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Drew McGuire Host of The Long Build
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LB-001 · Premieres June 15

The Five Bets That Made It Inevitable

Netflix 28 min Self-Disruption

A company that mailed DVDs made five platform bets in a row. None of them looked obvious at the time. This is how the pattern worked, and what it cost to run it.

Timeline

Chapters

  1. 00:00 Cold open: the $40 late fee that probably never happened
  2. 03:12 Bet one: a rental business on a format nobody owned
  3. 08:40 Bet two: killing the late fee
  4. 14:05 Bet three: streaming while the discs still paid the bills
  5. 19:30 Bet four: spending billions to make its own shows
  6. 24:18 Bet five: the whole world in a single day
Company Dossier

Netflix

A company that mailed DVDs made five platform bets in a row, and none of them looked obvious at the time.

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Founder Profile

Reed Hastings

A former Peace Corps math teacher who built and sold a software company, then co-founded Netflix in 1997 and ran it through three reinventions.

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Pattern

Self-Disruption

Killing your own profitable business before someone else does it for you.

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Extras

The Data Pack

  • ✓ The full subscriber and revenue dataset behind every chart in the episode
  • ✓ Primary sources and filings, annotated
  • ✓ The 2011 Qwikster internal timeline, reconstructed
  • ✓ Behind the scenes: how this episode was researched, written, and produced with Drew

Get the data pack when it drops