YouSaid · the spoken record

Reed Hastings

lines on the record: 96
first: 2026-02-09
most recent: 2026-02-09
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“There was a lot of hard work for 25 years. I was always trying to be the first one up in the morning, the first one reading the metrics. And, you know, it was a very wonderful intensive time. So I would say we made the best of what the luck offered. And it might not have worked out, like you said. And if it hadn't, I'd like to think we would feel like I would feel like the same person and that the success of Netflix hasn't changed me. That's probably a little bit naive, but I think it's fundamentally true that you can't underestimate the role the luck plays.”
2026-02-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Netflix: Reed Hastings. “We’re Not a Family.” The Provocative Idea That Helped Build a Streaming Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I wouldn't put them opposed to each other. So we got lucky at a number of places. We talked about the LVMH 50 million investment. It could have easily been bankrupt. We got lucky the DVD came along and lots of people worked on that. And then it won. We got lucky that a lot of competitors did or didn't do certain things.”
2026-02-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Netflix: Reed Hastings. “We’re Not a Family.” The Provocative Idea That Helped Build a Streaming Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ski Mountain with season passes and etc. The public ski resort's good, but it's not an exciting business. It's a hard, you know, it's like running a restaurant or something. The private side is much higher revenue, much more exciting. And so I think of it. And for me, this is totally different than running Netflix. But, you know, it has a lot of interesting puzzles.”
2026-02-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Netflix: Reed Hastings. “We’re Not a Family.” The Provocative Idea That Helped Build a Streaming Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We had a home there, so we were skiers there, but we were one acre customers. And I had noticed that the resort was not very successful. And so I started to get to know that spring the owners to see where I might be able to help. And in April, one of the two owners sold to me. And in November, the other one did. And so for me, it's a passion play of creating a real estate place of beauty. Real estate's a different skill set. You know, you build a neighborhood, you put in roads and sewers, and then you try to sell the lots. And that's the basic play. And this year we had a big success and we sold out. So, you know, think of it as a big resort like Heavenly in Tahoe for only $650 and their guests. And then we're also running the public resort, which is a normal public.”
2026-02-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Netflix: Reed Hastings. “We’re Not a Family.” The Provocative Idea That Helped Build a Streaming Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I'm super excited that my replacement CEOs, Greg and Ted, which have been running the business for two and a half years, they've tripled the stock since I left. So they've been fantastically successful. And I'm thrilled to be supporting them in this next chapter in acquiring Warner Brothers. But that's about all I can say about it as a board member.”
2026-02-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Netflix: Reed Hastings. “We’re Not a Family.” The Provocative Idea That Helped Build a Streaming Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And there's something about watching humans compete that makes it interesting. I think we humans care about what other humans do, and that kind of puts some limits. And that's why we have anti-steroid rules, because we don't want to, you know, change the competition too much. And I think in the same way, films will have human actors, not because it can't be something else, but because other humans won't be that interested. So think of it as the Booker Prize is a big prize for the best novel of the year. You know, the year that AI wins the Booker Prize, then it's starting to really change the entertainment business. But up until then, it's kind of tactical. About what's on screen.”
2026-02-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Netflix: Reed Hastings. “We’re Not a Family.” The Provocative Idea That Helped Build a Streaming Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Adults could watch it two or three times, kind of like Shrek was when we were growing up. And so it's our first big animated hit after, you know, maybe 40 different animated movies. We finally had a monster hit. So it's an artistic execution business. And, you know, if we can improve those ratios to from one in 40 to 1 in 20 to 1 in 10 to 1 in 5, we'll be a monster. But it's hard.”
2026-02-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Netflix: Reed Hastings. “We’re Not a Family.” The Provocative Idea That Helped Build a Streaming Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, you're right that it's a market structure of individual subscriptions that's very fluid. And so competing for it is having the best content. So this summer we had an amazing movie K-pop Demon Hunters that for eight-year-olds became like the stunning thing, you know.”
