Historical Overview
Our company was founded by Marc Randolph and Reed Hastings in 1997. The founders were very enthusiastic about modern technology and, besides, they had had experience in creating and successfully running websites. As a result, they came to the idea of setting up a website where people could easily rent or buy DVDs being at their homes. Thus, Hastings invested almost $3 million to start the business (“Culture at Netflix,” 2017).
Our company officially started operating in April 1998. On the first day, our staff consisted of thirty employees, and we managed to offer almost nine hundred DVDs for rent. Our basic offer was $4 for the item and $2 for the shipping. Our website provided customers with movie reviews and advertisements for more DVDs’ rentals.
Our advantage was that we had very few competitors, but the problem was that not many Americans had access to DVD players. Therefore, our company decided to make agreements with such companies as Apple, HP, and Toshiba to promote the production of DVD players. Our first major sale was in September 1998, when we offered ten thousand copies of the testimony of Bill Clinton in the Lewinsky affair. The reason for our success was that we set a price of only 2 cents for the item and 2 dollars for shipping (Matthew, 2014).
In 1999, our company had to stop selling DVDs online because of the strong competition from the side of Amazon. Therefore, we placed more focus on the DVDs’ rentals, which was not very successful. That is why we decided to change our pricing strategy and allowed customers to rent four DVDs for a fee of $16 per month. In 2000, we raised the price to $20. In some time, our customer base increased exponentially and was nearly 300,000, and we were processing nearly 150,000 orders per week (Matthew, 2014).
In 2002, we made agreements with such companies as Warner Bros. and Columbia Pictures in order to release their films on our websites first. Additionally, we opened distribution centers in many other cities including New York, Houston, Atlanta, Boston, and Los Angeles. Thus, by the end of 2002, we became the leader in the market of DVD rentals and our total revenues rose up to $200 million (Matthew, 2014). Moreover, the number of our subscribers also increased and was nearly 700,000.
In 2005, our company was shipping approximately 1 million DVDs per day by mail, and we had almost 40,000 movies in our base. In 2010, we made watching movies online available for our customers for a particular payment. As a result, in 2012, our site became one of the most visited websites in America (Matthew, 2014). In 2016, we expressed our determination to become global and to expand our business in 150 other countries. In May 2017, we were glad to announce that the number of our subscribers reached 100 million (“Culture at Netflix,” 2017).
Organizational Values
Many companies have their own values and mission statements. However, these statements are often either vague or simply ignored. We do not have a clear mission statement, but we do not ignore our principles and values.
In general, our company’s mission statement implies that we have a particular vision, keep our promises, and have nine values. Although we do not have an official mission statement, Reed Hastings sometimes expresses it at various conferences. Thus, our main goal is to acquire licenses around the world, thereby becoming the best global distribution service aimed at providing entertainment. In addition, we want to create markets that filmmakers could easily access and help content creators anywhere in the world to find a worldwide audience (Farfan, 2016).
As for our core values, first of all, we promise our customers the best service, our employees the feeling that they do something great, our investors the assurance of profitable growth, and our suppliers an important partner. Additionally, our nine main values include fair judgment, productivity, passion, reliability, selflessness, honesty, good communication, creativity, and intelligence (“Netflix’s mission statement,” 2016).
Additionally, we constantly remind that, apart from the mentioned above, our core strategy is to improve our business through the streaming subscription both globally and domestically. We constantly improve the customer experience, enhance our user interface, and provide our streaming services to more devices that can connect to the Internet. We provide ethical and honest conduct in handling various conflicts of interest between professional and personal relationships (Farfan, 2016). We also provide understandable, timely, accurate, fair, and full transparency in our documents and reports and comply with governmental regulations, rules, and laws.
We also practice an anti-rule philosophy. Certainly, we are strict about safety and ethical issues, for example, we strictly control the access to the information about the payment to our employees and the transferring of money from one bank account to another, but these are mostly exceptions. In general, we think that rapid recovery and freedom is better than attempting to prevent mistakes, as our business belongs to the creative sphere but not to the safety-critical sphere. Thus, if people have fair judgment, rapid recovery is easily achieved. Additionally, we recognize that our biggest problem is the lack of innovation, but we are developing strategies in order to eliminate this disadvantage (“Culture at Netflix,” 2017).
References
Culture at Netflix. (2017). Web.
Farfan, B. (2016). Mission statements of technology companies. Web.
Matthew, A. (2014). Netflix, Inc. success story. Web.
Netflix’s mission statement. (2016). Web.