Reid Hastings is leaving the post of CEO of the Netflix company he founded 25 years ago, foreign publications (Financial Times, CNBC, etc.) report.

Hastings, who launched Netflix in 1997 as a DVD-by-mail service, wrote in a blog post that he had been mulling his departure for several years. Now is “the right time to end my succession,” he added.

“Our board has discussed succession planning for many years (even founders have to evolve!),” Hastings, 62, wrote.

“I am so proud of our first 25 years and so excited for the next quarter century.”

COO Greg Peters was promoted to co-CEO alongside Ted Sarandos, who was in charge of programming during Netflix’s period of heavy investment, and was named co-CEO in 2020 with Hastings.

The change comes as Netflix has lost more than a third of its market value in the past year, and Sarandos and Peters will be tasked with guiding Netflix through a tougher time for the entertainment industry.

Hastings will remain executive chairman, following the previous examples of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Microsoft founder Bill Gates. The billionaire founder said he plans to “spend more time to philanthropy.”

The move from Netflix comes as the company said it added 7.7 million subscribers in the fourth quarter, well above expectations, thanks to popular programs such as spin-offs from The Addams Family and documentaries about Harry and Meghan.

Last April, Netflix stunned investors when it revealed it had lost many subscribers, triggering a stock market revaluation of the entire US media industry.

Netflix ended 2022 with 231 million paying subscribers, and in a letter to investors, the company noted that “2022 was a tough year, with a rough start but a brighter end.”

Who is the founder of Netflix

Hastings was born in Boston, Massachusetts, where he attended Buckingham Browne & Nichols School. Before entering college, he earned his first money selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door.

He then joined the Marine Corps in 1981, but decided to join after graduating from the Peace Corps training program “because of an adventurous spirit.”

He went on to teach high school math in rural northwestern Swaziland from 1983 to 1985.]He attributes some of his entrepreneurial spirit to his time in the Peace Corps, noting that “You once hitchhiked across Africa with ten dollars in your pocket, starting a business doesn’t seem too scary”

After returning from the Peace Corps, Hastings enrolled at Stanford University after being rejected by MIT. He received a master’s degree in computer science from Stanford.

In 1991, he founded his first company, Pure Software.In 1997, Reed Hastings founded Netflix with Mark Randolph, a former employee of Pure Software, offering movie rentals by mail to customers in the United States. From there began what later became a modern media giant.

Hastings served on the board of directors of Microsoft from 2007 to 2012 and on the board of directors of Facebook, Inc. from June 2011 to May 2019.