Top 40 Reed Hastings Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Do not tolerate brilliant jerks. The cost to teamwork is too high.”

— Reed Hastings

2. “Don’t be afraid to change the model.”

— Reed Hastings

3. “Be brutally honest about the short term and optimistic and confident about the long term.”

— Reed Hastings

4. “The best managers figure out how to get great outcomes by setting the appropriate context, rather than by trying to control their people.”

— Reed Hastings

5. “Be big, fast and flexible.”

— Reed Hastings

6. “Fibre optic is becoming like electricity. If you look at how electricity spread around the globe 100 years ago, that’s what’s happening now.”

— Reed Hastings

7. “Stone Age. Bronze Age. Iron Age. We define entire epics of humanity by the technology they use.”

— Reed Hastings

8. “Tomorrow when you come to work, if it doesn’t make the customer happy, move the business forward, and save us money – don’t do it.”

— Reed Hastings

9. “Most entrepreneurial ideas will sound crazy, stupid and uneconomic, and then they’ll turn out to be right.”

— Reed Hastings

10. “Companies rarely die from moving too fast, and they frequently die from moving too slowly.”

— Reed Hastings

11. “I learned the value of focus. I learned it is better to do one product well than two products in a mediocre way.”

— Reed Hastings

12. “I got the idea for Netflix after my company was acquired. 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.”

— Reed Hastings

13. “But as an entrepreneur you have to feel like you can jump out of an aeroplane because you’re confident that you’ll catch a bird flying by. It’s an act of stupidity, and most entrepreneurs go splat because the bird doesn’t come by, but a few times it does.”

— Reed Hastings

14. “Taking smart risks can be very gratifying.”

— Reed Hastings

15. “Humility is important in a leader and role model. When you succeed, speak about it softly or let others mention it for you. But when you make a mistake say it clearly and loudly, so that everyone can learn and profit from your errors. In other words, “Whisper wins and shout mistakes.”

— Reed Hastings

16. “Something will eventually replace the Internet. But it’s hard to know what and when it will happen.”

— Reed Hastings

17. “The Netflix brand for TV shows is really all about binge viewing. The ability to get hooked and watch episode after episode.”

— Reed Hastings

18. “I founded Netflix. I’ve built it steadily over 12 years now, first with DVD becoming profitable in 2002, a head-to-head ferocious battle with Blockbuster and evolving the company toward streaming.”

— Reed Hastings

19. “When there’s an ache, you want to be like aspirin, not vitamins. Aspirin solves a very particular problem someone has, whereas vitamins are a general ‘nice to have’ market.”

— Reed Hastings

20. “Truly brilliant marketing happens when you take something most people think of as a weakness and reposition it so people think of it as a strength.”

— Reed Hastings

21. “I’ve worked very hard, but my life’s always been fun.”

— Reed Hastings

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22. “I’m on the Facebook board now. Little did they know that I thought Facebook was really stupid when I first heard about it back in 2005.”

— Reed Hastings

23. “Farm for dissent,” or “socialize” the idea. For a big idea, test it out. As the informed captain, make your bet. If it succeeds, celebrate. If it fails, sunshine it.”

— Reed Hastings

24. “I don’t know of any Internet service that opens on a regional basis.”

— Reed Hastings

25. “At Netflix, we think you have to build a sense of responsibility where people care about the enterprise. Hard work, like long hours at the office, doesn’t matter as much to us. We care about great work.”

— Reed Hastings

26. “Comparing Apple to Netflix is like comparing apples to oranges, especially if the oranges made so many mistakes that people stopped eating oranges and just went back to Blockbuster.”

— Reed Hastings

27. “On the Internet you get continuous innovation, so every year the streams are a little better.”

— Reed Hastings

28. “I think there will be 20 years of evolution from linear broadcast to internet television.”

— Reed Hastings

29. “In fact, technology has been the story of human progress from as long back as we know. In 100 years people will look back on now and say, ‘That was the Internet Age.’ And computers will be seen as a mere ingredient to the Internet Age.”

— Reed Hastings

30. “The Costa Rican government is prioritizing laying fiber optic over paving roads. Costa Rica is trying to become one of the Internet societies. This is happening throughout the world.”

— Reed Hastings

31. “But it may be one of our best markets in the long term because when the Japanese society embraces a brand it is a very deep connection, so we’re willing to make that investment knowing that it’s not the quick route to success that might be in other countries.”

— Reed Hastings

32. “What’s got me excited about the education space is the growth of the Internet over the next 10, 20, 30 years.”

— Reed Hastings

33. “Broadcast TV is like the landline of 20 years ago.”

— Reed Hastings

34. “It is clear that for many of our members two websites would make things more difficult, so we are going to keep Netflix as one place to go for streaming and DVDs.”

— Reed Hastings

35. “Our brand at Netflix is really focused on movies and TV shows.”

— Reed Hastings

36. “I watch mostly independent films.”

— Reed Hastings

37. “I hate the photo shoots. I hate all that stuff.”

— Reed Hastings

38. “The Fearless Organization, she explains that if you want to encourage innovation, you should develop an environment where people feel safe to dream, speak up, and take risks. The safer the atmosphere, the more innovation you will have.”

— Reed Hastings

39. “I’m an HBO subscriber, and I watch a bunch of great shows on HBO.”

— Reed Hastings

40. “I recommend instead focusing first on something much more difficult: getting employees to give candid feedback to the boss. This can be accompanied by boss-to-employee feedback. But it’s when employees begin providing truthful feedback to their leaders that the big benefits of candor really take off.”

— Reed Hastings

41. “Lead with context, not control,” and coaching your employees using such guidelines as, “Don’t seek to please your boss.”

— Reed Hastings

42. “If you have a team of five stunning employees and two adequate ones, the adequate ones will sap managers’ energy, so they have less time for the top performers, reduce the quality of group discussions, lowering the team’s overall IQ, force others to develop ways to work around them, reducing efficiency, drive staff who seek excellence to quit, and show the team you accept mediocrity, thus multiplying the problem.”

— Reed Hastings

43. “In a fast and innovative company, ownership of critical, big-ticket decisions should be dispersed across the workforce at all different levels, not allocated according to hierarchical status.”

— Reed Hastings

44. “Netflix treats employees like adults who can handle difficult information and I love that. This creates enormous feelings of commitment and buy-in from employees.”

— Reed Hastings

45. “A fast and innovative workplace is made up of what we call “stunning colleagues” – highly talented people, of diverse backgrounds and perspectives, who are exceptionally creative, accomplish significant amounts of important work, and collaborate effectively.”

— Reed Hastings

46. “My goal was to make employees feel like owners and, in turn, to increase the amount of responsibility they took for the company’s success. However, opening company secrets to employees had another outcome: it made our workforce smarter.”

— Reed Hastings

47. “Great leaders, like Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos, also focused on the long term.”

— Reed Hastings