Quotes from Reed Hastings

We have a very wide range of content, but the brand-newest movies, what's happening with those is a $30 pay-per-view option - not from Netflix but from DirecTV and others - of movies that are in the theater.

Great leaders, like Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos, also focused on the long term.

Truly brilliant marketing happens when you take something most people think of as a weakness and reposition it so people think of it as a strength.

I've worked very hard, but my life's always been fun.

School districts in the US don't adopt technology very quickly.

Stone Age. Bronze Age. Iron Age. We define entire epics of humanity by the technology they use.

The Costa Rican government is prioritizing laying fiber optic over paving roads. Costa Rica is trying to become one of the Internet societies. This is happening throughout the world.

About half my work in education is U.S. political reform around school districts and charter schools, and creating more room for entrepreneurial organizations to develop. And about half on technology, which I look at as a global platform.

In hindsight, I slid into arrogance based upon past success.

How much has it been your experience that Americans follow what happens in the world?

I founded Netflix. I've built it steadily over 12 years now, first with DVD becoming profitable in 2002, a head-to-head ferocious battle with Blockbuster and evolving the company toward streaming.

What's got me excited about the education space is the growth of the Internet over the next 10, 20, 30 years.

My first company, Pure Software, was exciting and innovative in the first few years and bureaucratic and painful in the last few before it got acquired. The problem was we tried to systemize everything and set up perfect procedures.

Broadcast TV is like the landline of 20 years ago.

When we think about online learning, it's such 'early days.' Bill Gates is a wildly smart insightful guy. Yet, even a guy as smart and insightful as that, 30 years ago can say things like, 'Who's every going to need more than 640K of memory?'

Fibre optic is becoming like electricity. If you look at how electricity spread around the globe 100 years ago, that's what's happening now.

Well, we're about 24 million subscribers today, and that's up from about 15 million a year ago, so it's a very high rate of growth, and that's what's exciting about the business - more and more people are getting smart TVs, they're watching Netflix on their iPads.

It turns out that all Netflix streaming peak on Saturday night can fit inside a single fiber optic, which is the size of one human hair.

Our brand at Netflix is really focused on movies and TV shows.

There is a revolution happening, and within two years I think that Wi-Fi and Netflix will be built into all the televisions.

Comparing Apple to Netflix is like comparing apples to oranges, especially if the oranges made so many mistakes that people stopped eating oranges and just went back to Blockbuster.

At Netflix, we think you have to build a sense of responsibility where people care about the enterprise. Hard work, like long hours at the office, doesn't matter as much to us. We care about great work.

There's a finite market for DVD-by-mail, and the growth over the next 10 years will be in streaming.

Most companies that are great at something - like AOL dialup or Borders bookstores - do not become great at new things people want (streaming for us) because they are afraid to hurt their initial business.