Reed Hastings quotes:

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  • About half my work in education is U.S. political reform around school districts and charter schools, and creating more room for entrepreneurial organizations to develop. And about half on technology, which I look at as a global platform.

  • Stone Age. Bronze Age. Iron Age. We define entire epics of humanity by the technology they use.

  • At Netflix, we think you have to build a sense of responsibility where people care about the enterprise. Hard work, like long hours at the office, doesn't matter as much to us. We care about great work.

  • I founded Netflix. I've built it steadily over 12 years now, first with DVD becoming profitable in 2002, a head-to-head ferocious battle with Blockbuster and evolving the company toward streaming.

  • Great leaders, like Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos, also focused on the long term.

  • Comparing Apple to Netflix is like comparing apples to oranges, especially if the oranges made so many mistakes that people stopped eating oranges and just went back to Blockbuster.

  • I got the idea for Netflix after my company was acquired. 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. It was all my fault.

  • When we think about online learning, it's such 'early days.' Bill Gates is a wildly smart insightful guy. Yet, even a guy as smart and insightful as that, 30 years ago can say things like, 'Who's every going to need more than 640K of memory?'

  • The Costa Rican government is prioritizing laying fiber optic over paving roads. Costa Rica is trying to become one of the Internet societies. This is happening throughout the world.

  • It turns out that all Netflix streaming peak on Saturday night can fit inside a single fiber optic, which is the size of one human hair.

  • In fact, technology has been the story of human progress from as long back as we know. In 100 years people will look back on now and say, 'That was the Internet Age.' And computers will be seen as a mere ingredient to the Internet Age.

  • If the Starbucks secret is a smile when you get your latte... ours is that the Web site adapts to the individual's taste.

  • Our brand at Netflix is really focused on movies and TV shows.

  • How much has it been your experience that Americans follow what happens in the world?

  • Well, we're about 24 million subscribers today, and that's up from about 15 million a year ago, so it's a very high rate of growth, and that's what's exciting about the business - more and more people are getting smart TVs, they're watching Netflix on their iPads.

  • But as an entrepreneur you have to feel like you can jump out of an aeroplane because you're confident that you'll catch a bird flying by. It's an act of stupidity, and most entrepreneurs go splat because the bird doesn't come by, but a few times it does.

  • I think there will be 20 years of evolution from linear broadcast to internet television.

  • In hindsight, I slid into arrogance based upon past success.

  • School districts in the US don't adopt technology very quickly.

  • What's got me excited about the education space is the growth of the Internet over the next 10, 20, 30 years.

  • I've worked very hard, but my life's always been fun.

  • Most entrepreneurial ideas will sound crazy, stupid and uneconomic, and then they'll turn out to be right.

  • It is clear that for many of our members two websites would make things more difficult, so we are going to keep Netflix as one place to go for streaming and DVDs.

  • The Netflix brand for TV shows is really all about binge viewing. The ability to get hooked and watch episode after episode.

  • Be brutally honest about the short term and optimistic and confident about the long term.

  • In the States, there's ESPN3, and each country has different options, and other than premiere league football, there tends to be very little global content. And movie and TV rights are pretty broad content.

  • I watch mostly independent films.

  • My first company, Pure Software, was exciting and innovative in the first few years and bureaucratic and painful in the last few before it got acquired. The problem was we tried to systemize everything and set up perfect procedures.

  • But it may be one of our best markets in the long term because when the Japanese society embraces a brand it is a very deep connection, so we're willing to make that investment knowing that it's not the quick route to success that might be in other countries.

  • In the U.S., HBO is a very aggressive service.

  • I'm an HBO subscriber, and I watch a bunch of great shows on HBO.

  • There's a finite market for DVD-by-mail, and the growth over the next 10 years will be in streaming.

  • The best managers figure out how to get great outcomes by setting the appropriate context, rather than by trying to control their people.

  • We are seeing the beginning of things. Web 2.0 is broadband. Web 3.0 is 10 gigabits a second.

  • Think of Internet on the TV like the Web browser. The amount of time you spend on the PC in the browser is just going to grow continuously.

  • In 20 years from now we will all be able to click and watch TV.

  • There is a revolution happening, and within two years I think that Wi-Fi and Netflix will be built into all the televisions.

  • So much of the downstream revenue is linked to that initial excitement, to how much revenue is produced in the domestic box office. For example, what we pay for a film three years later is highly correlated to how well it did in the box office.

  • Fibre optic is becoming like electricity. If you look at how electricity spread around the globe 100 years ago, that's what's happening now.

  • Broadcast TV is like the landline of 20 years ago.

  • Be big, fast and flexible.

  • Companies rarely die from moving too fast, and they frequently die from moving too slowly.

  • Do not tolerate brilliant jerks. The cost to teamwork is too high.

  • Don't get distracted by the shiny object [and if a crisis comes], execute on the fundamentals.

  • Don't be afraid to change the model.

  • Human entertainment will have moved on to something new. Then the ultimate challenge for us is, can we figure out what that new form of entertainment is?

  • I don't know of any Internet service that opens on a regional basis.

  • I hate the photo shoots. I hate all that stuff.

  • I learned the value of focus. I learned it is better to do one product well than two products in a mediocre way.

  • I'm on the Facebook board now. Little did they know that I thought Facebook was really stupid when I first heard about it back in 2005.

  • In the long term, you have to believe that movies and TV shows will be like the opera and the novel, pretty nichey businesses.

  • Not every show has to work equally well. It just has to work better than any competitor because then we can outbid for the content.

  • On the Internet you get continuous innovation, so every year the streams are a little better.

  • Something will eventually replace the Internet. But it's hard to know what and when it will happen.

  • Taking smart risks can be very gratifying.

  • Tomorrow when you come to work, if it doesn't make the customer happy, move the business forward, and save us money - don't do it.

  • Truly brilliant marketing happens when you take something most people think of as a weakness and reposition it so people think of it as a strength.

  • When there's an ache, you want to be like aspirin, not vitamins. Aspirin solves a very particular problem someone has, whereas vitamins are a general "?nice to have' market.

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