Netflix began in 1997 posting DVDs through the mail. Reed Hastings then spent two decades making bets that destroyed whatever the company had just become, and the entertainment industry rearranged itself around the results.

The first one was streaming, launched while the DVD business was still the profitable half. The second was original programming, which turned a distributor into a studio and put Netflix in competition with the suppliers it depended on. Both moves put the existing model at risk on purpose.

He treated Netflix's own success as the thing most likely to kill it — and disrupted himself first.

He also wrote down a culture — freedom, responsibility, candour, and a famous willingness to pay well and part ways fast. Whether or not people liked it, the deck describing it circulated through every technology company in Silicon Valley.

Deep-pocketed rivals eventually arrived and the head start held anyway. Hastings moved to a chairman role having built something rare: a company whose central discipline was to attack its own business before anyone else got the chance.

After studying at Bowdoin College, Hastings taught mathematics in Swaziland with the Peace Corps, then took a master's in computer science at Stanford. His first company, Pure Software, made debugging tools and was sold in 1997 after a merger. He co-founded Netflix that year with Marc Randolph, renting DVDs by post one title at a time before switching to a subscription in 1999.

There were near-misses. In 2000 Blockbuster turned down a chance to buy Netflix for 50 million dollars. In 2011 Hastings tried to split the DVD business into a separate service called Qwikster and raised prices; the backlash cost Netflix hundreds of thousands of subscribers and much of its share price before he reversed course. House of Cards, in 2013, marked the start of the original-content strategy.

Hastings shared the chief executive role with Ted Sarandos from 2020 and became executive chairman in January 2023, with Greg Peters joining Sarandos as co-chief executive. Outside Netflix he has given heavily to education, particularly to charter schools in the United States, and earlier served as president of the California State Board of Education.