>> I mean, Reed Hastings did manage to build this rather large and successful business that killed off one of the most successful retail operations of its day.

>> I mean, Reed Hastings did manage to build this rather large and successful business that killed off one of the most successful retail operations of its day. It's possible that he just sort of did this by accident. But is this really the most likely explanation? It's possible, yes. And if we consider that there were possibly a few thousand people at that time trying to make that business work, then "by accident" does start to look like the best explanation. Was/is he smarter than everyone else trying to do the same thing? Probably not. Was/is he better connected, better funded, more able to run a business, than the others? Possibly, but probably not. Was/is he luckier than everyone else? Almost by definition, if we define "luck" as "something that helps people succeed". It's a very nebulous definition. But there's definitely a Venn diagram overlap of "by accident" and "by being very lucky". Even without getting to FedEx levels of "lucky", there is definite "luck" involved in making decisions based on incomplete information that will turn out to have outsize effects on the business later. This is a normal activity for startup founders, and I'll bet serious money that more than a few of them were made in Netflix' early years. We always underestimate survivor bias when considering successful startup stories. And without studying the other people who were trying to build the same business at the same time, we have no idea why some of them succeeded and others failed. Without this information, it's impossible to say whether Netflix succeeded "by accident" or by design.