It’s easy to look at entrepreneurial success stories as if they were destined to succeed. But for every Netflix story, there are hundreds—no, thousands – of other ideas that looked even more promising to their founders and failed. That’s why you’ve never heard of them. What made this one different? A big part of it was luck, I’m not gonna lie: the right time, right place, right technology, right market, all coinciding. And a big part was a culture of experimenting and refining that let us turn an idea into a service that actually worked. But underneath all that was a critical tension. Reed, applying relentless, unsentimental logic in evaluating every concept; and me, with an endless supply of new ideas and enthusiasm. And crucially, we were both OK with that. We debated, analyzed, revisited, and threw things out, and we still kept going.