Story Brief

Long before becoming a Hollywood mainstay with a market cap of over $315 billion, Netflix was struggling to stay afloat. After the dot-com bust, the then-DVD rental company was forced to make its first major round of layoffs in 2001, cutting roughly one-third of its workforce. For Netflix cofounder Reed Hastings , the experience drove home a lesson about how to think about a company: It may be a tight-knit team, but it isn’t a family.

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