Wilmot Reed Hastings Jr. (born October 8, 1960) is an American businessman.
He is the co-founder, chairman, and co-chief executive officer (CEO) of Netflix, and serves on several nonprofit boards and organizations. Hastings, a former member of the California State Board of Education, is an advocate for education reform through charter schools.
Hastings’ first job was at Adaptive Technology, where he created a tool to debug software.
He met Audrey MacLean in 1990 when she was CEO of Adaptive Corp. In 2007, Hastings told CNN: “From her I learned the value of focus. I learned it’s better to do one product well than two products in a mediocre way.”
Hastings left Adaptive Technology in 1991 to found his first company, Pure Software, which produced products to troubleshoot software problems.
The company’s growth proved challenging for Hastings, who lacked managerial experience. He said he had difficulty managing the company’s rapid growth in headcount. His background in engineering had not prepared him for the challenges of being a CEO, and he asked his board to replace him, stating that he was losing confidence. The board refused, and Hastings says he learned to be a businessman. Pure Software went public through Morgan Stanley in 1995.
In 1996, Pure Software announced a merger with Atria Software.
The merger integrated Pure Software’s bug-detection tools with Atria’s tools for managing complex software development. The Wall Street Journal reported issues integrating the sales teams of Pure and Atria after key salespeople from both companies left following the merger.
In 1997, the combined company, Pure Atria, was acquired by Rational Software, leading to a 42% drop in both companies’ stock prices after the deal was announced.
Hastings was named CTO of the combined firms and left shortly after the acquisition. After Pure Software, Hastings spent two years thinking about how to avoid similar problems in his next startup.
In 1997, Reed Hastings co-founded Netflix, which offered flat-rate DVD movie rentals by mail to U.S. customers.
Hastings and former Pure Software employee Marc Randolph co-founded Netflix by combining two emerging technologies: DVDs, which were easier to mail than VHS tapes, and an online ordering website rather than a paper catalog. Based in Los Gatos, California, Netflix amassed a collection of 100,000 titles and over 100 million subscribers. Hastings came up with the idea for Netflix after leaving Pure Software: “I had a big late fee for Apollo 13. I was six weeks late and owed the video store $40. I had lost the tape. It was all my fault. I didn’t want to tell my wife. I asked myself: ‘Am I going to compromise the integrity of my marriage over a late fee?’ Later, on the way to the gym, I realized they had a much better business model. You could pay $30 or $40 a month and work out as much as you wanted.”