Reed Hastings

Wilmot Reed Hastings Jr. (born October 8, 1960) is an American billionaire businessman.

He is the co-founder, and executive chairman of Netflix, Inc. and currently sits on a number of boards and non-profit organizations.

A former member of the California State Board of Education, Hastings is an advocate for education reform through charter schools.

Hastings was born in Boston, Massachusetts.

His father Wilmot Reed Hastings Sr. was an attorney for the Department of Health, Education and Welfare in the Nixon administration, and his mother Joan Amory Loomis was a debutante from a Boston Brahmin family who was repulsed by the world of high society and taught her children to disdain it.

His maternal great-grandfather was Alfred Lee Loomis.

Hastings attended Buckingham Browne & Nichols School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and sold vacuum cleaners door-to-door in a gap year before entering college.

He joined the Marine Corps officer training through their Platoon Leader Class, and spent college summers in the Marines, including a stint at the Officer Candidate School boot camp at Marine Corps Base Quantico, Virginia in the summer of 1981.

He did not complete the training and never commissioned into the Marine Corps—choosing instead to pursue service in the Peace Corps “out of a combination of service and adventure”.

In 1983, he graduated from Bowdoin College with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Mathematics, which he found "beautiful and engaging".

He went to teach math at a high school of around 800 students in rural northwest Swaziland from 1983 to 1985 after college.

He credits part of his entrepreneurial spirit to his time in the Peace Corps, remarking that, “Once you have hitchhiked across Africa with ten bucks in your pocket, starting a business doesn't seem too intimidating”.

After returning from the Peace Corps, Hastings went on to attend Stanford University after being rejected from his first choice MIT, graduating in 1988 with a Master's Degree in Computer Science.

Hastings' first job was at Adaptive Technology, where he created a tool for debugging software.

He met Audrey MacLean in 1990 when she was CEO at Adaptive Corp. In 2007, Hastings told CNN, "From her, I learned the value of focus. I learned it is better to do one product well than two products in a mediocre way."

Hastings left Adaptive Technology in 1991 to lay the foundation to his first company, Pure Software, which produced products to troubleshoot software.

The company's growth proved challenging for Hastings, as he lacked managerial experience.

He stated he had trouble managing with a rapid headcount growth.

His engineering background didn't prepare him for the challenges of being a CEO, and he asked his board to replace him, stating he was losing confidence.

The board refused, and Hastings says he learned to be a businessman.

Pure Software was taken public by Morgan Stanley in 1995.

In 1996, Pure Software announced a merger with Atria Software.

The merger integrated Pure Software's programs for detecting bugs in software with Atria's tools to manage development of complex software.

The Wall Street Journal reported that there were problems integrating the sales forces of Pure Software and Atria after the head salesmen for both Pure and Atria left following the merger.

In 1997, the combined company, Pure Atria, was acquired by Rational Software, which triggered a 42% drop in both companies' stocks after the deal was announced.

Hastings was appointed Chief Technical Officer of the combined companies and left soon after the acquisition.

After Pure Software, Hastings spent two years thinking about how to avoid similar problems at his next startup.

In 1997, Hastings and former Pure Software employee Marc Randolph co-founded Netflix, offering flat rate movie rental-by-mail to customers in the US by combining two emerging technologies; DVDs, which were much easier to send as mail than VHS-cassettes, and a website from which to order them, instead of a paper catalogue.

Headquartered in Los Gatos, California, Netflix has amassed a collection of 100,000 titles and more than 100 million subscribers.

Hastings had the idea for Netflix after he left Pure Software.

"I had a big late fee for Apollo 13. It was six weeks late and I owed the video store $40. I had misplaced the cassette. It was all my fault. I didn't want to tell my wife about it. And I said to myself, ‘I'm going to compromise the integrity of my marriage over a late fee?’ Later, on my way to the gym, I realized they had a much better business model. You could pay $30 or $40 a month and work out as little or as much as you wanted."

Hastings said that when he founded Netflix, he had no idea whether customers would use the service.

He is a proponent of Internet television and sees it as the future.

He credits YouTube for his shift in strategy for developing a video streaming service.

Netflix launched a service in 2007 to stream movies and television shows to computers.

As Netflix grew, the company was noticed for its innovative management practices—the results of the culture Hastings was exploring—called “Freedom and Responsibility.” Netflix reportedly offers mediocre employees large severance packages to ensure that employees are consistently working to further the company's innovative environment.

Netflix has eliminated sick and vacation time for employees, and instead allows them to manage their time off individually.

Hastings created an internal culture guide for Netflix by meeting with employees to discuss the company's culture and employees' hypotheses about it.

In August 2009, Hastings posted this internal culture guide publicly online, and it eventually became a pre-employment screening tool that dissuaded incompatible people from applying.

In September 2020, Hastings and Erin Meyer co-authored a book on Netflix's culture and management principles with interviews from current and former employees.