The Times Magazine 11The main upshot of these continuing
adjustments has been that the company
has very few of the usual corporate rules.
If you work at Netflix you can take
unlimited holiday, work the hours you want,
travel anywhere (in any class of seat) and buy
anything you choose on expenses so long as
you can justify your decisions as being in the
company’s best interests. Nobody tracks your
sick days and the parental leave policy is
“Take care of your baby and yourself”. You get
to see the company’s quarterly financial results
weeks before Wall Street does and have full
access to strategic information. The company
commits to paying you at the top of market
rates and actively encourages you to take calls
from headhunters to find out what that might
be. Employees at all levels make big strategic
bets without their boss’s approval all the time.
On the other hand you could lose your
job tomorrow and until you do you will be
subjected to searing public critiques of your
performance from your colleagues as a matterof course, sometimes over “Live 360” dinners
that can last for as long as five hours and
sound, to non-initiates, more like a barbaric
reality TV show concept than a sensible way
to nurture personal development.
Also, under something called “the Keeper
Test”, your immediate boss is expected to
assess, at regular intervals, whether you have
slipped from being a “stunning” performer
to a merely “adequate” one. If they can find
anyone better outside the organisation, it is
their avowed duty to Netflix to replace you.
The company, meanwhile, undertakes to
wave you out of the door with a “generous
severance” package and an assurance that
there was no shame in failing to keep pace
with such a high-performance environment.
It is perhaps hardly surprising that apart
from Hastings and Ted Sarandos, the chief
content officer who joined in 1999 and was
recently promoted to co-chief executive,
there are not many lifers at Netflix.
Growing up in Massachusetts, Hastings
was, he writes, “a pretty average kid with
no particular talent or standout ability”.
I must look doubtful. “Is that false
modesty? No. I mean, friends from high
school [seeing the career that followed] are
like, ‘You’ve got to be f***ing kidding.’”
He was no Mark Zuckerberg, a “recognised
genius” at high school, on whose Facebook
board Hastings sat for eight years from 2011.
“I lost at most things just by being a late
bloomer.” What does that mean? “Well, I don’t
know. If I tried out for sports, or asked a girl
out. There was nothing I was exceptional at.”
Pressed, he concedes that he was the
president of the school chess club, but only
by default.
At home emotions were not discussed.
Were you unhappy? “I mean, I’d be lonely and
in my little world like many teenagers, but not
at the extreme end of morose or suicidal, or
dysfunctional or depressed. I still went to
school and did my work. But there was no
sense of feelings...”
At 19 he went to a small university
in Maine, where his relaxed Californian
roommate astonished him by casually
confiding that he was a virgin. Hastings could
not bring himself to admit that he was too,
but gradually learnt through their friendship
that honesty could breed trust.
His outlook broadened further during a
year studying in Bath, where he worked in
a pub at weekends because he was good at
maths. After graduating he taught O-level
maths to children in rural Swaziland from
1983 to 1985, and then scraped into Stanford
University to study for a master’s in artificial
intelligence despite having had no childhood
interest in computers.
It was, he says, “the lucky break of my life”,
because it brought him to Silicon Valley. Hemet his future wife, Patty Quillin, in 1986
at a party and founded Pure Software five
years later.
By the mid-Nineties the company was
thriving, but the marriage was in trouble.
Quillin had become frustrated with his
failings as a husband and a father to their
young daughter. Through counselling sessions
he realised that his wife didn’t care about
money, missed the idealistic man she had
fallen in love with and resented his insistence
that he was prioritising his family when in
fact he was repeatedly putting work first.
Honesty and an adjustment of priorities
brought the relationship back to life.
The couple have now been married for
29 years, and have two grown children,
5 goats and 10 chickens.
Instead of residing in Silicon Valley or
San Francisco, where, according to Forbes,
there are a combined 89 other billionaires,
they live in the mellow beach town of Santa
Cruz, where Hastings is the only one.
Quillin, he confirms, remains “substantially
indifferent” to her husband’s business success.
It struck him early on after his marriage
guidance sessions that he should make similar
candour central to office life and, as it turned
out, “Truth-telling improved both marriage
and work.”
At Netflix that has meant dispensing with
some of the “normal polite human protocols”
that often prevent employees from providing
useful feedback to each other.
In 2001 when the internet bubble burst
and Netflix had to lay off one third of its
120 staff, the remaining 80 performed better
than the 120 had done. It was a “road to
Damascus experience” that convinced
Hastings that a smaller, more talent-dense
team was preferable to a larger one. The
company has attempted to maintain that
approach even as it has grown to more
than 8,000 employees.
Now another crisis has presented Netflix
with an enormous boost: coronavirus.
Hastings recognises the fluke element here.
“It turned out to be a biological virus, which
didn’t mostly kill people but kept them home.
It could have been an internet virus which
shut down our routers, and Disney, with
theme parks, would be fine.
“What we have to recognise is sometimes
you get a lucky break for a business and it’s
not your fault. Don’t feel guilty. We just feel
like, ‘OK, we’re serving customers and we get
this boost.’ Then, knock on wood, the vaccine
will come. Covid will be over. We’ll all tell
stories about 2020 and how crazy it was.”Keen to avoid the usual “CEO pontification
books” with No Rules Rules, Hastings brought
in Meyer, a professor of organisational
behaviour at Insead business school outside‘I WAS A LATE BLOOMER.
AT SCHOOL THERE WAS
NOTHING THAT I WAS
EXCEPTIONAL AT’
With Netflix co-CEO
Ted Sarandos in 2016