Founder Mode

• You have deals with N big media companies who each have their own restrictions on who can stream what from where. The list is constantly changing, so permissions to view media are locale-specific and revokable; you need a way to say “okay this person is not allowed any more to do that.”

• Multiple-screen detection emphatically needs to be rock solid. Someone is going to unplug their Roku player when their laptop says “you're watching from too many screens,” and by the time they get back to their laptop you need to be detecting them as streaming from 0 screens. At the same time a hiccup in this process shouldn't cause like 3% of your users to get a big streaming interruption as they don't seem to be online.

• You have to recommend stuff based on what this person has watched. An acquisition team needs to do cluster analysis on this to get new stuff to fill all of the different clusters of interests that emerge in your user base.

• People will search for shows you don't have. (Because of point 1, the big media companies only permit access to a fraction of their backlog.) You have to know this media that you don't have access to, well enough to recommend something related that might keep the user on Netflix instead of hopping to another service.

• All of this has to happen on pretty low latencies when someone starts up Netflix. That is, anybody who jumps into Netflix should see a personalized view of what they were watching, what they can watch, filtered by your allow lists and not cached on their device, within just a few seconds.

• All of this has to be portable to all of the different platforms Netflix supports.

Thats where the engineering problem goes from trivial to extremely complicated. Lots and lots of people demanding a similar quality of service across a wide pool of content on a wide pool of devices.

And that doesn’t even fully cover last mile issues.

Most startups fail. So they commonly get advice about how not to fail. Most of them still fail. That doesn't mean the advice was bad. Founders are gamblers and the odds suck.

If founders weren't looking for someone to tell them how to run their businesses or trying to rid themselves of their pesky responsibilities, this situation would be different. But that's a story that most founders don't want to hear.

It takes experience to see something awesome, and still drill into who asked for it, what problem is it solving, what value is it generating for the end user, etc.

It's easy to forget that sometimes even something super cool is not that useful and when the rubber hits the road, no-one will pay for it.