[2] A serial entrepreneur who is said to have helped found the U.S. edition of Macworld magazine and the computer mail-order businesses MacWarehouse and MicroWarehouse,[3] Randolph now serves on the boards of Looker Data Sciences and Chubbies Shorts.

Randolph's fascination with using computer software to track customers' buying behavior would ultimately inform his decision to create a user interface at Netflix that doubled as a market research platform.

[11] He further developed his theories about using direct mail to influence and retain customers doing circulation work while helping found the U.S. version of MacUser magazine in 1984.

While co-founding computer mail-order firms MacWarehouse and MicroWarehouse with Peter Godfrey and his partners about a year later, Randolph made the connection between overnight delivery and improved customer retention.

[12][13] Randolph spent the dawn of the Internet age building direct-to-consumer marketing operations at software giant Borland International starting in 1988.

He left Borland in 1995 for a series of short stints at Silicon Valley start-ups, including heading marketing at desktop scanner maker Visioneer, and then as a member of the founding team of Integrity QA, a developer of automated software testing products.

[16] In late 1996, Pure Atria announced that Rational Software would acquire it in an $850 million stock swap in what was then the richest merger in Silicon Valley history.

[17] Hastings and Randolph commuted together between their homes in Santa Cruz, California, into Silicon Valley for about four months while the Rational merger was finalized, and on these drives, the idea for Netflix was born.

[22] Randolph named the company, designed its initial user interface and branding and acted as chief executive for the first year while Hastings attended Stanford University graduate school.

The data generated by these market tests led the team to three concepts that they combined in 1999 to create Netflix's successful business model: a subscription-based service with no due dates or late fees and unlimited access to content, a "Queue" that allowed subscribers to specify the order in which DVDs should be mailed to them, and a serialized delivery system that automatically mailed out a DVD as soon as the previous rental was returned.