Another Big Tech founder (mostly) moves on.
Reed Hastings has been in charge of Netflix since he co-founded the company, which originally shipped DVDs by mail, in 1997. Now Netflix has more than 230 million customers around the world, dominates the streaming video industry it basically invented, and Hastings is no longer going to run his company day to day.
Hastings, Netflix announced Thursday afternoon, will become the company’s executive chairman. In his place will be two co-CEOs — Ted Sarandos, who has previously shared the CEO title with Hastings and is the company’s main point of contact in Hollywood, and Greg Peters, who has been the company’s head tech leader for several years. Hastings says he’ll still be working at Netflix but will now have more time for philanthropy (Hastings, a veteran of the Peace Corps, is particularly interested in education).
This is one that makes a lot of sense in many ways. For one thing, we have seen an entire generation of tech founder CEOs move away from their companies in recent years, so Hastings is very much on trend.
And at Netflix, Peters has always been one of the contenders for the co-CEO spot, and has been getting more time in front of investors recently in quarterly earnings calls. He’s also in charge of Netflix’s brand new ad business and its gaming unit — neither of which is a meaningful part of the company’s revenue at the moment but both are supposed to be over time.
Meanwhile, there has been lots of speculation about when Hastings would be stepping away from the company, and lots of people in and outside of the company have told me they thought Hastings would have already moved away from day-to-day operations by now.
