Roku: Anthony Wood

[MUSIC] It's amazing the number of media companies, executives that didn't think streaming would be popular. They just thought there's nothing wrong with cable and satellite. The world is not going to change. When it was so clear that of course it's going to change, the internet has disrupted every industry and it's going to disrupt videos as well. In fact, I think it is a pretty big competitive advantage that people underestimate us. And so they're always surprised when they lose. [MUSIC] Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists and the stories behind the movements they built. [MUSIC] I'm Guy Raazan on the show today, how Antony Wood helped transform the way we watch television. First with the DVR and then with Roku, a massive streaming platform with a remote that's simple enough for your grandparents to figure out. [MUSIC] One of the things we look for on this show are products and ideas that have had a big impact on how we live our lives. So Starbucks is an obvious one. Because even if you don't drink their espresso drinks, it's because of Starbucks's influence that you can get greatest espresso drinks almost anywhere in the United States. You might not use PayPal to send money, but the PayPal model has changed how we pay for stuff. Same with AOL or DoorDash or Instagram or many of the other brands that have been on the show in the past. In some way, large or small, they change the way that you and me and most people we know live. And this is basically what Antony Wood wanted to do. He wanted to change how we watch television and he managed to succeed twice, even though the first attempt ended in defeat. That defeat happened in the early 2000s with a product Antony created called Replay TV. Replay TV was a digital video recorder very similar to TVO and Antony Wood he basically invented the DVR except right when he launched his product, T-Vo did the same and managed to outmaneuver him. And that could have been Antony's story, invent the DVR but lose out to another company. Except as it turns out, Antony was just getting started. His experience with Replay TV triggered this idea that a single product could have a major impact. In this case, a single device could change a relationship to TV. It could give us a lot more control over what we watched and when. So in 2002, Antony set out to start something that were wind up having even more of a cultural impact than the DVR. Roku. Roku was a device that let people stream content directly from the internet and streaming changed everything. Along with Apple TV and Chromecast and Fire, Roku helped usher in an entirely new way of interacting with television. And what set it apart was its simplicity. Roku was made to be so easy to use, so intuitive, that your 90 year old grandmother could figure it out within minutes. Today, the company has more than 65 million active users, which means it's a giant, perhaps the biggest giant when it comes to home streaming products. And the man who came up with the idea, Antony Wood, has also pushed the company into the production business. Recently, Roku produced a biopic parody of Weird Al Yankovic called Weird. Anyway, Antony grew up in the 1970s, mostly in Houston. His dad was an aircraft engineer and, by middle school, Antony discovered computers and was soon writing his own software and eventually trying to sell it. But when he started college at Texas A&M, he didn't major in computer science. I didn't want to do computers because I was a little arrogant, I think, looking back on it and thinking that I kind of knew everything there was to know about computers or programming. If anything, I used to think a lot about how to. I was more interested in like starting a company be a good way to make money. Yeah. And I wasn't sure why I wanted money except that I remember I wanted a better modem and I could only afford a certain kind of modem. I could only afford a 300-bodd modem instead of a 12-bodd modem. So it wasn't clear why I was motivated to have money, but other than just earning money, you know, was sort of a characteristic of our family, basically. Like, go out there and make some money. When you were in college, one of those ways to make money was, I mean, of course, you knew how to write software, basic software. And I guess you decided to start like a little company making software for Commodore computers, the Amiga. What was the software that you were making? The first products we made, I was into kind of digital audio stuff back then, which was a new thing. And so I made something called a sound digitizer that would record stereo. I mean, back then, computers didn't do that. It would basically let you hook up your CD player or your microphone to your personal computer and record it, record it, and then software for editing it. And that was called that perfect sound. And that was fairly successful, actually. That was the first product I sold. So you called this company Sunrise. And the idea was to sell this. Who, I mean, your junior in college making the software and hardware. Who were you selling it to? How were you selling it to people? Well, I would have my friends build it. And then there was a computer store in Houston called MicroSearch. And the guy that ran it was pretty entrepreneurial. And he would distribute it basically and sell it. Then I figured out how you sold stuff to stores. And so then we started doing it ourselves. And then we started adding other products besides the sound digitizer. This became like a real business. Like you started to make money. I mean, I think I read almost $100,000 in profits at a certain point. Yeah, I remember I made, it would make about $100,000 a year, which for a college student was good money. But it wasn't like Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates kind of money. But I learned a lot about business obviously. One of the things I learned about business is one of my big lessons was the amount of money you have to report on your tax return is unrelated to how much cash you have in the bank. In the hardware business, you got to buy parts, you assembled them. So you got to buy the parts, you got to pay for the parts in advance. You assemble them into the things you're going to sell. And then you sell those things. And then those people that buy them to stores, they take 30 days or 90 days to pay you. So you don't get paid for a long time after you buy the parts. And so you have a cash flow issue. But you pay taxes on the sales no matter what the cash situation is. And so I remember being sort of outraged that I had to pay taxes on money I didn't have. I guess while you were running this business because it was so successful your grades started to suffer. Like you couldn't, you were not going to class because you were focused on this budding enterprise. Yep, so we got up, I think we got up to about 14 employees, had a little office. And I would sign up for classes, get busy and I wouldn't go. And they sent me a letter saying that I was on probation at one semester. And so I decided, well, I would regret not finishing my college degree. I was probably only a year away if I was full-time. So I decided that I would basically stop doing what I was doing. Go back to school full-time, get my degree and then kind of restart it. So that's what I did. So I think you were 25 or about 25 when you got your degree. And one of the people that who had worked for you at Sunrise was a senior wife, Susan, right? Yes, that's where I went. My wife, Susan, I hired her. I was very controversial at the time. I started dating someone I had hired. Yeah, she was hired to do printed circuit board assembly, which is kind of funny because she told me later that she had no idea what her printed circuit board was, but she figured she could assemble stuff. And so she applied for the job and we basically at that point hired anyone who applied. And then after college when we moved out to Silicon Valley, she was the office manager for for the new version of the company. And I remember it was kind of funny because I didn't really know where Silicon Valley was. I mean, I knew it was in Northern California, but I remember we had our map out driving around trying to find out where is this Silicon Valley thing. And it's not on the maps. So you came out to Silicon Valley not with the intention of getting a job at a bigger company, but to reconstitute Sunrise and to basically just build it up there. And that was what you were building. Yeah, but this time more focused on audio and more specifically focused on professional audio. You ran that you'd run that business for five years. And I guess you could you ran it until Commodore kind of went out of business because it was really designed for Commodore computers. Tell me about that decision. I mean, was it like you just kind of