It’s hard to believe Netflix is 20 years old. When Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph founded Netflix (formerly known as Kibble) in 1997, the company appeared to be little more than an upstart DVD rental business whose only real value proposition was the mail-order element of its operation. Fast forward two decades and Netflix has become one of the biggest TV and movie studios in the world, with more subscribers than all the cable TV channels in America combined. How did Netflix go from renting movies to making them in just 20 years? By consistently doing the obvious. For Netflix, however, doing the obvious rarely meant taking the easy way out. It meant making business decisions that were so difficult and so ambitious, few people could even see them, let alone understand them. Netflix has innovated in several key ways. They started with a frictionless DVD rental business facilitated by the internet, developed an entirely new streaming business from scratch, and finally invested in origina
September 16, 1985 and 1997: Twice on this day, Steve Jobs makes significant moves with regard to his career at Apple. In 1985, he quits the company he co-founded. Then, a decade and a half later, he officially rejoins Apple as its new interim CEO. In terms of the emotions associated with those historic occasions, it’s hard to think of two more polarizing days in Jobs’ life. Steve Jobs leaves Apple in 1985 The story behind Jobs’ 1985 departure is, by now, well-known. After losing a boardroom battle with John Sculley — a CEO Jobs recruited from Pepsi a couple years earlier — Jobs decided to leave Apple, feeling forced out of the company he started. After weeks of rumors that Jobs would quit and set up his own rival company — prompted by a flurry of sales of his AAPL stock holdings, totaling $21.43 million — he officially departed on September 16, 1985. He took with him a number of Apple employees to start NeXT Inc., his follow-up computer company. NeXT never became the success Jobs hope