Netflix Culture: Creativity and Freedom

How did you find that the environment at Netflix encouraged creativity and freedom?

I really liked it. I thought it was an incredible structure for people to do the best work of their lives. It requires people to be a little bit aggressive and a little bit bold. I don’t think it’s a culture where the meek do well or people that trying to consensus build, they also might not do as well.

There’s a messiness to it. You have probably heard this, with people in Netflix saying that there are many paths to yes; or that there are many different groups that can look at the same project, which is really what that means. Sometimes, when you are on the production side, which is where I am now, it might be confusing, who you should take what project to. There is a little bit of a downside to the messiness of all these different paths that can converge.

But for the most part, I think that formulation is winning, because global platforms just require so much content and so much different type of content and you need to test into it. I think it’s more likely that media companies are going to look more like Netflix than traditional studios or linear networks, over time.