In a lifetime people have seen the rise and the decline of many businesses. Reed Hastings, born October 8, 1960, was a man with a goal in mind and some would say turned out to be very successful. Success is not always defined by wealth or fame, being happy with what’s been achieved and still being able to move on is enough. Hastings was a man born in Boston, Massachusetts, who studied mathematics and later graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1983. He served for the U.S. Marine Corps, but later switched to the Peace Corps where he taught math in Swaziland. Eventually Hasting returned to the U.S. and studied computer sciences in Stanford. There he managed to get a master’s degree. He became a software developer and founded his first business, Pure Software, in 1991. This business aimed to solve a problem pertaining to said software, “...little attention was paid to the processing, …show more content…
Although his time with this company was very short lived as he sold it “for a substantial profit” . The decline of one idea though, lead to the rise of another. In 1997, Hastings formed an idea of a subscription-based movie rental service. One may ask why this idea was born and some would give you a long well thought out answer but for Hastings it was simple, “ he incurred a large late fee when he failed to return a store-rented video cassette.” . This idea would later transform into the online streaming company we now know as Netflix. As most businesses it had a small start in California, when DVDs were just starting to become popular. Hasting decided it would be a good idea to send these DVDs through mail, customers at first only being allowed to keep the DVD for a seven day period. Later this restriction was changed as they could get an unlimited amount of movies for a set fee paid every month. They were promoted widely in companies like Best