wound the company down and it had been going well or it was not going well or what happened? It was going really well, but to be honest, I was getting a little tired of doing audio stuff. Like in the audio for video business, which is our market, audio was always the second class citizen compared to the video. And then the and then the internet was just getting big at that time. This is like 95. So I guess - Right. - I guess Mosaic or Netscape was out already. - Netscape had just come out. Yahoo was like a couple kids. It was just the very beginning. - Yeah. And I guess you decide at this point to start a new company that could capitalize on this burgeoning internet. I think that this company is called Iban and it was sort of made like software that people could use to build websites and that kind of thing. And I'm assuming you use some of the money from sunrise to get this new company going. - Yeah, so I, you know, it built up a pretty good bank account balance, but I figured well my new company, I will fund it, but then we'll raise venture capital and kind of go bigger. - Yeah. - And so I brought my friend in as a partner because he knew all the venture capitalists and then hired a few engineers started going out and trying to raise venture capital. And then at the same time, we got the software up to the point where we could demo it. - It was not for sale yet. It was just to demo it. - It wasn't for sale just to show the potential investors. And there was a conference called demo. - It was a conference where you could literally demo your prototype. - And after that, we had lots of interest. - In investing. - In buying the company. - Yeah. - Even though you did not have a product for sale yet. - No, that's right. - You were nine months in and in fact, you cut an offer from Macromedia like a few weeks later to buy you out. - Yep. - You sold it for, reportedly for $36 million. - Right. - Some pretty amazing exit. - Yeah. That's when I guess Silicon Valley became like a real place to me. - Yeah. And you presumably owned most of the company. Maybe some of your employees had some equity, but you owned most of it. - Right. - So once you did that deal, you become, and this is common, we've heard this on the show before, you become an employee of Macromedia. It's part of the contract usually. - Right. - And so now you are working your third and your early 30s. How was that? How did that go for you? - It was a learning experience. It was very painful actually. I mean, I was excited. Like, oh, I'm gonna work for a real company. I'd never, you gotta remember, I'd never had a job before. I'd only, I mean, I had jobs like a Burger King, but I'd never had a job, you know, at a real company. 'Cause I just run my own companies. - Yeah. - And so I thought, oh, this is cool. I can learn about how companies are run. And, you know, I learned lots of stuff. I didn't learn what I thought I was gonna learn. I didn't really learn about the mechanics around the company. I learned about the politics of, not necessarily bad politics, but just how things work inside, you know, a company with lots of people and politics in the term of humans that are in a big team together, how they work and how they interact. - You managed to negotiate a way to leave a little bit early before the end of your contract. You, I mean, you had millions of dollars. You were set. You had more money than you could have imagined your parents ever had. I mean, it sounds like you were determined to start something new. Like, was that already a top of mind even once you had sold I band that you were gonna start something new once you got through this contractual obligation to macro media? - Yeah, like I'm not sure what motivated me or drove me, but I wanted to start a successful, like quote successful Silicon Valley company. Looking back on it, selling a company for 30, whatever million dollars is quite successful, but that's not the way it felt. Like I wanted to build the real company. I didn't want to just make the money. - Yeah. - It felt like I had sold out. And the way I justified it to myself was I was like, "Well, okay, I'm gonna take this money that I get from selling this company and then after my employment contract is up, I'm gonna use it to start another company." - I mean, the company that you would start, you started in '97. So really soon after you exited that obligation with macro media was replayed TV, right essentially the first version of a DVR, digital video recorder. How did you think of it? This is '97, I guess, like DVDs are just starting to kind of come out, but most people are still using VHS tapes. Most people are still going to a blockbuster at that time. And you're thinking of a digital video recorder. How did that idea come to you? - The idea came to me. I mean, just remember I was in the digital video, digital audio industry, right? That was the internet was kind of a sidetrack. But, and so I used to watch TV. I watched, there was a show I used to watch called Star Trek, the Next Generation. I would, it would come on when I was working or busy. And so I would report it on videotape. And it was just, it's hard to do. I mean, not only programming your VCR, but even if you know how to do that, you'd have multiple things on a tape. What's on the tape, you forget. And it was all kinds of problems. - All right, so the company was called Replay TV. The idea was you were gonna build a digital video recorder thinking that this was, and this is '97. Thinking this was gonna be the way you could store a lot more content, it wouldn't be one tape. It would be better quality, 'cause when you re-record over a VHS cassette, the quality degrades. And you were thinking, this is actually what we're heading. - Right into digital video. - That's close, but not quite. I mean, definitely, I felt like we were heading towards digital video. The benefits I thought were actually a lot better than what you just described. It wasn't really about digital quality. It was about the user interface will be simple that you could have features like, you know, I wanna record anything that has Harrison Ford in it automatically, for example. I just felt like it would be a lot easier to use. It would have features like pausing live TV and that. - Yeah. - It was a simple idea, but it was novel back then. I wanna record every episode of Star Trek, not just the one that's next Thursday, but I wanna just record each episode. And if it moves around in the schedule, because they adjusted the time, because the football game went longer, something, still recorded. 'Cause that was one of the problems with video tapes back then, was that you would miss the beginning or end, because they would move the broadcast time slightly. - Right. - So, anyway, so I figured, well, certainly we could solve this problem, you know, by using digital video and digital audio and hard drives. - By using a computer hard drive. - Yeah, using a computer hard drive. - Right. - But it was too expensive. Like, you just think about, okay, I could build this, but it cost way too much money to build. It would be very expensive. - Yeah. - It wouldn't be a consumer price point. - Right. - So I used to just sort of watch the prices of, you know, I used to go back then, the fries was popular in, so it was very-- - And they, yeah, sure. Fries electronic story out. Big, big consumer electronics. It was like a giant, best buy, but kind of more radio shacky. - Right. - A giant, yeah. - Giant radio shack for geeks, basically. And they would put an ad on the back page of the San Jose Mercury News every weekend with prices of hard drives, you know, would be one of the things. And so I'd kind of watch the prices of hard drives. And I think I decided that, okay, the hard drive, it's still gonna be kind of expensive, but it's possible now to maybe sell something for $500, kind of, which is sort of a starting consumer price point. So I decided it was possible to do it. And ultimately, I wanted one. Like I figured, you know, I had enough experience with Silicon Valley Venture Capitalist to figure out that hardware was really hard to get funded. - Yeah. - Consumer hardware, especially, it was super hard to get funded. So it wasn't necessarily the best business choice, but I figured at least I would get a DVR out of it. - So you yourself, you were gonna physically build a prototype? - No, not personally. At this point, you know, I had enough money where when I decided to do the DVR, I started a company and I started hiring people. And how quickly did it take for you to have a working model? - I think we probably had something to demo to investors after about a year. We, I mean, we launched a CES 1999, so that would have been January 1999, where we won Best of Show. - Right. I know you got Mark Andreessen as an investor of the founder of