Early Netflix was a small, tight-knit group. I knew everyone—I’d hired them. I knew what they were good at and what they didn’t know they were good at yet. I knew how they thought, how they worked. Most of all, I knew they were brilliant—that they could learn new things if needed. Jim had no experience in operations when I hired him. Boris wasn’t even a web designer. But I knew that both of them had the necessary drive and malleable creativity to make a go of it. And that’s how startups typically run, in the early days: You hire a bunch of brilliant people to be jacks-of-all-trades.
