Netflix’s Reed Hastings: Why culture matters
Masters of Scale
WaitWhat
4.6 • 4.4K Ratings
🗓️ 18 January 2023
⏱️ 41 minutes
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Summary
As Reed Hastings steps down from his co-CEO role at Netflix, we return to the leadership lessons he shared in his original Masters of Scale episode. This episode is all about how you need a strong culture to build a company that will scale beyond the early start-up days. And strong company cultures only emerge when every employee feels they own the culture from day 1. Here's how Reed Hastings and his team at Netflix did it – and made their culture deck famous in the process. Cameo appearances: Jeff Weiner (LinkedIn), Aneel Bhusri (Workday), Margaret Heffernan (entrepreneur), Tristan Walker (Walker & Co.), Mariam Naficy (Minted).
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Is your AI built for everyone, or is it built to work with your businesses' data? |
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| 0:26.5 | The horse was the dominant form of human transportation for about 5,000 years. |
| 0:33.5 | Domesticated Kazakhstan, 3,000 BC. |
| 0:39.5 | That's Reed Hastings, the founder and CEO of Netflix. |
| 0:42.7 | You might think he's giving an elevator pitch for a Netflix original, |
| 0:45.9 | like Marco Polo, but without the blind Taoist monk. |
| 0:49.6 | He's actually revealing the foundational strategy that drove the company's success. |
| 0:54.1 | He starts a story on the plains of Kazakhstan and moves pretty quickly from there. He's actually revealing the foundational strategy that drove the company's success. |
| 0:54.2 | He starts a story on the planes of Kazakhstan and moves pretty quickly from there. |
| 0:59.4 | The horse was the dominant form of human transportation for about 5,000 years. |
| 1:04.3 | Domesticated Kazakhstan, 3,000 BC. |
| 1:07.1 | So for 5,000 years, if you wanted to make a contribution of personal transportation, it was a better saddle, better breeding, better hooves. |
| 1:14.6 | And then in one generation from 1900 and 1930, everything changed with internal combustion engines. |
| 1:22.2 | What Reed Hastings understands with such clarity is that technological shifts don't always happen incrementally. |
| 1:30.2 | Sometimes they burst over your head like a thundercloud and wipe away habits that have lasted |
| 1:35.8 | thousands of years. And the trick is to realize those are pretty rare. So sometimes innovation |
| 1:40.8 | happens fast. And that's the kind of change we typically aim for in Silicon Valley. But more often, innovation happens fast. And that's the kind of change we typically aim for in Silicon Valley. |
| 1:45.9 | But more often, innovation happens slowly. And Reed Hastings knew early on that Netflix needed |
| 1:51.6 | both kinds of innovation. They started by sending DVDs in the mail and evolved into a streaming |
... |
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