Netflix (NASDAQ:NFLX) co-founder Mark Randolf is on a nostalgia trip of late, kindled by the 25-year anniversary of the DVD-cum-streaming giant he established with Reed Hastings in Scotts Valley, California back when Chumbawumba and All Saints were battling it out for chart supremacy.
Speaking of Kindles, Randolph’s Twitter-curated journey down memory lane produced a bit of a bombshell: Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) seer Jeff Bezos offered to buy the fledgling start-up for US$15mln merely a year after its founding. That’s around US$28mln by today’s standards.
“25 years ago, In 1998, Reed and I flew to Seattle to talk about selling Netflix to Amazon. The meeting went well, and Jeff Bezos floated a price of $15 million,” Randolph recalled.
“That wouldn’t have been a bad payday for less than 12 months work, but we thought we were on to something. We had finally gotten the engine to turn over so we weren’t quite ready to put it in park and hand someone else the keys.”
Perhaps more surprising was the name Randolph floated for his and Hastings’ company.
“We traded beta names: he laughed at Kibble and told me that Amazon had originally called itself Cadabra, which he had thought evoked the sense of magic that online shopping could produce. “The problem is that cadabra sounds a little too much like cadaver,” Bezos said, barking out a laugh.
Thankfully they stuck with Netflix as opposed to the word used to describe coarsely ground meal or grain typically used as animal feed.
“Jesus, Reed, where are you taking us?”Amazon was hardly the powerhouse back then that it is now, and by Randolph’s account, the offices gave little hint of the trillion-dollar enterprise it would become today.Reed looked down at the MapQuest printout he was using to navigate us, probably wondering the same thing.
We were in Seattle. The street we were walking on looked like a movie-set of Skid Row. There was trash on the sidewalk, broken glass… pic.twitter.com/bJsIeD657N
— Marc Randolph (@mbrandolph) April 13, 2023
“The carpeting was stained, There were multiple people per cubicle. Almost every horizontal surface was covered: by books,” Randolph Tweeted, adding that Bezos’s desk “was made of a door that had been mounted atop 4x4 wooden legs”.
Luckily Randolph and Hastings declined Besoz’s offer; Netflix went public a few years later, raising nearly US$95mln in May 2002, and their combined net worth is estimated to be around US$4bn today.
Randolph left Netflix shortly after the IPO and has acted as a board member on a raft of start-ups since.