Hastings: House of Cards and Orange Is the New Black proved original content model
Reed Hastings · a16z Podcast | Tech and Entertainment in the 'Era of Mass Customization' · Jan 2, 2019 · at 19:29
Reed Hastings, co-founder and CEO of Netflix, explains to Marc Andreessen which specific milestones validated that Netflix could consistently produce hit original programming.
0:00 / 0:38exact quote · 38.0s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Yeah, the first weekend, well, it was all the press leading up to House of Cards, and then the first weekend, and then there was the White House Correspondent Center that year spoofed it, and we had clearly hit a meme that we thought, wow, if we can do more of this, and then when we did Orange is the New Black about three months later, then it wasn't a one-shot lucky thing. It was the pair of those that proved that, you know, there would be more, and then whether it's Narcos or The Crown, you know, last week, you know, there's a whole series of these major shows, you know, or Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, you know, finding these incredible franchises that we can co-develop with Marvel.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Reed Hastings
Hastings: Andy Grove's 'only the paranoid survive' maxim breeds delusion and distraction
“Only the paranoid survive. That was Andy Grove's quote. And the problem with that is it over, it encodes the truth in a way, but it oversimplifies, because the paranoid are delusional. They see crazy things all the time, ok? And business isn't that easy. You d…”
Hastings: Linear TV will disappear completely in 10 to 20 years
“Linear TV, 1020 years from now, will disappear. It will be, once in a while, you'll see it in a hotel, like where you see a fixed-line phone, but other than that, you know, you're not gonna see it, and everyone around the world will be doing internet video as …”
Hastings: Managing creative teams like semiconductor yield kills innovation
“You know, at Pure, I was a product guy, and I didn't think much about management, and it didn't turn out very well, so as the company grew, it got more bureaucratic we were obsessed with putting processes in place, because every time there was a mistake, we wa…”
Hastings: Netflix will operate with fewer rules as it grows
“And so that's when I vowed that in starting another company, that at least we wouldn't make that mistake. That as we grew, we would try to have less rules, not more rules.”
Hastings: Software tools companies get acquired; media companies scale independently
“So that company, Pure, was a software tools company. They always get acquired. Media companies can grow to be quite large and independent.”
Hastings: Netflix kicked DVD executives out of management meetings to focus on streaming
“We were hybridizing it with streaming, and we were getting more streaming attention and executives, but the discussion was still a lot around DVDs, and then we realized that we had to kick out the DVD executives of the main management meeting.”