2026-02-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Netflix: Reed Hastings. “We’re Not a Family.” The Provocative Idea That Helped Build a Streaming Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's the incredibly broad selection, you know, podcasts, everything that's on YouTube is very popular. So we're definitely a surprisingly small player in the US and around the world, again, being less than 10% of television viewing and having YouTube be the past us and be the fastest growing. So we're, you know, again, trying to win more share by having better and better programming.”
2026-02-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Netflix: Reed Hastings. “We’re Not a Family.” The Provocative Idea That Helped Build a Streaming Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's all, in other words, the television viewing is television viewing. You pick up your remote control and you choose where you're going. That's the moment of truth that we're battling for. And do you choose Netflix or do you choose YouTube? And I would say the big challenger is YouTube because they have doubled in the last four years. Their share of television viewing somewhat in the US, but dramatically around the world. You know, people call it user generated, but it's not really users. It's kind of semi-pro. It's people putting all kinds of different content on. There's a little bit of user gen 2, but.”
2026-02-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Netflix: Reed Hastings. “We’re Not a Family.” The Provocative Idea That Helped Build a Streaming Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, if you look today at TV viewing in the United States as an example, Disney's ahead of us, YouTube, this is combining linear and on demand. YouTube's ahead of us. They're the largest. Disney's ahead of us, even Paramount's ahead of us because they all have. So we still have a long way to go. We're less than 10 of US television watching.”
2026-02-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Netflix: Reed Hastings. “We’re Not a Family.” The Provocative Idea That Helped Build a Streaming Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Successful, you know, our first market was Canada in 2010. And that didn't have DVDs, right? So that was streaming only. And that's part of what gave us confidence that streaming only could work. Then we did Latin America and then country by country in Europe. And then in 2016, we did the whole world ex-China. And we gained increasing confidence year by year because the markets that we had gone into early continued to grow and eventually became profitable.”
2026-02-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Netflix: Reed Hastings. “We’re Not a Family.” The Provocative Idea That Helped Build a Streaming Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What we did in original content was very well executed, but it was conventional wisdom that that's what we needed to do. So it wasn't that radical. It was just you got to do it well. The thing that was radical is being direct to consumer around the world. So every other network, let's take HBO as an example, but FX the same. They built shows for the US market. They had their own distribution here. And then they sold the shows off to the BBC or Canal Plus or different networks in different countries. They were not direct to consumer outside of the US. And we were the first to say, hey, with the internet, we can be direct to consumer in India, in Japan, in South Africa, in Brazil, in France. And this was seen as ludicrous in the industry that we would never be able to break in, that we would never get”
2026-02-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Netflix: Reed Hastings. “We’re Not a Family.” The Provocative Idea That Helped Build a Streaming Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, by the time I did that, which was, I'm going to guess 2020, we'd been working together for 20 years. So we grew up together. You know, we are both quite young in doing Netflix. At every place in the growth, we learned more and relied on each other. So it was a pretty easy, non-traumatic thing that only changed the business slightly.”
2026-02-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Netflix: Reed Hastings. “We’re Not a Family.” The Provocative Idea That Helped Build a Streaming Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't, and I still don't when I read a script. It's very hard for me to translate to why one and one didn't. I would say that's a unique skill which Ted and his team were very strong in.”
2026-02-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Netflix: Reed Hastings. “We’re Not a Family.” The Provocative Idea That Helped Build a Streaming Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which is all Ted's programming judgment. There were many scripts floating around and then he swung for the fences. We had to bid against HBO. This was not kind of junior content. This was first Lee content HBO was thinking of it. And we came in with a higher financial bid, even though we couldn't justify it at the time. And in the hopes that this would be our breakthrough, and indeed it was.”
