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

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And then it was unbelievable the elation because the first two days came in. It was like 85% retention. And we were like, oh my God, this is going to work.”
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, so in any case, the initial Netflix model was a single rental, you know, it was a $4 rental. And what we found is that there was less and less repeat business. So people did it for a little while, three, four, five rentals and then didn't really come back. And then when I came in, I wanted to convert us to subscription and to this idea that when you returned a DVD, we automatically sent you the next one from your list. And so in September 23rd of 99, we launched the subscription service. 20 bucks a month for unlimited DVDs. Got it. And we had no idea what would the retention be. In other words, once you started it, how long would you stay with it? You know, we waited day by day to see who would cancel. And you have to proactively cancel.”
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 think of it as an extended rental. I mean, you know, in other words, if you rent a car and then you extend it for three more days. You know, you can call that a late fee, but their marketing was poor. So it got named as a late fee like you're supposed to. Like it's a moral issue. And it should have been if they had just gotten to be called a double rental or an extended rental.”
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, in the early days when Mark was running it, you pay four bucks for a rental, and that was for five days. And then if you kept it longer, you paid another essentially a late fee. So you could return it by mail to make it convenient to avoid the late fee because you didn't have to go to the store. But you still had late fees.”
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, but that implies that it's like 20 little problems. It's not a hard problem like fusion. That's a hard problem. But it's a hard problem with many different aspects of the puzzle.”
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 will, I think, fill in the picture, which is I realized in myself, oh, I'm a crossword puzzle solver. So I like an interesting challenge with a bunch of challenge and constraint, and then seeing if I can figure out the crossword puzzle. Got it. And Netflix was a big crossword puzzle in many ways for 25 years. So I think that's the underlying theme. It almost doesn't matter what the domain is. It's mostly, is it a puzzle to figure out?”
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 think you're phrasing the question like an NBA would, which is sort of what are the properties of the business that made you think you had a differential advantage and how did this come about?”
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, definitely that's true now, but I would say at pure software, I was very bad at letting people go. And I introduced a lot of my own emotions. You know, it's natural for the manager to feel guilty or, you know, you like the people generally. And then letting them go, they're upset. You don't like hurting people. So I had gotten better, I think, by the time of early Netflix, but I would say much better now than I am then. So, you know, it's an evolution of something you get from practice.”
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, I don't remember how we talked about it. So whether it was a pitch deck or a memo or something, I would have done it in person, not just send them an email or text, but I may have written it out on some slides or on a memo or something.”
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 were asking about, or talking about barriers to people investing. So the biggest barrier for them was, you know, it seems like a temporary business And I wasn't sure that it was going to work, but I think, you know, it had the advantage of I wanted to use it. And so you hope there's other people like me because I was living an e-commerce life, you know, buying a lot of things on Amazon. Now I could do movie rental online. So it was kind of a natural extension. I was pretty confident the business would exist renting movies online. I wasn't sure that we were going to win.”
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. But in their plans and in their conversations, they talked about being blockbuster also, right? So that was perceived to be an internet based threat. And then the other is just downloading the movie was going to take over.”
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
“Very few, but that was more tied to we weren't streaming. So the threat there was when are you going to deliver over the internet, you know, Cosmo and other people were doing amazing things, overnight delivery or same day delivery.”
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
“Yep, I mean, mostly DVD, you know, there weren't that many titles on DVD. Because they had to go through and remaster them one by one. And the best titles they wanted to save for when 50 million homes had a DVD player. And then more people would buy it or rent it.”
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
“In the US, you can buy and sell DVDs like you can buy and sell a car. So I can buy a car and I can use it as a taxi service that I don't have to tell GM. In the US it was treated that way. The public display, which is charging, you know, like running a movie theater, that was not a right that came with the DVD. But we could ship them. We could buy them, sell them, resell them. They were not treated as intellectual property. They were treated as a physical good.”
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 did, but at that time maybe 1% of US households had a DVD player. In hindsight, we were too early Okay, we should have waited a couple years to launch. So it was a very small business. And we were okay with that. And you asked earlier, where did we buy DVDs from? Costco. We just go down to Walmart, Costco, et cetera, and buy, you know, 20 DVDs of a given title. And there weren't many titles on DVD because the studios were tentatively publishing the catalog.”
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 see. We started in the fall of'97. And so I put in the initial $2 million and was chairman. And then the site launched in like May of 98, roughly. And it may have been selling at the time, but the real focus was on rental. And, you know, was there a consumer demand for rental by mail?”
