
Blockbuster Could Have Bought Netflix for $50M - GordonS
https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/netflix-blockbuster-meeting-marc-randolph-reed-hastings-john-antioco.html
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alexhutcheson
It still would have been a bad deal, because there is no way that Blockbuster
would have given them the freedom and the funding necessary to execute their
pivot from a DVD-by-mail service to a streaming video service.

~~~
gandalfian
Blockbuster did put lots of money into developing streaming technology and
absolutely saw it as the future. But they were too early and gained no
traction. By the time the moment arrived they no longer had the money and
energy. But overal I agree Netflix wouldn't have been Netflix if it had sold
out early.

~~~
agumonkey
I'd love a list of all the too-earlys ..

~~~
INTPenis
My favorite is Microsoft Terra which was designed mostly to show off their SQL
database. THey had no idea about the power of personal data that Google would
exploit much later with Google Earth.

~~~
agumonkey
Ah well, very similarly DEC made altavista to show off so never thought of it
as a product. Then Google came.

~~~
INTPenis
Really? I had no idea Altavista was from DEC.

In school in sweden we actually had a computer class where they taught us to
use altavista. This was before Google blew up.

~~~
agumonkey
altavista history is "fun"

[https://digital.com/about/altavista/](https://digital.com/about/altavista/)

------
cryptofits
If you will look hard enough, you can find FOMO in so many different things.

If you were lucky enough to purchase 100 shares of McDonald's when it was at
$22.50 on its IPO date, you would have spent $2,250. Based on McDonald's
closing stock price on October 28, 2018, the investment would be worth $12.89
million.

We can also talk about Bitcoin but I think you got my point

~~~
jghn
A colleague was big on Bitcoin in mid-late 2009. I declared it to be stupid
and didn't bother. By the time I realized that was a mistake it was too late,
the days of normal people mining coins was long gone.

I've convinced myself that I'd have lost my wallet long before it became
valuable anyways. It helps me sleep at night.

~~~
Scarblac
I tried out the WWW when it was ~1000 pages mostly at CERN, and was
unimpressed... These things happen.

The thing with Bitcoin is that we were _right_ \-- it is stupid. But that
didn't stop the early adopters from making lots of money. That's highly
annoying.

~~~
blotter_paper
Were you right? Only time will tell. I'd expect more humility from someone who
just admitted to having been horribly wrong about webpages being a big hit...
on a webpage.

~~~
phkahler
Yes OP were right. Bitcoin could never scale to the point of being used for
every transaction. Thats a different thing than realizing it would have a
bubble with massive profit potential.

~~~
blotter_paper
"Used for every transaction" is a high bar; I suppose USD and the gold dinar
have both failed, oh well.

If we used a more reasonable metric, like "will bitcoins being worth
significantly more in ten years than they are today," OP may well be wrong.
You can think I'm crazy for saying that, but neither of us can really know at
the moment.

~~~
okcando
USD works as currency because it has a pretty stable and small rate of
deflation, a property that the fed tries to maintain. It works to trade value
and gives a subtle nudge to promote trading.

Bitcoin had the mission statement of being a currency, which it has failed at.
It's instead a highly volatile (and potentially highly profitable) investment.

So someone could be right that Bitcoin would not succeed (at being a useful
currency) and still have been wrong to not buy in (they should have gotten in
when the getting was good for the very reason it would fail to be a currency).

But it was and is more like gambling and less like "mattress money".