2026-02-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Netflix: Reed Hastings. “We’re Not a Family.” The Provocative Idea That Helped Build a Streaming Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Will every cable network which is a subscription business had started on other people's content build some audience And then start to add their own content. HBO was built on other people's content and then got good at original programming. So again, it was a very well-trod path. And when Ted Sorandos came in, which he joined us in 2000, he was the one who sort of articulated, you know, eventually we're going to want to do original content. And then we actually started in 2005 doing original content on DVD. And we didn't have a big enough subscriber base. And so after two years, we closed that down. That was red envelope entertainment. We closed that down in 2007, and then we reopened it essentially with House of Cards. I believe we commissioned that Ted did in 2010. And then it came out in 2013.”
2026-02-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Netflix: Reed Hastings. “We’re Not a Family.” The Provocative Idea That Helped Build a Streaming Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One thing nobody has ever gave us rights we bid for them, right? So it was an open market in buying the rights. And if we paid enough more than Hulu, we would win the bid. But Hulu was a pure play. It was all about streaming. That's all it did. That was the risk was that they would become the symbolic center rather than Netflix, which had the DVD heritage.”
2026-02-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Netflix: Reed Hastings. “We’re Not a Family.” The Provocative Idea That Helped Build a Streaming Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Wanted to shift the business absolutely, it would absolutely would have changed if everybody was like, well, we can figure this out in two steps. If we do it here with, say, grandfathering the price. There was no price ed. And then if it works well, then we can, you know, raise prices over time. So just as an example, there are many ways to do it less aggressively and still do it. And ultimately, we did it. The thing that was DVD became DVD.com. And so, you know, it happened. It just happened less dramatically. And then we eventually closed down the DVD business in roughly 24.”
2026-02-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Netflix: Reed Hastings. “We’re Not a Family.” The Provocative Idea That Helped Build a Streaming Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We talked about it as the informed captain. The leadership model is to be the informed captain. So the captain of a ship is the absolute ruler of that ship and makes decisions. We want our leaders to feel like they're the captain. It's not a democracy, but they needed to know what everybody else thought”
2026-02-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Netflix: Reed Hastings. “We’re Not a Family.” The Provocative Idea That Helped Build a Streaming Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A bit of history. Okay, so we dug our way out, and that's good. A year later, roughly, we spent some real time analyzing okay, what went wrong? How do we avoid it? And that's when I realized that many of the executives, top 50 people, thought this was very risky and unwise. But they all deferred to me because they thought, well, Reid's gotten so much right before. And they didn't know that the other people in the room were also scared. And if they had known that, they would have spoken up more forcefully. And we probably would have taken a slower, more cautious approach. So the thing we instituted on big decisions is everybody publicly weighing in on a tend to negative 10 is this a wise decision. So that would affect like going into Europe, going into original content, pricing changes so that everyone knows where everyone is.”
2026-02-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Netflix: Reed Hastings. “We’re Not a Family.” The Provocative Idea That Helped Build a Streaming Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just a YouTube, yeah, that's right, but then SNL parodied it. Jason Zude kisses. Yeah, exactly. It's quite funny. It's quite funny.”
2026-02-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Netflix: Reed Hastings. “We’re Not a Family.” The Provocative Idea That Helped Build a Streaming Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's probably three years really the launch of House of Cards and Arrested Development that kind of got us out of it in 2013, so two years. Right.”
2026-02-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Netflix: Reed Hastings. “We’re Not a Family.” The Provocative Idea That Helped Build a Streaming Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Correct. But both were good deals, but it was more expensive. So everyone knew it was scary, but as you said, everyone said, well, Reid's been right so many times before, let's do this. We did it. We got a number of things wrong, in particular the pricing we should have grandfathered in the existing base. But big picture, it was too early. So most of the customers didn't care that much about streaming and they didn't want all this change and the split. So we were ahead of the customers by several years. So it was a blow-up. Customers very upset. Stock drops by two-thirds. We did a layoff. We had to reset our revenue expectations. Was a disaster.”
