Jake Sligh
2K posts
In 2000, at the depth of the dot com crash, Reed Hastings and I tried to sell Netflix to Blockbuster for $50 million dollars. They laughed us out of the room. Today, the company they could have bought for $50 million has a market cap north of $150 billion. And the company that once had 9,000 stores, is down to a single one. But what lesson to take from this? That it’s possible for a handful of people, with no prior experience in the video business, to take down a 6 billion dollar category leading company? Sure. But I think the more important lesson - a lesson that Blockbuster learned too late - is simply this: If you are unwilling to disrupt yourself, there will always be someone willing to disrupt your business for you.
