'Every successful company rides the growth wave until it crests and falls. The secret is to create the next growth wave before the first one collapses.' — Gibson Biddle.
Biddle contrasts Netflix, which sequenced four growth waves (DVD-by-mail → streaming → international → originals, see GLEE Model (Get Big, Lead, Expand)), against Yahoo, cited as a company that rode search to prominence and never built a second wave once search commoditized.
The mechanism isn't just foresight — it's active reallocation of investment while the current wave is still working. Biddle gives Netflix's own numbers as evidence of the shift in progress: around 2010, investment split roughly 20% DVD-by-mail / 30% streaming / 40% international / 10% originals; by the time of the 2021 talk it had moved to roughly 5% DVD / 30% streaming / 30% international / 30% originals / 5% speculative experimentation. The declining-wave business (DVD) is deliberately starved in favor of the next one well before it stops being profitable.
This only works with a culture willing to defund a business that still works — see Iconoclast Culture for Stage Transitions — and a strategy patient enough to fund a bet years before it pays off, e.g. Placing Bets (Strategy-as-Bets Framing) on personalization.
Biddle attributes the growth-wave concept itself to a Yahoo financial analyst who described it to him directly.
He closes his talk on patience as the practical cost of this principle: Netflix's roughly $225B market capitalization (at the time of the March 2021 talk) was the result of about 20 years of experimentation, starting from a company once worth 'next to zero.' Successive waves compound into large value only over long, patient horizons — building the next wave before the current one crests (GLEE Model (Get Big, Lead, Expand), Multi-Stage Rocket / Capsule Metaphor for Durable Value) is a decades-long discipline, not a quarterly one.
Biddle uses the 'S-curve' framing to distinguish a genuine next growth wave from a mere 'enhancer' of the current one: he argues Netflix advertising was an enhancer of the existing subscription business, not a new growth vision, while games is the bet Netflix hopes will be the next real S-curve. He expects games, if it works, to take 5-8 years to mature into a growth driver — comparable to how long original content took to become one. See also 'Walk' vs. 'Run' Framing (Staged Bet Rollout) for how such bets are staged, and Netflix Advertising's Context-Dependent Reversals for the fuller history of the advertising decision.
Из тем: Netflix, Consumer Science, and Strategy Storytelling