Hastings had the idea for Netflix after he left Pure Software. Headquartered in Los Gatos, California, Netflix has amassed a collection of 100,000 titles and more than 100 million subscribers.
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.
In 1997, Reed Hastings co-founded Netflix, offering flat rate movie rental-by-mail to customers in the US
After Pure Software, Hastings spent two years thinking about how to avoid similar problems at his next startup. Hastings was appointed Chief Technical Officer of the combined companies and left soon after the acquisition. In 1997, the combined company, Pure Atria, was acquired by Rational Software, which triggered a 42% drop in both companies' stocks after the deal was announced. The Wall Street Journal reported that there were problems integrating the sales forces of Pure Software and Atria after the head salesmen for both Pure and Atria left following the merger. The merger integrated Pure Software's programs for detecting bugs in software with Atria's tools to manage development of complex software. In 1996, Pure Software announced a merger with Atria Software. Pure Software was taken public by Morgan Stanley in 1995. The board refused, and Hastings says he learned to be a businessman. His engineering background didn't prepare him for the challenges of being a CEO and he asked his board to replace him, stating he was losing confidence. He stated he had trouble managing with a rapid headcount growth. The company's growth proved challenging for Hastings, as he lacked managerial experience. Hastings left Adaptive Technology in 1991 to lay the foundation to his first company, Pure Software, which produced products to troubleshoot software. I learned it is better to do one product well than two products in a mediocre way." In 2007, Hastings told CNN, "From her, I learned the value of focus. He met Audrey MacLean in 1990 when she was CEO at Adaptive Corp. Hastings' first job was at Adaptive Technology, where he created a tool for debugging software. Īfter 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. He credits part of his entrepreneurial spirit to his time in the Peace Corps, remarking that, “Once you have hitchhiked across Africa with ten bucks in your pocket, starting a business doesn't seem too intimidating”. He went to teach math at a high school of around 800 students in rural northwest Swaziland, Africa from 1983 to 1985 after college. He did not complete the training and never commissioned into the Marine Corps-choosing instead to pursue service in the Peace Corps “out of a combination of service and adventure”. He joined the Marine Corps officer training through their Platoon Leader Class, and spent college summers in the Marines, including a stint at the Officer Candidate School boot camp at Marine Corps Base Quantico, Virginia in the summer of 1981. He graduated from Bowdoin College with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Mathematics, which he found "beautiful and engaging". Hastings attended Buckingham Browne & Nichols School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and sold vacuum cleaners door-to-door in a gap year before entering college. His maternal great-grandfather was Alfred Lee Loomis.
His father Wilmot Reed Hastings 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. Hastings was born in Boston, Massachusetts.