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A man waving around money in Hollywood does not want long for attention: usually the talent comes to him. One Saturday morning early last year, Ted Sarandos went to the talent.

The chief content officer of Netflix is an atypical Hollywood player. He’s 47 gregarious polite well liked and shy about dropping names. But as Netflix has grown from a fledgling DVD-by-mail service into the largest streaming video platform on the planet Sarandos has become the single largest buyer of movies and TV series in Hollywood. What brought him to the office of David Fincher last March was a desire to start making his own programming from scratch.

After two Academy Award nominations for best director Fincher was shopping a television project a political thriller about a conspiratorial congressman. With Kevin Spacey playing the lead it was the kind of high-gloss Emmy-shoo-in series that viewers expect to find on HBO. Sarandos wanted it to premiere on Netflix.

He knew Fincher was likely to greet him with skepticism Netflix had zero experience in TV development and even the companies that did fail at launching shows all the time. But Sarandos also had money and more important, an appetite for risk. He gave Finchers proposed House of Cards an unheard-of commitment two full seasons before a single frame had been shot at a rumored price tag of $100 million.The show came on at four oclock