you don't need to start a business,  you don't need to raise money,  

you just need to figure out a  way to quickly take your idea  

and collide it with some reality. The reason what's so interesting  

is probably the single most fundamental problem is what I call the failure to start.  

You have this idea and you love this idea, it's an amazing idea  

and the more you think about  it, the more amazing it seems.  

And of course, nestled safe and warm in your head,  

of course it's a good idea because there's no reality there.  

And there you're allowed to envision getting a hundred million downloads and imagine when  

everyone's using it how  powerful it's going to be.  

But of course, when you  actually try and make it real,  

all of a sudden, wham, you bump into reality and all those assumptions,  

well, they're wrong. How do people do that?  

Like if somebody has an idea right now,  

what would you advise them to do? How do they get out there  

and start battle testing this? Let me give you two specific examples.  

And I'll give you the quick one,  which is the Netflix example.  

Reed Hastings and I, my co-founder, were brainstorming ideas for businesses  

and we were not movie buffs, we had crazy ideas. We had ideas to do personalized dog food and  

custom shampoo and personal sporting  goods, all kinds of crazy stuff,  

and one of the ideas was this  idea to do video rental by mail.  

And at the time, video was on VHS cassettes, this is back in 1996/97,  

so that idea was a non-starter. And one day in the car,  

Reid mentioned he'd heard about  this technology called the DVD.  

It's thin, light and the idea popped into our heads that maybe 

we could make our video rental by  mail business work with a DVD,  

we could just mail it. So here's where  

you separate the entrepreneur from the dreamer. Rather than going, “what a great idea”,  

and rushing to the office and  working on the pitch deck  

or going home and writing the business plan or applying to be on Shark Tank or something,  

we said let's immediately try and  collide this idea with some reality.  

And in our case, we just turn the car around and drove back down to town where we lived  

to buy a DVD, but of course there weren't any,  

it was in test market. So we said, “well,  

close enough”, we bought a music CD and we just mailed it to Reed's house.  

And we found out in 24 hours  whether the fundamental premise  

of our idea would work. We collided it with reality  

within an hour of having the idea. But let me give you one more example,  

if we have a moment here. And just because people are going,  

“oh, that works if you have a  DVD, but it works for anything”.  

So I was working with a young woman and she had an interesting idea 

and her idea was to do  peer-to-peer clothing rental.  

She's saying, “I had this closet full of  clothes, I don't wear them that often,  

I'd kind of like to borrow my friend's clothes, I wonder if there was an app  

that lists everyone's clothes and we could borrow each other's clothes”.  

And then she was talking  to me about the thing that  

aspiring entrepreneurs do, how do I raise money?  

How do I find a technical co-founder? How do I build an app, blah,  

blah, blah, dreaming. And I said, “whoa, whoa, stop”.  

“Do you have a piece of paper?” And she goes, “Yes”.  

I go, “how about a sharpie?” She goes, “that too”.  

“And some tape?” I said, “write on a piece of paper”.  

“Want to borrow my clothes? – knock” And tape it to your dorm room door.  

And you're going to find out today whether your idea has any merit, 

because if nobody knocks, well,  you've learned something right there,  

but let's say they do knock and they let them in, you're going to find out about  

taste and about fit. Now, let's say they  

do find something they like and that fits, then you're going to find out a few days later  

how you feel about your favorite  blouse coming back stained,  

you're going to find out about  the cost of dry cleaning,  

you're going to find out so  much and you're going to do it  

with a sharpie and paper and tape. And you're going to do this for  

as long as it takes by hand to learn the  

fundamental premise, which is, is there a, “there”, there?  

And once you've done that, then it's easy to attract someone  

to help you with the technical aspects, it's easy to raise money,  

because then when someone  says, “what's your idea?”  

You're not saying, “imagine if you will”, you're saying, “look what I've discovered,  

look what I found out, look what I know”. And you can demonstrate your idea is a good one.  

And that's the trick, is you don't need to build an app,  

you don't need to start a business, you don't need to raise money,  

you just need to figure out a  way to quickly take your idea  

and collide it with some reality. And so what I'm trying to do is  

give people a whack on the head and go, stop thinking and start doing.  

The real brilliance by entrepreneurs today is not how good their ideas are,  

it's how clever they can  be about figuring out ways  

to test those ideas, to try them to, as I say, collide them with reality,  

that is what separates an  entrepreneur from a dreamer.