Netflix co-founder: Business is not about having a good idea.

Added: 2026-05-22

[00:00:00]It is not about having a good idea.

[00:00:03]Having ideas [music] is easy and trivial. The important thing is how clever can you be to come up with a quick and cheap and easy way to test it. I was meeting with a young woman who at the university and she goes, "Okay Mark, I've got [music] this idea.

[00:00:20]Um what I want to do is peer-to-peer clothing sharing.

[00:00:26]>> [snorts] >> In other words, I've got all this clothing in my closet that I never wear or I don't wear it very often. And I know my friends have a lot of clothing in their closet and other friends have clothes in their closet. It'd be great if we had this website and we could all post what we have and we could borrow each other's clothes and and I'm going, "Okay, that's interesting. What can I help you with?"

[00:00:48]She goes, "I'm trying to figure out should I drop out of college to do this?

[00:00:52]How do I raise the money to hire a team to build this for me?" And I went, "Whoa, you know, slow down here."

[00:00:58]Okay, interesting idea.

[00:01:01]But let's figure out if we can come up with a quick and cheap and easy way to collide this idea with the reality.

[00:01:07]I said, "Do you have a piece of paper?"

[00:01:09]She goes, "Yes, smart ass. I'm a college student. I have a piece of paper." I go, "Great. All right, do you have a magic marker?" She goes, "I have a marker."

[00:01:16]"Do you have a piece of tape?" She goes, "Got a piece of tape." I go, "All right, I want you to write on the piece of paper, 'Would you like to borrow my clothes?'

[00:01:24]Knock.

[00:01:26]And I want you to tape [music] that to the outside of your dormitory room.

[00:01:31]And we're going to find out in the next 24 hours whether the very, very first principle behind your idea is real. Is anyone going to knock? Cuz if nobody knocks, well, you've learned something very important right there. This thing you think is so attractive might not be.