It was a beautiful Sunday morning. I had decided to hike the hills on the east side of San Jose just above Alum Rock Park. Bocardo Rock was one of the highest hills in the area and made for a really stunning view of all of Silicon Valley. That morning it looked like a gigantic lake as it was fully shrouded in a dense layer of fog. I was feeling far removed from the hectic pace of my job at Netflix when I heard the ping of a text message. I quickly checked my Blackberry. It was from Reed. Yes, that Reed. My CEO. I wondered what was up for him to be texting me on a Sunday morning.

He was asking about the Netflix Culture deck. The leadership team had been putting their thoughts down about the unique Netflix culture into a presentation format. The now famous deck was just a PDF at that time. Reed wanted to know when I was going to upload the deck to our site. The plan had been to put it on the Netflix Values page. I had delayed uploading it because I thought the deck was too good to just tuck it away on that seldom visited page. So I quickly responded, “Reed, I think we can get a lot more mileage out of this deck if we put it on Slideshare. I think if we just post it as a PDF and bury it on that page it won’t reach a larger audience”. At the time Slideshare was the best way to have a presentation go viral. He hadn’t heard of the site. After I explained it, he liked the idea. And within an hour or so, Reed had created an account there and posted as a slideshare.

The funny thing is that when Reed created the account he just chose a random username that ended up obscuring who was behind the account¹. Somehow the deck got noticed and initially the belief was it had been leaked by an unidentified Netflix employee. This actually gave it a huge boost! 

The rest is history as they say². Later Reed created a more recognizable username on Slideshare and Netflix shared it more officially. In 2009, Netflix wasn’t the global name it is now. So this initial confusion turned out to be a happy accident. I am sure it would have eventually found its way to a larger audience, but the viral buzz helped get the word out.

Over time the deck became a powerful recruiting tool. Reed once said to me, “We chose to have a really opinionated culture on purpose. We realized that it would attract some and at the same time repel others. But that is ok. We built a culture that we believe in. If some don’t feel attracted to that, then that is fine.”

It is important to understand that Netflix had a clearly defined culture from its earliest days. The deck just made the story public.  The culture had been lived in for years . It was both authentic and clearly defined. It is not simply writing a set of values and publishing them. It has to be clearly defined and it has to be authentic. A story like that will resonate with the people you are trying to hire. It will attract those that believe in the same cultural behaviors. It will repel others. But that is ok. Your cultural story will become one of your most powerful recruiting tools.

Reed Hastings made this exact point in a 2017 interview on Reid Hoffman’s Masters of Scale podcast . Here is an excerpt from that interview.

HASTINGS: The culture deck started about 10 years ago. So first couple of years, we were just focused on survival, then we got public in 2002, cash-flow positive and it was clear we were going to survive. So we then started really thinking about the culture: what we wanted to be, how we wanted to operate.

And so over successive years, I improved this deck which I would go through with new employees. And sometimes those new employees would love it, sometimes they were like, “Oh my god, why didn’t you tell me this before I started? That doesn’t make sense to me.” And so we realized we should give it to every candidate.

And so then about 2007, 2008 [EDIT: this was actually first week of August 2009)] we did that by posting it on SlideShare. But again, it was really just to be able to send a link to the candidates. It’s not very pretty, it’s not very highly designed, doesn’t look like it’s an external marketing piece, but that authenticity, really, people liked in the outside world, and now it’s over 10 million views on SlideShare, and continues to be studied around the world.

HOFFMAN: And what were the unexpected benefits of having published it?

HASTINGS: Well the core benefit, which we did expect, was that candidates were very aware of the culture. The unexpected benefit was many people became candidates for us, because they loved that – what we described in terms of freedom and responsibility – that might not have otherwise thought about us.

¹ In the archived 2009 version of the slideshare deck, the username shows as reed2001. That is actually not the original username, but was changed shortly after the original post.