Most Entrepreneurial Ideas Will Sound Crazy, Stupid

Don’t Get Distracted By The Shiny Object [and If A Crisis Comes], Execute On The Fundamentals.

I Got The Idea For Netflix After My Company Was Acquired. I Had A Big Late Fee For Apollo 13. It Was Six Weeks Late And I Owed The Video Store $40. I Had Misplaced The Cassette. It Was All My Fault.

Technological Revolutions Are Very Hard To Predict. My Favourite Example Is Someone In 1850 Taking Care Of Horses As A Farrier. They Would Have Said, "look, Horses Have Been Part Of Human Existence For 5,000 Years. We Are Horse People. It's Permanent." But All Of A Sudden, The Internal Combustion Engine Comes Along And, With It, Oil Fields And Automobiles, Which Basically Replace The Horse Completely. So We Often Have These Long Periods Of Stability And Then A Sudden Inflection Point.

If You Look At Cable Networks, They Almost Always Start Licensing Content Wherever They Can, So They Can Build A Subscriber Base. But Then They Start Doing Their Own Content; It's A Pretty Well-trodden Path.

The Best Managers Figure Out How To Get Great Outcomes By Setting The Appropriate Context, Rather Than By Trying To Control Their People.