Netflix's public culture deck turns its people philosophy into a 13M-view document

In 2009 Netflix was growing fast — from DVD-by-mail startup to streaming company — and chief talent officer Patty McCord worried the culture that made it work would dilute. Her answer was to write it down. With CEO Reed Hastings, she produced a slide deck spelling out what Netflix believed: high performance over loyalty, freedom with responsibility, top-of-market pay, unlimited vacation and no annual reviews.

The deck was not a corporate brochure; it was the employment contract. McCord said the company wanted to 'codify what we wanted to be', and new employees were told the document was theirs to enforce — if they saw someone not living up to it, they should speak up. When people were let go, they received rich severance packages, the company's way of making its high-performance standard humane.

In August 2009 Netflix posted the deck on SlideShare, where it went viral. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg called it 'the most important document ever to come out of the Valley', and by 2016 it had been shared more than 13 million times — turning a hiring philosophy into the most visible piece of management writing of its era.