Reed Hastings taught high-school math in Swaziland with the Peace Corps before earning a computer science degree at Stanford. In 1991 he founded Pure Software, a debugging-tools company he grew through a string of acquisitions and took public, then sold to Rational Software in 1997.
That same year he co-founded Netflix with Marc Randolph. The popular origin story is a $40 late fee on a copy of Apollo 13. The truer story is a founder who had already lived one platform shift in software and recognized that physical media was a temporary state.
Hastings ran Netflix as CEO through the DVD-by-mail era, the pivot to streaming that nearly broke the company in 2011, and the move into original content. He stepped back to Executive Chairman in 2023, handing the CEO seat to Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters.
"Most entrepreneurial ideas will sound crazy, stupid and uneconomic, and then they will turn out to be right."