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 do way later. Yeah. I didn't. So I thought there's some chance that DVD will take off across the industry. And if it does, then there's a dislocation which makes it viable to build a business around. But it may be that DVD will fail, in which case the business is dead. So it was not a guarantee at all, but we said if this is successful, then there's an opportunity because when three people in a city have the DVD players, it doesn't make sense for Blockbuster to carry them. And so that they will be late to the game. And so that's where the by mail for their early DVD adopters would make sense. And then we had to race to get good enough so that once Blockbuster carried rental DVDs in the store, that we could sustain ourselves. So that, you know, there was many challenges.”
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
“Startup, disc, everywhere, and so on I was well aware of AOL disks in the mail. And so I thought, okay, they must be tough enough to go through the mail. And I rushed out and bought a bunch of CDs. You couldn't buy DVDs at that time and started mailing them to myself to see, would they arrive broken in pieces or altogether? And I remember we were living in Santa Cruz by then, you know, the next day getting the five discs and various types of envelopes. And if you put enough padding and packaging on it, of course, it's going to make it. But the question is how little. And this was like practically an airmel envelope. So, you know, very thin paper. And all five CDs arrived at my house in good shape. And so at that moment, that was for me, the like this can work.”
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
“But in the middle of 97 or fall of 97, mutual friend of marks and mine, Steve Kahn, who had, it was an audiophile and up on all the latest things, said, hey, there's this thing DVD coming out that was like a CD format, but held a movie.”
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
“Fees, right? They had out of stock in various problems. One advantage is that relative to Amazon, the nice thing about rental is because you got to return the good. It's a very different logistic path than selling things. So then it makes less sense for Amazon to invest in because it's only one category that does this. You know, you don't rent computers or bicycles or other things where they get shipped and shipped back. And it was a large enough business to be interesting. Blockbuster was about $5 billion in revenue. But not so large as to attract Amazon and others into it. So that crosshairs made it potentially interesting from an e-commerce standpoint.”
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, you know, like everyone of the era, I had my frustrations with video rental, partially by living when we lived in Lahanda far away from video stores and had gotten a big late fee. And, you know, again, it's not that remarkable because lots of people had them. But, you know, bugged me and seemed a painful consumer experience. And if it could be done by mail like Amazon, then it could be improved. But it turns out that VHS cassettes, which was the way movies were distributed, weighed about a pound and cost about $4 to ship. So if you got shipped a VHS cassette and then shipped it back, that was $8 on top of the three or four dollar rental. So that didn't make a lot of sense. So it ruled it out as an interesting category.”
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
“Exactly, so there was. Every new category, you know, you kind of got the URL. So think of it as e-commerce was like AI is today, which is everyone's doing. Everyone's throwing it.”
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, the general thing was. There was everything from pets.com, which old pet food online to, you know. 50 other, you know, there was the CD now, there 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
“Yeah, absolutely. So I was half hour drive, maybe 45 minutes. So, you know, we got a bunch of time just brainstorming on different ideas.”
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 suddenly we were both freed up and we said, you know, let's try to look at some interesting things to work on together.”
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
“He was a VP of marketing at one of the companies that Pure acquired. So that's how I got to know him. He's a very fresh thinker, creative. And then we made him head of marketing of the whole company. And then the whole company got acquired.”
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, I would say the, I don't know if it's easier or not. It's just not that interesting if we're talking about the weather or the superficialities. I find that in certain circles or topics, I find them incredibly exciting and that's very engaging. But in terms of flattering people and making them feel listened to like the politicians do, that's definitely a different skill set.”
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 it's an astute observation, but I would say my skills are sort of analysis rather than connecting in relationship all the time. But people saw that I was sincere. And so they kind of forgave me the awkwardness.”
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 had more money than I knew what to do with. And so it wasn't, and I didn't think I would do another tech thing. I did think the guy who had been the chairman of Netscape was Jim Clark. He had carved out a life doing seed investing. And I thought, okay, that's what I'll do is I'll be an angel investor. So, from a commercial standpoint, I started making seed investments of which one was 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
“There's a management phrase that someone's too busy chopping wood to sharpen the axe. And I was definitely guilty of that. I never took time to reflect as a small example. I was invited during that time to join YPO, the young president's organization, which is already mentor-oriented organization which in hindsight would have been very valuable now that I know about it well. But at the time, I thought, oh, it's way too indulgent, a day a month, you know, not doing the work. That's crazy”
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 think, first of all, it was not that everyone was happy. So it was, you know, a lot of chaos and I looked at a company like a semiconductor manufacturing plant and when you find an error, you know, you put a process in to avoid that error happening again. And the challenge of that is in the field we were in and in most tech fields, you have to be very creative and constantly changing the product of five years ago is not going to sell in the current climate. And what we did is kind of systematically drive out the mavericky people who didn't follow process or rules. And we were always trying to organize processes.”
