Netflix’s co-founder Reed Hastings spent 29 years at Netflix and now sends its two CEOs almost nothing. Not because anything soured — the opposite. He says Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters have absorbed his thinking so completely that phoning them is redundant. He’s tested that theory in the biggest way possible. When Netflix walked away from the Warner Bros. Discovery deal this year, its founder wasn’t in the room for the call.Speaking on Semafor’s The CEO Signal podcast, hosted by Penny Pritzker and Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson, the Netflix co-founder said he’s been “very disciplined” about not calling the co-CEOs on business matters since leaving the board in June. He tried, briefly. For the first couple of months he lobbed in the occasional thought, then noticed something: they could already run the simulation without him. They ask what Reed would think, set that answer aside, and do what they believe is right. Which, Hastings said, is what they should do. “They can mimic me and conjure me easily. I’m very predictable in that way.”
Reed Hastings on leaving the Netflix board: ‘like being a godparent versus a parent’
The social side hasn’t gone anywhere—he still talks to them and they hang out. What changed was the front line. Hastings stepped down as Netflix CEO in January 2023 and left the board this June, and he’s blunt that the second exit was the smaller one. Being on a board of a company doing well, he said, is a fairly relaxed gig. The genuinely disorienting part was the workload dropping from around 70 hours a week to roughly one.
The Warner Bros. Discovery call Netflix made without its founder in the room
The clearest proof of the handover came this year, when Netflix walked away from the Warner Bros. Discovery deal. Hastings says he wasn’t involved in that decision at all. Sarandos and Peters worked the trade-offs themselves. He describes it as a price question rather than a strategy one—Netflix was comfortable with what it had offered, Larry Ellison raised the bid, Netflix had the chance to match and chose not to.Hastings frames the whole shift as moving from parent to godparent. The company, he added, has to stop reliving how he did things and start making its own mistakes.