Who owns Netflix?

Have you ever logged onto Netflix after a long day at work and wondered who the rich person who owns Netflix should be? Here we will give you not only who they are, but also their backstory and more important information.

early years

Reed Hastings Born October 8, 1960 in Boston, Massachusetts. His father was an attorney in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare during the Nixon administration. Meanwhile, his mother was a debutante from a Social Register family who was disgusted by high society and taught her children not to like it.

Hastings then attended the Buckingham Browne & Nichols School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. During the hiatus year, he sold vacuum cleaners door-to-door. It wasn’t until 1983 that he graduated from Bowdoin College with a Bachelor of Arts degree in mathematics.

He then joined the Marine Corps, specifically for officer training. Hastings also spent college summers with the Marines. However, he never completed his training and was never commissioned into the Marine Corps. Instead, he decided to join the Peace Corps “due to the combination of service and adventure”.

After that, he was a high school mathematics teacher in rural northwest Swaziland from 1983 to 1985 after college. Hastings credits the Peace Corps for his interest in the business, as he stated, “After hitchhiking through Africa with ten bucks in your pocket, starting a business doesn’t seem too intimidating.” After the Peace Corps, he attended Stanford University and received a master’s degree in computer science in 1988.

Starting a business

Hastings was part of Adaptive Technology where he created a software debugging tool. He left Adaptive Technology in 1991 when he decided to start his own entrepreneurial idea. His first company was Pure Software, and its mission was to create software troubleshooting products. However, being the CEO was difficult as he had no experience as a manager and thus it was difficult for Pure Software to grow. He was so desperate for the company that he even asked the board to replace him, but they refused. Hastings claims it was then that he learned to be a businessman. In 1995, Morgan Stanley bought Pure Software. Then in 1996, Pure Software merged with Atria Software. However, there was a problem with Pure Software and Atria due to the integration, which led to the departure of the main sellers of both companies.

Then, in 1997, Rational Software bought the company now known as Pure Atria and appointed Hastings as CTO. But soon he left. Because of these problems, Hastings spent two years brainstorming to avoid similar problems in the future. That same year, Hastings and former employee Mark Randolph co-founded Netflix. They offered flat-rate movie rentals, combining two new technologies, DVDs and websites, because they were easier to navigate than their predecessors.

The idea came to Hastings after he left Pure Software when he had an overdue film fee and lost the tape. He also thought that no one was going to use this service. But luckily for him, the company, headquartered in Los Gatos, California, has over 100,000 titles and over 100 million subscribers.

Netflix, television and activism

Hastings created an internal culture guide for Netflix, as it was known. The company applied innovative management practices. He created an idea called “Freedom and Responsibility”. What he has done is offer employees large severance pay to ensure they have incentives. Netflix has also eliminated sick days and vacations and allows employees to manage their time. The Hastings Guide came out in August 2009. It even became an employment screening tool to weed out those who were not comparable to the job.

Hastings has since become interested in Internet TV and has admitted that it was YouTube that forced him to change his Netflix strategy. In 2007, he launched a service to stream movies and shows from a computer. He is also a director of Facebook from June 2011 to May 2019. During this time, he amassed over $10 million in Facebook stock. From 2007 to 2012, he served on the board of directors of Microsoft.

Hastings is also a political activist and was interested in education reform in California. He was a member of the State Board of Education and later President of the State of California. He helped pass Proposition 30 in November 2000, which helped lower the local school’s voter approval rate for building bond issues from 66 percent to 55 percent. Hastings also pushed for more education and teaching of English for non-English speakers. This caused a backlash and in 2005 he resigned.

Personal life and who owns Netflix?

Since then, he has also campaigned for charter schools and even campaigned for the abolition of elected school boards. He has also donated to children’s education, various Democratic politicians, the Covid-19 vaccine, the Ukraine non-profit, and Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU).

But, if you’re still wondering who owns Netflix, Hastings now only owns a small 1% of Netflix and is worth about $2.4 billion. He currently resides in Santa Cruz, California with his wife, Patricia Quillin. They have two children together.

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