Hastings realized that if he launched a hardware device, he could not partner with anyone else. He would be in the business of hardware, not software or entertainment. That wasn’t part of the Netflix core vision. So, he made the hard call and decided to stop a project, even when it was so close to being done, because it did not align with the overall strategy. Instead, Netflix spun off Project Griffin as a separate company, which you know today as Roku. Then it turned its sights to finding a partner with a device for which they could build an app. They approached Microsoft, and, six months
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