Marc Randolph spent a long commute pitching business ideas to his boss, and most of them were bad. Personalized baseball bats. Shampoo delivered by mail. Reed Hastings, who ran Pure Atria, kept listening anyway.
Randolph was born in Chappaqua, New York, the eldest child of an Austrian-born nuclear engineer turned financial adviser and a mother who ran her own real estate firm. He worked summers as one of the youngest instructors at the National Outdoor Leadership School, helped start the US edition of MacUser, and co-founded the mail-order firm MacWarehouse. In late 1996 Pure Atria bought the nine-person startup he had joined, and Hastings, a Boston-born maths graduate who had taught in a rural Swaziland school with the Peace Corps, kept him on as a vice president.
They mailed a music CD inside a greeting card, and it arrived unbroken.
Then came a test. They mailed a music CD inside a greeting card, and it arrived unbroken. Randolph has called that the aha moment. A disc could travel by post.
What few people remember is who else paid for the early days. Randolph had to pitch his own mother. In accounts of his story she was the last investor, after he had raised about $100,000 from others, and she put in $25,000. Those figures come from secondary reports, and he has joked that she was delighted he was finally running a company she understood. Her money sat beside Hastings's own and that of Steve Kahn, founder of Integrity QA.
Netflix launched in April 1998, charged per rental, and added a monthly plan in 1999. That year Randolph, who had named the company, gave the top job to Hastings. In September 2000 the two offered the business to Blockbuster for $50 million. Its chief executive said the dot-com hysteria was overblown. Amazon had once offered $14 to $16 million, which Hastings, who owned about 70 percent, refused.
Randolph left in 2002, the year Netflix went public at $15 a share. He has said early-stage work is triage and that he is not good at the other ninety-seven things. Hastings stayed and, in September 2011, announced a separate DVD service called Qwikster. About 800,000 of 12 million subscribers cancelled before he reversed course.
In 2025 Netflix reported revenue of about $45.2 billion and some 325 million paid memberships.
The part worth carrying away is how small the first proof was. An envelope, a greeting card and a mother's cheque were enough to start something that Blockbuster would not buy for $50 million.