------
noego
> _Randolph writes that he 'd been closely watching Antioco during this
> conversation. Throughout, the Blockbuster CEO appeared as a polished
> professional, leaning in and nodding and giving every indication of someone
> who was listening attentively. Now Randolph observed as an odd expression
> crossed Antioco's face, turning up the corner of his mouth. It lasted only a
> moment, he writes. "But as soon as I saw it, I knew what was happening: John
> Antioco was struggling not to laugh."_

Great article but it seems unnecessary to accuse Antioco of being arrogant
just because he turned up the corner of his mouth for a moment. There are tons
of investors who pass up on great investment opportunities every year. Most of
them aren't arrogant, they are simply normal people who don't have the benefit
of perfect hindsight.

~~~
FussyZeus
And more to the point, success in business is determined just as much by blind
luck as anything else. If Antioco had sprung on Netflix, who knows how many
other things he might've sprung on too? And even assuming Netflix worked out,
who's to say the other investments wouldn't have killed Blockbuster in the
process anyway?

This whole genre of articles confuses me. Is the message be open to new
things? Is it about other investors feeling regret for things they've passed
on, or worry about the things they didn't? I don't understand this at all.

~~~
RobertKerans
> This whole genre of articles confuses me. Is the message be open to new
> things? Is it about other investors feeling regret for things they've passed
> on, or worry about the things they didn't? I don't understand this at all.

Myth-making, mythologising. The genre is "business, but written as
adventure/thriller" I guess? Comes across as attempts to imply that it's all
epistemological. It's just turning things into a good story though, you're
maybe reading too much into it? (Although every one of these I've read seems
to go something like:

"I should have been terrified. But I was calm, I knew what I had to do. My
whole life had been building up to this meeting with Corpocorp.

The team was gearing up for the battle that lay behind those huge frosted
glass doors. I looked at them, and tears pricked at the corners of my eyes.
'Goddamn' I thought, 'this is the best bunch of guys ever put together for
business purposes', and my heart swelled with manly pride.

Joe Spiff had been my first hire. He was the best money talker I'd ever met. I
looked at him now, laser focussed on the dollar bill held between his fingers.
This was his routine, I'd seen him do it a hundred times. He'd sit and stare
at that bill for ten minutes, unblinking, not moving a muscle. Then he'd
just...crush it between his fingertips, quick as a flash.

Lawyerman Pete was _[contd.]_ ")

------
jvagner
I was part of an e-commerce company selling DVDs in the mid 90s, watching:
Amazon enter the space, a bedroom porn operation start to rise in the adult
dvd mailing market, and Netflix getting a start. We were ripping the movie
trailers off the DVDs and encoding them, streaming them on the product page.
All we had to do was rip the whole movie and make licensing deals with the
studios we were sourcing our products from, and BAM, we coulda been Netflix
too.

~~~
jlosito
I hear that’s not far off from what these streaming services do in reality.

------
pweezy
Check out the podcast "Business Wars" by Wondery. They have an 8-episode
miniseries on Netflix vs. Blockbuster that I really enjoyed and highly
recommend. It includes this story, as well as some of the other competitive
developments that, as crazy as it sounds now, at the time almost looked like
they would bring a victory to Blockbuster.

------
oblib
My wife, when we first met in the mid-90s, used to get DVDs at Blockbuster and
always returned them late and paid the late fees with no complaints, which
were huge. The first time I went with her to return some they took her money
and then told her she was no longer allowed to rent them there anymore.

She was pretty bummed out about that but I was shocked by how much their late
fees were and explained to the manager that my wife was paying them way more
than their customers who returned them on time and they may want to
reconsider. Her response was about as snotty as can be. She said something
like "We need them back on time for our good customers". We left laughing
because that just seemed crazy and we knew she'd be saving literally $100s per
month.

But I was puzzled about why they'd do that. It made no sense at all to me. She
was giving them a lot more money each month than their "good customers" which
I thought should have put her at the top of that list. And the manager, who
was so rude, clearly got a sadistic joy out of telling people "No more DVDs
for you!" like the "Soup Nazi" on Seinfield.

Before we'd met I'd never even been in a Blockbuster so that was my only real
experience with them and I remember well thinking their customers would flee
like rats from a sinking ship when a viable alternative came out.

As soon as I heard of it we bought a Roku and ditched our "Dish" satellite
service and after using it I knew Blockbuster was going to take a big hit from
that little black box. It was just a few years later I read they were going
out of business. By then I'd seen people lined up at "Redbox" dispensers and
the Blockbuster where we lived had already closed up.

I have to admit that seeing Blockbuster die like that warmed my soul like a
bowl of good hot soup

