12 The Times MagazineParis, to study the Netflix culture and act as
a “reader’s guide”.
Her findings, laid out next to his
comments, draw on interviews with more
than 200 current and former Netflix staff.
The outlines of the Netflix approach are
well known in the business world because of
an internal slide presentation known as the
Netflix Culture Deck that Hastings put online
in 2009. Meyer admired the honesty of the
slides but loathed their contents, which
struck her as “hypermasculine, excessively
confrontational and downright aggressive”.
On the other hand, Netflix has some of
the most contented staff (it came second on
a 2018 Happiest Employees survey based on
more than 5 million anonymous reviews from
workers at 45,000 large US companies).
It is not much of a spoiler to say that even
though Meyer is “impartial”, she finds a lot
more to admire than to admonish. The book is
filled with examples of people blossoming as a
result of the freedom handed to them, but she
does also provide glimpses of how stressful
some people find the working conditions.
There’s the recruiter in the Amsterdam
office, who recalls that during her first months
on the job, “Every morning, I would get into
the elevator at 8am, and as I hit the elevator
button, it was like a trigger. The air would
catch in my chest. I was sure that when the
doors slid open my boss would be standing
on the other side waiting to fire me.”
There are plenty of darker stories out there,
too. In 2018 the Wall Street Journal spoke to
more than 70 current and former Netflix
employees, some of whom described an
atmosphere that was “ruthless, demoralising
and transparent to the point of dysfunctional”.
One Korean former employee told them
that the emphasis on blunt shared feedback
“reminded her of North Korea, where mothers
are forced to criticise their sons in public”.
Several former colleagues told the
newspaper that Hastings was “unencumbered
by emotion”. They meant it as a compliment.
He has fired numerous close friends,
including Neil Hunt, who helped to create
Netflix’s celebrated recommendation
algorithm, and Patty McCord, a key architect
of the Netflix culture. Marc Randolph, the
original chief executive, revealed in a memoir
last year that Hastings, who had put up much
of the funding for Netflix, effectively fired him
from the lead role in 1998 because he thought
he could do the job better himself. Randolph
agreed and stepped down. He left the
company in 2003, a year after it floated.
Hastings tells me that he doesn’t want
anyone to feel unhappy in their job, “which
is why we are always clear that working at
Netflix is not for everybody”.
How much of your time do you spend
thinking about firing really good people whowork immediately for you? “Once a quarter
with the board I go through each of them. We
phrase it more positively: how hard would we
work to keep them?”
And when was the last time that you
thought somebody might be thinking: has
Reed outlived his usefulness here?
There’s not a flicker of surprise. “Well, I
talk about it with the board. They have full
power. I’m not protected [by the stock-holding
structure]. I do think that I should be held to
the same standard that everybody else is.”
So long as he retains the board’s confidence
he has no plans to go anywhere soon, despite
Sarandos’ promotion, which Hastings
described in July as “part of a long process
of succession planning”. In a call with
investors he emphasised that, “To be totally
clear, I’m in for a decade.”
He doesn’t have an office himself because,
like the entrepreneurs who pioneered Silicon
Valley’s values more than half a century ago,he believes in “management by walking
around” and in the avoidance of secrets, as
embodied in other businesses by locked doors
and cabinets (Netflix discourages both).So is Hastings actually a genuinely empathetic
person now or has he just learnt to fake it?
“I would say definitely an aspiring
empathetic person, whose sincerity in the
effort probably makes up for not being great
in the way a politician is,” he replies. “I’m still
basically an engineer but people can tell that
I care about it and try. It makes up for a lot.
“I think the reason I talk about the
marriage story is because what I say internally
is, ‘To be a better leader, you have to be a
better person.’” He used to think, in the
Pure Software days, that working on his
management style rather than the core
business was “self-indulgent”.
Later he learnt that it was more valuable
for a company to have a leader whom people
wanted to work for rather than “one more
product idea person” at the helm.
He prides himself on how few decisions
he has to make at work each day, because the
more that Netflix employees make big calls
rather than wait for approval, the faster and
more effectively the company moves.
When I ask Hastings if he ever has mediamogul dinners with Jeff Bezos, the founder of
Amazon, he says that, “Ten years ago is the
last time,” and adds that hanging out with
other tech founders is “not where my social
time goes. Mostly my non-Netflix time would
either go into philanthropy or family.”What the Albanian army remark missed in
2010 was Netflix’s next reinvention, which
began with the spectacular success of its first
big original series, House of Cards, in 2013.
In the early days the company licensed
old films and past seasons of TV shows made
by the traditional Hollywood powers and
used them to train viewers to expect their
entertainment on demand, on loop and
without advert breaks.
Then Netflix kicked into a higher gear and
became a prolific creator of entertainment in
its own right. Last year its production budget
passed $15 billion (more than or similar to
every rival except Disney).
Peter Kafka, who co-hosts the latest season
of the Vox podcast Land of the Giants, which
explores Netflix’s story, says that he was struck
by how the company had outmanoeuvred
the established studios, exploiting their
complacency and then seizing their territory.
“It’s basically been in full view of Hollywood.
They’re not making TV programmes and
movies in secret. They’re doing it out in the
open and that to me is the fascinating thing:
watching them defeat Hollywood with
Hollywood’s help.”
A few years ago the former president of
one major studio’s film division told me in
awed terms about how horrified and helpless
the Hollywood establishment felt facing the
arrival of tech companies with their internet-
driven business models, sky-high valuations
and apparently bottomless pockets.
“Amazon and Netflix are the next 100 years
of movie-making,” he said. “It’s almost like sea
creatures that don’t need oxygen are fighting
against land animals that do and going for the
same food source.”
Hollywood fought back last November
when Disney+ joined Hulu, Amazon Prime
Video and Apple TV+ in the war for streaming
viewers. HBO Max and NBC Universal’s
Peacock followed.
For now at least, Netflix retains a
commanding lead, but the skirmishes are
over and a clash of empires has begun.
The glittering prize is control of all the
entertainment that flows to our home screens
in the future, says Kafka, the podcast host.
“Everyone’s been aiming at that (not just
the studios). You know, you’re watching Apple
and Amazon and Google all go after the
TV, not just in this past few years but for
decades. If you go back you can see them all
trying to get to the TV set. And Reed Hastings
got there first.” nONE FORMER EMPLOYEE
SAID THE COMPANY’S
EMPHASIS ON BLUNT
FEEDBACK ‘REMINDED
HER OF NORTH KOREA’
WENN