Teach For All Talks With Reed Hastings

You need basically no introduction to this group, but so I'll keep this short, but I think as most of you all believe, Reid has essentially changed entertainment and his company Netflix has really made video streaming the way we consume television and films in the U.S. and increasingly globally. He's recognized as one of the world's leading entrepreneurs and CEOs, and what you may not know, unless you're here in the U.S., is that he's a major education activist as well. He serves on the board of KIPP, which is well known to most folks on this call. Reid has served on the California Board of Education and is just a generous philanthropist to many kind of education reform initiatives. And as I've shared in kind of communicating around this opportunity with you, Reid, I had the chance, you all, to talk with or to hear Reid speak to a big education conference not very long ago. And one of the things he shared was essentially his kind of most salient leadership lessons from Netflix, which I felt were just incredibly applicable to our work in the education sector. And so I'm just really excited to have the chance to have him surface his insights for our community. So Reid, just to get us started, I wonder if you can kind of just dive us into that topic, like kind of share, I mean, here's one prompt, but feel free to take this whichever, like how you view your role as the leader within Netflix. I mean, I think that that was the biggest headline that I took from listening to your talk, but just as a way to get us into it. Well, I was fortunate to run a company before Netflix, Pure Software, which grew to about 700 people, went public in 1995. So it was a tech software company. And as an engineer, every time we had a problem come up, I would hate that, and I would try to put a process in place to make sure that that problem didn't occur again. And, you know, when you build an elaborate set of these processes, it's pretty impressive what can happen that you attract people, you know, who can follow the rules and you get very specialized at your business. You don't make many mistakes and you're very, very consistent. But what we didn't appreciate is that we were also very rigid. We were very specialized to doing one thing incredibly well. And then inevitably the market shifted. In that particular case, it was from C++ to Java. But again, all markets shift over time, all needs become different. And what happens then is the company had very little sort of creative, inventive DNA trying to figure out the new world because we were so highly optimized at this other thing. And we ended up having to sell the company to our largest competitor. And in hindsight is when I realized that it's kind of like agricultural monocropping. And, if you do a vast area, 100,000 hectares of the same crop, in some narrow sense, you can gain a yield advantage because of the consistency. But what happens is you're extremely vulnerable to like a single bug, a single disease because of this hyper specialization. And in general, I realized, oh, there's this tension between getting better at something and staying creative. And I didn't really know how to resolve that tension. In some fields like safety critical fields, like airlines and to a degree schools, you do need incredible consistency because of the stakes involved. And eliminating error is a really good thing. And so that certainly is true in manufacturing. Think of the last 300 years and our societies figuring out how to manufacture penicillin at great volume and great consistency. And certainly you want to get to a zero error state when you're manufacturing penicillin. And much of our economy is influenced by this manufacturing mentality where you want lots of process, great scale, great reliability, and little variation. And then there's always been pockets of our economy like advertising agencies or political campaigns where it's the opposite, where you really want to increase variation. You're trying to learn so quickly and so dynamically. And the fundamental model of the industrial model is to reduce variation. And in the learning model, you're trying to increase variation. So they really have different goals. And so in starting Netflix, we vowed to see how flexible, how few rules we could operate with. Now, that could lead to chaos. And in many organizations, it does. They start with a dozen people and everybody gets what the mission is. And so they don't need many rules. And then they get to be 100 people and it's a and so they start putting in rules. And what our realization was that if we have the right people and we do a really good job of setting context, constantly talking about what our values are, what the mission is, that we needed very few rules. And so think of it as inspiring people rather than managing people. And the worst case is supervising people. Okay. And again, it depends on the kind of business. Now, if you're running a school, there is a degree of management and supervision, certainly over the pupils, but also the teachers. It is appropriate. But if you're running a creative organization and you're trying to come up with new ideas and to stress all of that, then you really want to push really hard on looseness, flexibility, good judgment. And you make up for it by increasing people quality as you grow. And if you could do that, you can run a very large organization. So Netflix is 6,000 now spread around the world with extremely few rules. So kind of simple versions are like anybody can sign contracts. And for most people, that's crazy. I thought you only have to have VPs or some level or how do you prevent bad things happening? Or we have unlimited vacation where you just, it's very flexible. We're all working in the middle of the night. We're working scattered hours. And so we don't have a formalized