Wikipedia: Reed Hastings |
Reed Hastings (Wilmot Reed Hastings, Jr.) was the founder of Pure Software and the founder of Netflix. He is currently Netflix'schief executive officer, president and chairman of the board, and serves on the Board of Directors for Microsoft Corp.
Early Life and Education
Hastings was born in Boston on October 8, 1960[1] and grew up in the Washington D.C. and Boston, Massachusetts areas. Hastings attended high school at the Buckingham, Browne, and Nichols School in Cambridge, Massachusetts.[citation needed] His father was a lawyer who once served in the Nixonadministration, serving as general counsel in the United States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.[1] "One weekend when I was about 12, my parents, sisters and I were invited to Camp David, when the president wasn’t there. Elliot Richardson, who held several cabinet positions, invited us. We rode around in golf carts, had a tour and I saw that President Nixon had a gold-colored toilet seat."[1]
Hastings studied mathematics at Bowdoin College[2] in Brunswick, Maine, and won its mathematics department's Smyth Prize in 1981.[3] "I wanted to go to a small liberal arts school and went to Bowdoin College in Maine. I majored in math because I found the abstractions beautiful and engaging," said Hastings.[1] Hastings received his bachelor's degree from Bowdoin College in 1983.[2]
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Business Interests and Social Activism
Founded Pure Software
Hastings' first job was at Adaptive Technology where he invented a tool for debugging software.[2] "I worked for Audrey MacLean in 1990 when she was CEO at Adaptive Corp. From her I learned the value of focus. I learned it is better to do one product well than two products in a mediocre way," says Hastings.[5]
Hastings left Adaptive Technology in 1991 to found his first company, Pure Software, that produced products to troubleshoot software.[4] Hastings found running the company challenging as the company grew exponentially. "As the company grew from 10 to 40 to 120 to 320 to 640 employees, I found I was definitely underwater and over my head. I was doing white-water kayaking at the time, and in kayaking if you stare and focus on the problem you are much more likely to hit danger. I focused on the safe water and what I wanted to happen. I didn’t listen to the skeptics."[1] Hastings' engineering background didn't prepare him for the challenges of being a CEO and he asked his board to replace him. "I tried to fire myself — twice," Hastings says. "I was losing confidence."[6] The board refused and Hastings says he learned to be a businessman. "I was an engineer myself. We doubled our revenue every year, but my transformation from engineer to CEO was when Morgan Stanley took the company public in 1995." [4]
In 1996 Pure software announced a merger with Atria.[4] The merger integrated Pure Software's programs for detecting bugs in software with Atria's tools to manage development of complex software. "With a single vendor and a unified sales force, we'll be able to make a really profound difference in the way people develop software," Hastings said at the time of the merger.[7] But the Wall Street Journal reported that there were problems integrating the sales forces of Pure Software and Altria after the head salesmen for both Pure and Atria left following the merger.
In 1997, the combined company, Pure Atria, was acquired by Rational Software triggering a 42% drop in the two company's stock after the deal was announced. Hastings was appointed chief technical officer of the combined companies[8] and left soon after the acquisition. "I had the great fortune of doing a mediocre job at my first company," says Hastings adding that "We got more bureaucratic as we grew." After Pure software Hastings spent two years thinking about how to avoid similar problems at his next startup.[9]
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