Netflix co-founder recently revealed in a podcast that he adopted a "‘great business philosophy" from Jeff Bezos's style of leadership at Amazon. “I try to take a lot of risks on things that are recoverable,” he said on entrepreneur Tim Ferriss’ podcast.
Hastings, who launched Netflix in 1997 and now serves as chairman of the $260 billion streaming giant, said that experimenting with reversible risks can “help you get more done". Otherwise, you are likely to get bogged down in anxiety over every potential worst-case scenario till you reach a point where you’re afraid to take any timely risks at all, he added.
″[It] just gets in the way of creativity,” the Netflix boss said. “In most fields... you want to move fast, and some things don’t work, and you fix them fast.”
He also referred to how Bezos looks at risks as either “one-way doors [or] two-way doors". In a different podcast, the Amazon founder said that a two-way door risk is easy to take because it’s reversible, so “you can come back in and pick another door,” but a one-way door risk probably can’t be undone. “You go in that door, you’re not coming back,”. “Those decisions have to be made very deliberately, very carefully,” Jeff Bezos said.
“I think that’s a great business philosophy. I share it," Hastings agreed.
Regarding risks the company can recover from, Hastings shared that at Netflix, approving of new shows that aren’t guaranteed hits may be considered a recoverable risk. If a show is unpopular with viewers, the company can cancel it and use its revenue from safer, lower-risk programmes to cover its financial losses.
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