Thread by @IntrinsicInv

This is a really interesting profile that is well worth a read if you’re not deeply familiar with Hastings and Netflix’s corporate culture. We agree he’s a truly world class leader. Choice quotes in thread below...

“They were all asleep to it during the early ascendance of Netflix," Barry Diller said of his fellow Hollywood moguls. “Now they’ve woken up to it, and it has slipped away from them and is never to be regained. They lost hegemony over an entire industry.”

“The heart and soul of our content,” is how Mr. Hastings describes [head of content and newly named co-CEO] Mr. Sarandos, who grew up glued to the TV and dropped out of community college in Arizona to work in a video store.

“there are all sorts of ways people have tried to hate the company,” for not getting their calls returned or not being able to schmooze their way into a big production deal with a friend. People whisper about the Netflix culture being arrogant
“But now they’re too big to hate.”

“Hastings makes his own cappuccino at machines, and we have no private dining rooms in our Hollywood office,” said a Netflix colleague. “He and Ted get food in the cafeteria like everyone else.”

After a long period when the club of mostly white, supposedly liberal men running Hollywood secured the power in a lockbox and acting shocked anew every time a movie with Asian or Black or female leads did great box office, Netflix is swiftly democratizing things...

...Its offerings include a show about a Japanese underwear store, a Belgian crime drama, a Spanish period piece about phone operators, a Portuguese bull-riding show. Netflix has also invested heavily in Black programming.

“Netflix doesn’t have to trot out one or two things, it has a library that’s a wide cross section of taste and content,” said Ms. DuVernay, who is producing a Netflix series on former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick...

... She called the service “the foremost and most robust distributor of Black images in the world.”