number of vacation days. Hiring and budgeting is very loose and approximate. And again, it may sound like, well, then it would be chaotic, but we're so self-disciplined and we give people incredible information internally so they can tell what's going on. So we're trying to feed people rather than manage them or more broadly inspire over management. And so that was sort of the big picture of this social experiments called Netflix. And I remember you sharing that through your journey, you've been working to release control, like give context, release control. And I would just imagine that even in your sector, it can feel like the room for error. There isn't a lot of room for error. No. I mean, I'm just curious how you think about. Yeah. What we have to do is create room for error. So let's go back to the monoculture, the hundred thousand hectares of one crop example. It is short term, more efficient. Okay. So if your orientation is I got to have the best results this year, then you probably do want to have to get out error. But if your orientation is let's tolerate lots of small errors along the way, none of them horrible, just not safety critical, but like something got spent that shouldn't have been something got hired that shouldn't have been something got tweeted that shouldn't have been because you're building up the leadership, the judgment muscle so that when the big changes come in your case, in society or in certain governments or things, or in ours, in terms of how people are entertained, that you've got people who are first principle thinkers and are used to taking independent action. So again, you're definitely less optimal in the short term and we think much more optimal in the long term. And so again, like Netflix, we started on just DVD by post in the United States and then expanded to streaming in the U.S. and then expanded to streaming internationally and then into original content. Most companies are not able to make those kinds of adjustments again, because they're so highly optimized for the single business. And so it is an attention because of course, if you allow catastrophic error, then the organization can die along the way. But it's trying to think about it or think about it in terms of your own kids. You want your kids to have adventures, but not die along the way. You want them, like I was always like, a broken arm is okay, a broken back is not. And so we would try to have our kids have adventures and climb trees and take risks. And that isn't optimal in the short term, potentially, but it is in terms of developing confidence and strength. So it's trying to think through those things within your organization, which is where can we try running a little looser and see if we only get small issues. And the benefit is developing the independent thinking muscle. Yeah. So, and I'm going to open this up sooner rather than later, because I think you've laid out kind of the high level principles. And I think this is a dilemma that we really are grappling with all over this network. But I do just want to ask you, I mean, you kind of drew a distinction, like this is good for some things, but maybe not always. And I don't know, I've personally been thinking a lot about this and we have across our network because we've embraced this big goal of, you know, we want our kids in our classrooms to be growing as leaders, shape a different future, you know, who can navigate a changing economy, solve increasingly complex problems. I mean, if you stop and think about it, the kids in our classrooms today, it's going to be all up to them in 10 or 15 years. And it's terrifying to think about that when you realize how controlling our schools are. I mean, you don't sit there as a passive receptacle of information and then suddenly wake up and lead 10 or 15 years later. So it leads to this real question around whether we can have such hierarchical schools and systems and organizations, and then expect our teachers to release control, foster the leadership of their kids, et cetera. So I think this is actually one of the reasons where I think there are organizational reasons as well, where a lot of the lessons you're sharing resonate a lot. But even thinking about the kind of education we're working to provide for kids has led us to become really kind of obsessed about this. I mean, do you have a reaction to that? No, I mean, I think you just want to split something. So you might say, like the safety critical stuff, I'm going to have some process around that. But then the pedagogical work and the inspiring of students, because you're certainly right that preparing students for this creative world, they have to learn and break an arm to use that metaphor. That is, they have to try things that don't quite work and then have that zest for going out and trying to figure out hard problems. Yeah. So we have about 125 people on here, and I'm going to try to orchestrate this via chat. And if you all don't have questions, I'll throw in some more of mine. But let me start by asking Phoebe. You all introduce yourselves first and then ask your questions. Phoebe. Sure. Thank you. Hi, Reid. I'm Phoebe Garfinkel, and I'm wondering about this tension between working in ambiguity and yet prioritizing the work that is going to drive impact. I think a lot of the experience we've seen is that it's helpful to know exactly what work you're supposed to do so that you can go out and get the goal and drive the impact. And in fact, what you're talking about is giving people less clarity in some respects. And so I'm curious how you have managed the tension between giving people ambiguity and clarity and what they should be working toward. Sure. In the Netflix context, it's about providing entertainment that people want basically instead of other entertainment. So we compete with sports, with HBO, with YouTube, with