2026-02-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Netflix: Reed Hastings. “We’re Not a Family.” The Provocative Idea That Helped Build a Streaming Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. And one step in that was to separate the businesses into the old DVD business was going to get spun out as Quickster. And then Netflix was going to be the streaming business like Hulu, that this was going to be the dramatic, you know, painful in the short term, but important in the long term thing to do.”
2026-02-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Netflix: Reed Hastings. “We’re Not a Family.” The Provocative Idea That Helped Build a Streaming Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let's set that one up because it's a good one I became in 2010 with a rise of Hulu, which was a straight streaming play by the industry. I became obsessed if we cling to DVD, despite the fact that it's growing and it's profitable, we may not succeed in streaming and that we should wean ourselves from the DVD business.”
2026-02-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Netflix: Reed Hastings. “We’re Not a Family.” The Provocative Idea That Helped Build a Streaming Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, I mean, I would ask the board if I were quitting or retiring, would you want to change their mind to stay? So yes, it applies to me also.”
2026-02-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Netflix: Reed Hastings. “We’re Not a Family.” The Provocative Idea That Helped Build a Streaming Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I don't think it actually cost us money because it got managers to act more quickly and it made it easier on the person who was let go because they got what they perceived as a generous severance package. So then we can be letting go of hundreds of people and have no lawsuits.”
2026-02-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Netflix: Reed Hastings. “We’re Not a Family.” The Provocative Idea That Helped Build a Streaming Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Then it's time for a generous reference package. That's right. The generous severance package helps in a couple ways. If there's a generous severance package, it hurt less because the person had a backstop. And then second, then we didn't have to do like performance improvement plans and document that we had tried and all those things, which eats up a lot of time and energy and money anyway.”
2026-02-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Netflix: Reed Hastings. “We’re Not a Family.” The Provocative Idea That Helped Build a Streaming Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, it's not rational when you let someone go. I mean, you want to think it through, but it's an instinct that you could get someone better for that role. So the test we use is called the keeper test. Would you fight to keep that employee if they were leaving on their own?”
2026-02-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Netflix: Reed Hastings. “We’re Not a Family.” The Provocative Idea That Helped Build a Streaming Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which really was not the experience of employees inside. So we should have warmed up that deck with a lot of intense positive emotions about teamwork. In fact, the story behind publishing that deck was too many people were surprised when they came into the company the way we operate. And it wasn't fair to them. We wanted to be really clear about who we were so that we differentially attracted the second type who was willing to tolerate job insecurity to get talent density.”
2026-02-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Netflix: Reed Hastings. “We’re Not a Family.” The Provocative Idea That Helped Build a Streaming Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, broadly, there's two types of people, one for whom job security is very important, and they're willing to tolerate uneven quality of colleagues. That's just an acceptable price to pay. And then there's others who are willing to tolerate job insecurity. Nobody likes it. Okay. But they're willing to tolerate it because all of their colleagues are amazing at what they do. And it's so much fun to work in that high talent, dense environment. So I would say the original deck was in hindsight didn't balance enough the love and the care that we have for each other. So it came across as competitive that we were internally competitive for the positions.”
2026-02-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Netflix: Reed Hastings. “We’re Not a Family.” The Provocative Idea That Helped Build a Streaming Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Proactively letting each other know about things, all kinds of close cooperation that were a joy to be part of. I think people did focus. We had a line in there that adequate performance gets a generous severance package. So that was sort of the acid line. The typical model is the job as a property right and you have to screw up and the company has to prove that to take away that property right. And what we were saying is no, in a sports team, it's very clear that adequate performance generates a cut and someone else gets a chance to try to be extraordinary in that position.”
2026-02-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Netflix: Reed Hastings. “We’re Not a Family.” The Provocative Idea That Helped Build a Streaming Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, families are dysfunctional in many ways. And so, yes, I think it's an inferior model. And again, team is not cold. You know, a good team really has highly functional people with good relationships between each other. They pass the ball well, sacrificing their own opportunity to score so that because the other person's got a slightly better shot. So, you know, you need incredible cooperation. And we said, you know, today, many people want to be team players, but not everybody has the skills to do a blind pass. So a blind pass in soccer or basketball. You have a high confidence where they're going to be. And so we would talk about that as the skill of teamwork, which is building trust.”
