Our CFO, Barry McCarthy, slowed his BMW to a crawl as he made the turn into Santa Barbara Airport. In the distance, a faint glow on the horizon was teasing us that it was close to dawn, but in front of us, the road was almost invisible, dark and shaded by the overhanging oak trees. I’d been to the Santa Barbara Airport dozens of times, but I’d never been here.

“That way,” pointed Reed Hastings, my business partner, from the front passenger seat, stretching a finger toward an even darker driveway off the main road. We pulled into a parking lot in front of a low wooden building. Flower boxes were in the windows. The roof was shingled. It looked residential, vaguely New England—less like an airport facility than a forgotten cottage. Just beyond it was an ornate wrought iron fence. Through the bars I could see the blinking wing lights of a small plane, parked on the runway.

Barry pulled up to a gate. Even in the pre-TSA era, it was clear that this was one of those entrances you needed some kind of authority to enter—and that in this case, “authority” translated to “money.” Luckily we’d wired it earlier that morning. Barry rolled down his window and pushed a red button on the call box.

“Tail number?” a scratchy voice croaked.

“What’s a tail number?” I whispered to Reed. He turned his head and gave me a look, the same one I often found myself giving my kids at any restaurant fancier than McDonald’s. The look that meant: I can’t take you anywhere.

The password given, the gate silently opened. As we passed through onto the tarmac, I saw the gate sliding noiselessly back into place behind us. No going back now, I thought to myself.

Less than 12 hours earlier, Barry, Reed, and I had retreated to a picnic table near one of the swimming pools at Alisal Ranch in middle of nowhere California—the site of Netflix’s first-ever corporate retreat. Barry had heard back from his contacts at Blockbuster, the brick-and-mortar Goliath to our David. They wanted to meet at their Dallas headquarters. “Not just tomorrow,” Barry was complaining. “That would have been bad enough. But 11:30 tomorrow? They want us there at 11:30 in the goddamn morning? Impossible.”

Barry picked up his mechanical pencil with one hand, and used the fist of the other to scrub a clean spot on the wood table. “First,” he said, scribbling a number right into the wood grain, “Dallas is on central time, so that means 9:30 our time. Then it’s a three-and-a-half-hour flight from San Francisco—so probably about the same from Santa Barbara. Plus, if you add on enough time to get to the airport...” He paused, adding some figures. “You would have to leave here by 5 a.m. And I don’t even need to check to know there isn’t a nonstop from Santa Barbara at 5 in the morning. We’re screwed.”

“So we fly private,” Reed said, as if it were self-evident. “We take off at 5, land at 10:30, have a car waiting. We’ll be there right on time. Probably even have enough time to grab an espresso.”

“Reed,” Barry blurted out. “That’s gotta be at least 20,000 round trip.” He moved to write something again, then thought better of it. “And I don’t need to tell you that we don’t have that type of money.”

“Barry,” Reed said. “We’ve waited months to get this meeting. We’re on track to lose at least $50 million this year. Whether we pull this off or not, another 20 grand won’t make a difference.”