lots of things. And so what I talk about is we want to do entertainment that people choose instead of those other options. And we can measure that success in terms of how much viewing do we win and what are the trend lines in terms of winning that. So that sets an overall context. We're trying to please our members, trying to provide them joy. And the way we measure that is in hours of viewing. And it does help to come up with a metric that way. So for you guys, highest level, you're trying to transform societies by providing a change in an education system that results in kids being better leaders, better thinkers, more connected. And so then you have to think, what are the intermediate points of how you measure that? Because if you don't have any of that, it's sort of just chaos and no one can tell if anything's any better than anything else. And so it takes a lot of thought, I think, for you guys in terms of how are lives changing. And I think if you focus on, hey, here's our ideas we want to bring about change because we want to develop young minds in these creative ways. And we want to do this a little bit differently in each country. There's going to be unique context. So you want flexibility at that level. But it's setting, how would you recognize, other than smiling children, how do you recognize what's a great program versus merely a good one? Great. Alejandra, can I ask you to ask your question? Sure. Good morning, everyone. I'm sorry, I'm a little under the weather, so I'm off camera. I'm Alejandra. I am a manager on the procurement team for Tish for America. And my question to you, Reed, is I really like the idea of inspiring people and having rules instead of managing them. But how does Netflix stay compliant with federal regulations? And I'm just coming from the perspective of working in the procurement area or department. And for us, it's very important that we stretch all our funds and grants to be able to achieve a bigger impact. But in the same time, we are a nonprofit and we should be running the organization as a business. So yeah, my question is, how does Netflix stay compliant with federal regulations when you mentioned that anyone in your company can sign contracts? And this is something that is kind of like a battle to us, trying to make sure that just the right people is spending the money in the right places. Yeah, I mean, it's tricky and I don't know that I would switch to and completely open model all at once. It's building a muscle around good judgment throughout the company such that people not only are well-intentioned, but have the relevant facts about what's acceptable or not. And we do have a set of non-negotiables in terms of integrity, in terms of anti-harassment, in terms of following the laws that are not sort of squishy. And everyone knows about those. And inevitably, we have a couple times a year where somebody crosses that line. And then we publicize it pretty broadly within the company as a teaching moment, not trying to humiliate the person, but trying to make sure that everyone understands, hey, we're all playing on a high-consequence field. And we have productions all over the world. And often in some locations, we'll get extorted. You have to pay a special payment to get a road open to be able to do this movie shot that you really want. And that potentially is in violation of US and British law. And so we have to be very careful about making sure everyone understands that. So we try to develop a high understanding in our people of the rules. And then we also, if there are issues, we don't paper them over internally. We're pretty open about them. And so that helps the whole learning base. And again, that's not in a safety-critical one, but so it works for us. There are occasional violations or contracts that we wish we didn't have. But again, we then compare that to having no innovation. And so we're willing to take these small errors. Do you all invest a lot in, when you say we're building the judgment muscle over time, how do you do that? Do you invest a lot in that, or is it all about hiring a certain level of person? No, we invest a lot in it, but not, we haven't found much formal coursework that helps much. So what we tend to do is kind of teach by example, and then we write up, it's more like a business school where you study cases. So if things happen and we write them up, we use Google Docs broadly, like you probably do. And so everyone's linked into a wide range of documents and examples, and it's, almost everything can be edited and it's by anyone. And so it's an evolving corpus of things that you can read about what's happened and what are the lessons. So it tends to emphasize people who are self-motivated to learn if you allow them access to the information. And then we'll hold Q&As and kind of go through things as an example. But we haven't done essentially any of the formal coursework, like here's judgment 101 or those kinds of things, or where we've tried some of them. They've lasted in one department for two years or four years, but they never, and they were bad, but they just didn't end up being all that helpful. And you're looking and hiring people who want not to be held back, people who are naturally seeking to learn and to grow. And so your job as a leader is to provide them the resources, but not spoon feeding. So I think of the formal classes as probably too much spoon feeding, and not to say we'll never do some of that, or there couldn't be some that's available, but many people throughout an organization tend to want to be like, where's my class? What are you doing, organization, to develop me? And we try to turn that around and say, self-development is the fundamental skill. And we'll try to stay out of your way, and we'll support your self-development efforts, but it's fundamentally an employee responsibility