2026-02-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Netflix: Reed Hastings. “We’re Not a Family.” The Provocative Idea That Helped Build a Streaming Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so I realized, oh, it's really that we want to organize as a professional sports team and not a family. And lots of people were operating their Silicon Valley business that way, but none of them admitted it or not many. And so the shock was the sort of it resonated because it was the truth of the what we aspired in much of the competitive ecosystem of team, not family. But no one had said it so directly.”
2026-02-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Netflix: Reed Hastings. “We’re Not a Family.” The Provocative Idea That Helped Build a Streaming Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The core of it was if you had incredibly talented people, you didn't need a lot of process and rules. Netflix was anti process and rules and pro talent density. And then to get talent density, we modeled it on a championship sports team. And they had to swap out players. And that was a normal part of the ethos. And so that contrasted with the notion of company as family. You know, you're all like my family, that kind of CEO talk. But then you go and lay someone off, which, you know, if you were on hard times, you wouldn't say we're going to lay off your sons. Your daughters get to eat and, you know, our ethos in family is around undying loyalty. That's what we admire.”
2026-02-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Netflix: Reed Hastings. “We’re Not a Family.” The Provocative Idea That Helped Build a Streaming Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, Mark bless his heart, put his ego aside when I came in. And then he was head of marketing and merchandising and up until the IPO. And just before then, we got in ahead of marketing, Leslie Kilgore, who was out of Amazon. But before that was Procter& Gamble and Central Casting for Marketing. And she really drove the red envelope and the iconic branding that we had. And, you know, by then was articulating the freedom and responsibility model. And so it was very consistent for me that I was not involved in the branding, the iconography, all of that, and that she ran it and ran it incredibly well. And now 20 years later, she's a board member at Netflix.”
2026-02-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Netflix: Reed Hastings. “We’re Not a Family.” The Provocative Idea That Helped Build a Streaming Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, we knew it. But they were a very good store operator. They had rolled up the whole business. They'd beaten everybody else. They were highly skilled at running stores. And I think that selective intelligence can blind you to other models. You take away 20 of the revenue from every store, and that takes away the profit, right? And our customer base was highly distributed, you know, across the US. So we knew that if we got to a certain size, that it was like, you know, a billion, it was very painful for the store-based model. And we always anticipated the store-based model would collapse if online got large enough. And then it was who's online, ours or blockbusters. But the inevitability of stores going away was pretty clear.”
2026-02-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Netflix: Reed Hastings. “We’re Not a Family.” The Provocative Idea That Helped Build a Streaming Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Blockbuster was the main one we were worried about because for them it was, you know, kill us or die. And we knew the biggest companies like Walmart were not going to focus on this tiny little business. They had a big competition with Amazon. So they never worried us, and we, in fact, played up David versus Goliath relative to Walmart to get us more attention. And I remember New York Times articles in 2002 about what's with Netflix. And it's got the biggest company in the world, Walmart, the biggest rental, you know, blockbuster coming after it. Amazon's lurking. But it was the little engine that could. And so that got us kind of more press. And with Amazon, we're always kind of worried because they have such high confidence, but it just was too niche a business for them.”
2026-02-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Netflix: Reed Hastings. “We’re Not a Family.” The Provocative Idea That Helped Build a Streaming Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The big storyline is we went public, it was fine for a quarter, Walmart announced Walmart.com that they were going to do DVD rental, which made no real sense. And then Blockbuster had bought a tiny little DVD rental company. And so they were clearly interested. And so those two facts created a lot of fear about our revenue. But our revenue never dipped in that time frame. It was only once Blockbuster did the big launch in 2004, 2005 that it was a real competitive battle.”
