Hastings: Managing creative teams like semiconductor yield kills innovation
Reed Hastings · a16z Podcast | Tech and Entertainment in the 'Era of Mass Customization' · Jan 2, 2019 · at 4:26
Reed Hastings, co-founder and CEO of Netflix, reflects on management mistakes made at his previous company, Pure Software.
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“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 wanted to make sure that mistake didn't happen again, so we treated it like managing semiconductor yield, When in fact, in a creative process, that doesn't work very well, and so it got less and less innovative, and that was the great scar, which is it got less fun to work at.”
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