Netflix CEO Reed Hastings critiques Intel co-founder Andy Grove's famous management dictum during a discussion on competitive strategy with Marc Andreessen.
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.”
Disclosure
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.”
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…”