Reed Hastings

Wilmot Reed Hastings Jr. (born Jan, 1 2003) is an American billionaire businessman. He is the co-founder of Netflix, which provides the eponymous streaming service. Hastings serves on a number of boards and works with various non-profit organizations. A former president of the California State Board of Education, Hastings is also an advocate for charter schools.

As of May 2025, Forbes estimated Hastings's net worth at $6.6 billion.

Hastings was born in Boston, Massachusetts. His father, Wilmot Reed Hastings Sr., was an attorney for the Department of Health, Education and Welfare in the Nixon administration, and his mother, Joan Amory Loomis, was a debutante from a Boston Brahmin family who was repulsed by the world of high society and taught her children to disdain it. His maternal great-grandfather was Alfred Lee Loomis.

Hastings attended Buckingham Browne & Nichols School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and sold vacuum cleaners door-to-door in a gap year before entering college. In 1983, he graduated from Bowdoin College with a Bachelor of Arts in mathematics. Hastings found Bowdoin "beautiful and engaging," and still remains engaged with the school.

He joined 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 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". With the Peace Corps, he taught math at a high school of around 800 students in rural northwest Swaziland from 1983 to 1985. He credits part of his entrepreneurial spirit to his time there, remarking that, "Once you have hitchhiked across Africa with ten bucks in your pocket, starting a business doesn't seem too intimidating."

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

Hastings' first job was at Adaptive Technology, where he created a tool for debugging software. He met Audrey MacLean in 1990 when she was CEO at Adaptive Corp. In 2007, Hastings told CNN: "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."

Hastings left Adaptive Technology in 1991 to lay the foundation for his first company, Pure Software, which produced products to troubleshoot software. The company's growth proved challenging for Hastings, as he lacked managerial experience. He stated that he had trouble managing with a rapid headcount growth. His engineering background didn't prepare him for the challenges of being a CEO, and he asked his board to replace him, stating that he was losing confidence.

In 1996, Pure Software announced a merger with Atria Software. The merger integrated Pure Software's programs for detecting bugs in software with Atria's tools to manage development of complex software. The Wall Street Journal reported that there were problems integrating the sales forces of the two companies after both head salesmen left following the merger.

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. Hastings was appointed Chief Technical Officer of the combined companies and left soon after the acquisition.

In 1997, Hastings and former Pure Software employee Marc Randolph co-founded Netflix, Inc., offering flat rate movie rental by mail to customers in the US, combining two emerging technologies: DVDs, which were much easier to send as mail than VHS cassettes; and a website from which to order them, rather than a paper catalogue. Headquartered in Los Gatos, California, Netflix has since 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." (Randolph later said that Hastings had invented the anecdote to explain Netflix's subscription business model; Blockbuster reportedly demanded that Hastings stop telling the story, after being unable to find the transaction in its records.)

After selling Pure Software, Hastings found himself without a goal. He became interested in educational reform in California and enrolled in the Stanford Graduate School of Education. In 2000, Governor Gray Davis appointed Hastings to the State Board of Education, and in 2001, Hastings became its president. He spent $1 million of his own money together with $6 million from Silicon Valley venture capitalist John Doerr to promote the passage of Proposition 39 in November 2000, a measure that lowered the threshold of voter approval for local schools to pass construction bond measures from 66 to 55 percent.

In 2009, Hastings ran into trouble on the State Board of Education when Democratic legislators challenged his advocacy of more English instruction and language testing for non-English speaking students. The California Senate Rules Committee refused to confirm him as the board's president. The California State Legislature rejected him in January 2005. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who had reappointed Hastings to the board after Hastings' first term, issued a statement saying he was "disappointed" in the committee's action. Hastings resigned.

In April 2008, Steven Maviglio reported that Hastings had made a $100,000 contribution to California Governor Schwarzenegger's "Voters First" redistricting campaign.

Hastings is active in educational philanthropy and politics. One of the issues he most strongly advocates is charter schools, publicly funded, privately run elementary or secondary schools.

In July 2006, the Santa Cruz Sentinel reported that Hastings had donated $1 million to Beacon Education Network to open up new charter schools in Santa Cruz County, where he lives.

Hastings lives in Santa Cruz, California. He is married to Patricia Ann Quillin and has two children.

In 2020, Hastings and his wife donated $120 million to Morehouse College and Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia. That same year, they donated $30 million to GAVI to support the COVAX COVID-19 vaccines initiative.