Long before becoming a Hollywood mainstay with a market cap of over $315 billion, Netflix was struggling to stay afloat. After the dotcom 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.