Netscape, who at the time was not yet the famous Mark Andreessen of today of Andreessen Horowitz, but he was certainly an important investor at the time - Did you have an easy time getting others to invest? - It was hard. I got some angel investors without a tremendous amount of difficulty. - But no major institutional investors? - Well, we were pitching them, but they, they were not interested. It was amazing how many people thought it was a bad idea. People would say things like, no one wants to pause live TV. Why would you want to do that? - To get a bag of cheetos. - I saw you exactly. It was kind of eye-opening how hard it is to explain a new idea. Eventually we did, I mean, we did get institutional investors, so I mean, we did angels at first, and then Vulcan, which was Paul Allen's venture fund, and Clinder Perkins will herst. - How much did you end up raising? - It was over, I don't remember the exact amount, but it was like $200 billion. - Absolutely. - Like that, and it was a lot of money back then. That's what I was saying. After we did the CES, we got a lot more attention, and then we managed to raise money from every major media company. - Yeah, you debuted this at the Consumer Electronic Show and Las Vegas in 1999, which was a big deal, 'cause DVRs were not yet, they weren't a thing, but at that same exact show, Tivo also debuted, which was your main rival. I think you're like your booze were side by side. - Yep, that's right. - I mean, you must have known about Tivo as you were developing Replay TV. You must have known about your competitor. They must have known about you. But you guys win Best in Show at CES, so clearly it's like Replay TV is gonna win this war. This is Beta versus VHS all over again, and here we go, and you must have thought, "Well, we're gonna win this." - Well, it was definitely head-eatimes, like, you know, We were on Good Morning America and like on TV and all kinds of stuff, but I didn't feel like I felt like There was still a battle in front of us But yeah as far as Tivo when we started raising money then we started hearing about them they were called Tell a World and When we really learned about them when it became a serious problem for us was we were pitching early on Phillips was a Consumer electronics brand that was bigger back then and they had an office actually in Silicon Valley and I got an introduced them and was pitching them right and Phillips is a Dutch-based multinational right that's that company the light bulbs and And back then they made TVs and DCRs. Yep So we were pitching them we were close to having a deal So the idea was that they would build and sell that we'd license the technology to them and yeah, and then what happened is tell a world Got an article placed in the newspaper about what they were working on So then Phillips is like oh, we got to go talk to these guys before we do this deal with replay and Then tell world essentially bought the deal which was a new concept to me like I had never thought of doing a deal that was not gonna be profitable Tell a world got the deal with with Phillips Phillips basically abandoned you guys instead of we're gonna go with tell a world Yeah, because tell a world paid them Tell a world paid Phillips to do the deal I see instead of Phillips paying you Till it's a partner with you they got paid to make these boxes these these DVR boxes. I got you so Already right then they had a massive advantage because they had a huge You know that a manufacturer behind them that could mass produce these products right it was a big moment our business plan was We'll sell these things at $500. We'll make money Yeah, the price will come down over time eventually. They'll be very cheap But we'll start you know very traditional like the way every prior consumer electronics products that have ever been launched Yeah Tivo then tell a world decided that they would take advantage that this was like in the dot-com boom They would take advantage of the fact that they could raise a lot of money They raise a lot of money and then they started subsidizing The DVRs selling them for what for like a cut rate price at a loss? Yeah, so they sell them for $99 instead of $500. Well, that was their plan and you guys There was no way you could sell your box for $99 correct. So the big thing was they were gonna subsidize the hardware Yeah, we lost that deal that was like, okay, this is now I understand we've got a competitor and they're buying the business Like they just changed the game. We're gonna have to raise a lot of money And it turned out actually them getting Phillips was good because we were both like you said at CES they launched with Phillips We didn't have a partner. We won best of show the whole consumer electronics industry realized this was gonna be a big deal yeah, and Tivo has signed an exclusive with Phillips to get that deal So we were the open available partner. Yeah, and we had won best of show and so Every consumer electronics company started talking to us and so we ended up signing a deal with Panasonic Which was a bigger brand than Phillips and you I mean you had like Walt Mossberg with the time at a column in the Wall Street Journal He like tested both yours and Tivos and he said the replay TV was more user friendly the interface was better like you were very well positioned to become the dominant DVR Company I remember I was overseas at the time. I remember coming back to the US from time to time in like 2002 2003 and just seeing everybody get have Tivos everyone all of a sudden had Tivos Mm-hmm But what happened I mean why why was it Tivo and not replay TV if by all accounts? It was a better product at that time and we shit first. I mean we're first first first. Okay. Yeah, so what happened? The dot com crash basically is what happened so they had turned it into a Business where you had to have lots of money to be successful They had raised a lot of money we raised a lot of money as well, but not as much as they did right even though we raised $200 million plus the burn rate had cranked up and we were spending you know I remember some months it would be $20 million a month Wow the thing that changed the dynamic is they went public Before us we were just about six months behind them But then the dot com crash happened and it suddenly became impossible to go public This is odd get like around August of 2001 or maybe a little bit in that 2000 I think okay, I don't remember yeah late 2000 maybe December 2000 and that basically When the market crashed that that meant yeah, our bankers they withdrew there's yeah, they said well They said we can't go public and then at that point You know because of the burner rate it was we were gonna be out of business in several months So you knew that you had to sell the business in order to otherwise you'd collapse yeah And so you did in August of 2001 It was announced that that replay TV was gonna be purchased by a Company called sonic blue. Yeah, I think they paid reportedly $120 million For replay TV which would be less than what you raised I'm sure this is painful to talk about now But but I'm sure much more painful at the time right so when that happened when the company sold You're not broke you still had the money from the sale from your previous company, but this was not a great outcome for you And you you kind of lost that war I mean Tivo had just outraged you and they they survived the dot com crash Did you feel like? Because that was a that was the first kind of Was it not I wouldn't say was a failure, but it was the closest kind of thing to failure that you had experienced at that point your career I didn't I don't know I don't people say ask questions like you just asked it I don't I don't think much about whether something was a failure or success First of all I financially it wasn't it wasn't a huge failure. I did make money on the sale and I Invented the DVR and like I learned I learned a huge amount of stuff and it was just a great Just a great experience. So I felt like You know there were times when it was very painful, but overall it was just an incredible experience and You know lots of people kind of slip in valley. They don't all have experiences like that Yeah, and we didn't I mean we didn't discuss all the all the sorted details But there was a lot of politics as well around the investors and The LA versus Silicon Valley culture. What's the LA versus Silicon Valley culture? What was the LA part of it? Well, so so replay was sort of this hybrid of Silicon Valley and LA right because we had venture capital investors like Kleiner Perkins and then we had all the major media companies as investors and they're Called into LA culture and and you needed an LA office because you needed to have buy-in from the big media companies in order for Replay TV to be successful. Yeah, and we've