Netflix Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Netflix - Research Paper Example It also offers flat rate DVD rental-by-mail in the U.S. Recently, the company has announced its plans for rebranding and restructuring of its DVD home media rental service into an independent subsidiary company called Qwikster, there by completely separating DVD rentals and streaming media (Murph, 2011). Hastings background and education Reed Hastings, the founder and the CEO of Netflix has been the company’s chairperson from the time it was established. Hasting was born October 8, 1960 in Boston, Massachusetts, and is a prominent entrepreneur and education philanthropist. He is married with two children and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area (Hamilton, 2011). He graduated from high school in 1978 from the Buckingham Browne & Nichols School in Cambridge, Massachusetts and for one year, he was a sales person for Rainbow Vacuum Cleaners (BB&N, 2011). Hastings studied mathematics at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine where he was awarded the Smyth Prize in 1981and Hammond Prize in 1983, before graduating with BA in 1983 (Hamilton, 2011). After a short stint with US Marine Corps in 1981, he joined the Peace Corps and taught high school maths in Swaziland from 1983 to 1985, and from his tour of duty, he joined Stanford graduate school, earning a masters degree in computer science in 1988 (Zipkin, 2006). Career, personality and skills After graduation, his first job was at Adaptive Technology, where through his creativity, invented a tool for debugging software. He left Adaptive Technology in 1991 to form his first company, Pure Software that specialized on products for troubleshooting software, and grew rapidly to the extent that he found it challenging to run the company (Zipkin, 2006). The experience from teaching in Swaziland, working at Adaptive Technology, and managing Pure Software made Hastings more determined, focused, and this transformed him from an engineering background to a CEO material. Following its success, Pure Software merged with Atria So ftware in 1996 forming Pure Atria that was acquired by Rationale Software in 1997 prompting Hastings to leave company shortly after the acquisition (Clark, 1997). To sum his personality and skills, Hastings is considered as being intelligent, creative, determined, understanding, analytical and a very charismatic leader, which is a scarce combination (Hitt, Ireland & Hoskisson, p.276). Idea for that led to establishment of Netflix and it improvement For two years after acquisition of his company, he became more engrossed in philanthropic education reform efforts and other sociopolitical reforms. It was during this time that the idea of forming Netflix Inc cropped. One day in 1997, he got late to return a Blockbuster video tape and was fined $40 for the Apollo 13, something that embarrassed him, triggering him to think about the huge market that was available if only a company did not impose huge fine on customers on lateness fees (Abkowitz, 2009). It was then when he began investigat ing on how to establish a movie rental business by mail. In his study, he realized that customers did not like long queues that were found in rental stores, poor selections, process of returning the movie, and the lateness