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.