Reed Hastings

He is married to Patrician Ann Quillin and has two children.

He was born as Wilmot Reed Hastings, Jr. on October 8, 1960, in Boston, Massachusetts to Joan Amory and Wilmot Reed Hastings. His father was an attorney for the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.

Reed graduated from a private school in Cambridge following which he joined the Bowdoin College where he studied mathematics. He also served in the Marine Corps officer training through their Platoon Leader Class in 1981.

He graduated in 1983 and joined the Peace Corps—a volunteer program run by the United States government which sends volunteers to developing nations of the world. He went to Swaziland and taught high school mathematics from 1983 to 1985. He later stated that his experiences in Africa helped hone his entrepreneurial skills and risk taking abilities.

He joined the Stanford University upon returning from the Peace Corps and earned his Master's degree in computer science in 1988.

He embarked on a career as a software developer and accepted a job at Adaptive Technology. There he worked under Audrey MacLean, the CEO at that time, from whom he learned the value of focus. He quit this job in 1991.

Reed Hastings was an entrepreneur at heart and had always wanted to start his own company. Along with Raymond Peck and Mark Box, he formed his first company, Pure Software in October 1991. The company, which produced products to troubleshoot software, grew rapidly over the ensuing years.

However, the growing success of the company proved to be a challenge for Hastings as he realized that he was not prepared to manage such a rapidly growing company. An engineer by profession, he found the responsibilities of being the CEO quite daunting.

The company went public in 1995 and Pure Software merged with Atria to form Pure Atria Corporation in 1996. However, some unforeseen issues cropped up after the merger and the combined company, Pure Atria, was acquired by Rational Software in 1997.

Reed Hastings considered his experience with Pure Software to be a vital lesson in his entrepreneurial career. He then collaborated with Marc Randolph to co-found Netflix in 1997. Netflix was conceived as a media rental service which offered flat rate rental-by-mail to customers in the United States.

Reed Hastings is the co-founder of Netflix, a media rental service based on his innovative ideas. The company’s services are available all over North America, several parts of Europe and also in Australia, South America, and New Zealand. As of July 2015, Netflix reported a subscriber count in excess of 65 million.