Reed Hastings is the co-founder, and executive chairman of Netflix and currently sits on a number of boards and non-profit organizations.
27 Facts About Reed Hastings
2.
Reed Hastings joined the Marine Corps officer training through their Platoon Leader Class, and spent college summers in the Marines, including a stint at the Officer Candidate School boot camp at Marine Corps Base Quantico, Virginia in the summer of 1981.
3.
Reed Hastings went to teach math at a high school of around 800 students in rural northwest Swaziland from 1983 to 1985 after college.
4.
Reed Hastings met Audrey MacLean in 1990 when she was CEO at Adaptive Corp.
5.
Reed Hastings left Adaptive Technology in 1991 to lay the foundation to his first company, Pure Software, which produced products to troubleshoot software.
6.
Reed Hastings stated he had trouble managing with a rapid headcount growth.
7.
The board refused, and Reed Hastings says he learned to be a businessman.
8.
Reed Hastings was appointed Chief Technical Officer of the combined companies and left soon after the acquisition.
9.
Reed Hastings had the idea for Netflix after he left Pure Software.
10.
Reed Hastings said that when he founded Netflix, he had no idea whether customers would use the service.
11.
Reed Hastings is a proponent of Internet television and sees it as the future.
12.
Reed Hastings created an internal culture guide for Netflix by meeting with employees to discuss the company's culture and employees' hypotheses about it.
13.
Reed Hastings was on the board of Microsoft from 2007 to 2012.
14.
Reed Hastings was on the board of directors of Facebook, Inc from June 2011 to May 2019.
15.
Reed Hastings became interested in educational reform in California and enrolled in the Stanford Graduate School of Education.
16.
Reed Hastings spent $1 million of his own money together with $6 million from Silicon Valley venture capitalist John Doerr to promote the passage of Proposition 39 in November 2000, a measure that lowered the level of voter approval for local schools to pass construction bond issues from 66 to 55 percent.
17.
In 2009, Reed Hastings ran into trouble on the State Board of Education when Democratic legislators challenged his advocacy of more English instruction and language testing for non-English speaking students.
18.
In July 2006, the Santa Cruz Sentinel reported that Reed Hastings had donated $1 million to Beacon Education Network to open up new charter schools in Santa Cruz County, where he lives.
19.
In June 2020, Reed Hastings donated $120 million to be equally split among the United Negro College Fund, Morehouse College and Spelman College.
20.
Reed Hastings supported Hillary Clinton in the 2016 US presidential election.
21.
In 2021, Reed Hastings gave $3 million to defeat the campaign to recall Gavin Newsom as governor of California.
22.
Reed Hastings is married to Patricia Ann Quillin and has two children.
23.
Reed Hastings appeared in a front-page article in USA Today in 1995, posing on his Porsche.
24.
Reed Hastings considers that immature now and has said that if he ever appears on the front page of USA Today again it will "not [be] on the hood of a Porsche, but I would [pose] with a bunch of movies".
25.
Reed Hastings sold his Porsche for a Toyota Avalon, but now drives a Tesla.
26.
In 2018, Reed Hastings appeared in a podcast series by Linkedin co-founder Reid Hoffman, Masters of Scale, and discussed the strategy adopted by Netflix to scale.
27.
In March 2022, Reed Hastings donated $1 million to Razom, a Ukrainian nonprofit organization that procures emergency supplies and medical equipment such as disposable resuscitators to treat the wounded.