When it comes to entrepreneurship, leadership and business growth few are as experienced Reed Hastings and his quotes will show you why.
Reed Hastings is an American entrepreneur best known for being the co-founder, chairman and CEO of Netflix. He also serves on a number of boards and non-profit organizations and is also a former member of the California State Board of Education.
Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph co-founded Netflix in 1997, initially offering flat rate movie rental-by-mail to customers in the United States. Serving as CEO, Hastings helped beat off competition from Blockbuster and Walmart and ultimately transformed the world of movies, TV and cable. In the process, he also introduced innovative management practices and created a unique culture at Netflix.
Today Netflix is one of the biggest content streaming services in the world and Reed Hastings estimated net worth is $9.4 billion as of 2019.
Below you’ll find the best Reed Hastings quotes on business and leadership. I hope it inspired your thinking.
Inspirational Reed Hastings Quotes
1. “Most entrepreneurial ideas will sound crazy, stupid and uneconomic, and then they’ll turn out to be right.” – Reed Hastings
2. “Companies rarely die from moving too fast, and they frequently die from moving too slowly.” – Reed Hastings
3. “Be brutally honest about the short term and optimistic and confident about the long term.” – Reed Hastings
4. “Great leaders, like Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos, also focused on the long term.” – Reed Hastings
5. “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
6. “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
7. “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
8. “When we think about online learning, it’s such ‘early days.’ Bill Gates is a wildly smart insightful guy. Yet, even a guy as smart and insightful as that, 30 years ago can say things like, ‘Who’s every going to need more than 640K of memory?'” – Reed Hastings
9. “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
10. “With failures, you learn one of 99 things to avoid. So they are not that useful. I think it is more useful to learn from others’ failures.” – Reed Hastings
11. “… 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
12. “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
13. “I’ve worked very hard, but my life’s always been fun.” – Reed Hastings
14. “Occasionally great wealth is created in a short amount of time, but it’s through a lot of luck in those situations. You just have to think of building an organization as a lot of work. It may or may not turn into great wealth.” – Reed Hastings
15. “Taking smart risks can be very gratifying.” – Reed Hastings
16. “Don’t get distracted by the shiny object [and if a crisis comes], execute on the fundamentals.” – Reed Hastings
17. “Don’t be afraid to change the model.” – Reed Hastings
18. “Responsible people thrive on freedom and are worthy of freedom. [They are] self-motivating, [pick] up the trash lying on the floor, [and behave] like an owner… Our model is to increase employee freedom as we grow rather than limit it.” – Reed Hastings
19. “Do not tolerate brilliant jerks. The cost to teamwork is too high.” – 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. “Be big, fast and flexible.” – Reed Hastings
22. “Guessing right is a skill developed over time. Not all smart risks work out, but many of them do.” – Reed Hastings
23. “Stone Age. Bronze Age. Iron Age. We define entire epics of humanity by the technology they use.” – Reed Hastings
24. “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
25. “When you grow up, as I have, in the shadow of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and others, success is defined as the total global transformation of a market. To achieve that, you need low prices and an attractive offering. It’s about trying to make a positive impact on a big scale.” – Reed Hastings
Did you like these inspirational quotes?
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