The current CEO of Netflix is 57-year-old Wilmot Reed Hastings. He was born on October 9, 1960, in Boston Massachusetts, and graduated from Bowdoin College. After that, he joined the Peace Corps and went to Swaziland to teach high school math. After returning from Swaziland in 1985, Hastings went to Stanford to obtain a master’s degree in computer science focusing on artificial intelligence. Hasting’s first job was at Adaptive Technology, where he stayed for a year before founding Pure Software, a company that created debugging programs for other software developers. Pure went public in 1995 and was acquired by Rational Software. In 1997, Hastings co-founded Netflix with Marc Randolph (Who is Reed Hastings?, 2017). Netflix originally provided movies via a mail-rental service, but now focuses primarily on providing content online, and also has recently moved towards providing original content. (Loudenback, 2015)
Hastings is well known for promoting a high performance corporate culture, and does not try to hide the fact that he rewards star performing employees and weeds out the underperformers. The extremely intense culture at Netflix also
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This infamous slide deck has been viewed more than 17 million times, and is revered by many start-ups as the pinnacle of high performance culture. The slide deck goes into depth about how Netflix hires “fully formed adults” who do not have to be micromanaged, produce results, and constantly strive to innovate. It discusses how one outstanding employee costs less than two adequate employees and can do just as much work, if not more (Hastings, 2009). Hastings believes this culture is necessary so that Netflix does not become too big and regulated, which would reduce innovation and adaptability, and prevent Netflix from attracting the top talents in the