Two Guys, a Big Idea, and a Lot of “This Will Never Work”
When Marc Randolph and Mitch Lowe get on stage together, you’re not getting the corporate version of the Netflix story. You’re getting the version with the arguments, the near-misses, the late-night debates, and ...
When Marc Randolph and Mitch Lowe get on stage together, you’re not getting the corporate version of the Netflix story.
You’re getting the version with the arguments, the near-misses, the late-night debates, and the moments where they honestly weren’t sure they’d make payroll.
Marc was the visionary who believed you could mail movies to people in little red envelopes and somehow compete with giant stores on every corner. Mitch was the operator obsessed with making the experience so good customers would never want to go back to those stores..
Most people thought they were crazy. Some days, Marc and Mitch agreed with them.
In this conversation, they will walk through what it really took to build Netflix from scratch — how they tested ideas quickly (and killed a lot of bad ones), how they built a culture that rewarded smart risk-taking, and how they survived moments when one wrong move could have ended the whole thing.
They’ll talk about:
- The meeting where they tried to sell Netflix to Blockbuster (yes, that meeting)
- The decisions that almost broke the venture
- The cultural principles that let Netflix reinvent itself again and again
- Why success can be more dangerous than failure
This isn’t nostalgia. It’s a conversation about leadership under pressure, about innovation when the odds aren’t in your favor, and about having the courage to disrupt yourself before someone else does.
And along the way, you’ll hear a few stories that didn’t make it into the press releases.
Because the real lesson of Netflix isn’t about streaming.
It’s about building something bold enough — and resilient enough — to survive its own success.
Additionally Marc and Mitch can share their perspectives on what it takes to be successful in a new enterprise these days as well as AI and the Future of Media and Entertainment.