~~~
dlp211
I think the problem here is that you are assuming that the amount that your
wife was paying made up for the lost sales of unhappy customers when titles
aren't available. The math is not revenue for someone else to rent at normal
rate vs. the revenue for your wife to hold onto the title, but rather the
revenue from a customer that keeps coming back vs. the late cost revenue minus
the the lost cost customer revenue.

~~~
kshacker
Having seen the rates for late rentals, I think your parent comment is "more"
right. Unless blockbuster was running such a tight ship that a single rental's
delay would upset the applecart ... but I remember waiting for DVDs and
cassettes and unless you hit the sweet spot (a few weeks after the release, or
maybe just on the first day of release), there was always a wait and/or the
associated frustration.

------
jcims
I could have stuck with my little bitcoin experiment in 2011.

~~~
lifeisstillgood
Thank you.

I have about a dozen different "If only" moments in my tech life, from turning
down job offers to not making tech experiments into real businesses (Twitter
and Docker, parking payments by mobile and a really good enterprise marketing
system)

I regret them all because I think they all _definitely_ would have made me
bajillions. including leaving running a bitcoin miner machine in the corner of
my office instead of turning it into a build server.

But frankly I probably would not be a billionaire by now had I done any or
even all of those great ideas in hindsight

It won't stop me trying for the next one, but it will mean if I duck out with
even a small win it's a big triumph

~~~
jcims
The only salve I have to apply for my missed bitcoin burn is the absolute
reality that I would have unloaded a thousand of them as soon as they got to
be worth a couple of bucks. That would have been way worse.

------
blantonl
I think the part in this article where John Antioco is perceived as arrogant
is a little misguided. It's important to remember that a natural gas pipeline
company based in Houston was vying to put Blockbuster out of business with
their own "Broadband" unit, and it indeed was laughable.

And we all know what happened to Enron.

------
tempsy
GameStop is a very interesting stock bet right now. It could easily go to
route of Blockbuster (most obvious route), but it could do so many things to
not be another crappy retail experience. Not confident they will turn it
around but there's certainly an opportunity for a brick-and-mortar game shop
done right.

~~~
parsimo2010
With GameStop's several year history of bad public opinion and what appears to
be decaying market share, I wouldn't bet on it. The current management is
clearly willing to accept the status quo and won't take the actions necessary
it "turn it around."

New management could signal that good changes are coming, but it could also
signal that specialists have been brought in to carve the assets up before
bankruptcy. I'd say it's far more likely that GameStop ends up like
Blockbuster and Sears, even if they _potentially_ could turn things around.

------
Causality1
Yeah, and we could've all bought bitcoins for pennies when we first learned
about them. The biggest barrier to understanding past decisionmakers is that
we know how it turns out and they didn't.

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werber
And Yahoo could have bought Google for even less. I would love to hear from
the people who turned these kind of deals down

~~~
bartread
Me too. Although the thing is it probably made sense at the time. Also, it's
far from guaranteed that Yahoo would have made a success of Google, or
Blockbuster of Netflix, so whilst there can be an entertaining schadenfreude
to stories like this it's not something you can take too seriously.

~~~
lifeisstillgood
This is the crux of it - if Google had asked me to be employee number one
there is a very good chance Brin and Page would have gone back to academia.

------
simonblack
"The Innovator's Dilemma."

It's been the downfall of many a commercial empire.

------
dmitryminkovsky
Lycos could have bought Google for 700k. If you bought a share of Home Depot
in 1982 you’d be a millionaire. Can’t think of a more banal form of what-if-
ism than looking back at missed market opportunities.

~~~
overcast
You could easily be a millionaire multiple times over working a normal job for
38 years too.

~~~
dmitryminkovsky
Yep!!

------
simonebrunozzi
Tried to post the same thing a couple of days ago [0], but no discussion
happened.

[0]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21010244](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21010244)

