Netflix Co-Founder Marc Randolph on How Web3 Can Fix Media

When Netflix co-founder Marc Randolph first started mailing DVDs to people’s homes, the idea sounded absurd. People told him it was crazy. Blockbuster was already a juggernaut. They told him, "That will never work."

Now, nearly three decades after Netflix began, Randolph sees a familiar pattern unfolding on the next frontier of media. This time, it’s not about shipping movies through the mail — it’s about rebuilding media from the ground up through community ownership and new monetization engines only made possible by the dawn of Web3.

“Everyone says that will never work because you're doing something that hasn't been done before,” Randolph, one of Coinage's first supporters and minters tells me in a new interview. “And if it was so obviously a great idea, it would have been done already.”

But certain pieces are falling into place. Coinage, recently off the win of launching one of the top Zora creator coins, is proving out the possibility of an entirely new way to build a media outlet. And as much as that could be a result of our model to let anyone mint a membership like Randolph has to co-own our media outlet, at the end of the day, he says it all still comes down to putting out good content.

“Everyone creates content, but 99.999% of it sucks and nobody wants it,” he laughed.

To him, the real challenge isn’t making content (which may only get easier with the rise of AI) it's about connecting creativity and distribution in a way that incentivizes good content to be made. But "good content" is hard to define. To many studio executives, that could mean a surefire return. As Randolph posits, it may also be why remakes are getting more and more common.

"What Netflix has done has moved it in a reasonably large direction away from this monolithic creator model where the studio goes, 'We have to pick things to do which very, very large numbers of people are going to want to watch,' which is why you end up with Spider-Man 93, you know, and Fast and Furious 64," he joked.

That dynamic, Randolph argued, hints at the next evolution of media — one that blurs the lines between audiences and producers. “What Netflix has done in some ways, which I think is very impressive, is they've begun to recognize we don't need to generate hits all the time,” he said. “What we really just need to do is say, 'Is this segment large enough to validate the investment it took to create the content for them?'"

That more specific content creation approach, coupled with the rise of Netflix's centralized distribution platform, has been what has kept it in the lead as an attention juggernaut. But that's not to say a new challenger couldn't come along that may be even more efficient in blending elements of crowd-funding, niche content creation, and distribution in new ways.

When I first invited Randolph to join Coinage back in 2022, his book documenting the early days of building Netflix That Will Never Work served as both a title and a challenge. The startup wisdom that built Netflix — test everything, embrace failure, and stay flexible — has become the same playbook we’ve used to pioneer community-owned media onchain. “Don't fall in love with the idea,” he told me. “Fall in love with the problem.”

Randolph is the first to admit that Web3’s ownership experiments are still early, but he’s drawn to the same pattern he recognized before the streaming era. “I’m still a big believer,” he said. “It's the power of blockchain. It's ownership, but it's distributed ownership. It's different models of ownership. It's such an interesting, interesting category. I think its applications to media are still out there and I applaud the direction you're taking it.”

In many ways, the same lessons from Netflix’s early days might apply now. They took a leap on a new technology, the DVD, that allowed them just enough of an inside angle to eventually wiggle their way into a longer-term bet that the internet and streaming would one day be possible. For us at Coinage, this experiment began in 2022 by leveraging NFTs to let anyone co-own our outlet, with a longer-term bet on new ways to monetize attention. Since then, Zora and the rise of creator coins have enabled us to unlock an entirely new revenue stream.

"In some ways, the more things change, the more they stay the same," Randolph said. The hard part, he explained, was timing — how to bet on the future before it arrived. “How do you bet on this future at a time when the future isn't here yet?” he said. “The question then, at least for us, was: what do you build in the meantime? What is the asset that you're going to own which will work now, allow you to have a real business, allow you to be economically sustainable, but be setting you up so that eventually, when the world does get to a place where a digital business is possible, you're in the strongest possible position.”

That patience is exactly how Netflix survived long enough to become a verb. Randolph believes the same long game applies to Web3. “It's making a strategic bet,” he said. “But there is this thing that you're always holding on to, that go, this is the gem that I'm trying to get to. How I get there, I'm extremely flexible about.”

Flexibility, he added, is the trait most founders overlook. “The real skill of an entrepreneur is how clever and creative can you be to figure out a way to validate your idea really quickly, really cheaply, and easily,” he said. “Success is directly correlated to how many different things you can try.”

Even when those experiments fail, Randolph doesn’t see them as setbacks. “I don't really see them as mistakes anymore,” he said. “Almost every single thing I try, I learn something from. It's rarely the only thing you learn. You get some glimmer of what the direction you need to go.”

That relentless curiosity — paired with a willingness to look foolish — might be the real throughline between Netflix’s DVD days and whatever comes next. “I don't waste a lot of time trying to guess what the future is going to look like,” he said. “I spend most of my time trying to ensure that I put myself in a position that I can take advantage of whichever way it happens to break.”

And as the future of media increasingly moves onchain, that philosophy might just define the next Netflix, too.

Coinage is a community-owned DAO letting our NFT holders become actual co-owners in one of the fastest-growing Web3 media outlets. Mint an NFT and become a member today to open a path to patronage dividends, or stake with us to support our project. Subscribe to our free Substack to catch all the important headlines from around the crypto world.