or a human responsibility to develop themselves. And again, we can be supportive in various ways, but it's trying to get out of that paternalistic sort of spoon feeding. If I haven't gone to a class, I'm not being invested in mentality, which can slip in. I once met with this author, Frederick Leloup. I don't know if you've ever read his book called Reinventing Organizations, which is just completely riveting, in my opinion, which talks about how there are different historical eras that kind of spawn different forms of organizations. And he advocates for something very similar to what you're articulating here. And when I met with him, I was asking him all these questions that were basically revealing my fear of what would happen if we released control. And he was just so puzzled. At the end of the dinner, he said, I have to tell you, this isn't the issue facing any of the organizations or companies I work with. The issue is people assuming ownership, people actually stepping up and wanting to lead at every level. And I just, I wonder, and it's honestly, it's what we've probably seen. We haven't, we've like really tried to undergo this transformation of our global organization and are kind of on that journey. And none of the issues have been around like, ooh, something terrible happened because we released control. It's more about like, how do we help everyone like really step up and lead? And I, you know, we're kind of going down this path of investing a lot in people's leadership development, but it sounds like, do you all do that kind of thing or? Well, I would say we are doing some of it. So for our top 20%, we now do like a version of PAHARA that Wendy went through. We do one week and that's very powerful, but it's also very general. You know, you read Lee Kuan Yew and Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela and talk about the, you know, personal impacts. So it's not like specific skills, you know, it's around cooperatively learning from each other. And again, our basic mantra is to be a better leader. You have to be a better person. And it's not around the two minute manager. It's not around little tips and tricks to motivate people. It's in fact being an authentic, seeking, curious person about how to make the world a better place, staying humble in front of that challenge. And then, you know, constantly, you know, by both by example and by exhortation, stimulating that conversation. And so when something goes wrong, what we try to say is, okay, let's not, you know, assuming that was a smart person who did something that really doesn't make sense. What we say is not what did that person do wrong? What context did I fail to set? How could a good person have gone off and done this? I don't know, you know, cooperative venture with Monsanto or something, you know, when you're in your terms, and you're like, oh, I see, I didn't really set any context about the global brand and about aspirational and about, you know, and so I did sort of set a context of do anything necessary to serve kids. And that was too simplistic of what I sent, set. And so I can see how we did this, you know, in a certain country, this big tie up with Monsanto. And so now I'm going to adjust my context a little about the value of long term brand. That might be an example. So anytime a mistake happens, we look at it as a mistake in the context that we don't have set. So as an example, internally, we have a document called our strategy bets. And it's just a Google Doc that everyone goes through. And it's got about 50 different bets that are ambiguous about what we're doing. So if something's 99% likely, we don't put it in there. Okay, like we should work in buildings rather than tents. Okay. But what we put is all the ambiguous stuff about, you know, we're not focused on sports, for example, we're really focused on movies and series. And many people think, oh, we should also do sports. But so that's why that's a bet. And then there's about 50 of these that document essentially, they make us articulate, what are all the judgment calls, and then we can collectively debate that. So that's a good example of sort of the openness and then the X being super explicit about the context. Helpful. Okay, I we've got an overwhelming number of questions here. Phil, can you answer your question? Sure. Thanks, Wendy. Hi, my name is Phil McCormish. And I work on the teacher or global staff. And I think what Wendy was talking about before about reinventing organizations is a good segue into my question. So you talked about making information available to all of your staff to help them make good decisions. And I'm just wondering, where you find the balance between strong internal communications to push out the information to your staff, versus making information more accessible, on demand, if you like, so that they can pull the information as and when they need it, because we found challenging to do both of those things and often find our staff can get very easily overwhelmed by the amount of information. So just wondering how you navigate that? Yeah, I mean, I would say we're mostly pull, that is there's lots of resources available. We tend to avoid like every group sending broadcasting and email to a lot of people that, you know, has tons of information of uneven necessity. Because the challenge is your organization grows is what do I need to know? Because, you know, you don't need to know the details in every country. In fact, it's too much. And so we tend to put those things in the doc, the Google Doc, and then try to provide some summary and links into them. So people will go on and read more and then follow the, you know, the whole network of links if they try to understand more about an issue. On a quarterly basis, we get the top 10, 20, top 20% together in person. So that's a big investment in travel and in