and it was basically the business was a merger of Silicon Valley to distribute the platform and then a service business, you know to monetize it afterwards Got it and the cultures are incredibly different and what they respect is different as well And so you know for example This is a small one, but I remember like we had a LA executive and he told me once like you need to comb your hair more And then like my hair is fine And so it was like for him like the way your hair looks is incredibly important Yeah, even in just internal meetings So that's the that's just a small example and and what about like You're kind of a low-key guy like you don't come across as being overly charismatic From first impressions. Yeah, well that's true But I get along well with Silicon Valley engineers like they that's why I am right you don't need you don't need to be not Everybody needs to be Steve jobs to be successful in Silicon Valley in fact You'd really don't need to be Steve jobs to be a successful leader. You can be a low-key and quiet Yeah, and I think actually many Silicon Valley executives are like that. Yeah But they're very political and they didn't respect we didn't respect each other and so there was a lot of Backstabbing that started happening. So it just became a very unhealthy situation So once you left this is um, you know 2001 You're you're done What was your head that point were you thinking about the next business that you were gonna start or what do you remember about that time? I I remember thinking I should take a break We had a vacation house in Oregon So I thought okay, well, let's go let's spend the summer And just relax and uh, so I did that And I quickly became very impatient. So I realized I wasn't good at just sitting around I mean it was fun. I went biking and Mountain biking and all kinds of stuff, but I was ready to do something after that What were you starting to think about? I mean your greatest idea of of all time that the digital video recorder You know and and for most of us we have maybe one great idea in our life And and that was it you had that idea So what were you possibly gonna do to to top that? Well, I would say I I would quibble a bit and not say it wasn't necessarily my best idea, but it was the Was the one that had the most mass market potential yeah, right and it had the you know ability to change the way Billions of people acted and that actually I think was a lesson that I took away which was That you can spend your time on different things and some of them just have much bigger potential than other things and So maybe I should factor that in like maybe it shouldn't just be things that I'm interested in But it should be things I'm interested in that also have the potential to impact a lot of people But it was up until that point your best idea you could record anything that Harrison Ford was in you could skip commercials You could I mean to completely change television viewing I mean, is that. were you thinking that way at all? I was definitely not thinking that way. I mean, you could say that the DVR was my best idea. That's not at all what I thought. I thought that I got lots of good ideas. Only come back in just a moment. Anthony joins forces with the head of Netflix. Read Hastings to build his next big idea. That is, until Reed decides to pull the plug on it. Stay with us. I'm Guy Roz, and you're listening to How I Built This. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Roz. So, it's around 2002, and after the sale of Replay TV, Anthony is already thinking about his next business. Something at the intersection of hardware, software, television, and the internet. You know, I went around, I talked to a few people. I think I introduced myself to Reed Hastings. You know, Netflix fame had lunch with him. Back then, Netflix was around. They were just doing DVDs by mail. Yeah. All right. So, you would eventually land on a concept for what would become Roku, which was a device to help television stream video from the internet. But this is 2002. There isn't a whole lot of stuff to stream it. This is not, this is pre-YouTube. Most people still had dial-up connections. Maybe there was, you know, some people were transitioning to DSL, but it was still early days. What was your concept that you had come up with? The original concept was just the category that there's going to be a lot of devices. So, I know that's kind of vague, but that was the idea. And specific product ideas, a streaming player was on my list, a video streaming player. But it wasn't time yet. You know, that's why Netflix was still mailing out DVDs back then. And that's why I met with Reed Hastings. I was like, obviously at some point this is going to be an internet delivered video company. And he's like, "Yep. You know, so I was sort of like, "Well, maybe there's something we could do together." So, but when I first started the company, the timing wasn't right for that. So, I figured we'll just build a product, start building my team, and get into the market. And I'm a big believer in, you know, getting into a big market area, and adjusting. Even if you don't know what the product is yet. Even if you don't know exactly what it's, I mean, you have to have something to start with. But it might not be where you want to end up eventually. Because the thing you started with was very far away from what Roku was. I think it was just like a box that connected to your TV that showed that would display paintings on your TV. Yeah. So, it's the same technology this in a Roku, but it was a, but it had a different position in the market. A different purpose, I guess. A different purpose, yeah. So, yeah. So, we made this first product, was basically a high-definition photo video and audio player. And then we made these little compact flashcards that had what we called live art on them. So, this was like a nature picture with a stream, where the stream was kind of moving. You know, the water was flowing. Yeah. At clocks, we had some cool clocks, like a robot that would fly around, you know, like a cuckoo clock. On the television screen. Yeah. So, it was the clock. It was the time and then on the hour, you know, robot. It was like this giant sort of steam-punk room. And then on the hour, the robot would take off and fly around and fix the pipe and things like that. By the way, how long did it take? Because I know you started the, you found the company in October of 2002. How long did it take you before you had a product to sell? I think it was about a year. It takes about a year to build a hardware software product. And what was it called? Was it called Roku? It's called the PhotoBridge. The PhotoBridge. And what was the company called Roku at that point? The company was called Roku. And Roku, by the way, it means six in Japanese. Right. Yes, my six company. I thought, you know, kind of an Asian sounding name would be cool for a consumer electronics company. And we, me and Susan and my wife were having dinner at the sushi restaurant. So, I started talking to the waitress about different words in Japanese. And I said, and it was actually depending on how you count, it's either my fifth or sixth company. Yeah. So, I asked her what the Japanese word for five is. And she said, go. And go was kind of a failed tech company. So, I thought, no, can't use go. I said, what is, what is six? And she said, Roku. And I said, oh, that sounds cool. Okay. So, sixth, sixth in Japanese. You're, you got Roku. Right. So, then we started our second product, which was streaming audio. We called it Soundbridge. I remember this. Use public radio content. Yep. So, it would stream public radio. It would stream internet radio stations. It would stream music from your local library. So, it was like, yeah, it was like an audio streaming device. Okay. So, cool. It's a good product. But I think around this time, 2002, 2003, you kind of reconnected with Reed Hastings, the co-founder of Netflix at a conference. And you, what, you pitched him on this, on making a box for them, like a streaming video box for Netflix. Yep. So, the, so the Soundbridge sold in, I would say, the hundreds of thousands, which was good, but not a huge hit. And basically, at that same time, I, it's not that I remet Reed. I maintained our relationship. And I would check in everyone's to wall and say, you know, some version of, are you guys ready to do a streaming video player yet? Because when you are, I want to make it for you. I remember one meeting with Reed, where he said, I mean, Reed is very strategic. And he knew that many companies had missed transitions in their industry. He knew his industry was going to transition from DVDs to streaming. He just didn't know when, you know, nobody did. And so, he actually told me once that he, you know, I, I've allocated, I'll call it 3% of our revenue, to