“Incredible people don’t want to be micromanaged. We manage through setting context and letting people run.”
Reed HastingsEntrepreneur's Journey
Born in Boston in 1960 with humble beginnings, Reed Hastings has a journey of development, exploration, and multiple companies to his name. Having taken a gap year selling vacuum cleaners door to door before graduating from Bowdoin College, Reed brought a wide experience before starting his first company. Believing in the value of education, Reed is on the board of multiple charities and has personally pledged funds towards education initiatives in California.
While he is famous for Netflix, Reed started his tech career working as a tool debugger in Adaptive technology. He credits his then CEO, Audrey MacLean, for his value of focus. Moving on to start Pure Technology and staying with the company when it merged with Atria before venturing out with ex Pure Tech employee Marc Randolph to co-found Netflix.
Innovation brought by the entrepreneur:
Netflix has evolved from a DVD mail service to a streaming behemoth. Famously starting Netflix to avoid paying a late fee on a rented DVD, Reed has been investing close to 1% of the company’s revenue in download technology from the beginning. The launch of a streaming service was just the first step in ensuring a global name that is highly recognized. Netflix also was the first to make in-house content and was the first global roll-out across most of the world. Giving the choice of what to consume to the consumers, Netflix is now working on ‘Channel’ – an option for consumers to explore the wide range of content on Netflix, without having to choose.
Key Success Attributes
Featured Entrepreneurs