time for two days. And that and then we do a bunch of memos for that maybe about 50 pages worth of memos that everybody needs that sort of the summary of their area for the last 90 days. And then we do it's a day of sort of discussions on what the issues are. So that's part of the kind of meeting rhythms that we do. But I would say it's almost all pull. And we're getting better and better about that, compared to say using email so much. Um, let me ask the students. I'm seeing Killian that your students have a question. Hello. Where are you all calling from? I'm from Belgium. I am in the in the fifth degree. And my question is, what the best advice you could give to students to improve our creativity? You know, it's just being an incredible observer of the world. If you look at what works in literature, in cooking and politics in education, you know, it's just reading a lot, watching a lot, interacting, and just trying to understand why do some things work? Why do they not? They're not easy to understand puzzles. But through that reflection, and then talking with people about, hey, why is this, you know, successful or not, I think you can develop a really strong intuitive sense of the kinds of things that make an impact on the world and the kind of things that sounded good, but kind of came and went. Fungi, can I ask you to ask your question? First of all, I'd like to just thank you for sharing such refreshing insights. I loved how you talked about mistakes in context. But my question is around, I think one of your principles that you say you live by is around how, I think I also saw it on your website, you talked about, you said we are extraordinarily candid with each other. And one of the things I'm realizing working in a global context is that what can be candid in one culture can be rude in another culture. So how have you gone around this as you operate in different parts of the world? And what advice would you have for us working in a global context? How would you get the balance right? Has Wendy had you read the book, The Culture Map? Do you know that book? We read it a lot. Okay. Okay, good. So then The Culture Map is a great insight for people who even have done a lot of international work of these different biases, like Europeans talking about the theory, and then getting to specific examples where Americans are socialized to do specific examples, and then abstracted eventually to the theory. And until you see these different dimensions exposed, you don't realize how single culture specific we all are. Then particularly in terms of feedback, really, direct feedback is hard in many cultures. And so what we try to do is make up for that with relationships. So we spend a bunch of time with people getting to know each other, trying not to be all business opening meetings with, you know, everyone to talk about what's going on in their life a little. And so that there's enough relationship that people are willing to be direct. Second, and particularly with our Asian employees, we're both critiquing more senior and older people and people in powers very hard. And then critiquing in meetings, which, you know, we like to do for efficiency, okay, how could this meeting have gone better? And then, you know, at the end of a meeting, and then people will say, or Westerners will say, Hey, you should have done this, you should have done that. And to our Easterners, that's quite shocking, you know, in a public room, and even to some Westerners. So I don't know that we've solved it, I would say, you know, we try to help with relationship on it. And then I would say, because we're so clear about what we are, when people join, we get a self selection that is, you know, of the Koreans that join us, they know what they're getting into, roughly speaking, and they want that. And so it's not the general Korean or Japanese or Chinese employee, but it's a special one that, you know, at least likes what they read on paper. And then what we try to do is help our Westerners understand that to critique someone, you know, in public in a way that might be quite comfortable in the West would be the equivalent of yelling at them. If you've grown up in an Eastern more deferential environment. And so, you know, you can just dial it down a little bit and be a little bit softer about it. So trying to bridge that gap. So again, you've seen through the culture map, many examples of lesser conflict, but this one about candor. And then what I do is I try to spend a, you know, each time I go around and talking with in meetings, I'll talk about the feedback that I'm getting, you know, which is sometimes pretty direct and harsh. And so that helps set an example of, wow, so we could talk about, you know, what he's struggling with. And then, you know, that makes it more okay. And so the more that I embody sort of such a strong desire for improvement that I'm willing to be critiqued, the better the atmosphere is that way. That because if you think about it, it's a little bit like athletics. If you can take the pain of the exercise, you can get stronger. And that's true about character. It's true about performance also. And so it's girding ourself for that pain. You know, can you do that, you know, extra mile? Can you do that extra pushup that makes you a little bit stronger? If you map that into the legitimate emotional difficulty of giving each other feedback. Amal, you want to ask your question? Hi. Yes. Thank you so much for doing this and for joining us. You touched a little bit on some of what I was thinking about in your more recent responses, but I really love the idea of learning from personal leadership lessons and sort of self-driven development versus the formalized sort of overarching type of approaches with leadership development and really cultivating a culture that allows for that. And it seems to me that