keep working on this idea of streaming in the background so that we don't miss the transition. How did you convince him to cooperate with you and Roku to build a device for Netflix? Well, it was a long process. He would go back and forth between like, when I sent him an email, he'd be like, yes, we, we need your help to, that we're going to do this ourselves. And then at some point, I got a call from a recruiter saying, we're looking for a VP of Internet TV for Netflix. And I was like, hmm, well, it sounds like they're really going to do it themselves. Yeah. And I called up Reed and said, hey, I hear you're looking for a head of Internet TV. I'd be willing to do that for you if you let me keep running Roku at the same time. Like, I can do it as a side project. And he's like, okay, that sounds good. So you basically said, hey, because oftentimes when you get hired, like if Google hires you, and you've got a company, they usually, there's a package and they just buy all your stuff and then they own whatever you built. You basically said, look, I've got Roku. I want to keep running that. But let me come over for you and see if I can develop something in-house. So he essentially said, Netflix said, okay, yeah, you still own your IP, you still own this company? Yeah, that's right. And it is very unusual. Yeah, very. And I didn't really think he would do it, but he did. And Reed is very out of the box thinking that way. Like he's fine doing things that aren't the norm as long as it gets him where he wants to go. And so I think he had a lot of respect for my ability and he had bought all the Roku products. He loved them. And he figured I would be perfect to build this product for him. Right, because the way I think this is going to work is instead of building the Roku device at Roku with the company, you were going to sort of like move it into Netflix and develop it there, right? Well, yeah, I capitulated. When you say you capitulated in the sense that you figured. Well, I wanted to deal with Roku with make the hardware. But that wasn't going to happen. And so I basically decided, well, if he's not going to let Roku do it, then maybe I should just go do it at Netflix. Do you remember when you became an employee at Netflix? Do you remember what year it was? It was 2007, I'm pretty sure. Okay, so basically the product you were building, which was the Roku product, was going to be the Netflix streaming device. Yeah, so at this time they had had a beta version of their streaming service, but you know, you have to have a PC on a PC on WebRowser. So I was hired to build their hardware box. They wanted a little box that they could give to customers so they could connect this to their TV and stream Netflix. So they didn't have to use their. you didn't have to use your PC. And just to clarify, you didn't need that box for a computer obviously because the computer is connected to the internet. But televisions in 2005 were not. the vast majority of them were not internet-ready or internet-connected. So you would need a box that did connect to the internet that did connect to your television to make this work. That's right. And I talked to Reid and I would have conversations like, you know, we shouldn't build just a Netflix player. We should build like an operating system for TV. We should run apps. We should. you know, it's going to be a lot more stuff besides just Netflix and people aren't going to want a separate box for every streaming service. And he's like, yeah, that's a good idea. And I go, but that's in conflict. They would be competitors in that flex is that okay? And he's like, I think that's okay. Yeah. And there was a lot of work going on in the sort of non-hardware part of Netflix. There was a lot of work going on. I said, well, how are we going to get access to this content? Because back then, it wasn't just a technical problem. It was a huge business model problem. I was a business model problem because I believe if you physically rent DVDs, that's a different proposition. It's like when a radio station plays a song and that's it. They just play a song. Versus when you stream something, then it's different because that means that people can. I don't know, watch it again and again or whatever. Is that the challenge for them? Yeah, so that's right. The studios had a large existing business. They were more interested in protecting than they were in opening up this new front. So building the hardware for this thing wasn't the biggest challenge. It was kidding. The rights to get the content to stream through that hardware. I think so. Yeah, I think that's the bigger challenge. And they didn't get rights for a long time. Yeah. So all right, so I read that in 2007 internally at Netflix. You were working as a project called Project Griffin, I think that was the code name for it. Right. That was our code name. And you had been able to like demo it for read many times. He gave feedback. You even demoed it for the entire staff. There was like a lot of excitement. But I think by the end of 2007, this thing was ready to be launched. It was ready to be debuted as a consumer product and start shipping to start being manufacturing, shipping to consumers. And one day read Hastings announces he's pulling the plug. Yeah, yeah, that's true. This is done. We're not doing this product. Just one day comes out and says this. We talked about it, obviously before he announced it. I mean, what happened? The sequence of events were that we were real in the hardware. I hired this guy to go to try and sign up Xbox and some TV companies that we were having good success there. Xbox would be available through or how would how to work. The idea is that if you had an Xbox, there would be an app on your Xbox that would let you watch the stream Netflix. I got you. Got you. Signed up, you would sign Xbox up and PlayStation up. I think even Apple TV, right? Right. So Apple TV existed back then as well. And actually, I think if I remember correctly, Apple TV was the turning point. Yeah. We were working on these other deals. It was becoming clear that we were going to get them, that you were going to be able to at some point get an Xbox and watch Netflix's service on it, that it would be built into TVs. Yeah. And then we approached Apple about the same kind of thing on Apple TV. Yeah. Let's let Apple TV stream Netflix. Yeah. And I think reads a sent an email to Steve Jobs to saying, are you guys interested in this? Steve Jobs replied, no, we're not interested because we hear you're building hardware that competes with Apple TV. Why would we ever be business with you? Something along those lines. So in other words, why would Apple TV make Netflix available through its box if you, yourself, making your own box? That was what they were. And so Reed started to get worried about this that as he started here push back, he was coming to the conclusion that maybe this was a bad idea. I don't think he was getting worried. I think he came to the conclusion that Reed's, one of Reed's characteristics is he's very focused. So he'll pick a direction then he is benignly focused on that direction. And so when I came in the direction was we're going to build a box and distribute to all our customers. He then, I think he then decided that a better strategy is to just license our service widely to other hardware makers and we're clouding the picture by making our own hardware. And so if I take this team, this working on this hardware and I spin it down, put it in Roku, then Roku can still finish the box, but it'll just be one of, you know, many boxes that we can license. All right. So essentially what happened was, was Reed decided to spin this, the streaming device back into Roku. This is the company Roku, which you were still running. And so instead of Netflix making the device Roku would make it and from his perspective, from what I understand, it was because he wanted Netflix to be a neutral platform that he wanted it to be available everywhere all the time. He didn't want to compete. He wanted to be something where all of these other content providers would want to be. And as controversial as it was at the time, it proved to be very oppression and a very good decision, ultimately, then Netflix did not go into that direction. Right. And the decision was, wait, was good for me. Like it was a great decision for us. And I was like, yes, that sounds great. That's what I wanted, you know, from the beginning. So you take these employees from Netflix, you've been working on it, they'll go to Roku. And then you worked at a deal where Netflix would get some of Roku's equity, basically. Yeah, that's right. So they invested, not a lot. I think it was $6 million. Something like that. That sounds right. $6 million. Yeah. Netflix put $6 million into Roku at the time. Right. And so they, I