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
“Typically, you know, your sales force and that kind of business is very important. And unfortunately, I had little grasp of who's the right type of person to run the Salesforce. And so I kept hiring the wrong people. And then taking a year to figure that out. And so we had a new head of sales every year, five years in a row, which is chaos in enterprise software. And yet, despite that, we doubled sales every year in that time. So again, that was the strength of the products. But to say it was unevenly managed would be generous.”
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, that was my MBA is essentially was Pure Software. And luckily, the products were amazing because my management was not. I only really had one gear, which was work hard. And so whenever things got harder, you know, difficult or challenging, I would just work more. So I would, you know, be coding at night and then, you know, trying to be CEO in the day. But I looked haggard. You know, I smelled. I hadn't showered, you know, it was not a very inspiring look.”
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. It was sort of like inventing an x ray machine, and no one had been able to see a broken bone before and suddenly they could. And so it exploded across the industry and everybody wanted it. And so it was a...”
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 I spent a year prototyping and learning how to do the software and do the proof of concept. So that was the beginning of pure software. And we released a product, you know, within a year, year and a half of starting.”
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 was underprepared for sure, but I would say one of the things about being around Stanford is all these pretty normal people create companies and you meet them. And so it doesn't seem so impossible at all, but I didn't know specifically how to do it. I didn't understand what incorporation was or how to get a lease or anything. The first year was trying to do a proof of concept. So I spent a year in a cold cabin in the Santa Cruz Mountains in Lahonda, where we just had a wood fireplace and had bought a sun microsystems computer. And at the time, that was like as expensive as a car, like eight megabytes.”
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
“If the team builds the thing that you think they should build, that there will indeed be a successful path there. And so you have to both not lead all these great troops into a box canyon where you all get killed, but you also need to set a great personal example and that those were sort of the big aspects of leadership.”
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 I said, you know, Barry, have you been washing my coffee cups all year? And he said yes. And I said, why? And he said, you do so much for us. And this is the one thing I can do for you. And, you know, I would never have discovered it, but for coming in so early that morning. And that just made me feel like, you know, I want to follow this guy to the ends of the earth because he was so admirable personally. And unfortunately, he led us to the ends of the earth, i.e. to build a product that nobody wanted. And so I realized in leadership, there's both being trustworthy and admirable. Which he was in spades, and also astute about where the markets were.”
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
“Thing I learned from him most was humility and the value of that. And one day I came in very early, you know, four or five in the morning. And I used to have a lot of coffee cups spread around my cubicle, you know, from the last four or five days. And every now and then the janitor would wash them all and leave them cleaned on my desk. I didn't think much of it. And then that morning I came in early four or five. I go into the toilet and I see my CEO there also in early. And I see a lot of coffee cups. And I realized suddenly he's been the one washing them all year.”
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 were doing AI for customer support systems. And I was working on the underlying operating system essentially for this. And we had a super compelling CEO, and he had a great vision. And I was the 2829-year-old engineer worked all the time, you know, loved doing all-nighters and, you know, was prolific in writing lots of code. And ultimately, one customer ever bought the software. And that customer never installed it. So it was this scarring lesson because I had worked so hard and written all this beautiful code that basically was now getting thrown away. But the CEO I learned a lot from”
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 think once a year, yeah, there was no payphones. You have to travel to the capital to do that, to call. So yeah, very isolated, beautiful, country, came home once during that for my sister's wedding. And that was very hard because, you know, you get to Johannesburg and you fly, I don't know, 18 hours to Boston. And then it's a three-day wedding that's elaborate in champagne and dress up and a lot of, you know, just magic. And then you jump back on the plane another 18 hours back and then you're in the classroom and the wind's blowing and it's quiet. There's, you know, was no electricity. Yeah, the contrast was hard. And when I came back from that week, I came close. Close to quitting. But you make your incredible connection with your kids and I ended up sticking it out. But that was the only real hard time in it.”
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
“They sign me up as a high school math teacher. And the country they sent me to was Swaziland, which is between South Africa, Mozambique. And this was all pre-internet. So, you know, I went off to the encyclopedia Britannica to try to learn something about, you know, Swaziland. And it is and was a very small place. 500,000 people.”
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
“My guess is what happened physical brain maturity. And the kinds of abstractions that we deal with in math came quite easily to me. The moment that I was surprised at was taking an advanced algebra class and the professor showed us in And I had gotten 100, and like the nearest other score was 80. So that really built my confidence that I could do math well.”
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 was a late bloomer kind of kid, so no JV or varsity sports. You know, we had to play sort of freshman stuff, no girlfriend, no big academic achievements, not that high a GPA.”
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, no, exactly. We had not much confidence that we could grow, period, and then particularly grow against them. 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
“Roughly the idea was did they want to bet on us to do the online if we could have become blockbuster.com, we'd grow a lot faster”
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