it really requires a level of trust and vulnerability culturally. And I think you've touched on a little bit of sort of relationships being the foundation of that, but I'm curious how you cultivate that more broadly, in particular, trust and vulnerability. Yeah, it's an excellent question. I don't feel like we've kind of cracked that and we've got, there's another book, you can tell I'm a big reader here, that I'd recommend called The Advantage by Patrick Lencioni. And he's got some specific exercises about, in it, about creating trust and understanding team and vulnerability that is quite useful. So that might be one place to start. And then, you know, big picture is just recognizing that we're all struggling with many of the same things. And if you can accept fault in each other and that we're all working to be better and to make a difference, I mean, I think that helps. You certainly have to set it sort of in a leadership example with all of you. So those would be some of the things that would help. Of course, there's a Netflix special just about this very topic, a Brené Brown call to courage. So it's a one hour special. I think it's significantly better than our TED Talks. And so you might all start with like a team watching at that. Helpful. Awesome. Gaurav, you want to ask your question? Thanks. Thanks a lot, Reid, for being here. And we've all learned a lot. I have two short questions. One is that one of the things that's always been amazing to see is the trade-offs that you and Netflix are willing to make for the culture. And I want to know what are some of the trade-offs that you found painful to make in service of your mission and culture and how you personally sort of made peace with that. And second is just a very technical one. You said top 20% of their employees. And they just said, how do you figure that out? So the easy one is the top 20% is just the 20 most senior people by title. So it's in our case, it's VPs and directors, which is about 900 now out of 6000. In terms of trade-offs. So as you grow, you have to be explicit that we're going to give up some things. So we're going to give up intimacy. When we were small, it used to be I knew everyone at the office, right? And we were all together. And then as we grow, we make more impact, that's a positive. And the negative is loss of intimacy, you walk around the buildings, and you hardly know anyone. And so I try to be super explicit about, you know, this is what's coming. As we make a bigger impact, it's going to feel less intimate. And that's a sad thing. But it's worth it to be able to change the world. And if you want intimacy without impact, you know, you can go open a restaurant. And then, you know, you you know, everybody, you know, your clients, it's incredibly intimate, you know, but you're not changing the world. So if you try to make the trade-offs explicit for people, then when they actually do feel that loss of intimacy that comes with growth, it's not as anxiety provoking, because they reckon, ah, that's right. And then it's and the price for that, or that's the price to be able to make a big impact. And I know I want to make a big impact in the world. Kenny, Lee, do you want to go next? Yeah, sure. Hi, Reed. Thanks for being here. You know, like being an education reformer, in your experience in doing education reform in the States, what's the biggest resistance that you've faced so far, like, especially working in a ethnically diverse community? And how do you overcome that? Yeah, well, you know, lots of people have been working on education reform for, you know, a couple hundred years. You know, there was a famous commission in the US, the Council of 10, where the president of Harvard and all these people, in 1892, trying to work on education. And like, you know, you have to think about it as education is how society sees itself. And it's always a spectacular focus for people. And, you know, each country has a different system about how it's trying to provide education. So most countries in Europe, it's a state system. In the US, it's each local city and town, you know, so it's very fragmented. And so some of the solution varies by the, you know, the type of system that's set up, excuse me, for education. In the US, I think the main trouble is, is we have these local elected school boards. And so if you think of Teach for All, and you said, what if the board of directors of Teach for All were publicly elected, you know, around the world? You know, it's like, it'd be very uneven who would run for it. And then most of the time that they win election, they would want to change the organization. That's kind of why you run in a public election. And you would have chaos, just as you would have chaos if the board of Netflix were publicly elected. And so I've come to believe that that's the fundamental issue in American public education. And the charter schools where they have their nonprofits, a lot like Teach for All, you know, are the basic organizational structure. And then if we have the organizational structure better, then the pedagogy would flow out of that. And you'd see lots of innovation, you'd see stability, career paths, all kinds of positives that you see in the rest of the economy. So my solution in the States is this, you know, grow the charter sector. And in New Orleans, one of our major cities, it was the lowest performing city in America for 40 years, 1960 to 2000. And then the charter sector started growing there. And now it's 100% charter or nonprofit public schools. And now it's solidly in the middle. It's one of the most incredible Renaissance stories ever in American public education. But it's very abstract. You know, most people want to hear about how computers are going to change education or project-based learning, or some specific pedagogical approach, as opposed to an organizational