Good morning. Thirteen years ago this week, Netflix rebranded its movies-by-mail service Qwikster.
Then-CEO Reed Hastings saw the streaming revolution coming and shoved his Netflix-branded chips into the pile. Three weeks later he conceded that splitting the streaming and physical media businesses was too, well, hasty and backtracked.
It all worked out: Netflix earnings today are 10X what they were then.
The company still owns the Qwikster.com domain, by the way. As the maxim goes: Every man has a price. —Andrew Nusca
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