Ujwal Nair

“OK Reed, I’ve got another one. Personalized shampoo!” Reed shifted his eyes from the road to glance over at me. He raised his eyebrows quizzically. “No, this is a good one,” I assured him. “We’ll have people cut off a lock of their hair. They’ll mail it to us, and our team of hair scientists will formulate a custom blend. They’ll automatically get sent a fresh bottle every month!” Reed didn’t say anything, turning his attention back to the road, flipping on his blinker and moving to pass a sand truck that was slowly laboring it’s way ahead of us up Highway 17. From the outside, I’m sure he seemed to be just another commuter on his way to work in Silicon Valley. But I knew what was really going on behind that blank face: a rapid-fire evaluation of pros and cons, a high-speed cost-benefit analysis, a near-instantaneous predictive model about possible risks and scalability. Five seconds would go by, then ten, then fifteen. But almost invariably, after about 30 seconds he would turn and say, “That will never work,” swatting the idea away the same way he had dismissed all my others. Personalized dog food. Custom sporting goods. Online vitamins. These were all ideas I pitched to Reed during our morning commute. One idea I had been particularly excited about was video rental by mail. “It’s perfect,” I explained to Reed. “People will pick out a movie from our website, we’ll FedEx it to them, and when they are done, they will send it back.” It didn’t take long for Reed to shoot that one down too. This was 1997, and video came on VHS cassettes. They were big and heavy, and shipping them was expensive. But one morning a few weeks later, Reed stopped the car at the end of my driveway and mentioned having heard about a new storage technology - still in test market - called a DVD. It held a movie. It was thin and light. “I was thinking,” he explained, “Maybe we do that video rental idea after all? We can use the post office to deliver the movies. Cut out Federal Express entirely.” We stared at each other both wondering the same thing: “Could this actually work?” All thoughts of the office forgotten, we drove into town to buy a DVD and find out. We couldn’t find a DVD, so we settled for buying a used music CD. We went a few doors down to the stationery shop and found an appropriately sized envelope. We put the CD inside, addressed it to Reed’s home, bought a stamp, and dropped it into a nearby mailbox. And went to work. The very next morning, when Reed stopped to pick me up, he didn’t need to say anything. He just held up a little pink envelope, with an unbroken CD inside, that had gotten to his house in less than 24 hours for the price of a postage stamp. And if there was a moment when the idea for Netflix was born…that might have been it. Because that was the first time we both realized, this just might work. (I'll be posting all week about my most significant Netflix moments. Make sure to follow along so you don't miss tomorrows post).

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