Reed Hastings, co-founder and CEO of Netflix, describes how the company managed internal friction while shifting focus from the profitable DVD business to streaming.
Insight
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…”
Prediction Open · timeframe Feb 2037
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 …”
Insight
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…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
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.”
Assertion Partly supported
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.”
Insight
Hastings: Netflix went vertical because legacy studios would stop licensing content
“By 2011, 20 12, we were realizing that many of the firms that we were buying from were eventually going to want to run their own streaming service, and that we had, we did not have a reliable supply, and so there's a bit of the burn your boats Cortez model, wh…”