think they got 20% of the company. Right. So after Netflix invested and we started shipping the Netflix player, we then decided to raise venture money. And so we raised money from a venture capital is called Menlo Ventures. And then Netflix decided they didn't want to appear to be favoring any one hardware manufacturer. So they sold their shares to Menlo Ventures. Right. So okay. So you've got now this standalone company now really doing what you initially hoped it would be doing, which was a box that could interface between the internet and your television. That's right. But help me understand what the business model was going to be. Was it going to be, because at that time, presumably the way to make money was just selling the hardware, selling the box. And I think the box that initially was like 99 bucks, right? Yeah. It was $99. Which was a big milestone back then because that was very inexpensive compared to other set top boxes. Yeah. So, yeah, the way I was thinking about it was that Netflix would be, you know, the killer app that would allow us to launch a new television platform. You know, and that was my goal. My goal was always to be the platform for TV that, you know, just like phones have Android and PCs have Windows and I felt like TVs needed Roku. Right. But we needed, we needed a way to launch that and get scale and that's what Netflix was for me. So although we launched the first product as the Netflix player, we, you know, we quickly started adding other services. We added an app store. We added billing systems. I mean, we added all the pieces to build a television platform. And that was the goal. All right. There was the Apple TV out at that time. It was more expensive. It was about 300 bucks. And you could watch television through that. And you could watch Netflix through that. There was the Roku product, which was $99. What I would have asked you at the time was, well, what happens when televisions are just in that it was inevitable when televisions have an ethernet port and you can directly connect to the internet or they're wireless and you can go Wi-Fi and you could just like load up Google Chrome on your TV and then just like log into Netflix. Like why would you, when that happens, what isn't that going to make Roku irrelevant? Like what, what, what did you say when people ask you that question? That's what read thought would happen. That was his sort of vision of the way things would play out. That's what lots of people thought. But I, you know, my experience in the TV industry was that price was incredibly important in the TV business and that web browsers were a very inefficient way to distribute software. Like they required lots of memory and lots of processing power and that it was not the way to make a, there be ways to do it a lot cheaper and manufacturers always picked the less expensive way. Yeah. And so that's why we focused on cost and that's why we were successful in web browsers or not because it just, it just adds quite a bit to the cost to build a TV if you try and use a web browser. The TV becomes more expensive you're saying. Yep. That's right. And what, what, in, in, at that time in 2008, 2009, what could you watch through the Roku box besides Netflix? Well, in a first start shipping, it was just Netflix. And then I think we added Amazon Prime after that. Prime video came out fairly soon. And then after that, we added the App Store. So, so there was HBO, Hulu, I think, came out around that time. And then because of the App Store, you started getting lots of little companies publishing, publishing stuff. Was it hard for you to convince other media companies to jump on board or was it more like everyone felt like they would miss out if they didn't jump on board? It was not hard to convince. You know, initially it was more like the internet companies like Amazon or YouTube or, you know, Hulu was sort of the internet experimental branch of, of different networks. Those companies that had made the decision to do streaming, they wanted to be on Roku because we were a leading streaming platform. Yeah. But if you went to traditional media companies that had traditional businesses, they had no interest in streaming. They viewed it as a threat to their business. So they did not take their services and put them on streaming for a long time. So the, the, initially the strategy was just to get as many Roku's in the hands of consumers. Because you were not making any money off of people watching Netflix through the Roku device, right? So the strategy was we will make some money on the hardware enough to basically finance the business, but we're not going to try and make a profitable business on it. We're just going to use it to build scale. And once you build scale, you can figure out how to, once people have these devices or have the Roku platform in their house, then you can figure out how to monetize it. Right. So you've got these devices and I think by 2011 you sold like a million and a half of these devices. So it's still, it's successful, but still, you know, you're still building it, building it out. I read it and an interview you gave in 2012. And this article, I think it was in Forbes, is that at the time most people who streamed video, were doing it through game consoles, through Xboxes in 2012. Only 1% of US homes at that time used a device like a Roku or Apple TV. And you had said at the time, look, we're essentially not, our market isn't the 18 to 25 year old first adopter, we're going for their parents actually. That's who we want to attract. Yeah, so our goal was to offer a solution that was very inexpensive, that was super easy to use. You didn't have to be a gamer to use it, and just had a lot of content. Yeah, I want to ask you about the simplicity side, because anybody buying a television today, and I'm just saying, if you're going to buy a television, just don't, because it's annoying. There's too many buttons on the remote. There's too much stuff. There's just too many options. Your products are simple. The remote is simple. It looks like a kid, like a remote for a preschooler. And I'm not trying to say that in a disparaging way. I like that. It's very simple. There's like simple buttons, easy to use. Even the website, very simple explanation of what Roku does. That was part of the strategy from the beginning, I think, right? Definitely. That's always been a huge part of our strategy. And I think our competition continually underestimates how simple consumers want their TV experience to be. Television, they want to sit down, maybe drink a beer, and they want to watch something as quickly as they can. And they don't want to get confused trying to figure out what they're going to watch. And so that has always been a big focus for us, even kind of a correlate to that, is the consumer electronics, especially when dominated by Japanese companies, they started competing by adding more options. And so that just started adding more and more buttons to their remote. And they got to the point where a TV remote has a lot of buttons and no one knows what they do. And so we put a lot of effort into our remote control to reduce the number of buttons yet still being powerful and simple to use. There was no off button on the Roku box. Yeah, that was a very controversial decision, but it was to make it easier to use. We didn't put a power button on their remote control, because if you go back to sort of what and things that is confusing to people about different devices on their TV, is you have a source button on your TV, you change the source, and the source might be an Xbox or a DVD player or a Roku player. And one of the things that made it hard was you didn't know if your DVD player was turned on or off. If it was off, then you didn't know if you were looking at your DVD player or not. So if you just keep the model at time, then it's easy to find. So it just makes it easier, and it doesn't actually change the power consumption. It just wasn't what people were used to. So we had a lot of resistance to it, but it made it a lot easier to use, and now it's the standard. 