OutreachCircle = Netflix. Old School Politics = Blockbuster.
Marc Randolph was the first CEO of Netflix and is a great writer. In Vanity Fair this week, he describes how three Netflix founders rented Vanna White’s Learjet to try to sell itself to Blockbuster in September, 2000, He was struggling not to laugh:
“Reed had carefully worked on his pitch, and as he leaned over the conference table and started building the shit sandwich, I couldn’t help but smile. It was a thing of beauty. A real triple-decker.”
His new book, That Will Never Work: The Birth of Netflix and the Amazing Life of an Idea, revels in truths that were obvious to sentient web users in September, 2000:
1️⃣ The dotcom metltdown wouldn’t kill the web.
2️⃣ Amazon would sell more books than Barnes & Noble and Borders.
3️⃣ Netflix would figure out how to stream videos.
4️⃣ Blockbuster was a dead man walking.
The Political Party Industry is as arrogant today as Blockbuster was in 2000, with a customer base even more frustrated:
“Managed dissatisfaction” was a central pillar of their business model. It knew that most customers didn’t enjoy the experience of renting from it, so its goal as a company wasn’t so much to make the customer happy as it was to not piss them off so royally that they’d never come back. And there was a lot to piss them off: late fees, crappy selection, dirty stores, poor service — the list went on.
But the most important point in our favor was the inexorable march of progress. The world was going online. No one knew exactly how, or how long it would take, but it was inevitable that increasing numbers of Blockbuster’s customers would insist on transacting online. Not only was Blockbuster ill-positioned to take advantage of that trend, but it didn’t even seem to see it coming.
Hello, Fans of democracy:
In 2019, it’s obvious that OutreachCircle’s friend-to-friend influence model is the future of crowdsourcing government policy that Clay Shirky described in 2012: How the Internet will (one day) transform government.
Contrast “Moscow Mitch” McConnell and Transportation Secretary wife Chao to OutreachCircle’s Sangeeth & Sindhu Peruri in their natural habitats, DC Swamp vs. basement gym. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said in 1875, “What you are stands over you the while, and thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary.”
MP3s, White wires, Red mailers & F2F voting clout.
We buy stuff mostly for what it says about us.
- Overnight, Sean Parker made Sony’s Walkman uncool.
- Steve Jobs’ simplest marketing brilliance was white headphone cables, announcing to everyone, “I have a $300 MP3 player and you don’t.”
- Netflix knew you’d keep its distinctive red mailers on the coffee table to return the DVDs that weren’t even available at Blockbuster, announcing to your friends, “I have people who manage my videos for me.”
Friend-to-Friend voting clout and policy campaigns will overwhelm old school politics when being a plugged-in influencer is obvious, important and worth bragging about. That’s clearly where the OutreachCircle team is going. It’ll be a wild ride.
Forbes’ Hayley C. Cuccinello this week: Netflix Cofounder Marc Randolph On Why He Left, Becoming A Mentor And His Love Of Chaos.
“I’m an invisible face,” he says.
But Randolph is fine with that and with his decision to leave before Netflix became the streaming giant that it is today…
“As you get older, if you’re lucky, you realize two things: what you like, but also what you’re good at,” Randolph, 61, says. “The answer to both of them [for me] is early-stage companies. I like the chaos. I like the fact that you’re working on hundreds of things at once.”
Mentoring gives Randolph the excitement of the startup world without the 24/7 lifestyle. At first, he tried being an advisor and soon realized that many founders just wanted to put his name on their pitch decks, which was unfulfilling. It took a few years for him to figure out what he wanted and what founders needed: 30% business advice and 70% personal advice.
More great prose, after being humiliated by Blockbuster:
We’d been in trouble before, but the dot-com crash was different. Selling had seemed to be our only way out. And Goliath didn’t want to buy us — he wanted to stomp us into the ground. As long a shot as Blockbuster had been, I had genuinely held out hope that it would save us. Now it was clear that if we were going to get out of the crash alive, it was entirely on us. We would have to be ruthless in our focus on the future. As my father used to tell me, sometimes the only way out is through.
As White’s plane swept us quietly and quickly back to Santa Barbara, I grabbed an empty champagne flute and tapped it with a plastic spoon from the fruit tray. Reed looked up sleepily, and Barry paused the number crunching.
“Well,” I said, pantomiming a toast. “Shit.”
I paused, taking in the absurd particulars of the scene: the Lear’s leather interior, Barry’s Hawaiian shirt, the tray of fruit big enough for a family of five. “Blockbuster doesn’t want us,” I said. “So it’s obvious what we have to do now.” I smiled. Couldn’t help it.
“It looks like now we’re going to have to kick their ass.”
Fans of democracy everywhere would be lucky if Marc Randolph and Sangeeth Peruri grab a cuppa at Peet’s in Los Altos.
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Previously:
9/07/19: @johndoerr, @outreachcircle is ready!
3/27/18: VoterCircle Has the Secret Sauce!
