Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings spoke at the Inc. 5000 Conference & Gala about lessons learned at Netflix and his new venture at Powder Mountain.
Mike Hofman and Reed Hastings. Photography by Nathan Bajar
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During a fireside chat at the 2026 Inc. 5000 Conference & Gala in Dallas, Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings reflected on nearly three decades of risky bets—including the one that badly backfired.
Netflix launched in August 1997 by renting out DVDs by mail, then eventually moved into streaming. The company initially positioned itself as an online Blockbuster.
“We named the company ‘net’ for internet and ‘flix’ for movies because it was always going to be internet movies,” Hastings said, referring to the vision to move from mail order to streaming.
Hastings said that the Netflix team went through about 50 revisions of the company’s signature (and now retired) red mailing envelope, working within the U.S. Postal Service’s one-ounce stamp limit. A DVD weighs 0.8 ounces, leaving just 0.2 ounces for packaging. Needless to say, they figured it out. By 2005 or 2006, Netflix had become the country’s biggest mailer, sending a couple billion pieces a year.
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“We spent a lot of time on postal sorters and polycarbonate breaking properties,” he said. “And, you know, it wasn’t very glamorous for the first 20 years.”
Netflix launched its first streaming service, Watch Now, in January 2007, a decade after its founding, as rivals like Apple and Amazon began selling movies as individual downloads. Netflix instead bundled streaming into its existing subscription, betting that, as Hastings put it, “all this content was going to come over the internet.”
But streaming came with a new set of challenges. “So on DVD, we had 100 percent of the content of the world, but it took two days to get to you,” Hastings explained. “And then when we started streaming, it took two seconds to get to you, but we only had a narrow slice of the content.”