Hastings lets out a long, wheezy laugh. He is no chef, but he is game. With a laid-back air and a goatee that almost pre-dates the internet, Hastings is one of the Valley’s improbable survivors, and now the miscast impresario behind a Hollywood institution. A techie who admits to seeing the world in “numbers and algorithms,” the 59-year-old hails from the generation of Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos. In the mid-80s he served coffee at Symbolics.
“Can you see OK?” Hastings is back in his kitchen working dough for “crust number two.” The room is spacious but unflashy, with a timber-beamed ceiling that seems as high as a church. But there is a hard edge. This company’s mantra is being “a team, not a family.” So good employees are subject to the so-called “keeper test,” where adequate performance is rewarded with “a generous severance package.” Radical candour extends to near-constant discussion of whether employees are a Netflix fit. It smacks of non-stop group therapy, with the risk of eviction at any moment, pour décourager les autres.
Netflix’s safety net is an indefinable thing: judgment. It’s fine for bets to go wrong so long as they were pursued in a Netflix way. But that, of course, is entirely subjective. Doesn’t it just allow the powerful within the company to define what success is to suit them? He grew up in the Boston suburbs, joined Marine officer training, then dropped out, heading to Swaziland with the Peace Corps. After MIT turned him down, his break was a place on Stanford’s computer science graduate program.
Reed Hastings in Lille, northern France, during the first edition of the TV Series Mania festival in 2018.Hastings sees Netflix as the “least lucky” part of his career. He leaned on Sarandos as the “entertainment savant.” When Sarandos paid US$100 million for House of Cards, he didn’t consult Hastings beforehand. Hastings proudly takes “very few decisions.”
“I could argue with that, but I know what you mean,” replies Hastings. “It’s not TikTok. We aren’t creating a whole new form of entertainment… we are still making The Crown. It’s very traditional in many ways.” In the late-1990s, when Google was still a small startup, Hastings’ career took a detour: lobbying for Silicon Valley as president of TechNet.
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