The entrepreneurship case study

The entrepreneurship case study

The entrepreneur in this case study is Evan Williams. Evan Williams is an internet entrepreneur and one of the co-founders of Twitter. He is currently a board member of Twitter. He worked at Google before exiting to channel his entrepreneurship abilities to Odeo.

Evan Williams was a major investor in Odeo, which is a podcasting platform founded by Noah Glass. When Evan joined the Odeo team, he was given the ‘founder’ title because he invested a substantial percentage of the funds needed for the business. Odeo was created with the vision to become the foremost podcasting website in the world. It was supposed to be the go-to platform for everything related to forecasting with features like a download client for downloading podcasts, a massive directory for discovering podcasts, podcast creation software, syndicated episodes, partnerships with major content publishers, playlist creation, channel creation, personalized recommendations and more.

After Evan Williams joined Odeo, two other people that will go on to found Twitter joined the Odeo team. Odeo launched in 2005 but was sold to Sonic Mountain in 2006. A major reason for the sales of Odeo was the fact that Apple launched a podcast section on iTunes. Odeo existed for a short while before the website finally went down.

Reasons Why Odeo Failed

1. Failure to diversify as fast as possible: If Odeo had other features to offer users beyond podcasting, it wouldn’t have failed so early. The launch of the iTunes podcast section wouldn’t have affected Odeo.
2. Not building enough features for podcast creators: Odeo’s podcast recording tools were too basic. Evan Williams and other company founders weren’t podcasters, so they didn’t understand what their users wanted.
3. Failure to adjust fast: Odeo did not have fast short-term plans that could deal with the growing threat of Apple iTunes. They thought that their long-term comprehensive strategy would see them through, but it did not. If a business can’t survive in the short-run, its long-term strategies are useless.
4. It raised too much money too early in the business: Evan Williams initially invested $70,000 in Odeo. When the startup became a little more popular, he invested another $100,000. When more than $1,000,000 in angel funding had been invested in the business through angel funding, the business received a term sheet of over three times their angel round valuation from Charles River Ventures.          

Later, Odeo was redesigned, and newer technologies were added. The site retargeted those that listened to podcasts on the web, and the organizational structure was reshuffled. The company right-sized by dropping some employees, and it began to focus on enterprise video instead of consumers. In 2017, Odeo’s domain expired and was sold.

Evan Williams took some of the Odeo founding team and investors and reformed a new company called Obvious Corp. This new company developed Twitter, Blogger, Medium and other products. Evan Williams is now a billionaire with a net worth of almost $2 billion. Evan Williams’s story is one of hard work, humility, simplicity, focus and honesty. Evan Williams is a model entrepreneur that startup founders should look up to, especially those in the internet domain.

Entrepreneur Name: Reed Hastings

Company Name: Netflix

The entrepreneur in this case study is Reed Hastings. He is the founder of Netflix. Netflix is the largest movie and tv show streaming platform in the world. Netflix has over 167 million paid memberships worldwide. On Netflix, users can access a variety of anime, movies, documentaries, TV series, comedy specials, and more. Users can watch these content on any internet-connected device any time they like without any commercial. Users can binge-watch full seasons of TV shows all day if they wanted to.

Netflix was founded in 1997 by Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph. At first, the company started with the pre-rental business model before switching to the subscription business model in 1999. With the subscription business model, subscribers can have unlimited rentals with no shipping fee, due date and extra charge.

Reed Hastings came up with the Netflix idea after he was forced to pay $40 in late fees after returning a rented VHS movie late. DVDs were new, and Hastings decided to take advantage of the market by starting a DVD rental business instead of the VHS rentals that were common back then. Hastings recognized that DVD was the future and he sought to ban late rental fees. He took the risk of starting a DVD rental business that will change the way content was being consumed. With the subscription model that Netflix introduced, subscribers could rent as many movies as they wanted every month for $16 a month. But you could only keep 4 DVDs with you at once.

The subscription model fetched Netflix a lot of money and they started getting 10,000 daily orders with revenues of $5 million. With the growth of the internet, Netflix started an internet streaming platform as they recognized that DVD rentals might become a thing of the past. By 2010, the Netflix streaming platform had become the largest source of internet traffic. In 2011, Netflix produced their first original series, ‘House of Cards.’ House of Cards gained a large following and it became a popular series and it helped to generated a lot of revenue for Netflix. Netflix went on to produce several other original series like Orange is The New Black, Stranger Things, Mindhunter and more. They also started producing original movies too with some of their movies getting nominated for the Academy Awards, also known as the Oscars. By 2017, Netflix had over 100 million subscribers with a market capitalization of $100 billion by 2018.

Reed Hastings and his co-founder Marc Randolph are bold, creative people that are not afraid to take new steps. They changed the way content is media content is consumed all over the world. They took the risk of selling their first business and started Netflix when no one else was into DVD rentals. They also took the risk of starting video streaming. They pushed on and influenced the public with their revolutionary ideas. They lost money at various periods, and they were deterred by various challenges, but they held on. Thanks to them, people can now enjoy movies and tv shows conveniently anywhere in the world.