Netflix founder Reed Hastings tells the story of the startup CEO who cleaned the coffee cups

Reed recalls being 28 years old working as an engineer at a failed startup in the AI space called Coherent Thought:

“I worked so hard as an engineer writing code. I was there every night, all night — the kind of thing, you know, how hard can you push? And I would build up over time on my desk this gross set of coffee cups. And every now and then the janitor would clean them all. So I learned that if I just waited long enough, I didn’t have to clean them.”

Then, one morning Reed came into work really early at 5am:

“I walk into the bathroom and there were all my cups being cleaned. I looked up and it was our CEO Barry Plotkin who was cleaning them.”

Reed asked him, “Barry what are you doing?”

Barry: “I’m cleaning your cups.”

Reed: “Have you been doing it the whole year? And you never said anything?”

Barry: “Well you work so hard and this is the only thing I can do for you.”

Reed remembers:

“I just thought, Wow, I’ll follow this guy to the end of the earth… And that’s exactly where he led us.”

He explains:

“What happened is he was an incredibly charismatic guy that didn’t have a good product/market fit vision. And we built an incredibly elaborate product and ultimately sold one copy of it to one customer who never installed it… It’s a funny thing about leadership. You can be very personally compelling and high integrity — that’s great. But you also got to lead people in the right direction.”

Full video: Stanford Graduate School of Business “Reed Hastings, Netflix: Stanford GSB 2014 Entrepreneurial Company of the Year“ (Sep 2014)

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Reed Hastings on the role of the CEO at a startup. “In the first couple of years, you do everything—you’re doing dishes at night, you’re coding, you’re writing marketing materials, you’re dealing with customers and investors. And you have so many disadvantages as an irrelevant little nothing of a company that you have to make up for it with talent, hard work, and brute force.” (full article).

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