After receiving a late fee of $40 dollars for an overdue Apollo 13 videotape, Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph founded which online company in 1997?
Reed Hastings spent two years thinking about how to avoid similar problems at his next startup. In 1997 Hastings and Marc Randolph co-founded Netflix, offering flat rate movie rental-by-mail to customers in the United States by combining two emerging technologies; DVDs, which were much easier to send as mail than VHS-cassettes, and an online Web site to order them from, instead of a paper catalogue. Headquartered in Los Gatos, California, Netflix has amassed a collection of 100,000 titles and over 100 million subscribers. Hastings had the idea for Netflix after his company was acquired. "I had a big late fee for 'Apollo
Marc Randolph Valley start-ups, including heading marketing at desktop scanner maker Visioneer, and then as a member of the founding team of Integrity QA, a developer of automated software testing products. In late 1996, software debugging company Pure Atria acquired the nine-person software startup. Pure Atria’s founder and CEO Reed Hastings retained Randolph as vice president of corporate marketing for the rapidly expanding Pure Atria. In late 1996, Pure Atria announced that Rational Software would acquire it in an $850 million stock swap in what was then the richest merger in Silicon Valley history. Hastings and Randolph commuted together between their homes