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Key Takeaways Before Reed Hastings cofounded Netflix in 1997, he worked as a programmer at a 30-person startup called Coherent Thought.
During his time working at Coherent Thought, Hastings drank a lot of coffee and accumulated a mountain of dirty cups at the end of the week.
He discovered one morning at 4:30 a.m. that his boss, the company’s CEO Barry Plotkin, was actually the one washing his dirty cups.
Billionaire Netflix cofounder Reed Hastings learned an important leadership lesson in his first job out of graduate school. He was working as a programmer in a 30-person startup called Coherent Thought. At the time, Hastings was 28 years old, writing code every day and drinking lots of coffee to work through the night as he completed assignments.
“My coffee cups would pile up,” he recently explained on an episode of the show In Depth With Graham Bensinger. “And every week or so the janitor would clean them all, and I’d have 20 new cups, and the cycle would go on.”
However, about a year into this cycle, he discovered that the janitor wasn’t cleaning his mountain of coffee cups — it was actually the company’s CEO, Barry Plotkin.
“One morning I came in very early to the office [at] like 4:30 [a.m.], and I went into the bathroom, and there was my CEO — and he’s washing coffee cups,” Hastings said. “And I was like, ‘Barry, are you washing my coffee cups?’ And he said, ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘Have you been doing that all year?’ “He said ‘Yes.’ And I’m like, ‘Why?’ And he said, ‘Well, you do so much for us, and this is the one thing I can do for you.’”
Netflix cofounder Reed Hastings. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
Hastings said the interaction made such an impression on him that later on in his career, he himself tried to “connect with people through humility” by making cups of coffee for visitors to the Netflix office. Plotkin’s leadership style meant that his staff would “follow him anywhere,” Hastings said, even though the company eventually went bankrupt because no one was willing to buy its product.
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