approach that then unleashes all of those things. So we've got a lot of political resistance also. So we'll see how that comes about. You know, it's a great adventure. And, you know, relevant to say your work too, is you got to understand that things take a long time to change. All the problems of the world today are the problems that our parents and grandparents couldn't fix. And so they're really hard problems. And even simple things like democracy and one person, one vote, take hundreds of years to really take hold. And so, you know, we're on a great long-term mission, but it's not going to be an overnight fix. Cheyenne has a question that I think brings us back a bit, you know, to refocus on the kind of organizational approach. Cheyenne, do you want to pose your question? Indeed. My question is, what does Netflix do to keep itself disruption-proof? The organizational lifespan of startups have been reducing. And the other question was, where does the innovation sit in your org? Is it decentralized or decentralized? It's decentralized. And, you know, I talked about those top strategy bets that were throughout the company and everyone thinks about. We also have top threats. You know, what are the threats of this and this? Like Disney, as an example, launching a global service to compete with us. They're about four times larger than us in revenue, 80 billion versus 20. They're incredibly good at developing creative properties. They have a lot of strengths. And so, you know, we spend a lot of time thinking about that, or about what are the new ways that entertainment is going to happen, maybe with augmented reality or virtual reality, or imagine a pharmaceutical product that, you know, you took a blue pill and you got to peacefully hallucinate, you know, for several hours. And then whenever you wanted, you took a white pill and it popped you right back. Like that might be hard to compete with, you know, for a series or a movie, right? Because it was, you know, these new ways to provide entertainment. So it's often those kinds of substitution threats that get you in a, you know, think of, there used to be a thing in the US, it was called Yellow Pages. And it's this giant phone book. And it was a great business directory to look up if you need a dentist or if you need marketing services. And they had a lot of competition of other so-called yellow books. But ultimately, it was the internet that replaced the whole field. So that would be an example of a big dislocation. Jared. Thanks, Wendy. And thanks, Reid, for joining us today. I'm Jared at the Teach for All global organization. My question is maybe somewhat related, but you've mentioned the idea of creating room for error. And I'm thinking of Netflix history, when it seems like there have been some big strategic bets, maybe they were at the time about primarily mail delivery to streaming, or, you know, providing access to content to content creation. I'm wondering, you know, what was the process that led to those pretty big bets for what the organization doesn't look like? Yeah. Before we got to streaming, there was a lot of anxiety because the internet's probably going to be around for 50, 100 years, long time. But we knew DVDs was pretty temporary. So we were definitely in a panic to free ourselves from dependence on DVD. And we set that context, which is most companies who do one, you know, type of business like this are not going to get to the new world. So and they're run by good people. So we're going to have to take more risk than most people want to the normal human beings take, because that's how they don't cross that. So we had set the context that we have to take huge risks. And we did in terms of a number of commercial deals, most of which worked out. You know, we had one famous mess in Quickster with a separation of DVD. But we look at it in hindsight, and sort of say it's part and parcel of moving so quickly. But broadly about like your error example, you know, like I just gave a talk for our lawyers, we now crazy to believe, but we have 500 lawyers in the company. And so they do an annual conference. And I talked about needing to make more mistakes, because they're moving so carefully that we really only had one bad contract with a company called Relativity in 10 years, and that cost us about $50 million. And so, you know, one $50 million mistake isn't enough. And then we should be moving quicker, faster. And I don't want us to make billion dollar mistakes. That would be quite expensive. But you know, if we had one $50 million mistake a year, and so anyway, afterwards, of course, you know, they were all talking about it, because normally they will as lawyers in particular, they want to make sure there's no mistakes, right? That's the orientation. And I was like, no, take up the pace about what you're doing and the speed and the flexibility until you can see you're just over the line, you know, or an occasional toe across the line. And again, not ethically, but in terms of like the contract, like who's going to pay who if a certain situation comes up. And so again, throughout the company, that would be an example of evangelizing the benefit of a couple, you know, or even frequent small errors so that we're fast and flexible. Great. Sarah Smiley. Hi, I'm with Teach for America. And I'm curious what advice you have in contexts where there's high staff turnover. So it seems like the idea is to build the judgment of staff members over time. What strategies should we be thinking about to do this successfully if we often have people sort of coming in and out of the organization? Yeah, that's a great point. I mean, it definitely would be different, you know, when people join or put it this way, when people join Netflix temporarily, which would be to work on a certain title, because they're producing the title, we actually