2026-02-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Netflix: Reed Hastings. “We’re Not a Family.” The Provocative Idea That Helped Build a Streaming Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Would say we took it public because that's what companies did. We didn't really question it that much. We took it public as soon as we possibly could. But in hindsight, I tell other entrepreneurs that don't be in a hurry to go public because it gives your competitors a lot of information. And that was certainly the moment I think that Blockbuster said, oh, that's bigger and more profitable than we thought. And we should go start competing. That was 2002. And in 2004, they launched Against Us. So, you know, in perfect hindsight, I wish we had stayed private for another two or three years”
2026-02-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Netflix: Reed Hastings. “We’re Not a Family.” The Provocative Idea That Helped Build a Streaming Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we did a big layoff shortly after the crash. So yes, we were conscious on that, you know, we had this amazing 50 million in from LVMH. And then we're going to have to make that last.”
2026-02-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Netflix: Reed Hastings. “We’re Not a Family.” The Provocative Idea That Helped Build a Streaming Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I'm not sure their exact thought process, but I agree with you that it was naive of us to think that there was possibly a deal. But we were probably feeling pretty desperate.”
2026-02-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Netflix: Reed Hastings. “We’re Not a Family.” The Provocative Idea That Helped Build a Streaming Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we had a similar thing with Amazon, but I think it was earlier, I think that was like in 99. But in both cases, you know, they, particularly Amazon, have 100 companies they could buy.”
2026-02-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Netflix: Reed Hastings. “We’re Not a Family.” The Provocative Idea That Helped Build a Streaming Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Curious, yeah. And I don't remember them actually making an offer, but I think we probably would have taken any offer, but it was not, it didn't result in any deal transaction. Probably all we did is make them watch us more.”
2026-02-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Netflix: Reed Hastings. “We’re Not a Family.” The Provocative Idea That Helped Build a Streaming Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We have been wanting to talk to them for a while and roughly the idea was, did they want to bet on us to do the online? Because if we could have become blockbuster.com, we'd grow a lot faster. So we talked to them and they were, you know, pretty gracious, but we were kind of naive about, you know, we wanted the blockbuster.com brand, right? Because if we had that brand, everyone, we wouldn't have to build our brand, you know. And I think they were, they looked at us, you know, as you know.”
2026-02-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Netflix: Reed Hastings. “We’re Not a Family.” The Provocative Idea That Helped Build a Streaming Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All of the above. So we had to pay to acquire customers marketing. We had to pay to acquire DVDs. And then we had our fixed cost, which was all the people. And then we had the mailing cost, how much did it cost to... Package something. So we lost money on every shipment because we were inefficient at packaging. We knew we could fix that, but we had to, you know, do a lot of scale to fix that.”
2026-02-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Netflix: Reed Hastings. “We’re Not a Family.” The Provocative Idea That Helped Build a Streaming Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Few million. So when we went public two years later, we were at 50 million. So I'm going to guess it was sort of, you know, 10 million of revenue and 10 or 20 million of losses, of cash losses.”
2026-02-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Netflix: Reed Hastings. “We’re Not a Family.” The Provocative Idea That Helped Build a Streaming Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah March and I had to think through, okay, how do we give ourselves the best chance of success? How can we grow get enough customers in that we become cash flow positive? And so that was the crucial thing is getting to cash flow positive.”
2026-02-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Netflix: Reed Hastings. “We’re Not a Family.” The Provocative Idea That Helped Build a Streaming Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Correct, so we close that round of them investing 50 million. I don't remember the valuation, but it was a good valuation. And that was February of 2000 and then March of 2000 is when the bubble broke. And, you know, it was a shitstorm of everybody retrenching, no more investment for anybody. So, you know, by pure luck, we got that deal done.”
2026-02-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Netflix: Reed Hastings. “We’re Not a Family.” The Provocative Idea That Helped Build a Streaming Giant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT