Reed Hastings

Reed Hastings is an American businessman. He is the co-founder, chairman, and co-chief executive officer (Co-CEO) of Netflix, and sits on a number of boards and non-profit organizations. He is currently on the board of several educational organizations including KIPP and Pahara. Reed is also a board member of The City Fund.

Early life
He was born in Boston, Massachusetts to Wilmot Reed Hastings who was an attorney for the Department of Health, Education and Welfare in the Nixon administration, and his mother Joan Amory Loomis was a Boston debutante from a Social Register family who was repulsed by the world of high society and taught her children to disdain it.

He attended Buckingham Browne & Nichols School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He graduated from Bowdoin College with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Mathematics. Between Bowdoin and Stanford, Reed served in the Peace Corps as a high school math teacher in Swaziland.

After returning from the Peace Corps, Hastings went on to attend Stanford University after being rejected from his first choice MIT, graduating in 1988 with a Master's Degree in Computer Science.

Founding of Netflix
In 1997, Hastings and former Pure Software employee Marc Randolph co-founded Netflix, offering flat rate movie rental-by-mail to customers in the US by combining two emerging technologies; DVDs, which were much easier to send as mail than VHS-cassettes, and a website to order them from, instead of a paper catalogue. Headquartered in Los Gatos, California, Netflix has amassed a collection of 100,000 titles and more than 100 million subscribers. Hastings had the idea for Netflix after he left Pure Software. "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. I didn't want to tell my wife about it. And I said to myself, ‘I'm going to compromise the integrity of my marriage over a late fee?’ Later, on my way to the gym, I realized they had a much better business model. You could pay $30 or $40 a month and work out as little or as much as you wanted."

Hastings said that when he founded Netflix, he had no idea whether customers would use the service.