NETFLIX

CEO Reed Hastings originally said he got the idea to found Netflix after he got charged with a $40 late fee for “Apollo 13”. The co-founder, Marc Randolph, discredited it and claimed that the two wanted to create “the Amazon.com of something” and focused on DVDs. The story of how the idea came up changed a few times. On the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain in 2017 said Hastings that the idea originated from a math problem about the bandwidth of a station wagon carrying tapes. A person would have to figure out how many tapes could fit inside the vehicle, how much data the tapes could hold and how fast the car could get to a given destination in order to fix this problem. This led Hastings to think about how quickly you could deliver a DVD through the mail and how much data it could hold (Castillo, 2017). It is not clear what idea exactly represents the original truth. Nevertheless, they started a test-run and decided to mail CDs, because the DVD was new technology at the time. After the test-run was successful, they decided to start Netflix. Over the years, Reed Hastings created from a small DVD rental and sales site a multibillion-dollar company in 20 years.