2012, 10 years after you officially launched a company, but really, part of that time you'd been in Netflix, you get an acquisition offer from Intel. They apparently were looking to buy you out for about close to half a billion dollars. You were reportedly looking for 1.5 billion, but that deal fell through because it was just too much for them. Is that true? Is that what happened? I remember that there was some interest in them buying us. We never got to the paper stage. Why were you willing to entertain the possibility of selling? Was it because-- We didn't really entertain the possibility of selling it. They tried to buy us. Or they didn't even try to-- I mean, it depends what you mean by try to buy. They were interested in acquiring us. We were not really interested in selling. But I mean, even if you're not interested in selling, at some point-- There's a price. There's a price, exactly. And so you basically, from what I understand, you basically said, sure, we'll take a billion and a half for it. I don't remember exactly. I do remember that I probably gave them a price. It was unreasonable. And they probably said no. But I think that's-- If we just go at a higher level, I think if you're an entrepreneur and you start a company, and you've already been successful, like I have, in terms of financially successful, then you don't really in it for the money anymore. And so it just becomes hard to do a transaction just based on money. My attitude for Roku has always been, look as long as I see a path to us continuing to grow and be successful, then there's no reason to sell. The reason to sell is if you think the competitive dynamics of the market have gotten to the point where it's difficult to be standalone and successful, that you need the leverage of being part of something else. And then that would be a legitimate reason. Like you don't want to run the company into the ground. But absent that, why would you sell this system? It's just getting more valuable every year. Right. True. But acquisition could also be a good thing. I mean, there are plenty of examples where a company is, I mean, an audible acquired by Amazon became a much bigger company. So there are lots of a Twitch, right? Because they become bigger. So there are-- and this is a strategy. You've got to give your investors a return. I know that a year later, Amazon approached Roku with an acquisition offer, and that also didn't work out. But at the time, there's an article at the time that was written about this. And one of your main investors-- and you said this too, and this article, you said, you know, we've had less acquisition offers than as normal for a company as successful as ours. And you said, I think it's because people don't understand the company. One of your main investors who sat in your board, Daniel left, said, more or less saying, I'm was shocked. There was a single media executive who believed Roku would be successful. It wasn't getting almost any acquisition offer. So clearly, whether you were interested in entertaining them or not, you were surprised at the-- lack of acquisition offers at the time. That's all true. I mean, I am surprised at how few serious acquisition discussions Roku has had. Because you were underestimated, do you think? Continually underestimated, and still are, I think. So for example, it's amazing the number of media companies, executives that didn't think streaming would be popular. When it was so clear that, of course, it's going to change. The internet has disrupted every industry, and it's going to disrupt videos as well. And then I think at the point when Roku became like, well, maybe we should think about buying Roku, we had finally become so valuable that it was too expensive for them. When we come back in just a moment, we hear about some of the other ways that the industry continues to underestimate Roku. Stay with us. I'm Guy Razz, and you're listening to How I Built This. (upbeat music) (phone ringing) Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Razz. So by 2014, Roku's sold around 8 million streaming devices in the US, but at this point, smart TVs are also rolling out into the market, which means Roku has to expand its reach. You actually end up partnering with manufacturers in 2014 to build the Roku platform inside the television. So now, of course, you sell their Roku televisions, and you work with a bunch of different companies. How much of a sort of a game changer was that? Did that, had you not done that, would Roku be where it is today? It was an important decision, and very key to our success. It is a hugely successful program for us, the Roku TV program. I mean, for a long time, we debated, should we actually make our own TVs, and it was clear that that's a tough business to be in. So we decided licensing would be by far the best approach. Yeah. Once you reached a level of scale, you were able to start thinking more specifically about, you're revenue model, because you're not going to make it by just selling devices. So from what I understand, it really, okay, you had the hardware, the streaming sticks, we'll start out with the boxes, now they've got sticks, that sells, that's not a huge part of your revenue, but then it was like licensing the platform, the software to these television manufacturers. Then there's a part of it that I don't understand, which I think is amazing, which is, there's a revenue sharing agreement with the content provider. So it's like cable channels, cable TV, if you're CNN, or let's just talk about a channel, for example, if you're CNN, you get money from advertisers and you get money from cable carriers that pay you a certain amount of money per subscriber. With you guys, it's almost inverted, which is the channels, the content providers pay you a small fee from their revenue, right? Explain how that works. - So yeah, so it's, I mean, our model is not a traditional cable model, as you just pointed out. We get paid for distributing content, but we don't have a monthly subscription, like a cable operator has, but we do have a billing platform. You know, part of our purpose-built platform for TV is building in tools for the industry to help them sign up subscribers. We can promote them, we can do one click billing. So we have a lot of influence on signing up subscribers and so our model is basically, if we sign up a subscriber or we do billing, then we get a piece of that subscription revenue. - Right. - So that's, you know, back to the underestimated part of it. That also comes in the play in the most media executives when they start getting into screaming, they underestimate Roku because they also have Samsung TVs or an Apple TVs. And so they're always surprised when they find out that we're their number one source of customers. Right. If your service has ads in it, then we don't get money from you directly, but we get some of the ad inventory. Just the same way, like you can sell some of the ad inventory. We can sell it directly. Right. We can sell it. You have an ad sales division essentially in-house. Right. And that's actually our biggest business is selling video ads. And it's pretty clear that advertising is a huge opportunity. There's out of loan, $70, $80 billion a year spent on TV advertising in the US alone and it's all moving to streaming. One of the things that we did that people didn't appreciate at the time, but now they do, is we started something called the Roku channel, which is essentially free ad supported movies and TV shows. And when we started it, everyone was trying to copy Netflix. So we were like, most countries in the world TV is free and it's supported by ads. The US is sort of unique in that the industry evolved at a point where you pretty much have to have a paid TV subscription. But you don't, that doesn't need to be that way. Like we can, with streaming, we can offer people free content and just have it supported by ads. And so that's what we did with the Roku channel. And so it was the first time really there was a lot of mainstream content that was available for free. That you would license or that you would outright buy. Both. Not just licensing, but now we're actually producing originals and it's very popular. People love free TV. So that's become a big part of our business in that it generates a lot of ad imagery. So it drives a lot of our ad business. As the device became more and more popular, some of your partners started to become competitors too. Amazon developed a competing product. Google. They're giants. They were and they are. Did that worry you at all? Well, of course, giant competitors concerns us. But I was pretty confident in our strategy. I mean, of course, it was risk, but I felt like we had a path to winning, which we have taken and continue to take, which is basically to build a platform, this custom built for TVs, as opposed to taking something to exist for, say, a phone and porting it to TV. And so it's not just the technology, of course, that's part of it. Like one of the advantages of our operating system is that it costs less to build the hardware. But it's also just to focus, incredibly focused on that one problem, as opposed to other problems. We're the only streaming platform company that that's all we do. We come to work every day trying to build the simplest, best, cheapest streaming player possible. Our competitors don't do that. They come into work every day, trying to figure out how to build a better search engine generally or how to sell more stuff online. Yeah. A lot of innovation in the business to happen