That Will Never Work by Marc Randolph

Author:Marc Randolph
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2019-09-17T00:00:00+00:00

The pitch did not go particularly well. Though they didn’t question my slides the way Reed had, the firm seemed dubious. And within a few days, one of their analysts was calling the office, asking questions that I didn’t have great answers for yet.

Eventually, they decided to fund us. But that had less to do with my pitch than Reed’s presence. Reed was a known quantity, venture capitalist catnip. He’d orchestrated major deals, he’d appeared—reluctantly—on the cover of USA Today next to his Porsche. People with money trusted him because he had a track record of making them money. Even in 1998, he had around his head the halo of Silicon Valley success: when Pure went public, well before the merger with Atria, he made a lot of people rich.

More importantly, he had a track record of solving seemingly unsolvable problems. Investors and VCs knew this even then. They definitely know it now. That’s why the second he walks into a room, people whip out their checkbooks. They know that what he does isn’t teachable, isn’t reproducible—hell, it’s barely even explicable. He’s just got it.

That’s what great entrepreneurs do, in the end: the impossible. Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, Reed Hastings—they’re all geniuses who did something that no one thought was possible. And if you do that once, your odds of doing it again are exponentially higher.

IVP funded us not because our forecast was good, or our pitch was perfect, or because I’d wowed them with my slides and enthusiasm. IVP funded us because, despite how impossible things looked, Reed was a miracle worker, and Reed was on board.

I was thankful for that. And I was thankful, too, that even though Reed was still running TechNet that summer, he had started taking a daily interest in what we were doing in Scotts Valley. But in retrospect, I can also now see that that’s when everything started to change.

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