A Conversation with Dunkin’ Executive Chairman Nigel Travis: Part 3

Before Nigel Travis took on his current role as Executive Chairman of Dunkin’ or worked as the President and CEO of Papa John’s, he worked for another established brand — Blockbuster. Travis was with Blockbuster from 1994 to 2004, where he worked his way through the ranks, ultimately becoming its President and COO.

From the dot-com boom and bust to the creation of the DVD on demand industry, Travis witnessed Blockbuster go through a lot of changes. And while the year he left was the highest revenue year for the company on record, there’s one opportunity that the company missed at the time — acquiring Netflix.

He said, “Netflix came along with their DVD-by-mail approach, and again, it seems weird sitting here in 2018 to go back to the early 2000s where the internet had gone through its boom and bust phase but was still nowhere near as sophisticated as we all expect now. And we saw [Netflix] come, we recognized they were successful in San Francisco then Austin, and we probably regarded it too much as a regional player. We had the opportunity to buy the company for $50 million. I think if you look up Netflix now — Netflix right now is worth, I think, about $84 billion.”