Reed Hastings: Netflix’s co-founder and media disruptor
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It's the year 2000, Dallas, Texas. On one side of a massive glass conference table sits a 40-year-old entrepreneur from Silicon Valley.
His company is losing money and he's running out of options. Across from him sits the man that could save it, the chief executive of the most powerful company in home entertainment, Blockbuster.
The pitch is simple. Buy this tiny, failing company for $50 million. Well, the Blockbuster executives exchange glances and one of them smiles. The answer is no.
But that no will be the making of our entrepreneur. In just over a decade, Blockbuster will be bankrupt and he will be a billionaire.
Welcome to Good Bad Billionaire from the BBC World Service. Each episode, we take a billionaire and we find out how they made their money.
We take them from zero to their first million and then from a million on to a billion. My name is Zing Zing and I'm a journalist, author and podcaster. And I'm Simon Jack. I'm the BBC's business editor.
And this week's billionaire was suggested by one of our listeners, Thomas, who wrote in to say, Good day, I've been listening to your podcast for a while now and I find it really fascinating. I wanted to propose a billionaire who is such a big part of our lives, but may be unknown to many, the co-founder of Netflix, Reed Hastings.
Good idea, Thomas. Reed Hastings is 65 years old and currently worth $4.7 billion at the time of recording.
And Netflix currently has 325 million subscribers worldwide. That is a stupendous number. I have to admit, I am one of those Netflix subscribers.
You're one of the 325 million? Me too.
Yes. I mean, I've watched so many good shows on Netflix and bad ones. Favourite? Couple? Favourite couple? Oh, I loved Stranger Things when it came out. Really? It was so good. It was so nostalgic. You're too young to be nostalgic about that era. I think I'm young enough to feel like I watched Indiana Jones as a kid. Okay.
I liked, there's so many good ones, wasn't there? But I did like House of Cards, which was a breakthrough series for them. It really was. And also there was a one called Ozark with Jason Bateman. And it was really compelling. I would love that one.
I mean, one of the interesting things about Netflix is that it introduced people to so many non-English language shows, like Squid Game, for instance.
Correct. Yeah. Well, anyway, whatever your favourite shows are, one thing's for sure, it completely changed the way we consume content. Binge watching wasn't a thing really before this. I have to confess, my partner said something, my wife said something the other day, and I said, what time is it on? And she laughed in my face.
You're lucky it wasn't your daughter. Yes.
Yeah, because it's disrupted the entire industry. And in fact, Reed Hastings once declared that his company's biggest competition was sleep.
But the Netflix journey all started out with DVDs. So let's hit rewind on the DVD player to find out how Reed Hastings did it.
Let's start at zero for Reed Hastings. He was born in 1960 in Boston, Massachusetts, in the US. His father was a lawyer who became an attorney for the Department of Health, Education and Welfare in the Nixon administration.
His mum was an East Coast debutante. Her grandfather had been a Wall Street tycoon who got even richer after anticipating the stock market crash of 1929. But despite that pedigree, Reed's mum was... repulsed by the world of high society.
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