The Chief Executive Officer of Netflix, Reed Hastings, is known for his astute business sense and for revolutionizing how the world consumes entertainment. Currently, he owns a 1% share in Netflix, which went public in 2022.
After graduating from Stanford, he founded a software company that he later sold for profit in 1997. He then thought of building a subscription-based movie rental service after incurring a large late fee for a video cassette he had rented.
Who is CEO of Netflix?
At the time DVDs were new to the market, but Hastings felt that they would be ideal for a rental movie business. He and his partner Marc Rudolph founded Netflix in August 1997, offering movies on rent that were mailed across the country. Customers could place their orders from a website instead of a paper catalog for a fixed monthly fee. Once they returned a DVD, the next movie on their list was automatically mailed to them.
As the founder of Netflix, Reed Hastings helped the company grow to 100 million customers and acquired over 100,000 titles in a short time. He expanded the company with movie studio partnerships and marketing campaigns. By 2007, he had expanded to offering TV shows and movies via streaming services. A split of the DVD and streaming service businesses in 2011 resulted in massive losses and the company worked quickly to rectify their error.
Hastings’ Netflix was careful to avoid the pitfalls he saw other companies make. He kept this in mind while developing Netflix’s culture – to foster innovation, which will help them keep their head in the game.
Netflix Strategic Plan
Netflix Reed Hastings wanted to nurture a company where boldness and innovation went hand in hand. In his book, coauthored by Erin Meyer, No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention, Netflix strategic plan is mentioned in detail. In an interview in 2018, Hastings spoke about delegating responsibility and how the company moved from being process-obsessed to a transparent business that trusted its employees implicitly.
From allowing employees to set their own vacation time to encouraging candid feedback irrespective of one’s designation, Netflix Reed Hastings wanted to build a company that could tackle market changes head on. He once admitted that the company invested heavily in algorithms to channel the right content to the right people. Another popular Netflix strategic plan is to hire top talent and pay them more than the industry standard. Netflix encourages people to have conversations about pay and even shows its financials to managers before earnings calls. These practices foster a higher sense of trust and ownership and helped the company accelerate its growth.
Hastings Netflix also encourages accountability and allows employees to make mistakes. You are not allowed to gloss over or fired for your mistakes, rather you must conduct a comprehensive assessment of what went wrong and share your learnings with your colleagues. In his book, Netflix Reed Hastings shares that allowing people to be unafraid of making mistakes helps everyone win. He states, “You win because people learn they can trust you to tell the truth and to take responsibility for your actions. The team wins because it learns from the lessons that came out of the project. And the company wins because everyone sees clearly that failed bets are an inherent part of an innovative success wheel.”
As of February 2022, Netflix commands a market share of nearly 45.4%.
So, at the end of the day the question who is the CEO of Netflix has a simple answer. He is a visionary with a net worth of over $2.7 billion, is passionate about developing the education system, and building a company culture that outlasts the leaders.
