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Reed Hastings describes the early years of building Netflix as a period where the CEO quite literally does everything. In the beginning, you’re coding at night, washing dishes, writing marketing materials, talking to customers, pitching investors—whatever it takes to keep the company alive. As he puts it, a tiny, unknown startup has so many disadvantages that the only way to compensate is through talent, intensity, and brute-force effort.
If you’re fortunate, this all-consuming phase lasts a couple of years rather than a decade. But once the company grows to 50 or 100 people, the role of the CEO has to evolve. You can’t know everyone anymore. You can’t touch every detail. You have to shift from doing the work to shaping the direction.
At Netflix’s scale today, Hastings says his responsibilities center almost entirely on strategy and vision. He decides which markets Netflix should enter, but not the individual countries or content choices. He sets overall constraints—like the marketing budget running 5–10% of revenue—but he’s not designing campaigns. And perhaps most importantly, he defines the cultural vision: the values, principles, and “rules of the road” that guide how the company operates.
What he can’t do anymore is the work itself. Netflix is simply too big. Any attempt to be hands-on at that level would burn him out and frustrate the team.
Hastings learned this lesson the hard way at his first company, Pure Software. At 33, he was still trying to be both CEO and a nightly coder, practically living at the office. It became unsustainable. Even worse, when bugs showed up in his code, he wasn’t available to fix them because he was busy doing everything else. Looking back, he realized he held onto both roles far too long.
For Hastings, the evolution of a CEO is a simple but difficult shift: in the early days, you do all the work. Later, your job is to empower others and make the big decisions that determine where the company goes next.