and we're good at innovation. So I'm confident that we'll continue to compete successfully. And the streaming wars has also benefited you, because the more that Disney and Amazon and Netflix and Hulu and all these different companies compete, Peacock and Paramount, it's better for you because most of them want to be on your platform. Yeah. The reason it's benefited us is because it benefits the streaming companies. When they want to build an audience, they start spending money on marketing. How do they want to spend money on marketing? They could buy billboards or they could buy ads on Roku where with one click from the ad, you can sign up for their service. And so those ads actually are just way more effective. And in terms of going in different directions, you have a bunch of things that you're advertising and obviously the hardware and the software. But what about content? I mean, I know you've acquired content or licensed content from Quibi, the short-lived Quibi. You've got to sort of bought out a bunch of their content. And I think you bought this old house that show on PBS, you own that show. Is there a future where you're going to be a studio and you're going to make your own stuff, too? We are producing originals now. Not a huge number like Netflix or Amazon, but still many millions of dollars worth. We have a show coming out right called Weird Al, a biopic starring Daniel Ratcliffe. Oh, that's a Roku original. Wow. Okay, I didn't know that. Yeah. This business has become, he went public in, I think, in 2017. And of course, like many tech companies, you've had an incredible ride in 2020, 2021, huge growth for Roku. Lots of people are stuck at home. 2022 is different. There's been a downturn across the board in the markets. You know, most tech companies, their stock prices are down 50, 60%. What do you think about that? I mean, you are the head of a public company. So you do quarterly earnings calls and so on. Are we talking about a temporary, I don't know, slow down or is this something? Are you sort of girding yourself for a long winter of business? Well, I mean, the way I think about it is the world is moving to streaming. It's a huge trend. You know, the economy is cyclical, that's just the way it is. And one shouldn't confuse the cyclical economy with the fact that everyone is switching to streaming. You know, our business fundamentally has got a lot of room to grow. So we're still seeing good growth. I mean, we haven't given outlook for the next few quarters, but, you know, we haven't announced layoffs or anything like that. This is a question that very few people like, but it's an important question to ask because we're living at a time of incredible wealth and I don't hold it against anybody who makes incredible, I think it's a great, it's great. I mean, if you make incredible wealth, it's good for you, you usually employ lots of people and you probably are going to end up giving away a lot of that money, but you do have that wealth, lots of it, more money than you could ever use your family could ever use. What do you think you would do with it? That's an excellent question and it's hard to answer. If you think about money and the fact that successful entrepreneurs accumulate it, you're right, they can't spend it all. It's right. In fact, almost a very tiny part of it is what they spend. The rest gets invested. So the question I think is, well, who should be investing that money? Should it be someone like me or should it be someone else? And so I think actually people that are successful earn money successfully through business are good at investing it as well. And so it's actually quite efficient for them to invest it versus someone else. In terms of how you could actually use the money, I have a big philanthropy effort. I hired a director of philanthropy, but it's actually very difficult to give away money effectively because there's less accountability versus a company. If you imagine putting money in a nonprofit versus putting money in a company, well, the company is measured and is very motivated on being efficient and makes hard decisions. When it's a nonprofit, they don't have those difficult decisions. They're less efficient and it's easy for them to waste it. I'm not saying that they all do, obviously, because I give a lot of money to nonprofits that I think are being helpful. But actually, if I had a choice between putting money in a nonprofit versus a company that were both addressing the same area, the company would be my choice because it's going to be more accountable and it's going to do a better job. But if that's your strategy, then you end up making more money from the money that you're investing. So, I think it's an interesting problem. How do you use your money most effectively for the world? Yeah. What's your main philanthropic focus? Well, our mission is basically advancing human progress and there's probably a few different areas where I give money to in that realm. One is medical and scientific research. So research around diseases would also research around interesting kind of science things that I don't think are well-funded. For example, I'm kind of interested in what causes ice ages. So I give money to a researcher in the UK that his team researchers the fundamental causes of ice ages. People don't know what causes ice ages. And for all we know, we're about to have another one. So scientific research, mental health, mental health and homelessness, which are very closely related. I give lots of money to that. But the focus is mostly on not just giving people money, but trying to alleviate the root causes. So there's a couple of other areas, but those are some of the areas I give money to. When you think about where you've come from, where you are today, you were clearly motivated to make money early on in your life. You talked about this when you were in college. You wanted money. You didn't come from a family of money. And you wanted to feel secure and stable. And you did. I mean, by the age of 31, you had 30 million bucks. Here you are today. Forget about the money side, but you built a culturally relevant product, a product that there are plenty of people who have made a lot of money, but not all of them have had a cultural impact where people are actually, their lives are affected by the thing that you made, right? And that happened. It's changed the way people consume media and content. Do you think that your path to success is because of your hard work and your intelligence and the grinder, do you think more of it has to do with getting lucky and having lucky breaks, meeting read hastings or the fact that Netflix didn't make the box and spun it out, or I don't know, how much do you think lucky? played a factor in how much do you think just your hard work played a factor? It's obviously a combination, right? Like it's a combination of I'm I think some of the key characteristics to at least the way I've been successful are passion like being very like I'm I love technical stuff and it turns out technical stuff can make you a lot of money. So you know having an interest in that being good at it but I don't really know why I'm good at it growing up with a culture that valued hard work and you know being persistent and and where the luck comes in is just how long it takes I think and maybe the timing a little bit. So you know I didn't I didn't just happen to be basing I sent them an email and I tried to figure out myself introduced them for example. So you had to make the luck happen? Yeah I think so. That's Anthony Wood the founder and CEO of Roku. By the way that new Roku original film that Anthony was talking about for sure they're most ambitious one today it's called Weird and it's a fake biopic about the life of Weird Al Yank. I think it's absolutely hilarious and if you want to find out more about the making of the film and how Weird Al conceived of the idea you can hear my brand new interview with Weird Al on my other show it's called The Great Creators and it's available wherever you get your podcast. Hey thanks so much for listening to the show this week. If you enjoyed it please do spread the word tell someone about how I built this or post about it on social media. If you want to contact the team our email address is [email protected]. If you want to follow us on Twitter our account is at how I built this and mine is @guyRaz and on Instagram I'm @guy.Raz. This episode was produced by JC Howard with music composed by Ramteena Robloey. It was edited by Niva Grant with research help from Sam Paulson. Our production staff also includes Casey Herman, Elaine Coates, John Isabella, Liz Metzger, Catherine Cipher, Kerry Thompson, Alex Chung, Chris Messini, Carla Estevez and Josh Lash. Our intern is Susanna Brown. I'm Guy Raz and you've been listening to How I Built This.