Reed Hastings

REED HASTINGS

Place of living : Massachusetts

Wilmot Reed Hastings, Jr. 50, is an American businessman and entrepreneur. He is the founder, CEO, president and chairman of the board of Netflix. In 1998 Hastings founded Netflix, the largest online DVD rental service, offering flat rate rental-by-mail to customers in the United States. Headquartered in Los Gatos, California, Netflix has amassed a collection of 100,000 titles and over 8 million subscribers. Netflix is known for its innovative business practices.

“I got the idea for Netflix after my company was acquired,” said Hastings. “I had a big late fee for ‘Apollo 13.’ It was six weeks late and I owed the video store $40. I had misplaced the cassette.” Hastings said that he had no idea when he founded Netflix if customers would use the service.

“Netflix was originally a single rental service, but the subscription model was one of a few ideas we had–so there was no Aha! Moment having unlimited due dates and no late fees has worked in a powerful way and now seems obvious, but at that time we had no idea if consumers would even build and use an online queue.”

Hastings didn’t necessarily expect a lot of quick progress towards the prize. “We thought we built the best darn thing ever,” Hastings said. But by June, 2007 Hastings said the competition is “three-quarters of the way there in three-quarters of a year.”

Netflix launched a service in 2007 to stream movies and television to users’ computers. “Thankfully, there are no parallels to Netflix,” says Hastings was featured in a front-page article in USA Today in 1995, posing on his Porsche. Nowadays he eschews flamboyance and says if he ever appeared 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.”

In 2005, Time magazine added Reed to its “Time 100” list of the one hundred most influential global citizens. In March 2007 Reed was appointed to Microsoft’s board of directors.