Netflix

“I think it was in 2002 I had, I ended up having to do the Heimlich maneuver. So if value add is you save the life of a CEO he had a piece of meat that couldn't get the slides. There's two of us in the conference room.”

“At the time the IPO, TCB owned 43%.”

“We will hold, you know, our private investments as they go public, the best ones for a long period of time. That's an economically driven decision. You know, we may take one times our money out, but the best companies over time, like Netflix, Spotify, et ceter…”

“We have a European waterfall structure. So once we return all the limited partner capital, then we start getting our carried interest. And once we do that, we're, you know, and we're distributing stock, we can choose to obtain the Spotify or Netflix shares you…”

“He went and canvassed the marketplace to see what the price of Netflix was, and there was no bid. No, no equity provider. Zero. So I know we did a kind of a restructuring financing in 2001 in order to get them through to the other side of profitability and fre…”

“But the price of sports, for the end user, Is going to be more. Therefore then the price of, there's going to be tiers at Netflix, you know, with the sports bet, which the sports tier you pay, you know, they're going to have to make a decision.”

“We put, when I was at T. Rowe, in half of it, and I did that, and then TCV, Jay Hogue, you know, did the other half. So this to me is like the classic example of a market-leading company embracing a transition They obviously ended up winning, right? We did tha…”

“And we instituted a much more collective information process on decisions going forward. Where everybody weighed in 10 to -10 on decisions, then it's all in a big shared document, so everyone sees what everyone else thinks.”

“Even today we're only about Netflix is about 10% of U S television. We've got a long way to go. And internationally it's less than that.”

“We've got some cool stuff going on the TV where your phone is the remote control, which has you know, higher latency, but it's easy for party mode type games.”

“In terms of like recognizing a K-pop demon hunters at a script stage you know, or pitch stage, which is the biggest value creator, you know, which things do we back? That will be a far distant skill.”

“Probably eight solid years, and that's part of what got me on the Facebook board, which is trying to figure out more of this, of, you know, how is social going to be, and ultimately that probably got solved by TikTok.”

“The biggest shows we have like stranger things were less than one percent of viewing in a year. So we have extreme non-concentration and you know, lots of different budgets and spread.”

“But it's getting us close to that edge of chaos where there's last minute saves and a lot of dynamism as you can possibly tolerate as opposed to say a semiconductor factor. Which is trying to reduce variation and reduce error to get rid of variance. If you're …”

“In the very first original series that we had that helped make our reputation was House of Cards. And we had to bid that away from HBO. So as media rights capital was making it, they had bids both from HBO and us, and we were not, we were a DVD company. Okay. …”

“One of the best things is to do large severance packages, like four to nine months of salary. And so it feels expensive at first, but one is it makes the person who's let go feel a little bit better. Because they've got a bunch of money in their pocket. Two, i…”

“The test that we encourage people to use is if someone were quitting, would you try to get them to stay, to keep them? Because that turns out to be a good test relative to, you know, all the relief we sometimes feel when someone not great moves on.”

“And I would say 90 plus percent of talent density, no rules, rules. The whole model has worked extremely well and the ability to move fast hire incredible people, have them do things. It's everyone being very creative. And I would say the talent density model …”

“I've come to look at it more like keeping a pretty broad funnel and hiring a lot of people. And then, you know, over the first year you really get to know them and you can figure out what you want to do. Do you want to keep them or not?”

“Lots of cancellations. Stock dropped by 75%.”

“I think it's probably 20% in the first year.”

“You want to be totally independent of your thinking and not consensus oriented at all, but you want to know what other people are thinking. Otherwise you're, you know, flying blind. So I think there's a high value on information gathering opinions, but then no…”

“Don't use things like we're a family. I treat you like my family. Okay. Which is like a little bit true, but not true enough. And instead we're a professional sports team and we all got to fight every year to keep our position. Because if we can upgrade, we mu…”

“We were contrarian and we had a contrarian thesis that we could build a business with DVD and then transition it to streaming. So and it's precisely because of that contrarian thesis that we didn't have much competition in that.”

“There's a hundred companies that stream now consumers can't particularly tell a difference between them. So I would say that's now just become part of the base systems. And commoditized. What's unique is still being able to do the AI recommendations all the de…”

“That's why we named the company Netflix's internet movies.”

“We ask directors to come to management meetings so they can watch what's going on, watch the sausage being made. Again, not so they're adding value, but so they're highly informed. And so we look for people who are wise in crisis.”

“And what we decided is let's have a low margins relative to cable which ran at like 35, 40% margin. So that we can invest a higher percentage of revenue into the content to have better content for our revenue level than we would otherwise.”

“If you over manage, for example, a tight process or specific hours that you have to be in the office or a wide variety of things, you filter out performance and creativity. And the looser that you can run, the more creative that the organization will be.”

“If you were to say, like, what is an important difference of Netflix versus these models is Netflix's content was differentiated. The models are more similar than they are different in that, like, you know, at any given time OpenAI may have a better model, Ant…”