Hi, it's Bob Safian. You've been hearing me as the host of rapid response in this feed for a few years now,

with short newsy interviews alongside the deeper dives of Masters of Scale. Well, I'm excited to share that rapid response is expanding into its own feed.

We'll be putting out shows twice a week, focusing on the urgent issues that business leaders are dealing with in real time.

So search for rapid response in your podcast player

and subscribe to make sure you get all our episodes.

I'll see you on the other side.

The horse was the dominant form of human transportation for about 5,000 years.

Domesticated Kazakhstan 3,000 BC.

That's Reed Hastings, the founder and CEO of Netflix. You might think he's giving an elevator pitch for a Netflix original, like Marco Polo, but without the blind Taoist monk.

He's actually revealing the foundational strategy that drove the company's success.

He starts a story on the plains of Kazakhstan and moves pretty quickly from there.

The horse was the common form of human transportation for about 5,000 years.

Domesticated Kazakhstan 3,000 BC.

So for 5,000 years, if you wanted to make a contribution of personal transportation, it was a better saddle, better

breeding, better hooves.

And then in one generation from 1900 and 1930, everything changed with internal combustion engines.

What Reed Hastings understands, with such clarity

is that technological shifts don't always

happen incrementally.

Sometimes they burst over your head like a

thunderclow and wipe away habits that have lasted thousands of years. And the

trick is to realize those are pretty rare. So sometimes innovation happens fast and that's the kind of change

...