave the house at a better time.
Yes, it does. Absolutely. I mean, if you want to make the plane, you know, you leave earlier. And again, it's not sometimes... Listen, you're going to stroll down the concourse. You don't need to run. And... If the plane left on time, running's not gonna make the difference. If the plane's late, running didn't make the difference. Either way you made it or didn't make it.
The amount of times that running for it was the gating item between whether you made it or not is like infinitesimal. So what's the point of running? And I really fundamentally believe that is that If I can be really smart about which problems I choose to focus on, I'll make the difference. I do not need to get everything right because most things don't make a difference. Some things do.
Some things do. And some of the small things that made a difference to your business seem to have been discovered through a process of sort of experimentation and failure. When I look back through your story, you're trying to get sort of Netflix to work and get product market fit. You referenced it a second ago, this idea of, no late fees seemed to be quite pivotal.
An idea you had to remove the late fees. I find this interesting because there's going to be entrepreneurs that build their idea and then bang their head against the wall and it doesn't work. And then I hear so often, whether it's from Brian Chesky at Airbnb or from someone else, Daniel at Spotify, that there seemed to be this one change that was quite pivotal to their business at some point.
So my question becomes like, how do I know? How do I find the thing? So can you explain to me why this no late fees thing and any of these other small changes that changed the game and what was the system that led you to them?
You know, we're talking about really finding product market fit. Product market fit, if I have to give a definition, is when you recognize you finally have something that customers actually do want. And it's recognized because all of a sudden the momentum of your business dramatically shifts. All of a sudden, things go into high gear. All of a sudden, acquiring customers is so much easier.
All of a sudden, they're sticking around. It's just this instantaneous, oh my God, we found it. And up until that point, it is this constant struggle of trying one thing after another, trying to increment your way closer and closer and closer. You know, when I mentioned that... At the beginning, there wasn't a lot of business model innovation with Netflix.
If you ordered a disc, we mailed it to you, we'd give you a due date. If you missed the due date, we had late fees. And the reality is the idea was ridiculous. It didn't work. Nobody would rent from us. And if you did rent from us once, you didn't rent from us again. And we kind of had this realization that, okay, we gotta begin figuring things out.
And thus began this year and a half long process of trying to figure out some way to get people to rent DVDs by mail from us. And we tried almost everything you could think of, hundreds of things. And I kind of talk about this a bunch that I had no shortage of ideas. I mean, I had lots of things I wanted to try.
And if there was a problem that I had, it was that I was a bit of a perfectionist back then. And so all these tests that I'd wanna run, I'd want them to be perfect. So we would lovingly argue over every word of copy and we would do custom photography and we would check every link and we'd stress test the site. And it might take us three weeks or a month to prepare for this test.
And we test this new idea, and then it would not work, wouldn't do anything. And we'd kind of look at each other and go, we just wasted a month. So, okay, faster. And then we'd do a test in two weeks and it would still fail. Okay, faster. And we'd do it in a week, faster. And we eventually started getting to the point we could do a test every day or multiple tests every day.
And it turns out that once you go that fast, things get very, very sloppy. So we would have the wrong image, or it would have the watermark on it, or the pages we had Greek'd would still be Greek'd. We'd have bad links, we'd crash the site. But that was such an incredibly big insight for us. because it turns out that it didn't make a difference.
That if it was a bad idea, even spending a month crafting this perfect test, wasn't going to make it a good idea. But if it had even an inkling of being a good idea, no matter how bad the test was, it's shown through. Customers would immediately perk their head up. They'd raise their hand. They would fight to do it. They'd call us. They'd reboot the site.
It was this incredibly loud signal that there was something there. And it goes back to what we said before, which is that it's not about having a good idea. It's about building this whole process and this culture and this system to try lots of bad ideas.
And we got really, really good at trying lots of bad ideas, one after another, hundreds of them, each one informing us to some little bit about what to try next. And eventually we got to this point where we had these two big ideas left. And one of them was at that point, Netflix was pretty big. We had probably in our warehouse, several hundred thousand DVDs.
And I remember one day we were, Rita and I were in the warehouse and looking at all these DVDs and going, it's such a shame that all these DVDs are here in the warehouse where they're not doing anyone any good. I wonder if there's a way to store them at our customers' houses. Let them keep them. And then when they're done, they mail it back. Well, let's replace it.
And rather than having them have to pay each time they replace it, let's just have a monthly fee, a subscription, and they can rent as often as they want. There's no due dates and no late fees. And it was a ridiculous idea. But when we tested it, it was that mythical product market fit. It worked. People loved it. They couldn't get enough of it. They told their friends.
They did not cancel their subscriptions.
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