An entertaining chronicle of creativity, luck, and unflagging perseverance.
The rocky road from startup to colossal success.
Randolph, co-founder of Netflix, makes an engaging book debut with a candid memoir recounting the history of the company as it evolved “from dream to concept to shared reality.” After co-founding the magazine MacUser and working in direct marketing for a software giant, Randolph, eager to work for himself, had been coming up with new business concepts (e.g., personalized dog food) when he hit on the idea of renting videotapes. When his friend Reed Hastings, looking to fund a new company, expressed mild interest, Randolph gathered a dozen “brilliant, creative people” to see if the idea made sense financially. Videotapes, it turned out, were prohibitively expensive to mail, but the upcoming new technology of DVDs seemed viable. Inventing a name for the new company (NowShowing and CinemaCenter were possibilities) was the least of their problems: Only by contracting with Toshiba and Sony to offer free rentals with the purchase of a DVD player did they entice customers, but even then, sales of DVDs were stronger than rentals. For a few years, the company was “almost always on the razor’s edge between total success and total failure.” When individual rentals failed to put the company on secure footing, Randolph and his team came up with the idea of a monthly subscription service with no late fees, a move that proved popular. Yet even with 200,000 subscribers, Netflix still lost money and was forced to trim its staff; the layoffs, writes the author, were painful. Besides internal changes, the company looked for alliances with more successful enterprises, but a deal with Amazon (it would sell DVDs and steer customers to Netflix for rentals) collapsed and a hopeful bid for Blockbuster to buy Netflix fizzled. Elevating Hastings to CEO helped to lure investors, and after “years of work, thousands of hours of brainstorms, dire finances, and an impatient CEO,” Netflix went public in 2002. Now with 150 million subscribers, Netflix has morphed into a media behemoth.
An entertaining chronicle of creativity, luck, and unflagging perseverance.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-316-53020-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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