Netflix (NASDAQ:NFLX) co-founder Marc Randolph says the “most dispensed advice in the history of mankind” might also be the worst.
Randolph told students three common graduation speech words — “follow your dreams” — constitute “terrible advice.”
“It’s not the advice itself that’s bad,” Randolph said. “It’s bad because all the well-meaning people telling you to follow your dreams leave out something important. They never tell you how.”
Randolph said there’s nothing wrong with following your passions or interests, but it’s difficult to monetize them without knowing how to execute your goals.
His advice for the graduates instead included phrases like “there’s no such thing as a good idea” — essentially meaning that you can’t know whether something is a good or bad idea until you try it — and “stop thinking, start doing.”
Randolph explained that he’d learned those lessons from his own career. Before he and Reed Hastings co-founded Netflix, they were co-workers at a software development company called Pure Atria who shared daily car rides to work. During those car rides, Randolph said, he’d pitch Hastings dozens of ideas, from personalized shampoo to dog food.
The pair came up with the idea to ship rental movies in the mid-1990s. At the time, it was arguably a bad idea: DVDs weren’t yet a mainstream entertainment medium, and cassette tapes were too heavy and costly to ship to consumers.
NFLX shares opened Wednesday jumped $2.02, or 1%, to $199.46.