don't make them employees, and we don't try to do all this investment, then they're here to make an amazing show. And, you know, then they're off to make another show usually for someone else. So that would be our closest and then we don't include them in that inner circle. So I would just say that's a unique challenge that we haven't faced. And it's something you'll have to think through about how you balance that compared to say, someone who might spend, you know, five to 10 years with you. You know, Reid, I keep thinking about the fact that like, we're working in this sector over here, and you know it well, obviously, where the need for transformation is so immense. And where even the studies that look at like, you know, what moves school systems from like, terrible to fair, and fair to good, and good to great, that show that the only way to get from good to great, or rather to excellent is to essentially push out responsibility and have local ownership and leadership and all. And yet, we're also feeling, you know, they're just this work is very hard, and it does feel that the room for error is very, very slim. So we have constant debate at every level of this network within network organizations at the network level around like, what's the right balance? Like, do we essentially take the approach that you're suggesting, like build context, invest in people's leadership development, you know, and release control? Or do we take a much more centrally managed approach? Or where should we be in the spectrum? And I'm just curious what else you would have us read, consider, etc, as we grapple with that kind of big choice. Okay, well, let's say high level, you have a one in three chance of succeeding in your mission. And what you want to do to maximize the odds of succeeding, is that you have about the same amount of risk for making too many catastrophic errors. And on the other side, from too little innovation or variation in the approaches between countries. So if you think of those as the extreme ends, then it's trying to figure out if you're in the middle, you want to say, yeah, there's if we don't succeed one in three, it's because we were running so loose that these catastrophic thing happens that, you know, killed the brand, and we never recovered. And on the other end, you know, that one in three, there's that we were so tightly managed, that we executed the play really, right, really well, but it didn't turn out to be the play in many countries. And we were close, but we didn't, we never discovered the winning solution. And so if your two edge case failure things are about equally balanced, that might be a good exercise, because most people lean to the tight because they're, people are naturally conservative, and what you're doing is incredibly hard, no one's ever done it. And so you got to be willing to say, most likely, we don't succeed. And given that, you know, we need to take some real risk to be able to invent what kind of models make a sustained impact, you know, in countries. And so that's okay, we're, it's, we're, you know, innovative, we're doing the thing that very few people are willing to do, which is to be creative and aggressive enough that we may fail. And we're willing to acknowledge that. But if we succeed, that is such a big impact in the world that it's worth it. That's helpful. Anna O'Gara, I think you have a question as well. Yes, I had a question similar to what Vonguy asked. But as your organization has grown and evolved from initially, I believe, a primarily American startup to expanding to various global audiences, to now being a fully global organization, how you have evolved your organizational culture, knowing that's something that you all do so well, particularly around the lines of transparency, and to move from being American and inclusive to your global staff to being a more global organization, if that's how you identify? Yeah, I mean, I would say, there's several organizational moves. One's about being inclusive, in its more traditional sense, race, gender class, that we're under, which is a global movement, but it's probably strongest in the US. And then second is around being less American centric. And we're still keeping English as the core language, you know, of the organization. But we are trying to do a lot more to facilitate people all over the world and feeling that they can thrive, you know, in this firm, and that it feels less and less American. And if you think of, for example, Nike and Adidas, you know, for most consumers around the world, they don't know where Adidas is from, it's just got three stripes, it's sort of generally good. And Nike is profoundly American. And you know, we really strive over time to become more like Adidas, which happens to be German. But that's a effort underway. And so what I'm trying to do in using that example is to really talk about there are two ways to operate, or at least, and here's an example that people could relate to. So that would be one type of setting the context of what we're trying to aspire to be. But both being, you know, more effectively multinational and being inclusive, are works in progress. And most of our employees would probably say we got a long way to go on both. So but it's a, you know, it's a big effort. Well, thanks, you guys. It's a great treat to visit with you all. And I'm so profoundly proud to know your organization a little bit and the work you're doing around the world is just incredible. As Wendy may have told you, my first job out of college was being a Peace Corps math teacher in Swaziland. And so I got my taste of, you know, different types of education system. And I've never forgotten the amazing students that I had in rural Swaziland. So the fact that you guys are trying to do this at scale all around the world is just incredibly impressive. So thanks to all of you.